Bangkok Noir

“What do you think he meant by that?” I asked. The girls wanted me to help decide which of their two cell phones had taken the best video. We watched again. The red-dress girl thought her Nokia version was clearer and the colors brighter, and I had to agree. But the green-dress girl insisted her Samsung sound quality had been better. Off they went in high spirits.

I still didn’t know the name of the suspect, or his motive, but one thing that came across was that this wasn’t a crime of passion. It was planned; it was serious. Maybe this was a gang killing. “I had to kill him”—that’s the sort of thing they say in gang vendettas. I wondered if Kaew was perhaps mixed up in drugs. There must have been lots of money, and maybe family pride was involved.

The girls had let me download their videos onto my computer. If I watched the videos closely enough, there might be some clue. So, seated in the vast food court, I looked again.

I noticed that there were faces in the crowd that I could recognize. I knew these people. Was that the lady who sells fried chicken at the corner? That man wearing a striped shirt—he lives on my street. We’ve talked in the café. As happens at a moment like this, my mind ran amok. I went from seeing one or two people that I thought I recognized to where suddenly every single person in those videos looked familiar. I couldn’t place them exactly, but I could swear that I’d seen them all.

Obviously, that was impossible. I decided I must be suffering from an overdose of morning light. Maybe it was the fluorescent glare and the trayclinking crowds that were making me dizzy. Too many photons striking the retina at an early hour. It’s not healthy.

I stumbled out onto the open street, baking under the full blaze of the afternoon sun. Cars crawled sluggishly along clogged avenues, while busy pedestrians veered around me on the crumbling sidewalk. A vendor tried hard to sell me a wooden frog whose serrated back he stroked with a little stick, producing a croaking sound. I’ve seen that frog a hundred times, and it came as such a relief, a return to normalcy, that for a moment I even considered buying it. I was back to Bangkok as I knew it.