The Windup Girl(119)

"What do you want?"

"We need to know if this was Pracha's doing. He has been quick to take over the investigation. We must know if it was he who drove the knife. Your patron and the safety of the palace depends on this. It is possible that Pracha wishes to hide something. It could be some of his December 12 elements striking against us."

"It's not possible-"

"It is too convenient. We have been locked out entirely because it is a windup who did the killing." Narong's voice cracks with a sudden intensity. "We must know if the windup was planted by your ministry." He passes her a bundle of cash. Kanya stares at the amount, shocked. "Bribe anyone who gets in your way," he says.

She shakes off her paralysis, takes the money and stuffs it into her pockets. He touches her gently. "I am very sorry, Kanya. You're all I have. I depend on you to find our enemies and root them out."

* * *

The heat of a Ploenchit tower in the middle of the day is stifling. Investigators clog the dingy rooms of the club, adding to the swelter. It is a sick place to die. A place of hunger and desperation and appetites unfilled. Palace staffers crowd in the halls. Watching, conferring, preparing to collect the Somdet Chaopraya's body for placement in his funeral urn, waiting as Pracha's people investigate. Anxiety and anger hang in the air, politeness filed to an exquisite edge in this most humiliating and frightening moment. The rooms have the feeling of the monsoon just about to break, electric with energy, fraught with the unknown darkness of roiling clouds.

The first body lies on the floor outside, an old farang, surreal and alien. There is little physical damage to him, except the bruising where his throat was crushed, the livid torture that was done to his windpipe. He sprawls beside the bar with the mottled look of a corpse raised from the river. Some gangster bit of fish bait. The old man stares at her with wide blue eyes, two dead seas. Kanya studies the damage without speaking, then allows General Pracha's secretary to lead her to the interior rooms.

She gasps.

Blood stains everything, great swirls of it spatter the walls and drool across the floors. Bodies lie in tangled heaps. And among them lies the Somdet Chaopraya, his throat not smashed as was the old farang, but literally torn out, as though a tiger has fed upon him. His bodyguards lie dead, one with a spring gun blade buried in his eye socket, the other still clutching his own spring gun but peppered with blades.

"Kot rai," Kanya murmurs. She hesitates, uncertain of what to do in the presence of this sordid death. Ivory beetles tangle in the bloody froth. They skitter and scatter through it all, making tracks in the coagulant.

Pracha is in the room, conferring with his subordinates. He looks up at her gasp of dismay. The others have their own looks of shock, anxiety and embarrassment flickering on their faces. The thought that Pracha could arrange such a killing fills Kanya with sickness. The Somdet Chaopraya was no friend of the Environment Ministry, but the enormity of the act makes her ill. It is one thing to plot coups and counter-coups, another to reach inside the palace. She feels like a bamboo leaf drowning in floodwater currents.

So we all go, she tells herself. Even the richest and the most powerful are only meat for cheshires in the end. We are all nothing but walking corpses and to forget it is folly. Meditate on the nature of corpses and you will see this.

And yet still she is unnerved, almost panicked by the sight of a near-god's mortality before her. What have you done, General? It is too horrifying to consider. The flood currents threaten to suck her under.

"Kanya?" Pracha waves her over. She searches her general's face for signs that he carries the guilt for this act, but Pracha seems only puzzled. "What are you doing here?"

"I-" she has words prepared. Excuses. But they fail her with the Crown Protector and his retinue strewn about the room. Pracha's eyes follow her gaze to the Protector's body. His voice softens. He touches her gently on the arm. "Come. This is too much." Guides her out.

"I-"

Pracha shakes his head. "You've heard already." He sighs. "By the end of the day, it will be all over the city."

Kanya finds her voice, spills her lie, pretending to the role that Narong has given her. "I didn't think it could be true."

"Worse than that." Pracha shakes his head grimly. "It was a windup that did it."

Kanya forces herself to show surprise. She glances back at the bloodshed. "A windup? Just one?" Her eyes trace along a peppering of spring blades embedded in the walls. She recognizes one of the other bodies as a Trade Ministry official, the son of a secondary patriarch. Another from a Chaozhou manufacturing clan, a man making his way in the business press. All of them faces from the whisper sheets. All of them great tigers. "It's awful."

"It doesn't seem possible, does it? Six bodyguards. Three men additionally. And only a single windup, if we believe the witnesses." Pracha shakes his head. "Even cibiscosis kills more cleanly."

His eminence the Somdet Chaopraya's neck has been ripped entirely away, breaking it, snapping and tearing so that though the spine seems attached still, it acts as a hinge rather than a support. "It looks like a demon tore him open."

"A wild animal, anyway. It's the sort of thing a military genehack would do. We've seen this sort of activity in the north, where the Vietnamese operate. They use Japanese windups as scouts and shock troops. We're lucky they don't have many." He looks seriously at Kanya. "It will go hard on us. Trade will say that we failed in this. That we allowed this animal into the country. They'll try to take advantage. Make a pretext out of it to seize more power." His expression turns bleak. "We have to find out why this windup was here. If Akkarat has set us up, has used the Protector as a pawn, to seize power."