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“I’ve never seen one as good as that before,” Lek says.
In the cab on the way to the station, stuck in a brooding jam at the intersection between Petburri Road and Soi 39 (on the other side of the glass: carbon monoxide laced with air), Lek says: “Did you know that according to Buddhism there were three human beings at the begi
“Yes.”
“A man, a woman, and a katoey?”
“That’s right.”
“And we’ve all been all three, over and over again, going back tens of thousands of years?”
“Correct.”
“But the katoey is always the loner.”
“Katoey is a tough part of the cycle,” I say as gently as I can.
“What’s a Trance 808?”
“The murder, love. It comes from the number of the standard homicide documentation: T808. Vikorn called it Trance 808 once, and it caught on.”
Back at the station Ma
I turn pale but say nothing.
Upstairs, I’m standing all alone on the bare wooden boards outside his office. In response to my knock, a bark: “What?”
“It’s me.”
“Get the fuck in here.”
I enter gingerly, in case he’s waving his pistol around, a common adjunct to Vikornic rage. Well, actually he has taken it out, it’s lying on his desk, but the signals are even worse. In a single timeless locking of eyes, I see that he’s been playing those old memory tapes again; wallowing. There’s a near-empty bottle of Mekong rice whiskey next to the gun, and an album of photographs in a large plastic cube showing his son Ravi at key moments in his short life. Ravi ’s corpse dominates the montage.
For everyone in District 8, the story is fundamental to our mythology. None of us were there at the time, but each of us has lived every moment. A few snaps from the photo album will be enough for your astute understanding, farang:
Snapshot 1: Ravi at age zero. Vikorn, husband to four wives, father to eight girls, holds his only son as if he were holding the meaning of life.
Snapshot 2: Ravi aged five, playing kiddie golf in a lush garden with the lovestruck Colonel.
Snapshot 3: Ravi at age sixteen bearing the symptoms of a seriously spoiled brat (smirk; gold Rolex; Yamaha V MAX motorbike; a beautiful girlfriend he was in the process of destroying with cocaine, sex, and alcohol; the old man making up the threesome with an obscene beam).
Snapshot 4: Ravi in his early twenties in Gucci casual standing in front of his scarlet Ferrari in Vikorn’s country estate up in Chiang Mai.
Snapshot 5: Ravi dead from a wound in his chest, his shirt soaked in pink blood fresh from the lungs.
The riots of May 1992 took everyone by surprise. It was supposed to be just another army coup (we’ve had thirteen since our first constitution in 1932, nine of them successful), but something had changed in the common people. General Suchinda, our prime minister of the month, was totally wrong-footed: the downtrodden were actually marching for democracy. A few bullets should do the trick. The order was given from on high. Zi
No mention is made of Ravi in the final report of the commission of inquiry into the riots, but every Thai understood what had gone on in Zi
There have been many skirmishes in this war, for Zi
The minute he saw that Zi
“He dropped the mark on my patch.” Vikorn glares at me.
“Not the best party ma
“Don’t give me your fucking supercilious farang back-chat.”
“Sorry.”
“D’you realize what this means?”
“Maybe I’m missing the finer points.”
“Maybe you’re missing the main fucking point. Would you come to my house and drop an elephant turd on my Persian rug?”
“Your what?”
“That’s the level of insult. It doesn’t get worse than this. No one, I mean no one, not even your army fuckups, does this. It’s the main rule. Without it we’d have-we’d have-”
“Anarchy?”
He looks at me but does not see me. In this case blind rage is no metaphor. He stops abruptly, goes to his desk, and picks up the gun to examine it curiously, as if unsure of the crimes it is about to commit, then with great care lays it down again next to the photos. I breathe a sigh of relief, for I have seen this before: the white heat of his fury slowly but surely mastered by a Herculean determination to use his great intellect for the purpose of spite. He looks at me again, eyes still glazed somewhat, but brighter. “Yes, anarchy. Do farang really suppose that our society could survive one minute without rules? Just because we don’t follow the written ones doesn’t make us third-world bums. No jao por wastes a mark on another jao por’s patch. It just doesn’t happen. This could take us back to the stone age.”