Two days later the documents have arrived from Zurich. Wow! Those banking lawyers really know how to pad! The old boys have to sign four copies with initials on every page, so the whole package-which I send out in neat A4-sized envelopes, plus red stickers with yellow arrows which tell them where to put their monikers-is about the size of a large hardback novel and just as heavy. When I get Lek to take Vikorn’s copies upstairs and then send the other set to his army chum for onward transshipment to General Zinna, he lets his long skinny katoey arms sag under the weight. Then I have to nag and cajole both Vikorn and Zinna to actually sign the things; they’re intimidated by the sheer size of the package and all that small print. Worst of all, they don’t like using their ID cards when they go to the notary to sign. Also, Vikorn is nervous. The truth is that he has never dealt in such a large single shipment. Somehow, Tietsin got both old men into a mood of high bravado, and now that it’s pay-up time, our godfathers are getting twitchy; they’ve never dealt with a Tibetan before. If, by some unforeseeable stroke of misfortune, they lost their forty million, they would both be in serious trouble. Zinna would be wiped out.

Finally, it’s all done, and I send the stuff off to Zurich so they can register the corporation in Lichtenstein. I’m not sure there are any people in Lichtenstein; maybe there’s just a large population of registered offices with a single robot to post letters and send them. Has anyone you know ever been there? You soon get into the did-they-really-land-on-the-moon mind-set, dealing with the virtual world of high finance. Then, out of the blue, a package addressed to me arrives at my home. It seems to have been sent by ordinary airmail from somewhere in Hawaii. I think: Hawaii? But the package makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Why is that? Oh, only because the bubblepak envelope is one of those designed exclusively for the shipment of DVDs. I am strangely reluctant to open it. I even leave it lying on the teak coffee table that Chanya and I bought at Chatuchak market on one of our lighthearted shopping sprees about a thousand years ago when the world was still innocent.

When I get to work, I tell myself I’m being quite girlishly silly, and after ten minutes staring at my computer monitor and consulting the online I-Ching and the Yahoo! astrology page, both of which are wildly enthusiastic about my love prospects today, I sigh and take a cab back home. When I pick the package up from the coffee table, I experience the same sensation as before: hairs standing to paranoid attention, something crawling up my back, a distinct premonition of death. Whose? Okay, okay, I’m opening it. Now I have it, an unmarked disk, shining brilliantly on one side; it is a Sony DVD, charcoal black on the reverse side with no title. I blow out my cheeks and scratch my ear before sliding it into my DVD player. At first I think it must be some kind of joke, for nothing appears on the screen. When I check the numbers flicking by on the counter, however, I see it must be a full-length movie of some kind. Finally, the monitor flickers into life-and there he is.

The Frank Charles standing before the camera is not quite as overweight as his cadaver. I think he must have filmed the introduction to his movie at least a year before he died. He appears to be looking directly at me when he says, “Hi, Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep-unless something has gone badly wrong, you are the one watching this movie, and, from what I know of you, you are probably alone.

“I guess you never expected to hear from me, huh? I am assuming you are the one running the investigation into my murder, because you always get the farang murders in District Eight. But even if I’m wrong, you have certainly heard of me and my spectacular manner of death. You are aware of the existence of a film. If you found the DVD in my safe, you also discovered it was just a set of preliminary shots of Nepal: not what you were looking for at all. You and your colleagues have also failed to discover whodunit. That will all be explained in the next two hours. What you need to know right now, though, is: why you?”

What is interesting to me right now is that the camera follows Frank Charles as he paces a little with his jaw in his hand; he is not alone, therefore, although you would never know it from his posture of total self-absorption. He carries his weight well, as a big man can, and does not thrust his gut forward in arrogance; one gets some sense of what it must have been like to have lived in the skin of that big, male, energetic, once-superb American animal. From his body language one understands that, before something went badly wrong, the world had belonged to him. Now he thrusts his hands into the pockets of his oversized denim overalls; there is a microphone attached to one of the straps.

“It’s ironic, because there is someone else who thinks she’s the muse behind this work. Let’s say she’s mistaken. She’s not the muse. She’s what you might call a point producer-the one who makes sure certain vital props are at hand. No, I needed someone with your eye, Detective, the one I could not fool, even when I tried my damnedest.”

He pauses and makes an almost comic gesture of humility and defeat. “I swear to God, Detective, that as far as I know there are only two people in the world who didn’t think much of my first full-length movie. You and me. You saw the plagiarism-so did I. And in your review you had no mercy. The little scene I stole from Truffaut, those long interior shots that Bertolucci perfected, playing with color à la Robert Altman, outdoor shots from John Ford, suspense from Hitchcock-and a lot of other thefts, too: you saw it all. You must have had one hell of a teacher at film school. Except you never went to film school, did you? That’s another thing about you that told me you are the one: your permanent pariah status in your society. Not only are you a leuk kreung, a half-caste, but your mother’s illustrious lovers taught you way above your station. One of them must have been an old-style French-movie buff, a real Cahiers du Cinéma type. Whatever. I’ll never know what you will say about what you are about to see. That’s not important. What’s important is that you understand.”

He lets a few beats pass. “You know what’s tough about being a voice from the dead? Jealousy. If you are investigating the case, Detective, have you gone up to Nepal yet? Have you met Tara? Have you slept with her? Or is this all just gibberish to you? I’ll never know. But what I do know is that you’re a Buddhist, and quite a serious one. That also weighed on my decision to show you my beloved masterpiece. You see, my other muse is too much of a cynic; she will see the point but not the pain. You, though, with that uncanny intelligence and sensitivity everyone says you have-you are ideal. I bet you experience my movie just as if it were all happening to you.”

He takes his hands out of his pockets and holds them behind his back.

“But the kind of Buddhism I almost got into doesn’t bear much resemblance to yours. Vajra, the Tibetans call it. Thunderbolt Buddhism, usually translated as Apocalyptic or Tantric Buddhism. It’s pretty heavy stuff, and that mantra Tara gave me really did my head in.” He pauses. “But at the end of the day, you know, a man like me isn’t going to be satisfied with mantras and mandalas; I’m just not that cerebral. And anyway, I belong to the great Western tradition of dramatic expression-and there’s no drama in Buddhism, as far as I can see. No, this is how it happened to me.”

He seems to falter, like a man shifting gears in his mind and fumbling a little-those might be tears in his eyes, it’s hard to tell.

“I was up in Nepal one time, looking for Tara, who had turned invisible on me yet again, and I was that far gone in the disease we call love that I thought maybe if I meditated and spent time at Bodnath and generally turned myself into a Tibetan-maybe she would come back to me. And that, my friend, is no state of mind in which to meditate or make a movie. So I gave up, like a good spoiled Yank, and just wandered around Kathmandu for a while. It happened to be a holy day, that one in October when they make a lot of animal sacrifices. I stood in a crowd of Hindus and watched while the Brahmin priest slaughtered a goat by clamping its head in a stock and cutting it off with a big knife. Then he threw some of the meat on the fire in the center of the shrine. And it was all Technicolor, of course, the great orange flames, the huge vertical crimson tikka in the middle of the priest’s forehead, his fantastic robes, the chants, the incense. Then when I looked around, I saw the whole square had been converted into a giant slaughterhouse, wherever I looked I saw shrines, priests, smoke, and goats-and for one dizzying moment I realized that most bourgeois of words, surreal, was not going to cut it; the squeals of the goats did not permit such an escape route.”