“Afraid they would.”
“Just like you.”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t take any more of that. I’m not a criminal, but once you’ve got a record they pull you in for anything.”
“Then we should try to solve this before they get to you. I don’t suppose you remember the people who rented your vans?”
“I’ll never forget them. Two couples they were, both ripped from the same cloth. I’d seen their type before, young Thai kids pretending to be Western hippies. Long hair. Fluffy excuses for beards. Dressing like bums so people would think they were artists or musicians. Stench of musk. They walked in off the street looking so straggly I thought they were about to ask me for the cost of a cup of sweet tea. Then they handed over a wad of money to rent the van. Those musicians, you never could tell. So you had to be nice to all the bums just in case they were rich. I should have been suspicious that the two couples were so alike.”
“And why weren’t you?”
“I assumed the first pair had told their friends. Either that or there was some hippy music festival on somewhere. It was just a few days between the two rentings. Of course, it’s easy to be logical after the damage is done. No. I was just greedy. I’d rent the vans out to anyone with the money to pay for them.”
“And the IDs they left you?”
“Like I say, they were fake. The photos were a lot more respectable than the kids but there was a likeness.”
“Did you keep them?”
“No. I had to hand them over to the police.”
“Did the kids have any distinguishing marks?”
“Not really. Beards. Hairy armpits on the girls. Nothing soap and a razor couldn’t fix.”
“All right. I might have more questions but, if I do, I’ll phone you.”
“And you aren’t going to…”
“
“I appreciate it. There’s nothing else?”
“Well, yes. There is one more thing. I need five minutes with your computer without you in the room.”
“I — ”
“I’m not going through your files. I just need to open some photos. But they’re personal.”
The manager turned on the computer for me and left quite placidly. I clicked out the memory card from the camera and worked it to the rim of the plastic bag so I wouldn’t have to touch it directly with my fingers. I slotted it into the Home Art computer and waited for the machine to find it. I looked over at Arny. He was sulking but the color had returned to his cheeks.
The computer found the external link and asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to save the photos on the computer so I opened them in ACDSee just to have a look. I clicked.
“Holy…”
It felt as if the office had sucked all the air out of me. My stomach was up somewhere around the fluorescent lights. Until I saw those pictures I’d always believed there couldn’t be a great deal of difference between your basic, six command, non-rechargeable digital camera and anything at the top of the line. Digital was digital. But, I tell you, I was wrong. I was in those pictures between the 3D layers, feeling every horror as if I were the victim. I swear I could hear the flies buzzing and smell the blood. I was mesmerized and horrified all at once by the awful clarity of the photography.
“Arny,” I said, “normally I wouldn’t show you pictures like these but, just in case anything goes wrong, I need you as a witness here. But I warn you, you aren’t going to like them.”
Eight
“ Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.”
Of course they’d affected me. How could they not have? All the way back in the truck Arny kept coming back to the fact I had no heart, no normal senses. That my work for the newspaper had turned me into a zombie.
“How could you sit there and look at those pictures without your heart being torn out?” he’d asked.
“It’s work,” I told him.
That’s what I always told myself. It’s work. People get mugged. People get caught. People die. They hadn’t touched your life before the crime. They don’t touch it after. They weren’t friends. You had no investment in them. Perhaps a little grief might leak through when you’re interviewing the loved ones of the deceased. You might shed a tear of sympathy even. But it was the worst day of someone else’s life, not yours. You write up your report in dull, unemotional language. Novelists cry into their keyboards. Reporters count words and watch the clock.
When I first looked at the photos on that previously untainted Home Art computer monitor, I’d been shocked, of course. Here was a murder in progress. A monk poses reluctantly for a photograph. Even by the second snap his hand is raised as if to say ‘enough’. His robes and his pale skin contrast elegantly with the tall bank of bougainvilleas behind him. In the third picture he looks down curiously at a hat that’s being offered to him, presumably by the cameraman. It’s an orange straw hat. A woman’s hat. In the fourth picture he has it in his hands, holding it like an alms bowl in front of him. His expression is one of amused suspicion. The camera is clicking continuously now and the hand of the cameraman is back in the shot. It appears to be gloved in a bright oven-mitt, shocking pink. But held firmly in its grasp is a knife. The blade is slasher-movie long. In some shots the afternoon sun glints off the blade and changes the quality of the photographs. As we step forward with the cameraman we are urging the monk to put on the hat. At first he smiles his incredulity, but as the blade touches his shoulder, he relents. We step back. There is one shot of the hat perched uncomfortably on the monk’s head. Ridiculous. But it’s as if this one shot has been sculpted in color. It’s a frightening but artistic photograph, one which resonates with dread. Time had been taken over it.
And then the knife and the oven mitt re-enter the frames: one, two, three as we approach the abbot. And then the butchery begins. The cameraman and murderer are one and the same. The abbot falls to his knees, stares once at the unseen murderer, turns away as if attempting to crawl through the flower beds, then he is supine across the concrete path. The puddle of blood spreads beneath him and then, as if from out of nowhere, a dog enters the frame. Its eyes are red with rage. Then it’s a blur, halfway out of the picture and there’s a second dog with teeth bared. It fills the frame. It’s about to consume the camera. Then there’s sky. The blur of movement. Then…nothing.
Altogether there were forty-six photos documenting the brutal murder of a peaceful man.
Just work.
The moon was almost full that cloudless night and the squid boats had all stayed home. Those romantic squid were drawn like mindless lovers to the glow of the moon rather than to the deceptive lights of the boats that lured them into their nets and onto their hooks. The moon made the beachscape glow pale gray but clear as day. Despite the absence of color around me, I couldn’t get the damned photographs out of my head. They were still vivid and loud in my mind. Neither could I free myself of the stupid theory that a senior monk had died at the whim of a hat.
I think I mentioned I was halfway through my M.A. at Chiang Mai University when THIS LIFE IS UNAVAILABLE flashed up on my screen. Half an M.A. isn’t really anything, you know? Who’d give you a job on the
