'They're off the hook.'
'I could see they were friendly when he came by our place the day they picked up the head. But why would he give them an-'
The door swung open, and Constable Mah Lek sauntered in with a tray of coffee cups and iced water.
'Sorry, folks,' he said. 'Had to wait for the water to boil. It's an old kettle. Sugar in the pot. Coconut cookies, but they're a bit old too.'
He set his wares down on the table between us.
'Everything OK?' he asked.
'I'll recommend the service here to every criminal I know,' I said.
He laughed and left us to it.
'Where were they supposedly having lunch?' I asked. 'There'd have to be witnesses to corroborate it.'
'Don't bother. They were at Egg's house. Just the three of them.'
Convenient. Egg and the rats alone.
'He has a house?'
'On the way to the hospital.'
'So he has other means. Like someone else I know.'
'Don't lump me together with his type. My means are from a family heirloom.'
'Accrued over hundreds of years of honest dealings with the common people, no doubt.'
'Don't mock the wealthy. The only difference between your family and mine is that we were successful at business. We were competent.'
'No argument there.'
We sipped our Nescafe, and I wondered why instant coffee was classified as a drink.
'All right,' I said at last. 'Then we need a counter-witness who saw them in Maprao at the time of the explosion. You were interviewing the bystanders. Did anyone see the SUV?'
'No.'
'Come on. We have twenty cars and trucks passing a day. Surely someone saw a big black wagon pass through.'
'Not one.'
'All right. Then they were driving one of their own cars. Did anyone see a strange slow-moving vehicle cruising the village?'
'No.'
'A motorcycle with both riders in helmets?'
'No.'
'Come on, Chom. You and the Keystone Kops were talking to the crowd for an hour. There were fifty-odd people there. Surely someone saw something? I watched Constable Mah Yai filling out a case form. Somebody was making a statement.'
'Not about the bombing.'
'Something else? What?'
'You know Ari?'
'The monkey handler? Who doesn't?'
'He filed a complaint.'
'I bet it wasn't relevant.'
'Someone's kidnapped his monkey.'
If I was the UN, I'd pick up the phone and request a Thai/Burmese simultaneous interpreter. Twenty minutes later I'd have a girl in my office with a Ph.D. in both languages. I wasn't the UN, and I had no idea how to conduct a clandestine interview with Shwe the squid dryer. He supervised a team at Grajom Fy that laid out sandfish and baby squid on bamboo racks to dry under the hot sun. With the arrival of the monsoons, sunny periods were few, so the workers had to hurry out with their trays and be prepared to hurry them back under cover when the rains came. I know it sounds trivial, but some twenty thousand fish are sun-baked there every day. Someone was making a lot of money out of the operation, and it wasn't the Burmese.
There was just the one NGO working out of Pak Nam, and that was Rescue the Orphans Thailand. It was a branch of an international organization called Rescue the Orphans World that reputedly did some good… somewhere. I had yet to find that place. In my cynical mind they were every bit as bad as the SRM and a dozen other acronyms and ini-tialisms that claimed to be doing more than they were. They misled and leeched off the backs of other projects and took a lot of photos of things they weren't responsible for to send back to the ignorant church folks in the West. ROT was brazenly Christian. With every pill, every textbook, they'd issue a reminder to the orphans that if it wasn't for the great white God, they'd be illiterate or starving or dead. So howsabout a hymn?
But ROT was also one of the three places downtown with A/C (7-Eleven and the bank being the other two), so I strolled into their office. I'd heard they had a Burmese working there who spoke English. There were four desks, and they were all empty. A tall man in a yellow T-shirt, yellow trousers, and a yellow peaked cap was sitting on the floor cutting out yellow paper chains. Yellow seemed to be in this year. He looked fearfully in my direction.
'Hello,' I said in English.
He remained seated on the ground, perhaps believing I'd come to the wrong place.
'Do you speak English?' I asked.
'Yes.'
'I need to speak to a Burmese worker. Can you translate for me?'
'Yes.'
I wondered whether this was one of those gag scenes where the person you're speaking to only knows the word yes.
'Where did you learn your English?' I asked.
'I graduated from the University of Rangoon many moons ago. I was an English major. Not frightfully useful in my present circumstances, I might add.'
All right, he could speak. He sounded like a leftover from the British Raj, but he could speak. My problem then for the next fifteen minutes, as we locked the office and drove my truck to Grajom Fy, was shutting him up. He was his own favorite subject. I could tell you all about his life, but it would really be a huge chunk of unnecessary narrative. So all you need to know is that his name was Clive. His portfolio in Pak Nam had nothing to do with orphans. He was here to initiate AIDS-awareness programs for the Burmese community. AIDS was still good charity, and even though there were far more pressing problems for the Burmese in Thailand, AIDS was what got Iowan and Indianan church folk dipping into their pockets. So, despite the fact he had no medical training and couldn't speak Thai, his command of the English language for some reason made him the ROT representative in Pak Nam. In his yellow ROT uniform the Burmese could see him coming half a kilometer away, but I wondered how they viewed him. With his education, I imagined he'd be something of an outsider. And would Shwe be comfortable with Clive as an interpreter?
We found Shwe among the vast spread of sunning tables laying out sandfish on racks like neat torture victims. All began well. The two were acquainted. They exchanged smiles and greetings. Shwe nodded curiously at me and told Clive a quick story, which I'm certain involved my underwear. Clive's brown cheeks turned claret. We retired to the shade of a huge deer's ears tree and sat on large plastic buoys.
'What would you care to know?' Clive asked, still too embarrassed to look me in the eye.
'Last night I was asking a group what they knew about Burmese bodies being washed up on the beach. Shwe had something to say, but the others there wouldn't let him tell me. I want to know what he knows.'
Clive's translation and the subsequent discussion in Burmese took some time, and I thought I was about to be excluded until Clive sighed and looked at his knees.
'Well, goodness,' he said. 'One is never too old for an education. I am flummoxed to learn of these things. It would appear that there have been numerous disappearances from amidst the Burmese. All unexplained. A husband would fail to return from his toil in the plantation. A workmate might stop by his associate's dormitory only to discover the door open and the bedding unperturbed. A fishing boat captain might be overwhelmed that a good and
