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commercial, I guess.”

“Where have I heard the phrase before?”

I am about to answer that question, for I know exactly where we both first heard it. Then I realize how far ahead of me the Colonel already is. We exchange glances.

“Yammy,” I say. “But he’s in jail awaiting trial, at which you’ve made sure he’ll be sentenced to death.”

Vikorn raises his hands and lifts his shoulders. “The best moment to pitch him a deal, don’t you think?”

With resignation I realize I’ve blown any possibility of carrying the Damrong case further today. Sorry, farang, I feel a digression coming on.

5

As the detective responsible for prosecuting him, I carry the whole of the Yammy file in my head as I sit in a cab on the way to Lard Yao.

He was born into a lower-middle-class family in Sendai; his father was a salaryman for Sony and his mother a traditional Japanese housewife who cooked whale and seaweed like a demon. Decisive in Yammy’s early years was his father’s access to Sony prototypes, especially cameras. Our hero learned to point and click soon after learning to walk and as a consequence never fully mastered verbal communication. In an introverted culture, that didn’t matter much, but his written Japanese was also poor. Never mind: his father, all too aware of the depressing consequences of a life spent toeing the line, saw genius in his son’s defects. Sacrificing much, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Yammy’s educational flaws went unnoticed. As soon as possible his father sent him to film school. All was going well until the family took a sightseeing holiday in San Francisco, where Yamahato senior was the only tourist in two decades to manage to get run over by a tram. His mother used the insurance payment to finance the rest of Yammy’s film education but refused to stay a minute longer in America. All alone with his genius and without his mum’s famous seaweed-wrapped whale steaks, nevertheless Yammy had little difficulty in rising in the ranks of Hollywood cameramen.

“You’re terrific,” his favorite director told him. “You have this Asian attention to detail, your ego doesn’t get in the way of business, and you understand perfection in art. You’re gonna go a long way in advertising.”

“I don’t want to go a long way in advertising,” Yammy replied. “I want to make a feature film.”

The director shook his head sadly. He also had once wanted to make feature films. So had the first, second, and third cameramen, the gaffer, the sound engineer, and the dolly grip. “It ain’t easy, kid,” the director said, “and it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with talent.”

Yammy already knew this. If the studios appreciated talent, they wouldn’t make the same old junk year after year, would they? Sure, sometimes even Hollywood did something right, but Yammy wasn’t interested in the American market. He had plans to go home once he’d honed his talents to a razor edge. His heroes of the silver screen included Akira Kurosawa, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Sergei Eisenstein, Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bufiuel—cinematic geniuses whom most people in Hollywood had never heard of, not even in film school. And he knew there was another, probably insurmountable, social impediment to his success in California. After all, at that particular time he and his team were filming in Colombia for a perfume advertisement that could just as economically and a lot more easily have been filmed on a mountain in Colorado. As Yammy put it in his faxes to his chums at home in Sendai, “Firstly, I do not snort cocaine, secondly I do not use coke, thirdly I do not do snow. Everyone thinks I’m an FBI plant.”

Every night after filming, he and the director went through the same ritual conversation while the director arranged extravagantly long lines of white powder on a marble tabletop.

“It’s about money,” the director said. “To make an independent art-house movie, you need