The Bangkok Asset: A novel Read Free Page A

satisfied and neither was I. We didn’t say so, but he wanted proof that what the Inspector had said was true. In Thailand matricide is virtually unknown. It is one of those crimes so extreme, inviting a sentence of millions of years in a hell starker than stone, before the perpetrator reemerges in some primitive life form, that most of us, including me, believe it to be exclusively Western. Inspector Krom, though, seemed to take the unnatural crime in her stride.
    “That’s as much as you saw, right?” she asked me.
    “Yes. After that the wind died and the fog returned.”
    “So, here’s the continuation in real time. It will have to be radar, which is monochrome, because of the mist. Look.”
    I studied the screen, now black and white, as the tall
farang
threw off his padded parka to reveal a magnificent torso under a black T-shirt, removed his pants leaving boxer shorts, took a couple of paces to the stern, poised like a professional swimmer, and dived elegantly into the churning water. The two Thai men stared after him but made no effort to move.
    “Who in hell
is
that?” I muttered.
    “I don’t know his real name, if he has one.” The Inspector waited to see if I would react to that. I didn’t. “They call him
the Asset.
Or, if you prefer,
Goldman’s Asset
—that could be changing, though.”
    “What could be changing?”
    “Goldman’s ownership of his Asset.”
    “Who is Goldman?”
    Krom played with the buttons some more to change focus. Now we were looking at a great shadowy hulk standing on the riverbank no more than a hundred yards from where the van was parked. Even in monochrome with nobody around to compare him with he appeared gigantic, in a weatherproof jacket the size of a bedsheet, hands in his pockets, thinning hair blown about by the wind.
    “Meet Joseph George Goldman,” Krom said. “Former CIA officer, retired.” She cast us a glance. “He still works for them, though. On contract.” I looked at her, waiting for more. “He’s too old, really, but they can’t do without him.”
    “Why?”
    “Wait and see.”
    “This is the weirdest day,” I muttered. “Really, the weirdest day of my entire career.”
    “How so?”
    “I’m investigating a murder by beheading that happened last week in the market behind the police station. Suddenly I’m told to come here in this filthy storm. When I asked if it was related, the Colonel said he wasn’t sure. Now two women are murdered—drowned—with no clear motive and no reason for supposing there’s a link with the case I’m working on.”
    “Get used to it,” she said.
    “Why?”
    She shrugged, as if to say that if I didn’t understand yet, I soon would.
    Now she manipulated the radar to return to the river. She used the boat as a point of reference—the two men were huddled in the stern, pressing their bodies together to make one dark heap—then tracked across the river until she located a blob in the water. It was the tall blond
farang
who I’d decided was as good as dead. No one survives that kind of current, that kind of flood. Buddha knew how many tons of violent water would be brought to bear on a frail human form, no matter how much iron those muscles had pumped.
    But he wasn’t dead or even in trouble. He disappeared from the screen perhaps a dozen times, when it was unclear if he had drowned or if the mist had simply engulfed him; then, with a regularity that became increasingly improbable, the cropped bullet head would reappear a couple of yards nearer the bank. Sure, the flood was taking him downstream, but the fact that he was able to fight the current and remain almost at the same point on the river spoke of an unbelievable strength and endurance. When the Inspector switched back to Goldman, that giant, we watched him walk parallel to the bank to reach a point downstream from the swimmer. At the same time he removed his jacket and let the wind take it. Now Joseph George Goldman stood in a huge dark T-shirt and