I won’t spoil the movie for you, farang. You never know, it might find its way on to the black market one of these days; I might even upload it onto one of the illegal file-sharing Internet sites. Suffice to say we are led by an ingenious sequence of cuts and shots to intimately understand the director’s psychology, about which he is uncompromisingly honest. One surprise is the violence of his mind. His adolescence is not only filled with erotic imaginations, but moments of extreme rage as well. He knows not where this tendency originates, much less his bizarre gift for marrying exactly the wrong women. By the time we get to the end we are convinced that for him there is no other option; there is no way for him to retain his fragmented self, nor has he acquired the strength to change at root. Can art help?

Well, now I’ve taken you this far, I guess you’d be vexed if I didn’t at least let you have the first scene, which is also the last:

It is that squalid room on Soi 4/4 where we first encountered him. At first his bearded face-he is at his most obese now, the beautiful young director buried under a flesh mountain-fills the whole screen. As he retreats from the camera, he mutters, “Anyway, it’s less expensive doing it this way, a dummy would have cost too much.”

The camera follows him in a brief tour of the room before he climbs with difficulty onto the bed, and now, finally, I understand the books. They were the one item whose purpose eluded me. I had thought they were a perverse tease by a deranged mind; now I see their amazing innocence. They are a confession not to murder, but to a crime which scarred his soul far more deeply: an inauthentic life.

Once he has propped himself up, he says, “Okay, focus the camera on the top of my head, make sure you’ve got me from the eyes up, I don’t want any nose in this shot, but you have to angle it to take in the ear when the saw cuts above it: drama, I don’t want this to be a boring shot, ha, ha. Now get the saw and come over here and wait. Remember everything we practiced during rehearsals. Don’t duck down as you work, because the camera will catch your face and you’ll be incriminated and this scene cannot be reshot, ha, ha.”

A few moments pass during which he keeps his eyes closed, then: “Okay, I can feel the drugs working, my whole mind is slowing. That’s when she said to start. Leave the camera now and come over here. If my head starts to slump you’ll have to pull it back into the frame. Now, it should be possible for me to use my own strength to dig out the first few spoonfuls from the left lobe, the one that’s been causing all the trouble for sixty years, but if I can’t, you’ll have to help me. Use one of your hands to guide mine, but make sure I keep hold of the spoon.”

The hands holding the buzz saw are sheathed in surgical gloves of the ultra-thin, almost transparent kind; it is not possible to be sure, but I would say the hands are female-long, slim, and porcelain white. The glove successfully obscures the details of an unusual ring on the index finger of the right hand, which appears to be quite broad with tiny protuberances suggestive of gems. She proceeds slowly, taking great care not to damage the spectacularly filmatic arachnoid mater, with its great crimson webs of veins and arteries which feed the brain. When she is finished, she raises the skull, much like a waiter at Maxim’s might reveal a great dish by whipping off its cover.

“Did I just experience liftoff?” Frank Charles asks in a groggy voice.

What am I thinking? I’m thinking, Poor Sukum. I’ve solved the case for him after all, and with the best Buddhist will in the world it’s going to be hard to let him take the credit. Anyway, it’s a suicide, so what credit is there to claim? This isn’t the stuff that leads to fast-track promotion. It’s kind of funny in a sense, but I’m not laughing. The film might be a masterpiece in its own weird way, but for my money, the genius lies in the introduction. The straight, honest, naked confession of a life of luxurious failure has hit a nerve with me; I’m haunted. I send a copy to the FBI by e-mail attachment, then I call Sukum.

For the sake of good housekeeping, I need to follow up a little on the Fat Farang suicide. After all, records already show that I’ve interviewed Doctor Moi in connection with the file, so I really need to have her comments on the movie. Then there’s the little detail of the familiar hand holding the buzz saw, which I cannot simply ignore. Also, let’s face it, every cop loves to bust a triple-A liar.

It was Moi herself who suggested we meet at the Starbucks in the Emporium, a shopping mall on Sukhumvit, which used to be state of the art until they opened the Paragon at Silom. You can only understand the Asian passion for shopping malls when you realize you didn’t invent them, farang, we did. You added the air-conditioning and the coffee, for which we are most grateful. For the rest, it’s the local street market all over again.

Starbucks here is an Atlantic island in the middle of a Pacific Ocean of cooked-food stalls, ice-cream stands, pharmacies, cutlers, bathroom specialists, and, most important of all, vendors of electric rice cookers. Behind me is a Japanese supermarket, somewhat on the pricey side and therefore frequented mostly by HiSo Thais, Japanese, Koreans, and farang. Shopping there is a treat. All over Asia no shopper is ever required to empty their own trolley at checkout; here, though, Japanese rules apply, and you not only have your trolley lovingly discharged before your eyes, but also cop a high wai and extra-special sawatdee-krup-with-smile from the beautiful clerk, who really does convince you she’s pleased to see you. Just for the record, farang, I am not making an invidious comparison with your supermarkets (where they make you feel like a shoplifter with previous convictions who has to be watched all the time).

The café is no more than a large stand with lounge chairs open to the rest of the mall, so while I’m waiting for Moi, who is late as usual, I sit at a table and watch the world for a moment. I see a TV personality who does a lot of commercials, and a senior banker with his young mistress: he rents a suite in the apartments attached to the mall; the girl is so much the exquisite light tan Barbie doll of his dreams that one cannot doubt she has enjoyed previous lifetimes as a banker’s moll.

Now here is an Isaan family: the woman battling a feeling of inferiority with brute defiance and a permanent frown, the man looking skinny and humble and nostalgic for his rice field, the kids like miniature tanks which go shooting off in every direction, fall over, come shooting back; they inherit rubber bodies in Isaan. There are plenty of Sikhs, Hindus, Moslems from the South, middle-aged farang with their local squeezes, some white women politely waiting to reclaim their men and move to another country; a couple of Thai dykes with spiky cropped green and crimson hair hold hands with exaggerated affection. There are plenty of middle-aged gay farang with obedient local slaves, too. Now here’s a Nigerian family, the mother in national costume with bright mauves and oranges with a purple turban. There is on average one humble, smiling, lazy Thai sales assistant for each shopper; when there are no customers the boys stage mock kung fu fights in the refrigerator section while the girls apply cosmestics and gossip.

I sit back in the armchair and wait. When she is more than twenty minutes late, I stand up to stroll around for five minutes and check the escalators. When I peer down onto one of the lower floors, I see Moi, her tall, slim figure with long hair tied loosely back with a silver clip; she is wearing a silk blouse the color of old gold over black leggings and seems to be involved in some kind of dispute with her maid, who is carrying some packages. I guess the Doctor has been shopping. Both women seem angry; I’m surprised at the intensity of the maid’s expression-Moi seems slightly scared, but gesticulates upward, in my direction. Finally, she shrugs, turns her back on the maid, and gets on the escalator. I rush back to my armchair, but stand to greet her when she arrives. My problem, at this moment, is that I have not yet decided whether or not to start by telling her about the DVD someone sent me from Hawaii. I had decided to play it by ear, but now I’m not at all sure how to guide the conversation. I watch while the Doctor orders a peppermint mocha at the stand, then comes to sit opposite me in one of the armchairs. She is in an unusually alert mood; her smart black eyes take in everyone in a couple of glances, then check me. I have the unnerving feeling that she knows something about the package from Hawaii, and that that was what she was arguing about with her maid. We exchange pleasantries, but when I say nothing about the case, she becomes uneasy. Finally, she says, “You wanted to see me, Detective? I am hoping you have good news for me? An intervention with the disciplinary committee would be nice.”