black cat whose pleasure it is to toy with them.
So much for clairvoyance; but the exercise does seem to have provoked a more mundane line of inquiry. I check the data Immigration sent me this morning. It is a curious fact that Baker, Smith, and Tanakan all arrived back in Bangkok from their various destinations overseas on the same day, some twenty-four hours after the end of the period during which forensics says Damrong must have died. Coincidence, or the inevitable response of three blind mice who had no reason to be elsewhere once the cat was dead?
2
25
The FBI is staring at a tureen of fat snails cooked in their own juice with a brown sauce. We are eating at D's, just off Silom, an open-air restaurant popular with those who work the Pat Pong bars.
'You don't have to do this,' I tell her. 'Really. It's quite a risk you're taking.'
'I want to. I got into Thai food in the States, right after I met you the first time.'
I cannot comment because I never ate Thai food on my one trip to America. (To Florida; the John was a muscular seventy-something who meant well. I remember massive hands that were always fixing things, long hours while Mum and I stood around watching and applauding on cue at the Bathroom Leak Triumph, the Victory of the Fuse Box, the Battle of Flat Battery, et cetera. But he bored Nong so badly she had to invent a terminal illness for her mother so we could leave after a week. Back in Bangkok I had to deal with his pleading phone calls because Nong couldn't bring herself to speak to him. I was twelve.) I'm not as worried about the snails as I am about the somtan salad, which also has caught Kimberley's eye.
'At least have some sticky rice with it. Roll it into a ball like this.'
She watches a little resentfully, having graduated in spice already. She copies me, however, dips her ball into the sauce, and munches merrily with no ill effects. 'Delicious.' I see no advantage in pointing out there were no chili fragments at that end of the salad.
'We think he's in Cambodia,' the FBI says. We are still doing Bright and Cheerful around each other, by the way, careful not to mention Lek.
'Who?'
'Kowlovski, the masked man. His isometric image was recorded entering Phnom Penh airport about a week ago. Meanwhile the LAPD has come up with a whole bunch of background data. It's like looking at a fly caught in a web. That guy was in deep trouble.' She doesn't really want to eat any of the snails but feels honor bound to give one a go. 'How do you do this?'
'Suck.'
She does so, and after a moment of resistance the snail shoots out of its shell into her mouth. She starts to gag but masters herself manfully.
'Money?'
Covering her mouth and speaking through her fingers: 'It all comes down to that. It's the California Catch. To be marketable you got to be glamorous and to be glamorous you got to be hip, and to be hip you got to have dough, and to have dough you got to be marketable.'
'Cocaine?'
'Whatever's in style. This guy is a cipher. He has the mind of a whore: Whatever you want me to do for money-just make sure I look sexy while I'm doing it. He owes dealers and loan sharks, he owes back payments on child support for an ex-wife and two kids in Kansas, and he owes lease payments on some SUV he never drives far because he can't afford the gas. Threats pouring in. This is just stuff the guys on the ground over there picked up in one quick trawl through the porn industry. There are no secrets-it's a very transparent business.'
'So why Cambodia? If he was paid as much as we think for the flick, he could have settled all his debts and resumed the lifestyle, gone back to the more humdrum kind of studding.'
A shrug from the FBI. 'We don't know. We only have one witness who saw him in the last couple weeks. It's an old girlfriend who he keeps in touch with. She says she's the only person in the world he's ever had a relationship with that went below the skin. She thinks he's a troubled soul, with everything repressed. That certainly fits the pattern for prostitutes, male and female.'
Kimberley rolls another ball of sticky rice and this time plunges it deep into the somtan salad, pressing it down to absorb more of the sauce, then takes a bite. I dare not get technical at this stage by explaining that the intense but transient suffering she is about to inflict upon herself has directly to do with the overstimulation of her second chakra, which of course is the prime mover in her passion for Lek.
'Did she say anything else?'
I have to wait for the answer because her mouth is on fire, she is hiccupping, a sweat has broken out on her forehead, and her face is heart-attack crimson. Cold water is the worst therapy, but she takes a gulp from the bottle in the ice bucket. Now she has to visit the bathroom. I munch on the somtan and pick off a couple of snails while I'm waiting for her to return. The chili in the somtan goes well with my cold Kloster beer. (The two streams come together in a riotous clash somewhere in the back of the throat, sending a delicious shock wave through the taste buds.) Now the FBI is marching back to the table, her face set.
'Yes. She said he came back from a trip somewhere overseas a couple weeks ago and was real quiet, then disappeared altogether. Usually he's always ready with the latest friendly sound bite, normally a very personable guy in a Lycra kind of way. This time, though, he seemed depressed. She was surprised he had the depth to get depressed. I don't think I need any more snails or somtan salad.'
'I think they'll cook you a steak, if I ask them nicely.'
'I'm suddenly on a diet. How about I watch you eat, and I'll munch on some nice bland sticky rice if I get hungry?'
'Okay. Did he seem to have money the last time she met him?'
'Yes, she said he made a point of paying off some back rent on his apartment in Inglewood, cleared the slate with a grocery store, and gave her a silk shirt and skirt. They asked her if it was Thai silk, and she said she didn't know.'
Finally the braised duck has arrived in a pot. The FBI eyes it suspiciously, but when I assure her there are no spices in this dish, she takes a tentative bite, then digs in.
Her cell phone rings, except nothing rings anymore. The gadget explodes with an old Thai number she grew fond of when she was here a few years ago: 'Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy.' She says, 'Kimberley,' and listens. Then she says, 'Shit,' and closes the phone.
'He committed suicide in Phnom Penh yesterday. Apparently he used an AK-47 and a piece of rope tied around the trigger, which is not easy to do, but I guess if you're really determined to go that way…' She casts an eye over the remains of the meal, then looks at me. Hard to say what is causing my sudden loss of appetite: death; the manner thereof; the fact that the Masked Man will never be brought to justice; the memory of what he did to Damrong; the thought, only now surfacing in my mind, that I might have to make a visit to Phnom Penh. All of a sudden the energy has gone out of the day, and it's not because Mercury is retrograde (though it is, and our prime minister is on record as observing what a corrosive effect it is having on political life; for me, Mercury can come or go, but Jupiter conjunct the Moon in Scorpio- now that's a curl-up-in-bed-with-a-spliff day for yours truly).
This case has a trick of remaining perpetually out of reach, like a mirage. And no, I do not want to go to Cambodia; they hate us over there. Both sides have made so many land grabs over the centuries that no one really knows who started the feud, which shows no sign of diminishing no matter how many Thais cross the border to gamble. I guess they've never really forgiven us for defeating them at Angkor Wat that time: even in those days about seven hundred years ago, the Khmer were so reliant on magic they stopped bothering with combat training; the Thai invasion could be likened to a motorcycle gang smashing its way into an undefended sweet shop. We took
