Killed at the Whim of a Hat

range of mountains looming up in front of you. But in Maprao with the Gulf stretching deceptively away from you, you knew that line — the one you had to stretch your neck to see all of, left and right — that was the edge of the world. You could sit on your back balcony and watch a hurricane pass over Cambodia, see giant cruise ships shrivel to nothing, view the creamy pink sunrise a whole continent away.

Something had changed inside me. I began to understand why everyone within a twenty-kilometer radius was an idiot. It was for the same reason that you could live in a condominium room for years and not know that your next door neighbor was stacking body parts in his refrigerator. Ignorance breeds ignorance. If you want the world to be as narrow as your mind, you can make it so. I’d assumed I was superior to everyone in Maprao so I hadn’t seen a need to confirm my status by actually talking to people. The odd thing was, once you got to know them you realized there was more common sense around you than in a whole city full of educated but suffocating people. Certainly more than in a barrel-load of monkey politicians. Living their lives wasn’t desperation for the Mapraoans, it was a sensible choice for a very proud people.

I was a celebrity for a while. We had three national TV stations down here interviewing me about my role in solving the abbot’s killing. The event might have slipped by unnoticed but for the bizarre demise of Mika Mikata. The self-filmed video of her suicide was on automatic feed to her Web site, and its popularity on YouTube was unprecedented. Mikata had no intention of being taken alive. With her chest-mounted cameras and her spectacular orange hat, she was dispatched by jet-propelled hang-glider to the top platform of the Tokyo Tower, the world’s tallest orange structure. There, she gave a heartrending but virtually incomprehensible speech and flung herself over the parapet. Viewers were able to make out the strains of ‘Killing Me Softly’, in Japanese, as she somersaulted through the air. But, as both the still and video cameras were destroyed as she bounced off the overhanging observation deck, her actual death was not recorded, which would have been a major disappointment to her fans. However, live coverage or not, Mika Mikata’s death had been as colorful as her murders.

My articles on the investigation and subsequent discovery of the killer were very well received. I even had a spread in Matichon Weekly magazine. I had offers of full-time positions I would have been a fool to pass up. I received personal calls from managing editors at newspapers that made the Mail look like a rag. Oh, I considered them. I had sleepless nights. On numerous occasions, I dialed all but the last digit of their phone numbers. But…well, we had a business to run. Our sleeping province, momentarily awoken with a kiss from the angel of death, had decided to press the snooze button and go back to sleep again. I spent less time scouring the newspapers and more time gutting mackerel. With the absence of intrigue, I was able to put more time and effort into our resort. The shop attendance had rocketed to an average of seven customers per day. With Gaew’s help, Arny had almost doubled the room occupancy from one per five-day period to one-point-seven by the simple addition of a sign: LAST BED AND FOOD FOR 100 KMS. It wasn’t exactly true, or rather it was an outright lie, but any travelers silly enough to find themselves on these back roads late at night were unlikely to sue us later. Arny had also written to Lonely Planet for inclusion in their 2010 edition. It was a bit like me writing to Mr. Pulitzer asking if I might put my name on his list, but I admired my brother’s spirit.

And me? I cooked. I began what one day might be called a garden. And I fed the dogs. Yes, that was a plural. Sticky Rice pulled through. He woke up one day like a born-again canine with the kick of a small cow and has hardly dared to go back into that sleep world since. I assume my ankle was the first thing he saw when he came around because he follows it so closely I have to wipe snot off my leg after each trip through the yard. It’s rather pathetic but endearing and, I confess, I might have found myself cuddling him from time to time but only while he’s in rehab. Gogo continues to glare at me with disdain and maintains her orbit.

