The Godfather of Kathmandu - By John Burdett Page 0,113

it’s very clever—it makes for great cinema.”

“And the other stuff—we see the whole of the inside of his skull?”

“Apparently, that was the easy part. Just a question of trick photography and a lot of work with plastic models.”

“But”—I’m spluttering—“we have the body—that’s how he died—the skull was completely detached, parts of the brain had been eaten—there was real blood everywhere—someone ripped his guts out—the murder wasn’t faked.”

“I didn’t say the murder was faked, honey, only the movie.”

We both hang there in silence for a long moment. I say, “Wow.”

“I agree. Wow! I’m jealous—what a great case! Is it the only one you’re working on?”

“No,” I say, swallowing guilt like something sour in my mouth. “I’m doing something special for Vikorn at the same time.”

She’s smart enough to take the hint. There is sorrow in her tone when she says, “Ah!”

I am realizing how compromised I am, how my freedom of action has been destroyed by the chains on my spirit. For all her faults and her restless need for love and change, the FBI still has integrity; I doubt she’s ever broken the law in her life, or even slightly bent the ethics of her profession. For all her experience, she’s less worldly than I am these days. I envy her the unobstructed speed of her brain when she says, “I don’t want to tell you how to run the case, Sonchai, but if I were you—”

“I know,” I interrupt, anxious, I suppose, to show I still know how to investigate a murder. “The surviving husbands.”

As soon as I’ve closed Skype I find Frank Charles’s movie and slide it into the DVD drive. I fast-forward to the ending, then play around with the controls until I’ve got extra slow-mo. I stare in disbelief. The FBI is right. At this speed it is possible to see the edge of the saw’s circular blade touch on the hair, which is covering some kind of skin-colored strip that bulges slightly in the center, and as soon as it does so the strip bursts, shedding “blood.” I manage to catch a still and magnify it: tiny shreds from the plastic strip are clearly mixed with the spray of gore. You wouldn’t normally notice them, because they look like bone fragments. I’m shaking my head. I need Einstein. I have Sukum.

41

It’s around midnight when I finally decide to call Sukum to get the names of Moi’s surviving ex-husbands. Then I take a cab to the station to dig out the report from the nerds who hacked into Frank Charles’s computer. Then I take a cab to his penthouse on Soi 8.

It’s about two in the morning, and most of the action is finished for the night at Nana Plaza when I pass. There is a drunken farang who has to hold on to the wooden guardrail of one of the bars in order to stand up, and a katoey who is trying to get him to his hotel. A bunch of whores are crossing the street to the Nana Café, where it is possible to hang out until dawn, hoping a customer will show up. There is a line of taxis, too, ready to take stray jet-lagged farang to those unlicensed bars where you’re scrutinized from behind a spyhole before they let you in (you don’t have to be white, just foreign), and where you can drink and play with girls for as long as you have the dough. Soi 8, also, is very quiet but still carries the signs of a party neighborhood: girls with farang sitting on iron seats outside a closed bar; a Westerner in his late twenties singing to himself on his way home (an ancient European Cup song to the tune of “Blue Danube”: Vienna are shit, shit-shit shit-shit); a couple of cops standing by a lamppost, chatting.

At the apartment building they are surprised to see me and not too keen to let me into Charles’s suite—can’t it wait till morning? I’m in no mood for diplomacy, though, and opt for arrogance as a means of getting their attention. Now I’m sharing the elevator with a sulky receptionist who opens the door to the penthouse and shrugs. She doesn’t have the time or the patience to hang around, so she closes the door behind me and returns to reception. All alone in the silence of his death—which, I now realize, has quietly penetrated every aspect of his home—I decide to pause, trying to commune with his spirit. Were you murdered