Bangkok Noir

Bangkok lore is replete with scary spirits, phii, who haunt the night alleys with disgusting entrails dangling, mouths foaming, tails flailing. But these phii have nothing on the great invisible Spirit of the Afternoon, who descends at 3:00 p.m., lowering her smoggy wings over the city, siphoning away the oxygen and disturbing people’s hearts and minds. A sluggish reptile that needs to bask in the sunlight for a while before she musters the energy to move, she wakes in the morning, but only goes hunting in earnest in the afternoon. Traffic grinds to a halt; clocks slow; business deals flounder; marriages grow stale; the heat reaches its unbearable apex. Taxi drivers talk too much and drive recklessly. People like Kaew die. Not a good time to go out in the sun.

Then I caught sight of Ajarn Jaa sitting in the corner. An influential academic, Jaa is one of those daunting Thai figures that one knows but, despite a welcoming smile, hesitates to become too familiar with. We bump into each other at the press club, and he always has something erudite to say. Jaa dwells in a knowledgeable heaven of his own. But I thought: “Here’s someone I know! Isn’t that what Nop and Evelyn have been telling me? ‘Talk to people you know.’ ”

I grabbed another iced cappuccino and sat down, uninvited, at Jaa’s table. He smiled welcomingly. After what seemed like an hour of pleasantries, I finally broached the question: “Ajarn, do you know anything about the murder that took place last week on the Skytrain of a man named Kaew?” This time I hit the jackpot.

Jaa was brimming with information. Yes, it was drugs, and money, lots of money, some of it counterfeit from North Korea. Jaa even knew about Kaew’s brother Nop, who was in deep as well, so it would be best to avoid him. In fact, Kaew’s whole family is involved in criminal networks. Jaa appeared to have made quite a study of the case. He regaled me with story after story, practically a genealogy of Kaew and his renegade clan from Khon Kaen. As he spoke, the pieces fell together, and I began to see the logic of the thing. Given a background like this, it’s surprising that someone hadn’t got Kaew even earlier. As for the drugs and money—well, in Bangkok that’s hardly news. It was a prosaic case after all.