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A police detective tracks an exotic killer from Bangkok's seedy underworld to the upper reaches of its society. |
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GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION
Bangkok 8
a novel by John Burdett
Knopf, New York, 2003, 318 pp, $24
EXCERPT:
he African American marine in the gray Mercedes will soon die of bites from the Naja siamensis, but we don't know that yet, Pichai and I (the future is impenetrable, says the Buddha). We are one car behind him at the toll for the expressway from the airport to the city and this is the closest we've been for more than three hours. I watch and admire as a huge black hand with a heavy gold signet ring on the index finger extends from the window, a hundred-baht note clipped stylishly between the pinkie and what our fortune teller calls the finger of the sun. The masked woman in the booth takes the note, hands him the change and nods in recognition at something he says to her, probably in very bad Thai. I tell Pichai that only a certain kind of American farang attempts conversation with toll booth operators. Pichai grunts and slides down in his seat for a nap. Survey after survey has shown sleep to be my people's favorite hobby.
"He's picked someone up, a girl," I mutter casually, as if this were not a shocking piece of news and clear proof of our incompetence. Pichai opens one eye, then the other, raises himself and stretches his neck just as the Mercedes hatchback races away like a thoroughbred.
"A whore?"
"Green and orange streaks in her hair. Afro style. Black top with straps. Very dark."
[CONTINUED BELOW]
"I bet you know who designed the black top?"
"It's fake Armani. At least, Armani was the first to come out with the black semi-tank top with bootlace straps, there have been plenty of imitators since."
Pichai shakes his head. "You really know your threads. He must have picked her up at the airport, when we lost him for that half hour."
I say nothing as Pichai, my soul brother and partner in indolence, returns to his slumbers. Perhaps he is not sleeping, perhaps he is meditating. He is one of those who have had enough of this world. His disgust has driven him to be ordained and he has named me as the one who, along with his mother, will shave his head and eyebrows, which honor will permit us to fly to one of the Buddha heavens by clinging to his saffron robes at the moment of death. You see how entrenched is cronyism in our ancient culture.
In truth there is something mesmeric about the black marine's head-and-shoulder set which has consumed all my attention. At the beginning of the surveillance I watched him get out of his car at a gas station: he is a perfectly formed giant and this perfection has fascinated me for three hours, as if he were some kind of black Buddha, the Perfect Man, of whom the rest of us are merely scale models with ugly flaws. Now that I have finally noticed her, his whore looks erotically fragile beside him, as if he might crush her inadvertently like a grape against the palate, to her eternal and ecstatic gratitude (you see why I am not suitable for monkhood).