What else have I been doing? Nothing, I suppose. Oh, yes. I did come up with a solution for the mystery of the interred VW. The world would never hear of it and the story didn’t even warrant a follow-up in Thai Rat. Readers have short attention spans and the effort of retelling the tale was beyond the editors. But my inner diva has started to write it into a screenplay for Clint. It’ll be a sensation. Although the police had given up on the case, I was determined to keep it alive. I’d done all the flow charts and brainstorms and reviewed all the evidence and I found myself up against a brick wall. There was only one thing I knew for sure: that the couple in the interred VW were not the couple who had been asked to give evidence against Tan Sugit. There was, however, a very impressive list of things I didn’t know. I didn’t know where the first VW had disappeared to after its brief stay in the police parking lot, who rented the second VW and where they went, how evil Auntie Chainawat was involved and why she sold that strip of land to Old Mel, how the VW got itself buried, or anything else. Because, to tell the truth, at that stage I knew nothing. I can’t say it didn’t worry me but I’d literally run out of avenues to pursue. Sissi had searched the Internet and delved into the private briefs of one or two senior policemen but she’d come up with nothing relevant. I could have left it there, I suppose, but for the memory of the driver and his girlfriend sitting calmly in their seats. There were families somewhere ever wondering what had become of their loved ones. What about their spirits? I know. It doesn’t sound like me, does it? But all that hanging around in temples…well, something has to rub off.

One annoying phrase that kept replaying in my mind was what the old Chinese lady had said the day I asked her why she’d sold her land. Even after I edited her bad Thai in my mind, it still sounded like a second-rate martial- arts movie line: “People who connect the past and the future may know the present.” I’d thought about heading back over to Ranong and beating the meaning out of her with a baseball bat, but that was on one of our very rare red meat days.

So, I began with the past. What I knew already was that, before the bridge was built across the neck of the estuary, all the land around here had been underdeveloped. Before the prawn farms there were still mangroves and much of the landscape was still covered in a thick layer of natural vegetation. Huge tracts of land were bought up by local Chinese speculators who waited for the inevitable march of time. There were no paved roads and the only settlements were to be found on the coast. The coconut and palm plantations had yet to arrive. When they did, Old Mel was one of the pioneers and I needed to imagine what the countryside was like when his family moved in.

The land office was one of a huddle of simple government buildings around the Lang Suan stadium (capacity twelve thousand — mostly standing). The office was another bruised edifice that begged not to be painted white again. Anyone could stroll up to the second floor and take a look at the square-meter plans that sketched out the allotments and their boundaries. The two plots I was searching for were clearly marked with the current borders. I could see how they fitted into the overall land-grab mosaic. If I’d so wished, I could have asked for the names of any of the neighboring owners and been given contact details. The land department did all it could to encourage the sale and resale of its dirt.

In a back room were large cardboard rolls that contained older and older versions of these plans. By digging deep, I made my way to 1980 where I found the land before its sale by the Chainawats, separated at the original border. There were two interesting differences in the surrounding plots. One was that the parcels were very much larger. The land demons hadn’t yet begun to slice and dice their plots and sell them at extortionate prices. Two was the anomaly that almost all of the land divisions had remained faithful to one long continuous border, as if someone had drawn a random uneven line across the map and told everyone they were to keep to one side of it or the other. I asked the clerk why this was but she was young and more interested in her fingernails. She suggested I take a look at the geological maps of the region.

My quest led me to Professor Woot Juntasa at the department of geology of Mae Jo University. This was a pretty but minor campus of the mother Mae Jo in Chiang Mai and whenever I’d passed by, it had always seemed to be unoccupied. The day of my visit was no exception. I walked from building to building looking for somebody to guide me to the professor’s study. The first human I found was the portly professor himself. His face was a shiny red mask that hinted at either too much field work in the midday sun or eczema. Either way I got the feeling he would have been happier at a campus in Scandinavia. Even under the full Finnish blast from his air-conditioning, his armpits were still forging through some tropical jungle. His eyebrows were too high on his forehead and it made all his expressions ones of surprise.

He seemed truly delighted to have something to do of more substance than teaching soil erosion to bored undergraduates. I told him about the region I was interested in and he smiled that knowing smile of an expert. He told me that not only did he have large-scale area maps of the Lang Suan river basin, he also had aerial photographs that I might find amusing. He launched off into a description of the region from the Paleolithic period and we retired to a small meeting room where he spread his maps out across the table.

“Perhaps you could point out exactly the terrain you’re interested in?” he said.

It wasn’t so easy without the labeled plot boundaries, but I was able to locate Old Mel’s land from the bend in the river and the relief lines of the Wat Ny Kow cliffs. Professor Woot laid a sheet of