station because the duty calls are starting to come in. I say I'll be there in twenty minutes. Sergeant Ruamsantiah is running the response teams today.
I'm in a cab when my cell phone starts to vibrate in my pocket. It's Ruamsantiah with a bust. 'It's a damn funeral casino,' he says, his tone full of apology.
'I thought we stopped busting them.'
'Unofficially. We got a report from a cop-must be a disgruntled relative who wasn't invited. It's not something we can ignore. You can go as easy as you like, just make sure you take down names and keep notes so we can say we acted promptly on the information.' I call Lek to tell him to meet me at the Skytrain station nearest the address.
Sorry to lay a culture shock on you halfway through the yarn, farang; funeral casinos work like this:
You are a newly minted ghost all alone on the Other Side without a body, feeling understandably disoriented. There is still plenty of connection with your living relatives through subtle lines that science will not be able to detect for a few hundred years yet, but after your loss of vital functions, the communication operates largely through transfer of emotional energy: urges outlive reason. Without a body, though, you are dependent on a certain residual awareness filled mostly with separation anxiety. Now, what do you most not want? Answer: you most don't want to be alone. Relatives who might have irritated you profoundly before you became a corpse now acquire an important-nay vital-function. It is the duty of close family to surround you with as many people as possible for the duration of the wake, which can go on for forty-nine days, at the end of which you will have found a new bivouac in someone's — or something's-womb. Now, there is one activity and one activity alone that will keep your average Thai coming to your home day after day for seven weeks, especially if they didn't much like you in the first place. The other advantage to buying a few roulette wheels and offering a private gambling service is for the bereaved spouse to use the profits to pay for the monks, the food, and the roulette wheels and to put together a fistful of baht to see close family through the difficult postwake period.
All of which explains why Lek and I find ourselves outside Nang Chawuwan's third-floor apartment in a modestly appointed building on Soi 26. Lek snooped around and confirmed there is a fire escape from the apartment by means of the back door. By banging loudly on the front door, therefore, and yelling, 'Police,' we are able to cause an immediate evacuation. Sounds of Sunday-best shoes slapping on the wrought-iron fire escape on the opposite side of the apartment, excited whispers, some giggling. The exit goes on for about ten minutes, which probably indicates that more than a hundred guests are now legging it down the soi. We bang again on the door, and this time it opens on an exhausted, tearful, but spirited woman dressed in traditional Thai costume; Nang Chawuwan is all of five feet tall.
I don't want to cause offense at her time of mourning, so I let her play for time while the last of her guests make their getaway, then she leads us into the flat. She has not troubled to hide the roulette wheels; there are five of them. Cleverly, she has left small piles of cash next to one of the wheels. She glances from the cash to me to Lek to the cash.
'This is a very serious offense that carries a prison sentence,' Lek tells her sternly, while taking a peek at the deceased, who is lying with his arms folded over his chest in a brightly varnished pine coffin: the gaunt, humble face of a workingman. Indeed, he is so gaunt, I'm wondering if Nang Chawuwan starved him to death. An ignoble thought, perhaps, but that is one skeletal cadaver.
'Sorry,' Nang Chawuwan says.
Unable to maintain stern for very long, Lek stares with infinite compassion at the corpse. 'Poor thing's lonely already,' he says, 'I can feel it.'
A sniff from Nang Chawuwan. 'That's why I did it, I had to make it worth everyone's while to keep him company. How else was I to fulfill my obligations as a wife?'
Lek finds this question too troubling and turns to me for instructions. I am afraid I am somewhat transfixed by the corpse, like a cadet with his first cadaver. Death is hitting me strangely this week.
'Take the money,' Nang Chawuwan says, losing patience and jerking her chin at the cash next to the wheel.
'We don't take money,' Lek says, again checking my eyes.
'That's right,' I confirm. I smile. 'Better put it away-it's a little incriminating lying there like that.'
Nang Chawuwan makes big eyes. 'You don't take money?' A grin breaks over her features. 'I knew my Toong was a good man, but I never knew he had that kind of karma. Imagine, busted at his funeral by two cops who don't take money!' She shoves the cash down her bra for now. 'He was practically an arhat, a saint, and this proves it.'
'You'll have to give us your ID card,' I say, 'and if anyone asks, this was a serious bust that went wrong because we didn't know there was a fire escape.'
'Right.'
'And you're never going to do this again, are you? I mean, you're not going to call around to all your guests to tell them the coast is clear as soon as we're gone, right?'
'Of course not.'
'Promise?'
'Promise.'
'Just this time then.', Locking eyes with me for a moment: 'Are you sure you won't take some money? I would feel safer.'
'No,' Lek says, all firm again and pointing a long finger at her. 'You'll have to trust us.'
Old Toong's excellent karma has her all excited. She's remembering all over again what a fine man she married and how well he took care of her, even after death. It's not often a ghost gets so lucky at his own funeral casino. Indeed, Nang Chawuwan is now so fortified with his spiritual power, she has fished her cell phone from out of her costume and started calling the guests back before we're out the front door.
While we're walking down Soi 26, though, in search of a cab, I'm starting to feel dizzy and have to stop at a cafe. Normally I don't drink on duty, but I need a beer and order one. Lek orders a 7UP, then goes to a street vendor who is pushing his glass-and-aluminum trolley along the gutter. I watch while the vendor opens the hinged glass, stabs at a sour green mango, dunks it onto a cutting plate, and slices it up so fast his hands are a blur. Now he's using the funnel end of the steel plate to slide the slices into a plastic bag. He chucks the first plastic bag into a second, into which he adds pink sachets of chili, salt, and sugar for the dip. The final touch is a cocktail stick with which to eat the mango slices.
'What's the matter?' Lek wants to know when he returns, chewing.
I felt the blood drain from my face, and I'm sure my skin was gray as I sat down hard on a plastic seat outside the cafe. It's a street that caters mostly to the housing needs of workers in the entertainment industry. There are plenty of katoeys around, a lot of farang, and girls in jeans and T-shirts on their way to work.
'Death,' I say. 'Every cop builds up a resistance from the first day on the beat. You can lose it, though, just like that.' I snap my fingers while he makes big eyes. He does not understand, and there is no way I'm going to confess to a shameful event of last night that the bust has brought back to mind. I swallow the beer quickly but fail to block the memory:
I woke up with a jolt so hard, I could feel it in my joints. Chanya was my first thought, but she was already awake, staring hard at the ceiling. She only does that when she's angry.
'It was her again, wasn't it?'
I waited as long as I could before saying, 'Yes.'
'Sonchai, I don't know how much of this I can take. I'd fight any living woman for you, but the dead? D'you know what you've been doing for the last half hour?'
I was unable to answer.
'You've been fucking her, haven't you?'
I turned my head away. 'Yes.'
'On and on. That's the third time in as many nights. Then you came. You're all sticky.'
I didn't realize. Now the whole dream came back to me. Except that it wasn't a dream. It was a visit. I couldn't move for trembling.
With an effort my darling overcame her anger and went to fetch a damp cloth. She wiped me down as roughly as she could without removing surface skin. 'A normal man has a real mia noi. You have to have a fucking dead one.'
