It was then that I made one of those trivial decisions that can have an enormous impact on the rest of your life: I turned off my cell phone. I wanted to take the moment to allow my mind to relax-I’d hit the ground running when I got off the plane from Kathmandu and had hardly stopped for breath. I went to the temple at Wat Rachanada on the river and in the silence allowed Tietsin’s mantra to spin without restriction in my head. I cannot tell you the specific Pali words, farang, for I am bound to secrecy, but I am allowed to describe the blade wheel, which is imagined as a star-shaped weapon closely resembling the shiken used by ninjas, although unlike the shiken it has a disturbing way of morphing into other shapes. The blade wheel is the enemy of self-delusion-“self-delusion” meaning just about everything in the field of normal everyday perception, in particular our most cherished delusions about ourselves. I didn’t switch the phone on again until it was all over.

It is usual in these kind of circumstances for the bereaved to say, I knew something was wrong; but I didn’t. Even when I noticed the small crowd outside our apartment and the way they could not look me in the eye, I failed to make any connection with the stain on the road or the private car parked nearby, or the driver in tears talking to some uniformed cops. When a young constable blurted that I needed to go to the hospital on Soi 49 immediately, I realized the stain on the street was blood, and my mind split into pieces. At the hospital Chanya and I could only stare at each other across the bed where Pichai’s six-year-old body lay dying.

“It’s my fault,” she said. “I let him get out of the taxi on the wrong side. The driver of the other car wasn’t going fast, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. It’s all my fault.”

Haggard, I shook my head. “No, it’s not your fault. This is my punishment.”

She let a beat pass. In a dead tone: “For being Vikorn’s consigliere? I was the one who talked you into that. You would never have accepted the job if not for me.”

I knew then that I had lost her as well as my son. Her sorrow and guilt was of the kind no human agency can assuage. And so was mine. I remember thinking in a savage mood, Tietsin, Tietsin, Tietsin. Only you can help me now.

A week later, after the monks at the local wat had instructed Pichai’s spirit on how to avoid rebirth and burned his small body, Chanya announced she had made arrangements to be a mai chi, a novice nun, at a wat in the far east of Thailand, near the border with Laos. They were a radical sect composed entirely of women dedicated to a life of meditation and contemplation of the most extreme kind: four hours sleep per night, near-starvation rations, no electricity, and absolutely nothing to do except develop the inner life. They were not allowed real corpses to meditate on anymore, but the local hospitals provided them with photographs of cadavers, which they used as a method to concentrate on transience. I, on the other hand, tried every means I could think of to get hold of Tietsin by phone, or in any other way, but he had disappeared from view. I was left with only his mantra.

But a mantra, after all, is simply a way of tricking the mind into a higher level of consciousness, and this was something I could achieve only intermittently. There were moments when I was flying high, when death really seemed to be the bad joke the Buddha always said it was. There were nights spent entirely with Pichai in his spiritual form-I’m not going to pretend they were mere dreams-when he comforted me and told me he’d decided to abandon his former body and I should not concern myself about it. He told me there will be no opportunities for people to evolve spiritually in the generations to come, for we will be entirely enslaved by materialism, and his spirit had therefore preferred to return to the Far Shore. He told me there were many millions over there, like him, waiting out the next few millennia until the Maitreya Buddha incarnates on earth and we can all be human again.

At this level the mind knows no fear and experiences the joy of absolute freedom. Cannabis cannot lead to such heights, although you can use it to sustain them; but then the crashes are all the more devastating. After Chanya left, I spent a week in bed clawing at my mattress, unable to believe the anguish. When I finally went back to work, I had learned to treat my grief with a combination of dope and meditation. The case of the murder of Frank Charles, aka the Case of the Fat Farang, also nicknamed the Hollywood File, was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Who cares whodunit? The grim, mechanical rituals of the world grind on, monochrome now, and entirely without interest to me; although Lek keeps assuring me I’m going to snap out of it sooner or later.

Believe it or not, of those few in my intimate circle, Vikorn is the most concerned about my mental health. He insisted on paying for Pichai’s funeral and came to listen to the monks chanting over my son’s corpse before they burned him. The Colonel seemed quite moved; he wiped his eyes a couple of times and hugged me once when nobody could see. I watched his face as they pushed Pichai’s little casket on the rollers into the oven and the smoke started coming out of the chimney. For all his faults, Vikorn is Thai, after all. The Western superstition that karma stops with death is as improbable to him as it is to me; I’m sure that, like the rest of us, he saw himself for a moment being rolled into the oven.

After about ten days, though, he has started to lose patience. His technique now is scrupulously to avoid any mention of my grief; maybe he thinks I’ll get over it if he pretends it’s business as usual? This morning he called me into his office to give me my orders for the week. I was in a morose frame of mind, so he tried jollying me up-not a strategy he has spent much of his life developing: “Tell you what, if you like I’ll give you that stupid murder old Sukum has got his knickers in a twist about. Put your name on the top of the file: you’ll be officer in charge. That way you’ll be sure to get promoted when the board next meets, even if you are half farang. What were the circumstances again, I seem to remember it sounded kind of exotic?”

“Famous rich farang Hollywood director gutted from solar plexus to crotch,” I heard myself saying in a bored and somewhat sulky voice, “a stone in his mouth, suggesting, probably falsely, that he was done in by the Sicilian mafia, but there was also an imago in his mouth and it looked as if someone had recently feasted on his brains: the top hemisphere of the skull was cut around and removed-probably done by a rotary saw of the surgical kind. Some of the brains had been eaten: a paper plate and a plastic spoon were found in that squalid flophouse at the end of Soi Four/Four. All of which indicates the invisible hand of Thomas Harris.”

“So why doesn’t someone arrest Thomas Harris?”

“He didn’t do it. He wrote the novels the crime is based on, along with Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and maybe some other noir influences-I wouldn’t be surprised to find Baudelaire in there somewhere.” To Vikorn’s baffled gaze, I say, “I guess you have to be at least half farang.”

“Exactly. The case is yours.”

“I don’t want it. I don’t want promotion. Let Sukum get the credit; I’ve already told him I’ll help if he wants.”

I watch the old man’s expression freeze into contempt. “You’ve been meditating again, haven’t you? I can always tell when your monk manqué side starts to show. Was it those bloody hills up there that got you all sanctimonious? I knew I should have sent someone with you.” I do not say, You know exactly why I feel like this. He went back to his desk shaking his head, pretending to be baffled. “Other jao por have to worry about getting ripped off by their staff, normal stuff like that. You I have to worry about losing to the Buddha. What did I do to deserve it? Get out. And, by the way, the Hollywood case is yours.”