knock but press the door. It opens, and I step over the threshold. I guess he could not be dead and still be in a semilotus position, but the vital signs are few. I step over to him where he meditates with his back against a wall under a window. I think I am about to shake him, but the Buddha directs differently. I caress his beautiful face and kiss him gently on the forehead. 'Phra Titanaka, my brother,' I whisper.
He opens his eyes in another universe. He smiles with the generosity of one who has dumped ego and accepts eagerly the love in my eyes; then he remembers, and the anguish takes over.
'Gamon,' I say, 'we're going to have to let them go. Baker is dead because of us, but it was not really our fault. We don't have a lot of bad karma arising from his death. But if we go through with Damrong's plan, what will become of us? We'll be locked in granite for a million years.'
Horror in his eyes: 'And if I don't obey her? Have you any idea the power she has? She visits me every night. I still have sex with her.'
'Because you let her. You're a Buddhist monk-how can you allow yourself to be enslaved?'
My words startle him. He blinks at me then stares at his robes. 'Of course, I'm so used to these, I've forgotten I no longer have the right to them.'
In his disoriented state his childlike response is to stand and disrobe in front of me. This is not the effect I expected, and I want to tell him to put them on again, but as he stands in a pair of boxer shorts with the heap of saffron cloth at his feet, I watch a fascinating transformation. The monklike comportment quite melts away in less than a minute, together with the personality that went with it. That other side of him emerges: harder, more primitive, more built for survival, more criminal. I see clearly now the young man who once smoked and traded yaa baa. His voice is stronger, hoarser. He goes to the single window of his hut to look down on the compound where his elephant assassins graze.
I say, 'Gamon.'
He sighs. 'There is more.'
'Tell me. It might save someone's life.'
Controlling his tone: 'Her last e-mail didn't tell the whole story. It didn't tell the story at all.'
I think he wants to turn his face to me but cannot. I have him in profile while light starts to bleach the compound. 'Things she didn't want to remember or think about simply ceased to exist in her mind.'
He summons the courage to face me. 'You saw the reference to incest, but you didn't pick up on the significance.'
'Tell me, my friend, while there is still time.'
A groan comes from the heart. 'It started just like she said, two frightened kids in a wet and stinking two- room hut, Mum and Dad drinking, smoking yaa baa, and screwing in the next room — partying, you understand — no food for a day or two because they were too far gone. Then when Mum was unconscious and Dad was out of his head, he would call for her. He liked to mix sex with his voodoo. She would go to him, then come back looking like death. Looking like a seventy-year-old fourteen-year-old. But she stopped him from using me. Even then she was using her body to protect me.' A long sigh. 'But she had her needs too.'
After a pause, he starts again in a stronger voice. 'Sure, that's how it started. She showed me what she wanted and how she wanted it done. When I was a little older, she showed me what I wanted and did it for me. That was after her first tour. My first experience of sex was world-class, you might say.'
He coughs. 'Nothing wrong with that, apart from some primitive taboo designed to keep the tribal genome healthy, which hardly applies in an age of contraception. People who worry about such things should worry more about how Damrong and I would have turned out without incest.'
A long pause. 'But when she came back from her first tour in Singapore, she had changed. She was only eighteen, but she was a woman.' Licking his lips: 'And a whore. Whores suffer from terminal love starvation-you know that. They screw and they screw and they screw, and not a drop of love comes out of it no matter what they try. A kind of madness takes over them. They must have a real lover, even if he's some ugly, broken-down, old white man — '
'Or a close family relation.'
He nods. 'After every tour she came home panting for me. Usually she would get to Surin and call for me. I would go see her in a hotel. If she'd done well that month, she would rent a five-star suite. She liked showing me the power of her money. She was so hungry for me, it was almost like being raped. But of course, I wanted love too.' A couple of beats pass. 'She would always spoil me afterward, buy me motorbikes, whatever I wanted. One time she'd made so much, she bought me a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy-we had to sell it a few months later when times got tough. She would say over and over again that our love was the only way, that she couldn't keep on the Game and support me if she didn't have me to come back to.' Looking at me curiously: 'How did your mother handle it? Did she keep asking you if you really loved her?'
'We went through that stage.' Paris, old Truffaut snoring in his gigantic Belle Epoque bedroom under the silk bedspread, None embarrassed in front of me for going with such an old man: You do love me, Sonchai, don't you? You forgive your mum, darling, don't you?
'But she never seduced you?'
'Nong? No. Impossible even to imagine.'
'From the age of fifteen I heard the same words over and over: If you ever leave me, I'll kill myself.'
Light dawns in my skull just as the heat starts to bite, and sweat magically appears all over his brown body. I think: Of course, foolish of me, she would have needed a real lover just to carry on. But he would have had to be a cripple, hobbled. Memory flash: once walking with her on Sukhumvit, hand in hand, insanely happy, I tripped on a manhole cover-a stupidity you commit only when you're in love. I had to limp for a couple of days. I expected Damrong to despise me, but her reaction was opposite to that. She took care of me, urged me to lean on her shoulder, massaged my ankle in the middle of the busy street, showed love while I was helpless, used kindness from her palette of seduction. 'I see.'
'Perhaps you don't. She did a tour in Switzerland that lasted eighteen months. She was making so much money, she didn't want to lose her clientele until she felt she'd cleaned up.'
Two beats pass while he brings his heart under control, then: 'I was the one who couldn't stand it. I simply couldn't. Without her I was less than half alive. I smoked too much yaa baa, started selling it, got caught. She had to rush home to bribe the cops to get me out of jail.'
A terrible choking takes hold of him. He coughs hoarsely and shakes his head. He points to that short, thin white scar on his left wrist, which precisely replicates the one on his sister's arm. 'Childish, third-world melodramatic — but the blood was real. We vowed our lives away to each other. She said she'd never leave me for so long again, I promised to reform, go to some fancy school in Bangkok that she wanted to send me to, learn to speak English — I would be the saved one. When she was totally burned out by her late twenties, I would be able to look after her. Repay the debt: gatdanyu. That's what this case has always been about, Detective. You could call it a Case of Third-World Debt.'
'But you ordained,' I say.
He rubs his eyes. 'She did try to make more regular visits, but then the chance came to work in America, and she was greedy. She used some Mafia connections to get a visa. She was away two years that time. I wasn't a teenager anymore, I was in my early twenties. I'd graduated from university with a degree in sociology, of all things. I don't think she realized how useless that was going to be.' He looks frankly into my eyes. 'I knew I could never work-too fucked up. But I didn't want to betray her by going back to drugs. I did what any young Thai or Khmer man might do. I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. But the Thai Sangha wouldn't have me because of my criminal record, so I crossed the border to Poipet, the Cambodian gangster town where our parents came from. No worries about criminal convictions there. When I e-mailed my decision to her, she didn't mind at all. She thought I would stay in the robes for a month or so before boredom forced me out. So did I.'
I am staring at him, lost in horror, wonder, and admiration. I say, 'Oh.'
'Yes, oh.'
'You found you were a natural.'
'Everyone said so, from the abbot to my meditation master. A reincarnate for sure, they said. This kid has been around for millennia, flirting with Buddhism, never quite taking the final step. I found vipassana so easy, I was able to meditate for a full two hours after only the first week. After a year I could manage a full day and night. I was experiencing freedom and happiness for the first time in my twenty-four years on earth.'
'While she was in the States.'
