The Motion Picture Teller


 Contents
 
 Title
 Copyright
 Act 1 Bangkok 2010
 Prologue
 Act 2 The Motion Picture Teller
 Author’s Note
 
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Start
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ALSO BY COLIN COTTERILL
 The Coroner’s Lunch
 Thirty-Three Teeth
 Disco for the Departed
 Anarchy and Old Dogs
 Curse of the Pogo Stick
 The Merry Misogynist
 Love Songs from a Shallow Grave
 Slash and Burn
 The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die
 Six and a Half Deadly Sins
 I Shot the Buddha
 The Rat Catchers’ Olympics
 Don’t Eat Me
 The Second Biggest Nothing
 The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot
 
 Copyright © 2023 by Colin Cotterill
 Published by
 Soho Press, Inc.
 227 W 17th Street
 New York, NY 10011
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Cotterill, Colin, author.
 Title: The motion picture teller / Colin Cotterill.
 Description: New York, NY : Soho Crime, [2023]
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022024746
 ISBN 978-1-64129-435-5
 eISBN 978-1-64129-436-2
 Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. | Classification: LCC PR6053.O778 M68
 2023 | DDC 823/.914—dc23/eng/20220524
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024746
 Printed in the United States of America
 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 My thanks to my Thai friends who encouraged me to go ahead with this project and to my longtime editorial readers with their sarcastic but always relevant comments over the years. My love to Kyoko, my wife and best friend, and a passing wag to our nine mentally challenged dogs.
 
 PROLOGUE
 There were two worlds. There was the real world, where Supot delivered letters for the Royal Thai Mail service, where everyone he met was an unlikely character even for fantasy. In this world, teenagers dropped lighted matches into post boxes; elderly transvestites invited you in for coffee and romance; paving stones subsided beneath your feet, leaving you ankle deep in muck; monks smoked a joint before heading off on their alms rounds; and office girls paid homage to the plaster elephants at the concrete altar in front of the department store, then returned to instant noodles and cheesy television soaps in their windowless rooms.
 There was that world.
 He was six paces into Nisomboon’s yard before he realized what he’d done. It was an increasingly common bout of stupidity. He should have rung the bell and had the owner come to the gate. Or, even better, he should have stayed in bed. All around him like slow-breathing land mines were the mid-siesta bodies of nine dogs, semi-rehabilitated and doubtlessly dreaming of postal worker kebab even then. They were probably rabid ex-street mongrels with issues, each with the capacity to rip the flesh from his bones. But they slept in peace in the midday heat under the shade of the sprawling banyan tree. There was hope.
 He completed the walk to the house more silently than any postman in the history of mail delivery. He placed the letter on the step of the open front door, then turned on his heel and prowled back toward the gate . . . and safety. Were it not for the clash of keys in the bunch on his belt, he might have got out of there unscathed.
 Then there was the intended world—one that beckoned from a cruel distance. The world of motion pictures, where he spent his only truly happy hours. Where Brando pads his cheeks with cotton wool and Kelly risks pneumonia in the rain. Where Lang introduces the serial killer, Godard highlights the dangers of romance, Fellini encourages decadence, and Akerman demonstrates the beauty of housework. Where women are stabbed in the shower, seven men overthrow an army, and a computer takes over a spaceship. A world where anything is possible and preferable.
 He sat beside Ali—his best friend—a spicy fish ball on a skewer poised at his lips. He had no idea what the actress was saying—she was speaking French, the language of seducers—but she was saying it so beautifully that he didn’t want to insult her by reading the Thai subtitles. Not while she was up on the screen acting her French heart out for him. He could pick out a semblance of a plot: there was some problem with her schoolmaster husband. Some deal going down with the man’s minor wife. But Supot could read that later. It didn’t matter. For now, he was in the trance of delight, riding around on this cinematic carousel for an hour or so. The truly great films could keep a person engrossed whether they were in Thai or Icelandic or Mauritian Creole. Language was superfluous, a supplementary bonus to a man who loved film.
 If Supot Yongjaiyut had shown any aptitude at all, a mere glimpse of skill as a filmmaker, actor, or even a lighting technician, he would have lived contentedly in the world of cinema. But he was without hope. Hopeless, some might say. He’d trawled down through his depths of creativity and imagination and found not one modest shoal, not one squirming sprat of aptitude. In fact, considering the natural ability of his mother, Oi, he even left the plausibility of genetic transference in tatters. She had been the talent of the family, and she’d kept her genes to herself.
 Supot couldn’t complain, though. Oi undoubtedly loved her children. Where other mothers might have given themselves to an unsuitable replacement husband for their benefit, Oi never did. She vowed never to leave herself dependent on a man again. She worked two jobs and dedicated herself to doing the best for her kids—sending them to a good school and having plans for their futures. During the day she clerked in the office of a river barge company. At night she made tiny clay models at home to meet orders from Central Department Store.
 She molded little market people, bunches of fruit, carrying baskets, and sleeping dogs between her clever fingers. She painted them with brushes as fine as a baby’s eyelashes, varnished them, and baked them in her old Chinese oven. Every evening, Supot and Tam would finish their homework and sit