Free Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett

tell me, how do you make them move?” It’s true, the saxophonist on the wall is swinging his instrument up and down while he belts out the meanest version of “Bye Bye Blackbird” I’ve ever heard. Now I realize it is the colors that are playing the tune, the complex structures of tropical russets, extravagant sunsets, overripe jackfruit, heavy brown men and women who seem to have only half emerged from the earth, the cries of the human spirit that has trapped itself in matter—all are transmuted into an intense, tangible aural landscape by the sax on the wall. Then Damrong appears. By an extraordinary shake of the kaleidoscope the whole wall swirls and twists until her form emerges. She is topless in a sarong of Tahitian design, and her brown skin fits the color range of the painting perfectly; but her slim body is lithe and Thai, and a superior energy gives her power over those around her. Her black hair is flying, and there is a mystic gleam in her eye. Hello, Sonchai. What are you doing here?

“I’ll call for a taxi,” Lek says, half amused, half ashamed.

8

Of course Lek and I know very well who Pi-Oon’s lover is. His mug adorns the pages of the HiSo zines in both Thai and English versions. Here he is with the usual suspects at some ballgown and black-tie function, having his pic taken with deep-cleavage wives of deep-pocket movers and shakers. Round-faced with porcelain skin, laden with filigreed gold on his neck, wrists, and—according to Lek—ankles, he has shrewdly cultivated the banking sector of the aristo circuit, which is said to be the real reason his advertising business thrives. His name is Khun Kosana, and he is known throughout Bangkok as a true na yai: big face. His bizarre affair with the poor, ugly, but wildly gifted Pi-Oon has been the talk of the gossip industry for over a year; it seems they get on famously and really are considering a marriage in Canada or Amsterdam, and to everyone’s amazement Khun Kosana, the na yai playboy par excellence, really does seem to adore his paramour, has paid for all the medical fees pertaining to his gender reassignment, and most incredible of all has so far been faithful to him.

I’m at my desk, thinking that things are falling into place rather well. All I have to do is find a subtle way to put the squeeze on Khun Kosana to find the origin of the Damrong snuff movie. I have no doubt one of the advertising mogul’s HiSo buddies earned himself some street cred by giving him a copy; no doubt it’s doing the rounds of the jet-set circuit, and so long as I play by the rules (never threaten law, only blackmail), I’ll be able to force one of them to reveal the true source. I’ll need to have Vikorn behind me in order not to get snuffed myself, of course, but that can be finessed by letting the Colonel do some milking of these expensive cash cows who run the country. All in all it was a good move to get stoned with Gauguin — I’m still thinking of him in that incarnation (which I rarely revisit, I mean the Tahiti lifetime a century ago; it was a mistake, the whole back-to-nature thing; I was a French doctor, which is how I got to know Gauguin, who, as we have seen, has not yet clawed his way out of the third-world trap he set himself over a hundred years ago—but never mind, it’s not part of the plot). Now my cell is playing Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You”: it’s Lek.

“They’re dead,” he says. “Both of them.”

“They tortured Pi-Oon in front of him, then shot them.”

Lek has called a couple of uniform cops to secure the hut while we’re waiting for the forensic team, but there isn’t going to be anything we don’t know already: Pi-Oon, his great prizefighter face still in a howl of agony, his artist’s hands twisted and torn, fingernails ripped out, a hole between his eyes and a bigger exit wound at the back of his skull, is propped against the lower part of his self-portrait in the middle of the