Laughing: “You could say that.”

On a whim, Pisit calls the monk back to ask what he thinks of all this, and Western culture in general. After his drubbing just now he is in a Zen-ish sort of mood, not to say downright sarcastic: “Actually, the West is a Culture of Emergency: twisters in Texas, earthquakes in California, windchill in Chicago, drought, flood, famine, epidemics, drugs, wars on everything-watch out for that meteor and how much longer does the sun really have? Of course, if you didn’t believe you could control everything, there wouldn’t be an emergency, would there?”

There is a knock on my door. The FBI has arrived.

In the back of the car again I try to explain why meditation can help in the art of detection. I’m not sure if I believe what I’m saying or not, I just happen to be in the mood to say it. I may have fallen prey to the irresistible temptation to wind her up. “To understand why someone suffers a violent death, it can be helpful to investigate their past lives. These things do not happen by accident. There are no accidents, no coincidences.”

“Uh-huh?”

“For example, in olden days in America, were there many brothels?”

“In the Old West? Sure.”

I nod. “Bradley’s obsession with sex was surely a consequence of having traded in it.” I frown. “That doesn’t explain the snakes, though.”

“Okay, you want to play this game, it’s not so difficult. Maybe he ran a brothel that was built on a rattlesnake nest? Maybe he punished anyone who didn’t pay by putting rattlers in their beds?” She shakes her head. “Can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“You don’t understand. It’s not a question of plausible hypotheses. You have to follow a vibration back through time. Bradley had a very specific vibration, very strong. My problem is his karmic origins are not Asian.”

“How about Central America? Aztec, Inca, Mayan? They all had snake fetishes. They were unbelievably cruel, too.”

A vision immediately flashes before my mind: the snakes, the pit, the plumed priest, the rings on his fingers, the victim’s terror, the ziggurat. I beam at Jones, who turns away with her usual Can’t believe this guy expression of terminal exasperation. After a few minutes she turns back again, having mastered her frustration-not without effort, to judge from her expression. “Okay, give me an example unrelated to the case.”

“An example?”

“Yes, from your own life, a genuine past-life memory that can be corroborated for a button-down nuts-and-bolts type like me.” She sniffs the air. “Your obsession with perfume, for example, I bet you can trace that back a few hundred years. It’s sure got me beat, you can hardly afford to dress yourself but you wear this expensive cologne-or is it a Bangkok fake?”

“Of course it’s not a fake, fake perfume stinks after being on the skin for a couple of minutes. It’s just a perfectly ordinary Polo from Ralph Lauren.”

“Perfectly ordinary Polo from Ralph Lauren,” she mimics. “At about fifty bucks a bottle.” She stares at me, waiting for a story to ridicule.

Her attitude has made me curl up protectively around the memory: the old Pont au Change which connected the Île de la Cité with the Right Bank, four-story buildings loaded the bridge, slap in the middle sat a perfumer’s: a dark and musty workroom populated from floor to roof with chemist’s jars of tincture of musk, castor, neroli, jonquil, cinnamon, tuberose, ambergris, civet, sandalwood, bergamot, vetiver, patchouli, opopanax. Nong was there in the mountainous skirts of a mid-ranking courtesan, Truffaut in his startlingly white horsehair wig. Okay, it might be fantasy and autosuggestion, but how did I know there were buildings on the Pont au Change in the eighteenth century? There are none at all now and it took me days on the Web to corroborate. I’m a Thai cop, I didn’t know there ever were such things as bridges with shops on them.

I decide to tell Jones after all. She stares at me in silence, then shakes her head. “If only you weren’t so damn cute. How come you know all those names of ingredients? I’ve never heard of half of them.”

Farangs are full of surprises. It’s the erudition that impresses her, not the quality of the evidence.

The FBI did not need to ask why we were going to the crocodile farm. It was not often anyone used snakes as a murder weapon, and none of our usual forensic consultants was competent to analyze the blood of reptiles. Jones knew that the python and all the cobras that had not been sent to Quantico had been dispatched to the croc farm for examination by Dr. Bhasra Trakit. The croc farm is out of town, just off the main road to Pattaya. I have allowed four hours for the journey and it is a few minutes before 8 a.m. when we set off. The sun is just visible through the haze, like a rotten orange soggy at the edges. To avoid conversation I pretend to sleep in the car, while secretly meditating.

The driveway to the small administrative building does not disclose any crocodiles or other reptiles, and I think the FBI is hopeful about not having to see any at all. Dr. Trakit wears the white coat of a medical practitioner and could have been a physician except for the pet she is playing with on her desk. “I want you to meet Bill Gates,” she says with a smile in perfect English. Bill Gates looks small and cute enough, almost like a toy. He is about 20 percent mouth, with a crooked grin when the doctor gently squeezes his neck and strokes him. His underbelly is creamy white with a light gray-green coloring on the upper part of his body. Dr. Trakit smiles at Jones like a proud mother, and offers her Bill Gates. “Be careful with him.”

“How old is he?”

“Only three months. They’re so delicate, especially in captivity. Shall we?”

Trakit had looked tiny even behind her desk. Now that she stood, we see she is hardly more than five feet, and very slim. She puts Bill Gates in the pocket of her coat and leads the way down a corridor, out into the heat of the day.

Now we see them, immobile masses of sloping scales half submerged in swampy pools. Jones tenses. Back in the States, of course, every precaution would have been taken, but here in the Third World… Just my luck to be the only FBI special agent ever to be eaten alive by a crocodile while on a trip to a forensic lab. “Please walk softly,” the vet says. “They’re very sensitive. If we make too much noise, they panic, and when they panic they pile up on top of each other, especially the younger ones, and the crocs underneath suffocate. They suffer from depression too.”

Jones is almost walking on tiptoe. “Depression?” (As in manic?)

“Yes. And it’s much harder to tell when a croc’s depressed than a human or a dog. Crocs are motionless most of the time, whether they’re depressed or not. You can only tell when they stop eating. Here we are, this is the hospital.”

We enter a long low outhouse with the odor of tropical dampness and something else hard to define which includes nuances of rotting vegetation and putrefying flesh. “Excuse me one moment,” the doctor says. We stand and watch while the doctor goes to a fridge and takes out what looks like a slightly chilled chicken. We follow to a white door which the vet enters with a finger to her lips. On a long table in the center of the room a crocodile is strapped around its center and tail. The reptile is about eight feet long, its short legs held by chains which wrap around protective pads. The animal’s jaws are held open by stout rope and it seems to be asleep. Jones waits in the doorway. “Just one moment,” the doctor says. She goes to a chopping board at the other end of the room and chops up the chicken with a meat cleaver. She places some pieces of the chicken in the croc’s mouth with her tiny hand, moving them around on its tongue, until the tongue begins sluggishly to move. It must be due to a defilement of mine that I’m enjoying Jones so much: she is frozen in terminal horror.