Bangkok Haunts

Cambodian border where they are holding Baker, but there will be plenty of buses. I don’t think I can quite stand a long, hot, uncomfortable bus ride tonight, though, so I make a call to Hualamphong railway station and manage to book a first-class overnight sleeper. It’s one of those third-world treats I like to accord myself from time to time, and I’m quite excited when the train starts and the uniformed orderly comes around with his crisp white sheets to make up my bunk. Suddenly I’m a boy again taking a first-class trip up north with Nong, who is flush with dough from our sojourn in Paris with the ancient Monsieur Truffaut.
Clickety-click, clickety-click,
I might not have the most respectable mum in the world, but I definitely have one of the smartest.
Clickety-click, clickety-click,
we have money in the bank and medicine for Granma’s eyes, and we’ve paid the rent—nothing to worry about for at least a month.
Clickety-click.
To know how to cheer oneself up is a first step to enlightenment. It’s fun to be disobeying Vikorn, who thinks I’m checking out Yammy at this very moment.
    I wake up to a dawn in cleaner air. It’s a two-track, two-platform country station, but there are a few cabs waiting for passengers. I agree on a day price with a driver, and off we go for a picnic in the country.

13
    Sleepy Elephant village is a large hamlet with no municipal buildings at all. You distinguish it from the countryside because there is a slight increase in the density of population. The police station where they are holding Baker is hardly more than a large shophouse with a five-cell jail attached and a half acre of land, where a silver buffalo is inexplicably tethered. The young cop behind the desk is feeding a pet monkey when I walk in. I flash my ID and tell him I’m investigating the murder of one Damrong Baker, which doesn’t ring a bell with him at all. I tell him the
farang
Baker, her ex-husband, is a key suspect in my investigation. He blinks at me:
So what?
    “Immigration,” I explain. “You are holding a
farang
who tried to cross the border illegally yesterday. They don’t have any holding cells—that’s why Baker is in one of yours.” His brow is like a piece of wood with fixed furrows. It occurs to me that stupidity can be exaggerated for strategic reasons.
    The problem with rural policing is that there is no such thing as a rural policeman: the best you can hope for is boys and girls who can wear the uniform without getting themselves into too much trouble. Their loyalties are always local, however, and I’m from the despised big city. By all the rules I ought to bribe him, but I resent the idea. Anyway, he’s too young to help. I decide to concentrate on the monkey for a moment. It’s a baby and emotionally dependent on the young cop. It looks at me with big moist eyes, then scuttles away to cling to his neck, then climb up on his head, holding his hair in bunches in its tiny hands.
    Now the cop with the monkey on his head is finally looking directly at me. He’s not at all sure I’m safe to talk to, and I’m not at all sure he can speak standard Thai; all I’ve got out of him so far is a few mumbles in the local Khmer dialect. I’ve got his attention, though. “Get the boss,” I say softly. He nods and picks up a telephone to say a few words.
    Just as I thought, the boss was on the other side of a door, listening. Now he appears, doing up the buttons on his sergeant’s uniform, wiping his lips. He’s in his midforties and looking at me with drunken belligerence.
    “Are you holding a
farang
in this station, a
farang
named Baker?”
    He is at the point of shaking his head, so I intervene with a narrowing of the eyes and a concentration of the sixth chakra. When that doesn’t get his attention, I say, “Colonel Vikorn, Chief of District Eight, Bangkok, is going to be very angry with you if you took his money and then double-crossed him. Did you let Baker bribe you last night?”
    The sergeant was not expecting to be put on the spot in this lifetime. His survival strategy in this body has been to take money and then kick the can a little farther down the road for someone else to pick up—or kick. His police station is ten miles from the smallest, most obscure, least used, and technologically most backward immigration post in all Thailand, so he’s had plenty of opportunity to develop this MO into an art form. Now he’s having trouble with the sudden delivery of the