Killed at the Whim of a Hat

cool, not hot blooded. It was no crime of passion.

“Sissi, there’s something wrong here.”

“Perhaps, but don’t you think it would make a fabulous movie?”

I thought about it.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“I could play the lead.”

“The abbot?”

A silence gushed out of the end of the phone in a scolding blast. I sometimes forgot how hairy was the trigger upon which her finger rested. You’d never know what might cause it to twitch.

“That was a joke,” I said.

Ever-increasing silence. I expected to hear a click and the groan of a dead line.

“Come on, Sis. Laugh!”

“Not funny.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But to make this movie work for Clint…” We both had a burning admiration for Mr. Eastwood — we’d seen all his stuff on pirated DVDs. All right, perhaps we didn’t admire him enough to contribute to his royalties but we did like him. “We can’t send Sister Bia to the chair.”

“It’d be lethal injection.”

“So, what do you want me to do?”

“I’m not sure.”

For the next ten minutes, until my cell battery ran dry, I told my sister about the incident with the camera and described the photographs. I think she got most of it. When I stood up, the polystyrene stuck to my backside like a saddle. I don’t know whether it was as a result of the heat I exude down there or some natural latex dripping from the tree but it took me five minutes to disengage myself. It wouldn’t have been fitting for me to go and visit a former Minister for the Environment with a block of foam stuck to my rear end.

The plaque stating that this was the Awuso Foundation National Headquarters was screwed to a solid concrete post beside a fancy fretwork iron gate that towered above me. The two-story house beyond was an iced wedding cake with Roman pillars and strawberry trimming. I dabbed at the gate with a damp finger in case it was electrified. The glass shards topping the four-meter wall had alerted me to the possibility, but my finger wasn’t shriveled to a sausage stub. I put more effort into the gate and discovered that the big fancy beast rolled effortlessly on rubber wheels. It was so well oiled, in fact, that it didn’t stop rolling and I had to run to catch up with it before it crashed into an ornate flower bed.

By then I was aware of eyes. At first count I made out six belonging to camouflaged gardeners in army surplus, armed with hoses and hoes but merely standing around like extras. Two more eyes were looking at me from an upstairs balcony. These, I assumed, belonged to the man I’d come to see, Sugit Suttirat. They were set deep in a piggy little head on top of a beefy body. It was like looking up at the underbelly of a turtle except this particular turtle was wearing a Kim II Sung special safari suit and a baseball cap. I didn’t know whether he’d come to the balcony specifically to meet me or whether he’d been there all day practicing his false-teethy smile and his air-calculator finger wave. I’d phoned ahead, of course. “Freelance journalist doing follow-up stories on memorable politicians.”

I couldn’t have been accepted any more warmly if I’d arrived naked on a mattress of thousand- baht notes.

“Nong Jimm?” he called.

Nong was designed to rub you up the wrong way if you weren’t an actual younger relative. You used it on waiters and cleaners and street children so it really put you in a place you didn’t want to be. But to a man of his standing it meant nothing at all.

“Tan Sugit,” I squealed.

Tan was top-end suck-up. As far from nong as Klong Toey slum was from the Ginza. Once I’d jumped through all those superfluous honorific hoops and clambered over the ice-breaking debris, I was beside him on a vast brown leather couch in his living room. From this close I could see that Tan Sugit had been worked over by a plastic surgeon or two. He was able to move his mouth but, north of his neck, that was pretty much it. His beady eyes didn’t blink and his cheeks didn’t billow when he smiled. He was in a sort of facial truss.

My old faithful tape recorder sat between us. I could have gone the digital route but I enjoyed watching the tape rotate. I tested it; “One-two, one two,” in English to establish my international credentials, then launched into the interview. My intention was not to head straight into the ‘Did you murder two hippies and bury them because they threatened to expose your criminal activities?’ question. That could come later. This was more a get-to-know- you session. As an almost award-winning journalist I had to remain impartial and talk to him as if he’d been born of human parents rather than eels. As a member of the press you remained passive and talked to your interviewee without allowing yourself to imagine feeding the tail of his navy blue safari suit into the jaws of the ice crusher at the fish factory. You are a professional.

Throughout the interview, as I studied him, the question ‘How does a short and overweight person, obviously incapable of looking after himself with his fists, get to be an influential figure?’ kept arising. The answer, as always, was ‘money’. He stank of it. My brief run through his early years had arrived in Surat in 1978. I looked pointedly at my clipboard.

“I believe at the end of the nineteen seventies you were involved in the rental car business,” I said. It was just another in my list of questions and I didn’t put a great deal of emphasis into it. His smile stretched to its limit. I was afraid it might crack a seam all the way up the sides of his face and across his bald head. I’d be a witness to his face falling off. But it held.

“I don’t know where you heard that one,” he said. “I was involved in a number of ground-breaking ventures back then but car hire wasn’t one of them.”

An overweight woman in her fifties with short cropped hair dyed crimson arrived with coffee on a tray. She was dressed all in white like a late-starting Judo student with no belt to her name. He ignored her so I knew she was either a maid or a mistress. A wife he’d be obliged to introduce.

“Really?” I asked.

“I think I should know.”

I flipped back to the previous page of my clip file.

“It says here that there was a disturbing incident in nineteen seventy-eight when allegations were made that your…company had been accused of stealing rental cars. My records tell me you spent some time in prison.”

He laughed again, or, at least, his mouth did. As there were no tics or flickers to be found on his face I couldn’t look for indications of guilt.

“Nong,” he said in his deep baritone, “with a man of my standing, it’s only to be expected there’ll be envious individuals trying to pull you down. There’s a lot at stake. When you have an honest man at the helm, the criminal classes see him as a threat to their well-being. A man who cannot be corrupted or bribed is always going to be a target.”

“So you weren’t ever arrested?”

“Of course not.”

Ooh, he was smooth. The lie was so deft I felt certain a polygraph needle wouldn’t have flickered through the whole performance. A politician if ever I saw one. He glanced at his watch and I could tell he was becoming irritated by the direction in which the interview had headed. So, I fed him a few more scraps of ego fodder to get him back on track. He was chuffing along nicely again with all the aplomb of an elected official, so I chanced throwing another metal bar across the rails.

“So, we come to your relationship with the Chainawat family in Ranong,” I said casually.

Of course, I had no idea whether there was such a relationship but it was worth a try.

“Where are you getting all this background information from, exactly?” he asked sternly.

“Oh, you know, public records, old news archives, the Internet. I was even discussing you with the provincial governor on the telephone a few weeks ago. He was the one who suggested I write a feature on you. You’re really a local celebrity so it’s thrilling for me to be here in person. I actually went to see the Chainawats on another matter and even they mentioned you.”