Bangkok Haunts

mustache around her mouth which she wipes with a sleeve.
    As it happens, I’m not thinking about the monk—I’m thinking about Kimberley. I know she’s never been to Cambodia before, but I think something in her culture makes the detritus familiar; she’s more relaxed, more sure of herself, than in my more demanding country. She is also wearing military-style pants and a light khaki vest with a hundred pockets. “Anything could happen here,” she says with relish. “Are you sure he’s for real?”
    “As sure as I can be. He’s definitely a meditator familiar with
vipassana.
There’s no other way to get that weird.” I tell her about Phra Titanaka’s personality changes.
    “Bipolar,” she diagnoses. “A true psycho could never be that organized or that coherent. Maybe he forgets to take his lithium from time to time. You think he got to Kowlovski?”
    “Looks like it, doesn’t it? One elephant-hair bracelet might have been a coincidence, but two—”
    “Is downright provocative. Somehow he found out who the masked man was before we did? But I thought you said he never saw the video.”
    “That’s what he said. Monks don’t lie.”
    A snort from Kimberley before she quaffs more beer. She is shaking her head. “Wasn’t Pol Pot a Buddhist monk?”
    “For a while. It didn’t seem to take with him.”
    “A Khmer Buddhist monk?”
    I shrug. “It’s obvious he didn’t do it—he’s not any kind of suspect.”
    “But he seems to know more about it than we do. Sonchai, why are you protecting a religious nut you hardly even know? He got to Kowlovski. He distributed elephant-hair bracelets to all major suspects. Maybe he sold his sister? Maybe he’s behind the snuff movie?”
    I flash Kimberley a look of incredulity. “You just don’t get it,” I say. It would be a rude response in Thai, but Kimberley’s mood is impregnably buoyant.
    “Get what?”
    “Gatdanyu.”
    “Huh?”
    I take a deep breath because I’ve been down this alley before; trying to explain
gatdanyu
to a
farang
is like trying to explain the DNA helix to a Sumatran headhunter—the reception is inevitably superficial.
    As best I can, I describe the hidden structure of a society few foreigners would recognize as Thailand. When Buddhism first came to our shores, our ancestors accepted its message of generosity and compassion with enthusiasm. They also saw the need to adjust it to take account of a quirk in human nature which they had noticed during the ten thousand or so years they had passed without Buddhism. I guess the objection they had to the naïveté of their new faith could be expressed in one word:
payback.
How do you make generosity worth anyone’s while? By making sure it pays is how. As a result, every Thai is the center of an endless web of moral credits and debits that will end only in death. Naturally every favor must be valued against an unwritten accounting system which uses the Big Favor of Birth as its starting point, a debt that takes priority over all others.
    “Superficially, Thailand can seem like a male chauvinist culture; scratch the surface, and you’ll see we’re all controlled by Mother. I sure as hell am.”
    “That’s really why you work in your mother’s brothel, against all your finer instincts?”
    “Yes,” I confess, unable to look her in the eye.
    “And when I see all you Thais running around as if everyone is a successful business center, what they’re actually doing is working out how to get a favor out of A to use to pay back a favor owed to B maybe from childhood, et cetera?”
    “You’ve got it.”
    “Wait a minute—what about the girls who work the bars? Are you telling me they’re paying back the debt to Mother by selling their bodies?”
    “Yes. That is exactly what they’re doing.”
    “And the mothers know?”
    “There’s an omertà about it, but in reality everyone knows.”
    Kimberley is looking at me over the rim of the pint glass of beer she just ordered. She shivers as she puts the glass down. “Wow.” She shakes her head. “They may not be cut out for the Game at all. It’s emotional blackmail pure and simple? They dump their chances for a successful marriage, childbirth, everything?”
    “Now you’re going too far. What chances? We’re talking poor, Kimberley.”
    “But how does this apply to the case? I thought Damrong and her brother hated their mother.”
    “That’s the point.
Gatdanyu
is very practical. You owe the one who actually does