The Bangkok Asset: A novel by John Burdett Read Free Book Online

on the mirror and handed it to me. “What use is a handwriting expert? It’s the one form of communication even the NSA doesn’t collect.”
    “I know. But they can tell likely level of education, cultural origins, even certain character traits.”
    “Sure, that will narrow it down to a few million. Better you go see the
mordu.
A clairvoyant would be more specific. Okay, I’m a scientist, but I’m still Thai. I’ve never seen such an obvious piece of black magic in my life. I was joking about extraterrestrials, actually this whole case has Khmer written all over it. Go see the holy man, there’s no one else.”
    “I’m on my way,” I said, thanked her, and left.
    Out on the street I waited for a taxi to take me across the river. Perhaps it sounds odd to you, R, that in a difficult case one should ask for occult help, but for us it’s really not so strange, though we don’t normally tell
farang
like you about it. To suppose that humans are rational is a largely Western superstition to which most Asians are resistant. After all, if reason has failed in this case, that must be because reason isn’t powerful enough to penetrate the mystery, mustn’t it? Clearly, I need something with more chili. I’m off to see the wizard. All the best seers live on the west bank, known as Fangton.
    In the taxi I replay those bloody words for the thousandth time:
Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is.
A couple of days ago I put the phrase through a simple computer test. On the assumption that the
smudge
is a word erased and that the writer was using grammatically correct English, there are not many alternatives: in all likelihood the missing word would be an article or a pronoun:
my, your, his, her, their, the, our.
None of them would surprise in an ordinary case of murder by a disorganized psychopath. In the case of an organized mind, though, only two would really make sense; either
Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who
your
father is,
which would not normally be an important enough message to write in blood, or
Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who
our
father is.
That would at least be a revelation worth making; in the mind of a certain kind of psycho, it might even be worth murdering for.
    Now as my mind relaxed in the back of the cab it started to gnaw on something Inspector Krom had said with that in-your-face directness that takes no prisoners:
Then there’s your permanent search for your biological father. Everyone knows about that.

4
    R , did you know your same-sex parent when you were growing up? If you did not, then my song will be familiar: I never stopped looking for him, from the minute I realized he was missing. All the kids at infant school had a dad, why not me? Therefore the previous thirty-seven years had been rich in daddy substitutes, most of them from my imagination. All I had to go on was Vietnam: a good-looking Yank in his early twenties, face blackened with war (sometimes); a charmer of women (Mum in particular). Because his English was perfect, so mine had to be. Should I thank him for opening my mind to
farang
confusion? I’m not sure, but how else were my fantasy dads going to communicate with me or I with them? He sure didn’t speak Thai worth a damn, I had Mama Nong’s testimony to rely on there.
    Sometimes I made him muscle-bound like those GIs you see in the Museum of American War Atrocities in Saigon (of course I went, long before they renamed it so they could trade again with Uncle Sam—it’s still there if you don’t believe me). I found one in a photo on the wall of a soldier with arms so powerful he looked incomplete without something heavy to lift. When I realized I wasn’t built that way I slimmed my dream dad down a bit. I kept him at average height, calculating that I was going to be tall for a Thai anyway, and who wants to stick out at age thirteen? Then, when I realized how important brains were, I made him smart, really smart. To justify my