Bangkok Haunts

been quite a letdown after the States.”
    “I don’t know about that. Prostitutes in the States don’t have such an easy ride.”
    “Anything else?”
    “I’m working on it. The whole case rings a bell. I think it got a lot of publicity because some of the city fathers were involved.”
     
    Mrs. Damrong Baker: the asymmetry in the name might say it all. I have to call Immigration five more times before I am able to convince them to get off their backsides. When they do, it is simply a matter of plugging Dan Baker’s passport number into their database. Finally my desk phone rings.
    “He’s here in Bangkok.”
    “As a tourist?”
    “No. He has a license to teach English as a foreign language. Yearly renewable visa plus work permit, signs in every three months to confirm his residential address.”
    “Which is?”
    “Sukhumvit Soi Twenty-six.”
    I call Lek, my assistant. While I am waiting for him, I walk to the window to look down. The young monk, whom I’ve come to think of as “the Internet monk,” is crossing the street to enter the Internet café. I watch his vivid saffron robes disappear into the bright shop; then Lek arrives. We take a cab. “I want to know if he’s lying or not,” I tell Lek. “Just watch him while he answers.”
    All Bangkok taxi drivers practice witchcraft, but this one is at postgraduate level. Garlands in honor of the journey goddess Mae Yanang hang from the rearview mirror with a bunch of amulets, obscuring the middle slice of external reality. I should mention that there are two ways of avoiding death on our roads:
pop pong
and
pop gun. Pop gun
signifies the usual dreary ineffective stuff like wearing a seatbelt and not driving too fast; we generally prefer
pop pong,
with its inviolable spiritual protection. Done properly,
pop pong
not only protects your life, it can also deal out severe punishments to those who threaten it. At this very moment our driver is proudly recounting the tale of a road-rager who cut in front of him last week, only to be flattened by a cement truck five minutes later. “What a mess,” he says with glee, and points to the ceiling.
    Lek is riveted: “Dead?”
    “Sure.”
    “He didn’t have an amulet?”
    “Would you believe it? He had a
salika
inserted under the skin.”
    “And he still died?”
    Our driver points to the ceiling again with a beat-that expression. “Accidents don’t just happen. The origin is in the past.” He jerks a thumb backward to indicate the past.
“Gam,”
he says. Karma.
    Lek and I study the ceiling, where a kind of astrological chart provides luck, health insurance, and protection from traffic cops. The inscriptions are in, not Thai, but the ancient Khmer script called
khom,
from the time of Angkor Wat. “You use a
moordu
?” Lek wants to know.
    “Sure, a Khmer
moordu.
What do Thai seers know? All magic comes from the Khmer in the end.” He shifts around to give Lek a quick glance. “I got into this in a big way after the tsunami. Before that I was pretty
choi choi
about it.”
    “Because of the ghosts?”
    “You bet. See, what people don’t appreciate is that most of the Thais who died didn’t come from Phuket at all. They came from Krung Thep and up north. And of course, the
farang
ghosts wanted to get home as well, so the dead all arrived here trying to get on planes at the airport or buses back to Isaan. My partner, who uses this car on the night shift, said it was terrible. He’d pick up a party of four or five passengers and drive them to Don Muang; then when he turned around to collect the fares, they weren’t there anymore. The worst, though, were the ones who boarded in the dark; then when he turned the light on at the end of the trip, they were totally rotted already, eyes hanging by the optic nerve and bouncing around on their cheeks. Then there were the
farang
who don’t know diddly about being dead and were still looking for loved ones, crying out and all that. It was just awful. For that kind of stuff, you got to have professional help.”
    Lek nods gravely in agreement. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this side of the
katoey
soul, so I look out the side window, where carbon monoxide is laced with air. We’re stuck in the usual jam at the Asok-Sukhumvit crossroads, and a kid about ten years old with a dirty face and exaggerated misery picks his way around the stationary vehicles. He makes a halfhearted attempt to clean the windows with a broken windscreen wiper, then holds