Bangkok Haunts

use for washing the car, although these are all saffron-tinted. Inside, ready-packed by the stallholder, I find all a monk needs to survive a day or two in that spiritual desert called maya: a pack of instant coffee, biscuits, Lux brand soap, two cans of 7UP, a box of
yaa dum
aromatherapy sticks, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and incense. The whole idea of
tambun
is to store up treasure for
chart na:
give flowers, you’ll be beautiful; give money, you’ll be rich; give medicine, you’ll be healthy; give candles, you’ll be enlightened. It’s a long wait for the next life, though, when you’re only thirty-five.
    The magic is more powerful the more senior you go, so I seek out the abbot and offer him the goodie-crammed bucket, which he accepts with a nod. Now I’m in the temple kneeling before the great golden Buddha on the platform, holding my trembling hands in a high
wai
and begging for mercy. My mother, Nong,
in extremis
has been known to promise a thousand boiled eggs and a couple of roasted hogs’ heads, but I am of a different generation:
I’ll be a better husband, a perfect father, a better cop, a wiser teacher to Lek, a more devout Buddhist—I’ll do anything, anything at all, just to get this THING off my back.
    You never know immediately if it’s going to work or not—it all depends on the unpredictable compassion of the Buddha—but for the moment I’m satisfied I’ve done what I can. I try to meditate for twenty minutes to give more power to my supplication; then, pretty much exhausted, I leave the temple. I’m on my way to the great gates, when a familiar figure catches my eye. Lek is sitting with Damrong’s brother, Phra Titanaka, on a seat under the banyan tree. Lek is careful to keep his head below that of the monk’s, while gazing at him with adoration. Phra Titanaka is speaking slowly, with a beautiful, compassionate smile on his face.
    Did you know,
farang,
that the ancients saw jealousy as a greenish horn-shaped intrusion of the astral body directly into the physical sheath? The cuckold’s horns were independently witnessed all over the world even before the age of sail: the Maya, the ancient Egyptians, and the Japanese all knew about them as well as the Elizabethans. I know because I checked the Net. Well,
Arbeit macht frei,
they say, so I stroll back to the office projecting nonchalance to see if I can push the case a little further along. However, I find conventional forensic analysis unhelpful: there is no evidence to link Smith the suave lawyer and Baker the less-than-suave pornographer either to the snuff movie or to Nok’s murder. Tanakan is only implicated to the extent that both atrocities took place in his very own perfumed garden—a circumstance he could argue away with a thousand-baht note. If, on the other hand, I unlock my bottom drawer and take out the old Burmese wooden phallus which I use only
in extremis,
like Green Lantern’s light—mostly because it’s embarrassingly large, with the glans painted a lurid crimson—and hang over it an amulet that Lek claims he got from a Khmer
moordu
of towering seniority—thus producing a kind of altar on my desk underneath the computer monitor—lean back on my chair, close my eyes, and let go of all extraneous thought, what do I find? Three blind mice propelled by tight little spirals of karma that go back many hundreds of years, and a black cat whose pleasure it is to toy with them.
    So much for clairvoyance; but the exercise does seem to have provoked a more mundane line of inquiry. I check the data Immigration sent me this morning. It is a curious fact that Baker, Smith, and Tanakan all arrived back in Bangkok from their various destinations overseas on the same day, some twenty-four hours after the end of the period during which forensics says Damrong must have died. Coincidence, or the inevitable response of three blind mice who had no reason to be elsewhere once the cat was dead?

2
    THE MASKED MAN

25
    The FBI is staring at a tureen of fat snails cooked in their own juice with a brown sauce. We are eating at D’s, just off Silom, an open-air restaurant popular with those who work the Pat Pong bars.
    “You don’t have to do this,” I tell her. “Really. It’s quite a risk you’re taking.”
    “I want to. I got into Thai food in the States, right after I met you the first time.”
    I cannot comment because I never ate Thai food on my one trip to America. (To Florida; the john was a muscular seventy-something