Bangkok Noir

“It’s been good chatting with you,” Jaa remarked, and granting me the most refined of wais, he whiffed out the Starbucks door and was gone. I stayed behind, delighted at my good fortune in getting some real information, until it hit me: Jaa never had given me the name of the killer.

Jaa had provided motive for a case of crime and vendetta. But after all that factual input, the identity of the man who stabbed Kaew stubbornly refused to reveal itself. The question that I started with in the morning remained unanswered. By this time it was 4:00 p.m., and although the day was still bright and hot, I had no choice but to exit Starbucks and brave the crowded Skytrain home. In Thai the words for “four o’clock” and “five o’clock” are sii mong yen and haa mong yen, “four drumbeats cool” and “five drumbeats cool,” meaning presumably the cool of the afternoon, but it never made sense to me. There’s nothing cool about a Bangkok afternoon, except the icy chill of the Skytrain itself, which makes the heat seem even more oppressive when you exit.

Steeped in thought, I walked down the steps from the Skytrain and then stopped in my tracks, the breath literally sucked from my lungs.

There she was. The lady selling fried chicken. She was a witness, and I’d seen her in the video. Now here was a case of asking someone that I know. I bought some fried chicken and thought about how I could bring this matter up. I’m well aware that directness is never the right way in Thailand, but I had to ask her. As she began chopping up the chicken, I blurted it out: “What did you see at the Skytrain last week?”

Through the oily steam billowing from her woks, I saw something in her eyes. Nop had been noncommittal. Evelyn had focused on her parties. The girls in red and green had seen the whole incident as a photo op. Ajarn Jaa had been caught up in the complexity of his theories. But this woman was afraid. In her eyes I saw a deep and implacable fear. “I wasn’t there,” she stammered. As she handed me a little plastic bag of chicken and rice, she whispered, “You’d better go home.”

There was clearly no point in pressing further. I thought: “I’d better take her words at face value. It’s time to go home.” In any case it was almost five o’clock, and soon New York would be on the phone demanding a response.