The Bangkok Asset: A novel by John Burdett

Author:John Burdett [Burdett, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307272683
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-04T05:00:00+00:00

20

I’m still at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Doc Bride called just now to say he has checked out already and is downstairs with a car and driver. He is impatient because the journey into the bush is long and slow at the other end and he wants to arrive at our destination by early afternoon. I’m throwing my toothbrush and shaving gear into my overnight bag, checking my money belt for passport and cash, dashing down to reception, paying in baht at a ruinous exchange rate, humping my bag out to the white Toyota four-by-four with a Khmer driver that is waiting at the curb. The Doctor and I sit in the middle seats, but at opposite windows. He issues an instruction to the driver in Khmer without saying hello to me.

—

Phnom Penh is a small town and it takes only a few minutes to reach the suburbs, which quickly degenerate into shantytowns with dirt roads between shacks with tin roofs. Quite often there are homemade elevated walkways to enable people to keep out of the mud during the rainy season. Kids have fun in tin cities like this; I catch sight of big, round, mischievous faces, small gangs with monkeylike mastery of the maze in which they live. On the other side of the glass it is already hot, of course, but not yet unbearable. I know these slums will be asleep before noon and stay that way until sunset. I have a feeling that where we are going may not have great satellite cover, so I make my early-morning call to Chanya.

“Hello, darling,” I say.

She grunts sleepily. “Where are you?”

“Phnom Penh, we’re in a van on our way to the jungle.”

“We?”

“I’m with Dr. Christmas Bride.”

I thought the name would amuse her, as it did the first time, but she merely grunts again.

“You okay?” I say.

“Yes. Except that I’m suffering from event starvation, Action Man.”

“See you in a day or so. There might not be any satellite cover where we’re going.”

“Take care,” she says.

I turn to look out of the window: scrappy bits of land, some huts, a brand-new part of a highway that says foreign investment all over it, some brush and paddy fields, a boy following a buffalo with a switch. I try to work out where this Englishman is coming from. In repose, when he is not making full use of his mobile features, there is much of the gargoyle in the way he stares malevolently into space.

At about noon the driver turns off the road, which is now bare concrete, onto the shoulder, which is an outreach of jungle remains. There are no tall growths and the scrubby bush looks unhealthy and primitive, as if something has poisoned such advanced life as trees and flowers, leaving only primeval vegetation that hugs the ground and crawls like something cowed and persecuted. I know that we have been traveling steadily east since we left the suburbs of Phnom Penh and that it was in the east that

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