Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach jj-2

by Colin Cotterill

  "If you don't get killed."

  "The only way I can see getting killed here is in the rush for the Ladies'."

  "In that case, I hope your flight gets canceled."

  "Thanks. Gotta go."

  For the first time since we'd arrived in Maprao, I had back-to-back call-waiting. It was just like the good old days. Aung was hanging on. I wondered if he'd decided for us to get together before the effects of the antidepressant wore off.

  "Aung?"

  "You really want to help?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Shwe. They've taken him."

  I sat in Aung's little living room with Grandad Jah, Arny, and Ex-Police Captain Waew. Aung seemed uncomfortable to have so many Thais in his house. He'd almost fled through the back door when he saw us arrive en masse at the front.

  "Aung, it's me," I'd called out. "This is my family. We're here to help."

  Once we were all seated on mats on the floor and had been served lukewarm water in six different drinking vessels, Aung's wife, Oh, left us to it. I don't think it was a matter of this not being a woman's business. Even without the benefit of understanding their language, I could tell she was distressed. I got the feeling she'd attack her husband with a wok as soon as we left. She was a mother of five children, and her husband's decision to bring in the Siamese was inviting danger.

  "So, what happened?" I asked Aung.

  Once more the Burmese looked nervously at Grandad, who'd not opened his mouth since our arrival. I hadn't introduced him as ex-police, so there had to be some scent about him.

  "At about one o'clock," Aung began, "Shwe was on his way back to his lodgings. The rain hadn't let up, so there was nothing they could do at the fish-drying plant. Shwe was walking alone along the road by the fruit orchard when a police truck pulled up. Shwe was used to this. He stopped, wai'd-the police like it when we wai-and reached for his ID card. One of the policemen pulled out a gun, so Shwe dropped to his knees and put his hands on his head. We learn…"

  He looked at Grandad Jah.

  "We learn all the hoops to jump through for the police. Usually, it's just a game that we're encouraged to lose. But this time they bundled Shwe into the back seat of the truck and didn't even look at his ID. And they drove, not west to Ranong immigration, but north along the coast road to Sawee. There, they dragged him out of the truck, searched him, and locked him in a concrete shed with six other Burmese. None of them could speak Thai, so they had no idea what they'd been arrested for. Five of them had legitimate work permits and sponsors. Like Shwe, they'd been picked up off the street in broad daylight. Shwe knew in his bones that this was connected to the slavery rumors."

  "How could you possibly know all this?" I asked.

  "Shwe kept his cell phone taped to his lower leg," said Aung. "He was sick of getting his phones permanently confiscated by the local cops. Body searches generally miss the back of the leg. So he had his phone with him. He called me and told me what had happened."

  "And he's still in Sawee now?" Captain Waew asked.

  "Yes," said Aung.

  "Do we have enough information to pinpoint the place they're being held?"

  "No. One of the detainees knew the district they were in because she'd been there before. But not the exact location.

  "They have women there?" I asked.

  "Two in that group."

  I wanted to ask why, but I feared what the reply might be.

  "Are you still in contact?" I asked.

  Aung shook his head.

  "Here's the problem," he said. "Shwe's phone battery is really low. With all the power outages, he hasn't had a chance to charge it. He's got…I don't know…a few minutes left at the most. I told him to turn it off and only get back to me if he finds out their exact location."

  "That was smart, lad," said Grandad, much to everyone's surprise.

  "But it means that all we can do is sit around and wait," said Waew.

  "Right," Grandad agreed. "And what then? Even if we know where they're being held, are we expected to go and raid the place? Us?"

  Aung's face seemed to confirm the hopelessness of it all. He'd feared as much. What the hell could we do about it? Who was there to report to? I felt I was letting him down.

  "Shwe said there were two policemen in the truck?" I asked Aung.

  "Yes."

  "Did he describe them?"

  "That wasn't so important. He had a few minutes on his phone."

  "Of course."

