a murder as you could possibly imagine; on the other, there’s not a sign of ungoverned rage, the decision to mutilate the human form apparently sustained with surgical discipline. The victim was disemboweled with a single careful incision from solar plexus to lower abdomen; his guts flopped out because he was so obese. Similarly, the whole of his upper cranium had been removed, but the surgery was carried out with considerable care and skill—the pathologist has explained that it is not easy to keep the saw steady without practice. Most telling of all, there are no irrational slashings or stabbings, which may have indicated a psychopathic disorder in the killer. All of this might have been explained away on the grounds that we simply do not have enough information about the perp; but we do: we have the books s/he used as a blueprint. But why? Surely not as a manual? Someone, obviously, is trying to tell us something. And then, of course, there is the small matter of cannibalism.
Now that they have been dusted I am able to pick up the books one by one: The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, an Edgar Allan Poe short-story collection, including “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and—what a coincidence!—The Godfather, by Mario Puzo.
I’m shaking my head at the impenetrable mystery, at the same time wishing there were a window to look out of. “No window,” I say to Sukum.
“Didn’t you look at the room rates? A room with a window is double the cost of one without.”
“But we’re dealing with a successful Hollywood director, the most spoiled subspecies of human being that exists on earth. How could he possibly make a decision based on a five-hundred-baht difference?”
Sukum scratches his head and shrugs: a farang issue on which he is not qualified to speak. “Maybe he didn’t want windows.”
“He wanted a bathroom, though. Rooms without bathrooms are even cheaper.”
Sukum and I check out the bathroom: tiny, with a flush toilet crammed next to a shower stall with a torn curtain. There are no clues here. Indeed, that is another paradox. In a case involving extreme violence, you don’t normally find the perpetrator’s mind organized enough for such a thorough cleanup. Apart from the blood on the floor, there was no circumstantial evidence to follow up on at all. It almost has the mark of a professional slaying; but professionals do not indulge in such a baroque style. Nor do they eat their victims’ brains: it would ruin their reputation, and they’d never get any more work.
Stumped! I’ve never come across anything like it. Violence, you see, is a form of lust, a primitive kind of consumerism: early capitalism, you might say. Just as it is impossible for you to buy a dream house without first fantasizing about it, so with the love objects of killers. They are driven by compelling images just as irresistible to them as dog-snoring-in-front-of-fireplace-while-cute-kids-play-safely-on-lawn may be to you, farang—lacking your discretion, however, they tend to end up with an ugly piece of meat, whereas you merely get stuck with a subprime mortgage. Rage turns to ashes: panic. But I see none of that here; nor do I feel it. For the perpetrator to saw open the victim’s skull, they would have had to concentrate for as much as ten minutes, being careful not to cut into the delicate, spectacular, crimson spider web of the arachnoid mater—the inner membrane which protects the brain. But why would you worry about the arachnoid mater of someone you were about to kill, especially when you intend to dig into it for supper? After the perp finished they must have carefully put away the rotary saw and the knife they used to cut him open, neither of which have been found, and coolly departed the premises. I’m not entirely displeased that it’s Sukum’s case, not mine. Dead end: we stare at each other and shrug.
Downstairs, Lek does not seem to be faring well with the desk clerk. When Sukum and I exit the elevator we walk into a katoey shouting match. In Thailand people rarely express their feelings in public; but this is Nana and these are transsexuals, and they both hail from the Northeast, so they are yelling in their own dialect of Lao, which neither I nor Sukum understand. Finally Lek, who, much as he loathes physical violence has no problem with a really good mouth fight on the fishwife model, says something to make the other katoey start to walk around