The Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett

generosity is too much for him; it’s too Buddhist, too un-cop. “A minute ago I hated your guts and was fighting the temptation to have you bumped off,” he whispers in a disorientated voice. “Now you might be the biggest benefactor of my life. It must be your
farang
blood that makes you so incomprehensible.”
    “Must be,” I agree genially. Instead of going back to his desk immediately, as he would like to, he hangs around, looking even more apologetic. “What is it, Khun Sukum? If you are stuck, I’ll try to help.”
    He fidgets a bit and does a sort of dance. “I did a little preliminary research.”
    “Yes.”
    “The victim’s name was Frank Charles. He owned a luxury condominium on Soi Eight.”
    “Yes?”
    “But if you remember, he was found in that flophouse on Soi Four/ Four.”
    I push back on my chair until it balances on the rear legs, and I’m using my feet on the desk to maintain balance. “Khun Sukum, did I not already explain, when
farang
get money they often stop thinking about waste. I mean, other factors come into operation.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like perhaps he was embarrassed that the security at his condo would know he brought a different woman back every night, or maybe more than one. Or perhaps he thought if he behaved like that someone would tell his circle in Hollywood.”
    “They don’t have prostitutes over there?”
    “Of course, but
farang
suffer greatly from a disease called hypocrisy. That may be why he was here in the first place. What does his passport show? How often did he visit Thailand?”
    “Four times a year for the past ten years.”
    I open my arms in a sort of invitation to Detective Sukum to share my dubious expertise on the subject. “It may be a safe working hypothesis that he was one of those famous
farang
who are also sex addicts, who make regular visits to Bangkok while pretending to be working on their laptops at home. There are quite a few literary figures like that, and even more from the California entertainment industry, and lots of judgmental British journalists as well, not to mention Hong Kong lawyers. That being so, he might have bought his condo for its proximity to Soi Seven.”
    “What happens in Soi Seven?”
    “The Rose Garden.”
    “It’s a brothel?”
    How to explain the Rose Garden? “Not exactly. It’s full of freelancers. It suits young mothers who need spending money whether they’re married or not, girls with boyfriends they need to service during the evening, women with part-time jobs who can slip out of the office to turn a trick or two before going home to supper.” It occurs to me that a homily is called for: “The unpalatable truth is that promiscuity makes men happy, and quite a few women, too, especially when they get paid.”
    “It’s full of
farang?”
    I notice the telltale signs of Thai shyness overcome him. “Do you want me to go with you?” I ask.
    He nods in relief and lets me have another of those smiles. Before leaving my desk I send off an e-mail to Kimberley Jones:
    All you can share about Frank Charles, Hollywood director?

13
    Like a lot of Thais, Detective Sukum has never spent much time in the Nana area, although he has passed through it often enough and reads about it almost daily in the newspapers. Perhaps we got the idea of invisible screens from the Chinese, before they kicked us out of their country about fifteen hundred years ago. The invisible screens in this case produce a kind of psychological enclave for the benefit of
farang
men—men like Frank Charles, for example—who do not know how to be discreet, and so we have to be discreet for them, letting them get away with poor public behavior in a restricted area in the hope it will not corrupt our kids. Therefore I deliberately stop the cab at the Sukhumvit/Soi 4 junction and walk Sukum past the stalls that line the pavement where you can buy DVDs of the latest movies, some of them clearly marked as being for the eyes of the Oscar