  But it did mean there were other police officers involved. Egg wasn't alone in all this. If the kidnapping took place at one, it meant Egg wasn't in that truck. He was in the interview room with me. I started to wonder whether the whole station was involved. I also wondered whether anyone would bother mentioning seeing a police truck passing through Maprao a few seconds before our shop was bombed. Was it us against the police force?

  Aung promised to phone me the moment he heard from Shwe. We secretly hoped that wouldn't be too soon because we weren't prepared to deal with such an eventuality.

  10.

  Something in the Way She Moos

  (from "Something" -GEORGE HARRISON)

  As we were already in Pak Nam, I diverted us via the Internet shop. It was the worst possible time to be there. The place was crammed with Zelda warriors and online car-jackers and big-eyed Japanese searchers. We needed subterfuge, and my task force hounds needed exercise. Grandad Jah walked in first, like the head reservoir dog, and flashed his ID, putting it back in his pocket before anyone had a chance to notice it was his Lotus supermarket discount card. Arny and Waew fanned out behind him to make it look like a raid.

  "All right. Everyone away from the computers," said Grandad.

  Chair legs scraped and teenage arms rose.

  "Who are-" began the owner.

  "Haven't you been warned, son?" Grandad asked, looking rudely through the documents on the young man's desk. Waew began facing all the kids against the wall. Arny…looked menacingly uncomfortable.

  "You think we don't monitor what goes on in places like this?" Grandad asked. "You want to see a list of all the illicit Web sites accessed from right here? Don't you know there are laws in place to prevent minors looking at filth and radical rantings?"

  "I don't-" began the owner.

  "No, you don't. But ignorance doesn't keep you out of prison, boy. Come on. Outside, the lot of you."

  You'll notice Grandad hadn't actually claimed to represent any official body, but he had that presence. While everyone was marching out, I snuck inside and hijacked a computer that was already online.

  Alb, I wrote. I desperately need an NGO working with Burmese that has some political and financial clout. Funding from overseas preferred. Urgent.

  While I waited, I printed out Sissi's class lists on the communal printer. As I looked casually through them I noticed something odd about the names. Most of them were followed by an "m" or an "f" to denote gender. In the first semester, the Chaturaporn that Sissi had spotted on all Noy's lists was tagged as male. But in the second and subsequent semester, that had been changed to female. Given my own family history, it wasn't unthinkable that Mr. Chaturaporn had opted for gender reassignment, but I doubted anyone would leave a country with the best sex-change clinics in the world and go to Washington for a snip. It could have been a mere clerical error, but I'd get Sissi to follow up on it later. I was checking the weather forecast for the Gulf when Alb's reply arrived.

  Contact Piper Porterfield at Hope for Myanmar, he wrote. I hear she's been sleeping with George Soros, the philanthropist. Lot of aid money to spread around for the Burmese cause. She's got nice tits too.

  Men. Was there any hope for them? Fortunately, rather than a bra cup size, he'd added her phone number. I called. She picked up almost immediately.

  "Piper."

  I told her who I was, where I was, and what was happening. I didn't know whether she could speak Thai, so I did this in my pronunciation-challenged English. All the time she kept qu
iet, and I wondered whether she'd put the phone on her desk and gone out for dinner. But I kept going all the way to Sawee and the seven incarcerated Burmese.

  "Can you hear me OK?" I asked.

  There was a pause and a sound like the tap of a keyboard.

  "Just the seven?" she asked.

  I think I preferred her when she was quiet.

  "Yes."

  "It's just that that is rather small fry."

  She had a Lady Di accent.

  "Just how many people need to be kidnapped and killed before we can increase the size of the fry?" I asked.

  "Thousands disappear every year," she said. "Refugees wiped out by the junta on their way to Thai camps. Children nabbed from construction site slums. And lots of et ceteras. I get reports such as yours every day. Your situation is every bit as tragic, of course, but the resources needed to resolve the matter would far exceed the benefits."

