Bangkok Noir

Outsiders would try to destroy our culture. We have terrorists like the Sea Shepherd, saying that because we hunt limited numbers of dolphins and pilot whales we are wrong. How can that be?” Tanaka shrugged his shoulders, looking out at his audience. “How can the Japanese way of life be wrong? It’s not logical. It’s not scientific.”

Chinapat thought the speech sounded like something from the lips of an old analogue way of viewing reality. He opened one eye and glanced down at his watch before he closed them again. Waiting was the worst part of his job. Listening to a speech from Tanaka was the second worst part. He quite enjoyed, though, the planning, working out the details—place, time and, most important of all, the exit from the scene once the work was done.

Mr. Tanaka hadn’t made his first job easy. In the real world there were no “cheat codes” to game the system. He had to figure out stuff one step at a time. Tanaka hadn’t stayed in any of the luxury hotels on Sukhumvit Road. Instead he had holed up, as if expecting trouble, in a compound in Thonglor—the heart of the Japanese expat community—ringed with CCTV cameras, security personnel and limited access. On screen, none of these obstacles would have taken more than a few keystrokes to blow through.

Tanaka droned on in a public speech fashion—all words, no images—with lots of very important people in the audience who actually appeared to be listening. Chinapat hated all of those words, and he hated more how the words made him captive, a passive, helpless, patient observer. Analogue boredom flowed like pain throughout the system.

The overhead lights dimmed, and behind him the film started.

The screening of The Taiji Truth ended with a slow fade to a group of fishermen sitting together with their wives and children. The villagers lived in Taiji, located in southwestern Japan. These were the same people who’d done the heavy work, the slicing and cutting, the killing in The Cove. In this film the fishermen appeared as heroes, dressed like samurai. They talked about the history of their village and its simple, honest people, who only wanted to continue the traditions of their ancestors. Self-sufficient, modest, proud and very Japanese… but no one was talking about Academy Awards. The film had been financed by members of the far right in Japan and had been taken to Asian countries to show the true story of the people of Taiji and their relationship with the annual dolphin hunt.

The camera floated across the faces, making them look like humble, salt of the earth villagers who had little in terms of material possessions. The kind of people one rarely thought about as living in Japan. Chinapat thought they looked like men, women and children from a village near the Laotian border he’d once visited just to see what such a place looked like. He was more careful about unstructured visits, as they often led to little more than dust, barking dogs, chickens scratching the ground and the smell of wood fires. Bangkok was different. So was Taiji.

No more than five minutes into the documentary, there was a jump cut. Nothing gracefully prepared the audience for what came next.

A shudder arose as the screen filled with the Taiji bay boiled up a gruesome red. Blood gushed from dozens of gutted dolphins as local Japanese villagers slaughtered as if on a battleground, hacking and stabbing and cutting through the flesh. Tanaka started shouting in Japanese. A couple of the men in the first row ran to the front, using their sizeable bodies to block the screen. Other Japanese men from the second row ran to the projection room in the back. Chinapat heard them cursing in Japanese.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have had someone sabotage our film. Those who hate Japan stop at nothing to hurt us. What you are seeing is an example of the history of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. They seek to interfere and bring down our traditions. We will stand together against such people.”

The Japanese in the audience applauded. After a few seconds they were on their feet giving Tanaka a standing ovation. It was Tanaka’s moment of glory. He actually smiled and bowed to the audience. The men outside the projection room were having difficulty getting in. The projectionist had locked the door from the inside.

“In Japan we follow the principle of sustainable use. Dolphins are a renewable resource.”

Chinapat kept his eye on the stage, watching the sea of dead and dying dolphins dancing over the faces and chests of the Japanese men from the audience who stood shoulder to shoulder, as if they’d practiced this formation. The shallow inland bay reminded him of Fanta strawberry red, one of Chinapat’s favorite drinks as a boy. The rest of the audience reacted with confusion and anger. Watching the men from the first five minutes gleefully slaughtering the dolphins horrified the women in the audience. They registered a common emotion, which exploded like a flock of birds that had spotted an eagle circling. The roaring sound of stale breath sucked deep back into the lungs, a rising tone of disgust salted with despair.

Finally the film stopped, and the men who’d been blocking the screen filed back and took their seats. Three other men came out of the project in booth, leaving a comrade inside to keep an eye on the projectionist.

As Tanaka resumed his speech, apologizing for the interruption and promising to file a complaint, he said, “What you’ve just seen is the work of terrorists.”

More applause burst from a sizeable section of the audience. Chinapat observed that a number of those applauding were missing little fingers. The absent appendage didn’t muffle or reduce the sound of the clapping. Then an attractive young Thai woman with red streaks in her long black hair entered from one of the side doors— she looked no more than seventeen or eighteen. She wore a tight, short black miniskirt and a crisp white cotton blouse with shiny buttons that looked like military decorations. She walked straight to his row and sat in the seat next to him. “I know who you are,” she said. “And I have a message for you.”

He didn’t recognize her at first. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else, younger sister,” he said.

“It’s a trap,” she said, looking straight ahead at the stage. “We’ve been set up.”

“That’s not my reading,” he said.

Her name was Seven and she’d expected an argument. “That’s because your calculations are off point four,” she said.

He ran through the sequence from top to bottom. “Fuck, you’re right,” he said, his mouth ajar. “How did that happen?”

She leaned over and whispered, “You were in a hurry. Now we don’t have much time. But I have a backup plan.”

One of the things Chinapat loved most about Seven was that she always came with a fully developed contingency program.

She firmly grabbed his hand, and together they moved down the row to the exit door and out into the main lobby. Seven handed him a shopping bag and pointed to the men’s restroom. A couple of minutes later, Chinapat emerged wearing a baseball cap, dark glasses, Wrangler jeans and a T-shirt with a small dolphin icon above the heart.

2.0

Where are you?

Nana Entertainment Plaza

In a small, overcrowded back room of a bar converted into an office, a couple of tables, chairs, bookcases, a filing cabinet and two enormous safes occupied the area behind a locked set of teak doors.

Sitting amid gray smoke, a heavy-set MiddleEastern man named Jaul slumped in front of a computer screen. His enormous stomach rose above the edge of the table as his right hand moved the mouse and his left hand fed a large, freshly fried chicken drumstick into his mouth. Jaul was online, working through a pirated version of an early program of an archeological dig outside Baghdad. He was the owner of the Smoke but No Fire Bar.

The bar, once a travel agency, was discreetly set back from the staircase on the second floor of the Nana Entertainment Plaza. It was early morning, and the plaza was deserted. A few delivery trucks downstairs. Otherwise only a stray cat and a couple of resident dogs occupied the narrow corridors. Jaul loved the early morning, when he was left alone to count his money. His was a popular bar, and his women tall and young and beautiful. Money, piles of cash, accumulated every night like clockwork. He had counted his money twice and made notes in a ledger. Behind the chair where he sat, the safe door was ajar. Through the door appeared rows of stacked Thai thousand and five hundred baht notes.