27

It’s early afternoon by the time I reach Soi Cowboy and open the bar. I’m keen to check with Lek after his evening with Fatima, but first I need to discuss Chanya’s diary with Nong.

I wai the Buddha as soon as I’ve switched the lights on. The important thing, always, is to keep the beer and spirits replenished. Most customers drink Kloster or Singha or Heineken, and the girls of course make half their money through lady drinks, a fact which is never far from my mother’s mind. She has left a message telling me to order more Kloster and tequila from the wholesalers as soon as I get in. The tequila is not a problem, in the worst case we can always buy a few bottles retail, but the Kloster is dangerously low.

When I look up at the Buddha statue, I finally understand why I’m feeling so edgy. The little guy is fresh out of marigolds. Out in the street I find a flower vendor, from whom I buy as many garlands as I can carry. (Wherever you go in my country there will be a flower vendor, her stall laden with Buddha garlands: it’s a sure bet in a land populated by sixty-one million gamblers.) As soon as I’ve smothered him in flowers, I light a bunch of incense, which my mother keeps under the counter, wai him mindfully three times, and stick the incense in the little sand pit we keep for that purpose and beg him to switch the luck back on. The minute I’ve finished, my mother Nong arrives with her arms full of marigolds.

“I was so busy yesterday I forgot to feed him,” she explains from behind all the flowers. I don’t say anything, merely watch while she takes in the garlands I’ve just hung all over him. “Oh. Well, he’ll forgive us now.” A beam. “We should be in for some really good luck. How did you get on in Songai Kolok?”

I make a face and tell her to sit down at one of the tables. I tell her about the diary and the all-important fact that Chanya knew Mitch Turner in the United States. Had a passionate affair with him. Nong gets the point immediately. “There could be evidence linking her to him? If the Americans investigate, they’ll surely find out he was seeing a Thai girl in Washington. Even though she was traveling on someone else’s passport, they might find out who she really is?”

“Exactly.”

I gaze up at the Buddha and make a face. How many marigolds will it take before he forgives us for neglecting him? Nong follows the direction of my gaze, goes up to him, lights a bunch of incense, and wais mindfully, with rather more piety than I was able to muster.

“I’m sure you didn’t wai him properly,” she scolds. “It’ll be okay now.”

Now “Satisfaction” is playing on my mobile. It’s Vikorn, wanting to know how I got on in Songai Kolok. “You better get over here,” he tells me, and closes the phone.

The public area of the station is crowded with the usual collection: beggars, whores, monks, wives complaining about their violent husbands, husbands complaining about their thieving, lying wives, lost children, the bewildered, the ruthless, the poor. Everyone here is poor. Vikorn’s corridor is empty, though, as is his room apart from him. He listens while I tell him more about Chanya’s diary and the CIA men Hudson and Bright who turned up in Songai Kolok. He stands after a while, then walks up and down with his hands in his pockets.

“Look at it this way. You’re a brilliant scholar with at least a Ph.D. in something hideously complicated. While still an idealistic student, you decide to serve your country by joining the CIA, which eagerly recruits you. Ten years down the track you are no longer a na"Ive student. Everyone you knew at college is earning twice your salary and having fun spending money. Men and women who were twenty percent dumber than you in school are now captains of industry, technology billionaires-maybe they’ve retired already from their first careers. They don’t have to worry about what they do and don’t say to their wives and families, they don’t need to think that the order could come from on high any minute for them to pack their bags and spend four or five years of their lives in some godforsaken dump like Songai Kolok. They don’t suffer polygraph tests every six months, random drug tests, electronic eavesdropping. You, on the other hand, are snared in the organization. Promotion is the only hope, the only way out of an incredibly frustrating trap. Now, spying is just the same as soldiering in one respect. What you need is a nice big war to open up the promotion prospects. Since 9/11, there is only one way anyone in the Agency is going to get promotion, and that is by nabbing a few Al Qaeda operatives. Tell me, how did they strike you, those guys you met who were sniffing around Mitch Turner’s apartment?”

As usual, my master has effortlessly demonstrated his strategic genius, the superiority of his mind, his encyclopedic grasp of human weakness in all its guises. “The older one, Hudson, was exactly like that,” I admit.

“Middle-aged, frustrated, desperate for promotion, sick to death of the tedium of small-scale spying, wondering what the hell he’s doing in the third world when he expected to be driving a nice big desk in Washington at this stage in his career, ideologically jaded?”

“Yes.” It does not seem appropriate to mention Hudson ’s extraterrestrial origins at this moment.

“And the other one?”

“Typical socially immature farang male with big ideas and tendency to walk into elephant traps.” There seems no need to go into the poor boy’s antecedents; people simply do not realize how boring most past lives are. Like so many of our species, Bright has been a herd animal for more than a thousand years, getting himself honorably killed in most of history’s great battles. Doubt did not enter his soul until he lay limbless and dying at Da Nang, when he entertained the unthinkable: Had he been misled?

“Hmm.” Looking at me brightly: “The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that. What is the West but a gigantic supermarket? And who really wants to die for a supermarket?” He stares at me. I shrug. “It’s simply a matter of being careful.” He makes that obscene fish-tickling gesture and grins.

When I check on Lek, I find he has called in sick for two days. Nobody knows where he is. When I call Fatima, she doesn’t know, either.

“Should we be worried?” I ask her.

“Darling, it was his moment. I had to kick him out of his comfortable little nest. Did he fly or not? There are no rules. If he survives, he’ll be back. He can’t do without me now.”

“You didn’t even check on him?”

“Don’t be a child, darling.”

Chanya in my dreams again last night. An artificial lake of the kind only seen in Rajasthan, a perfect square with a temple apparently floating on a white raft in the center. On shore, a line of forlorn young men. Each pilgrim is ferried out to the island for an interview with a Buddhist monk who resides there. When it is my turn, I find I cannot look into the monk’s eyes. My hand holds out a photograph of Chanya. I wake up in a sweat.

The dream has shaken me. I don’t think I’d admitted to myself how desperately I wanted her, and now I’m going through that disgusting form of anguish that is so entertaining when it happens to someone else. Having Vikorn make snide references to my emotional life is one thing, but to be outed by the transcendent is quite a different kettle of pla. Even so, I take a good couple of hours before I open my mobile and flick through the names until I reach C.

“Sonchai?” she says in that designed-to-melt tone that makes you want to kill her when she uses it on other men.

“I was just wondering how you were getting on.”

“Were you? Did you read my diary?”

A hoarse whisper: “Yes.”

“I suppose it’s not that interesting, really. I just thought you would want to know the background, in case…”

“Sure. I understand. There are a couple of things, though, maybe we should talk about.”

“There are? Like what?”

“Hard to talk over the phone, don’t you think?”

“In case we’re being listened to? Is it that bad already?”

“Ah, maybe, we just don’t know.”

“What d’you want to do?”

“Maybe we should have a bite to eat?”