  I didn't know whether I admired her honesty or hated her for it.

  "Benefits obviously meaning something more important than keeping people alive," I presumed.

  "Yes, look, I'm sorry. In my line of work I tend to trivialize death. It helps. The benefits I'm referring to are the factors which help to change world opinion. Burma has no natural oil to rescue from tyranny, so we have to rely on slowly creating a mood of outrage at the social level before we can hope for international intervention. Once we have political support, we may be able to save more lives than we can with a small police action in the forgettable south."

  "I thought you had a budget for things like this."

  "We do. But our directive is to maximize these situations. To take an issue and humanize it at an international level. Touch as many hearts as possible. We did a sea rescue once, but it was so isolated and over so quickly that we barely made a ripple in the world press. It was a very expensive failure."

  I was punched numb for a few seconds. When I came around, I asked, "Do you have a counterpart at the Thai Police Ministry?"

  "Certainly. We fund their Division of International Day Laborers."

  With all that money you'd think they'd come up with something more catchy than DIDL.

  "And what do they do there?" I asked.

  "They distribute information to the press. Collect relevant reports from the police data bank."

  "Any of them have guns?"

  "What are you getting at? They're all qualified police officers."

  "I mean, do they ever leave the office and go out and shoot people?"

  "Not…no, not shoot. There are officers attached to the unit who are involved in casework."

  "But they could be called upon if massive public outrage was being waged. They could rush to a scene if it was in the public eye and guaranteed a world audience?"

  "I suppose…yes."

  "Good. Then this conversation wasn't a complete waste of time. I'll get back to you."

  The trouble with a cell phone was that if you slammed it down, you'd break your own jaw. It seemed the bigger the organization, the less they dealt with actual people. And don't even get me started on the UN. All I needed was a few thousand dollars for high-powered weaponry, and we could do the rest ourselves. Blow those slavers out of the Gulf. But no, I suppose that would be just too difficult for the silly cow to write up in the annual report.

  I collected my printouts and my family and Captain Waew, abandoned all the street-bound nerds, and returned to the truck. We were on our own, tactically, but I didn't want to break that news to the task force. It was a desperately lonely feeling. Giving up suddenly felt like such a good idea. While Grandad drove us very slowly home through the drizzle, I looked around at my cohorts. Arny had joined up because he wanted to impress his girlfriend. Grandad and Waew were on board because they wanted to get revenge on a couple of hoods. None of us was particularly fond of the Burmese. Once the Viagra had worn off, I doubted I'd have any personal interest at all. So what was it? Why could I not shake this urge to do something suicidal? The rain smudged my side window, and I looked into its patterns. I saw the posturing of the rat brothers and the homophobic bullying of Lieutenant Egg, and I thought back to why I'd become a crime reporter. If the crooks were crooked and the cops were crooked, who was there left to bring justice to our corrupt world? Who could we respect? Where was the shoulder angel who twanged on the conscience of the undecided youth? Who else might argue that the words graft and dishonesty and selfishness were not necessarily inspirational? Who else but the press? That's why I'd become a journalist, and that's why I'd turned to crime writing. To shore up our flimsy status quo. To challenge the view that the bigger the crime the lower the chances of arrest.

  Victims of trafficking and imminent execution shouldn't be on their own with no hero to fly in and rescue them. But out there on the high sea there were only the seagull and the prawn to witness the crime. It was a vast lawless outback. It was impossible for a criminal not to be overwhelmed by that feeling of invincibility. Who cared what he did?

  Me.

  I'm not sure anybody noticed that explosion of moral dignity inside the cab of the Mighty X. I felt it was time to inspire a team spirit.

  "OK, everyone," I said. "Let's get serious. What do we have to go on?"

