The Godfather of Kathmandu - By John Burdett Page 0,124
the phone; all he communicates is fear, so it seems I have to carry the burden of enlightenment all on my own. As soon as I touch down in Bangkok, I call him again. “That was the deal, wasn’t it? I do the investigative stuff, then you corroborate or not?”
“Not on the phone. I’ll come around to your house. No, wait, I don’t want to be seen visiting you, I don’t want them to think we have a personal relationship.”
“D’you want me to wear a disguise?”
“Would you?”
“I was joking, Detective.”
He coughs. “How about Hua Lamphong?”
“Thirty minutes.”
• • •
So now I’m sitting at a café in the train station with an iced lemon tea, watching some backpackers hump their packs to the platform from which the train for Chiang Mai and all points north will depart. The station is crowded, as usual, mostly with rural Thais who have come to find fortune in the big city, or to depart in sorrow that they have failed. There are plenty of food vendors and taxi hustlers, as well. There is a big clock under the old-style rotating noticeboard that carries the departure times and makes it possible to imagine it is a hundred years ago when the station and its clock were new. Sukum is late. Sukum is terrified.
Finally he shows up in a pair of jeans, a black T-shirt, and dark glasses. He is carrying a Thai newspaper, which he has opened and raised to eye level, so that he has to take precautionary peeks before every step. He still walks like a cop. When he sees me he makes a sign to say, Don’t say hello. Instead of taking the seat next to me at my table, he sits at an adjacent table and takes out a pack of L&Ms. Sukum never smokes. I try not to stare as he opens the pack, thumps it to extract one, and lights it clumsily with a butane lighter. Ad-libbing as best I can, I wait for a few moments, then ask if I can have a cigarette. He shoves the packet at me. When I take one I use the opportunity to go nearer to him to beg a light. All the time his eyes are darting, and I see a fine patina of sweat has covered his face and soaked his T-shirt into a still darker shade. “Get a newspaper,” he hisses. So I find a vendor, buy today’s copy of Thai Rath, sit down at my table again but nearer to him, and carry on the conversation as if I am making remarks about the day’s news.
“You really met Johnny Ng?” he whispers. Despite his fear, he is fascinated that I may have penetrated further into the heart of darkness than he did ten years ago when he first started investigating Doctor Moi.
“Yes.”
“And he talked?”
“Yes, he talked. But that guy is a born survivor. What he said is all unat-tributable. I need you to fill in the gaps.”
He shakes his head at the incalculable depth of the void that has opened under his feet. “Okay,” he croaks, “talk.”
I tell the tale of a Chinese soldier of fortune whose tragedy was not entirely without a silver lining. True, Ng was shuttled around between family members after Mao’s Cultural Revolution had claimed his parents, and finally found a long-term foster home with a British family living in Hong Kong when it was still a British colony. All along, his surrogate families tended to be quite well-off and very well educated. He himself was also very, very smart. The youngish bisexual man—he was in his mid-to late twenties—who went to Bangkok to check out the possibilities of a distant family connection with a well-to-do pharmacist only a few years older than himself was cocky, adaptable, fluent in English and three Chinese dialects including Teochew, excessively good-looking, and entirely without moral sense. He married Moi within three months of meeting her, without expecting much in the way of love or normal family life. He had no illusions. Mimi Moi was weird within a tradition of upper-class Chinese women and not in the least interested in sex. That made a deal easy to reach. He would provide her with a respectable and attractive front for social events; in return she would have him trained in the most esoteric, and profitable, aspects of the gem trade. Theirs would be a symbiotic arrangement between what one might call “married singles.”