Bangkok Noir

On that fateful bright March morning when Colonel Thongfa came to call, Samart had been connected to his shortwave radio via an earplug hidden in a large chrysanthemum. He’d been hoping to pick up a traffic accident, a small motorcycle prang with which to impress the officers. But luck had once more perched on his lap. A foundation volunteer had come across the scene of a police killing and was radioing for a rescue truck just as the Colonel and the Captain arrived in the hut. It was perfect timing. Samart’s immediate future was gilded, his next month’s food bill paid. With his belly full and his brain frozen, he lay back on the peach-perfumescented mattress and let himself drift. And drift.

He was in the front seat of an old brown Austin A40. Until now he’d always been an observer of his nightmares, a voyeur. He could no sooner have participated than a viewer could step inside a TV and become acquainted with the soap stars. But here in the Austin he could smell the old leather of the upholstery. The semi-headed crone was sitting beside him in the driver’s seat. It wasn’t her best side. He was surprised to hear his thoughts come out through the mouth of his passenger-seat-self when he said, “What have I done to deserve you?”

“What?” she replied. Drool dribbled from her sluggy black tongue.

“I mean, this is a dream. Am I right? A dream? So why do other men get Lucy Liu in a Catholic high school uniform and I get… if you’ll excuse me… road kill?”

She was surprisingly unoffended by his slur.

“You need me, Samart.”

“Oh, yeah? And why’s that?”

“I’m your spirit guide.”

She put a skinny hand on his thigh, and even though he could barely feel it, he squirmed away across the seat.

“I can help you with your career,” she went on.

“I can pass information on from this side.”

“Really? Well, I happen to know from personal experience that all this spirit stuff is bullshit.”

“Then what do you think I am?” She leaned closer to him and he could smell some sort of decay, which had obviously been doused with perfume. Her hand moved further up his thigh.

“You’re a nightmare.”

“Thank you. And you could make me a complete one, Samart.”

“How?”

“Invoke me.”

“And how would I go about that, as if I couldn’t guess?”

Halfhead reached down and pulled both recliner levers, and their seats dropped to the horizontal. Samart clawed at the door but there was no handle. Halfhead rested a hand suddenly as heavy as guilt on his chest. What remained of her face hovered above his. Warm saliva dribbled from her lip as she spoke.

“You just whistle, Samart. Just whistle and I’ll do your bidding.”

“That’s all?”

“And this…”

She pressed her half mouth onto his complete one and snaked her gooey tongue between his lips.

He awoke retching with the taste of stale eel in his throat, the musky scent of rotting flesh in his nostrils. He hurried to the window and dispatched the entire evening’s supper into the hibiscus. Nothing would possess him to go back into that nightmare. Nothing. Or so he believed.

For the next month Samart’s attachment to the police rapidly came unstuck. It was an unmitigated disaster. He’d hoped to stretch his luck and the odds of chance to two, perhaps three months before they found him out. A premonition here or there gleaned from the body snatchers’ network might have bumped him up to four. A nice little nest egg, a retainer buoyed by the odd win bonus, some money put away for rainy days—perhaps even enough for the Amway dealership he’d dreamed of. They made serious money, those Amway reps. But even the averages had turned nasty on poor Samart.

The police had consulted him on eight cases. Bombed, the lot of them. He’d claimed to see the departed spirits of two children who turned up, not at all dead, eating ice cream in the truck of their estranged father. He’d given three grid references for criminal hideouts which turned out to be a temple, a fallow rice paddy and the Lampang governor’s summer house. He failed miserably at identifying which of two counter staff at a gold shop had lifted a four karat bracelet, and he picked out the wrong man three times in a lineup, even though all but one were police officers. It was a period of great anguish for the shyster shaman. He put it down to lack of sleep. She’d been there all the time, Halfhead the hag, in his naps and his daydreams, in his nights of floating like a corpse, half-submerged in shallow sleep. She’d been there waiting for her whistle. He’d vowed never to purse his lips again, but a visit from not-only-slightly insane Colonel Thongfa pushed him back into the nightmare world inhabited by the walking sliced.

“You know how many people I’ve killed?” the policeman asked. It was his opening remark, and it tripped off his tongue as innocently as “Have you had dinner yet?”

“Lots?” Samart offered.