  I'd forgotten all about the old boys and their afternoon detective work. As they hadn't mentioned anything I assumed they'd had no success with the Thai boat owners. So I was surprised when, with a twitch, Captain Waew said:

  "Common opinion is that it's the Bangkok boats doing all the illegal stuff. There were two new concessions added out of the blue last year by senatorial decree, or whatever it's called. That means that despite long-standing agreements with the Fisheries department limiting the number of contracts, every now and then you get some influential figure handing out deals to this or that nephew or cousin. They'd lease big boats and take them deep into the Gulf. They'd reap as much profit as they could before the next election when the contracts were revoked by the next minister, who'd go on to replace them with his own relatives."

  "Did you manage to get the names of any of the boats?" I asked.

  "The contact didn't know any specifics, so I phoned the Department of Fisheries. They'll fax me a list of all the newly registered boats over the past year. The local trawler owners aren't at all happy about outsiders coming in, ignoring all the no-fishing zone markers, using dragnets over young coral and just generally making assholes of themselves. The big-boat captains that come from down here in the south, they aren't averse to bending the odd rule, but they've all learned from experience what overfishing has done to their industry."

  "This might be a stupid question," I asked, "but isn't there anyone policing the sea at all?"

  "I found an old seafarer who told me all about the Coastal Patrol," said Grandad. "Except he called them the

  Postal Patrol. They have two boats to police an area of two thousand square kilometers. And they don't have much of a budget for fuel, so they rely on donations."

  "Don't tell me," I said. "From big-boat owners."

  "That would be correct."

  "So if they don't go after the big boats, what do they do?"

  "Splash around in the shallows hassling the small-boat fishermen, from what I can make out. Fine them for minor infringements."

  "While the big boats break the law with impunity," said Waew.

  "It all seems…I don't know…too big for us," said Arny. Never one to pass up an opportunity for pessimism.

  "I think it's doable," I said.

  "How?" asked Grandad, turning to give me a prolonged Grandad Jah glare, even though he was driving.

  The Mighty X really shouldn't have had a back seat. The expression "4-Seater" was only a selling point. I suppose if you had two mine-victim passengers, it would be the perfect vehicle. But anyone with legs had to wrap them around the seat in front. With Arny taking up half the cab all by himself, we were an intimate foursome in that small space. You could smell the lack of confidence.

  "I don't know w
hat it is yet," I said. "But I know there has to be a way."

  When we got back to the resort, the sea had retreated somewhat, but the Neo-Mekhong river out back was wide enough for paddle steamers to ply their trade. Only the side walls of the bridge were visible above the surface. A hundred years ago all this water would have found its way unimpeded to the sea, but idiots like our predecessors had built for sea views and filled the land and limited the runoff from the hills to ninety-centimeter pipe segments that burrowed under driveways and palm plantations and houses. Monsoon water didn't have that type of patience. If you've gotta go…

  We parked the truck on the hump in the road fifty meters from the resort, and I splashed down to the kitchen. I was on dinner duty, of course. With the tide at its lowest, I no longer had to wade from the larder to the stove. The power had been off all day, so the menu was decided on what smelled best in the dark refrigerator. I was just one step ahead of putrefaction. The day's events had caused me to be absent for the Noys' return on the postal motorcycle earlier. I'd called Mair from the truck, and she told me the two had eaten sparingly and were sorry they'd tried to escape. So I decided to create an evening meal that was both nutritious and welcoming. Thankfully, gas was not subject to the whims of nature. I was halfway through my famous spicy ginger chicken when Sissi phoned.

  "What's happening?" I asked.

  "I'm into the semi-finals of the table tennis tournament. It appears it's one of those skills you never lose."

  "I thought all your muscles had atrophied from years seated in front of a computer."

  "You're so yesterday. For six months I've been seated in front of the computer on a stationary cycle. I've probably been to Shanghai and back since May. I had to get in shape for Seoul."

  "You bored?"

  "It isn't quite as intense as I'd hoped."

  "Is your flight canceled?"

  "Everybody's flight's canceled."

  "Are you allowed to leave the airport?"