Bangkok Haunts

ear. “It’s all we’ve got. There’s no other way to organize Thailand. It’s not perfect, people abuse it, especially mothers, but there’s no other way for us.”
    “You’re half
farang.
You must look at it from a different point of view sometimes.”
    “My blood is half
farang,
but I think like a Thai.”
    “You’ve been abroad. You speak perfect English. You even speak French.”
    “So?”
    “I want to know.”
    My tone expresses the beginnings of exasperation. “Know what?”
    There’s a long silence. Perhaps he has never formulated this thought before. “What I’m doing.”
    “I don’t know what you’re doing.”
    “I think you do. I want to know, from a
farang
point of view, am I going too far?”
    “Too far?”
    “The price she’s making me pay—is it too high?”
    “What is the price? Did she give you instructions?”
    A pause. “Perhaps.”
    “And money. She gave you all the money she made out of the contract, didn’t she? How much? A lot, I think—she was very shrewd. That’s what you don’t want to face, isn’t it? Two weeks ago you were a helpless monk; there was no point in dwelling on the horrors of your childhood; you were penniless; the most you could hope for in this life was to be left to pursue your meditation practice. You were already very advanced, almost an
arhat.
You were able to dissolve the past because the present offered no way of—” I stop deliberately in midsentence. I want to know if he’s hooked or not. When he says, “Go on,” I’m sure that from now on he will not be able to stop speaking to me.
    “Revenge,” I say.
    Apparently this word has not yet crystallized on the surface of his mind, like a virus that does not reveal its true nature unless magnified and photographed.
    “Revenge? Where would I start?”
    “You would probably never start. You were never the one to start anything, were you? It was always her. She knew how to survive, you didn’t. You spent your life as a second-stringer. You still are a second-stringer. Sure, you wouldn’t know where to start when it came to revenge, but she would. Tell me what she is making you do.”
    A pause. “No, I’m not going to tell you that. Anyway, I think you have already guessed.”
    “She would never have left the strategy to you. I think that nothing has changed. In death as in life she is controlling you.”
    “If you think like a Thai, you must know I owe her everything. If she had left instructions for me to hang myself with my robe, I would have followed those instructions to the letter.”
    “How easy that would have been for you,” I say gently.
    He takes a full minute to reply, then: “Yes. That’s true.”
    “And how hard this is for you, whatever it is she is making you do.”
    “I have to do it.”
    “How? Will you hire foreign mercenaries? You can certainly afford them. But it would be difficult for them to understand. Even mercenaries have rules.” Listening to my own thoughts, I suddenly realize where the help will come from, when the moment arrives. “They’ll be Khmer, won’t they? I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. Retired KR foot soldiers have many advantages. One, they will do anything for money. Two, they obey orders instantly and to the letter. Three, they are plentiful and inexpensive. Four, they know all about elephants. Five, they will be able to disappear into the jungle, or more likely Poipet, where geriatric generals in wheelchairs will protect them.”
    He is full of surprises. “Poipet?” he says with an intake of breath. “You’ve been there?”
    “Yes. Once.” Memory clip: a drab Cambodian town near the Thai border, roughly the same latitude as Angkor Wat. A terrible coarseness everywhere, even in the faces of children, most of whom were prostitutes. I really did see the famous retired KR generals in wheelchairs sucking on tubes attached to oxygen cylinders. “Have you been there yourself, Phra Titanaka?”
    “I ordained there.”
    He closes the phone, but the number he was using is recorded on my own. I think he will not answer, but I try anyway.
    “Yes?”
    “At least tell me about Kowlovski.”
    “Who?”
    “Her costar in the movie.”
    “Ah, yes. The masked man.”
    “You worked on him, didn’t you? I think you abused powers you had acquired in meditation. You didn’t raise a finger, but you killed him by making him kill himself, didn’t you? I think that would have been very easy for you. His tiny, shallow,