The Golden Elephant

by Alex Archer

  Shortly they agreed on a price. It was steep but not ruinous—notwithstanding what Roux was going to say—but Annja figured that if she was going to hire somebody, she might as well get the best available. Patty seemed to be that, so Annja was willing to pony up.

  “All right, then,” Patty said when they settled. “You have yourself an official photographer. How about the rest of the team?”

  “At the minimum,” Annja said, “and I want to keep this minimal, for reasons I’m sure you understand—”

  Patty nodded. Annja took the risks attendant to crossing a sealed border between two overmilitarized and adrenalized Southeast Asian states very seriously, even if Ruhle didn’t believe she did. In this case it was the world-wise veteran who didn’t know what she was dealing with, not the fresh-faced newbie.

  “I want an area specialist, an anthropologist who knows the people and cultures of the ground we’re going to cover. And we need a guide. Preferably somebody who’s not a stranger to border crossing himself. Or herself,” Annja said.

  Ruhle nodded. “The guide I can’t help you with—the best man I know for this region died two years ago of acute lead poisoning because he got a little fly around an ethnic army in Myanmar. The second best is doing hard time since the Thais caught him being a little too familiar with informal border crossing, if you get my drift. But as for an anthropologist with regional cred, I have just the man for you. He’s got all the integrity in the world, he’s on a first-name basis with half the tribes between here and the Himalayas and he’s got an A-1 international rep. Plus he’s available and in the area, as of a couple days ago.”

  It was Annja’s turn to narrow her eyes. “Do I hear an unspoken ‘but’ here, Patty?”

  “With two ts,” Ruhle said. “He is the best. But he can be, well, a total asshole. Not to put too fine an edge on it.”

  16

  “Are you sure this guy is the best?” Annja asked. She wore a cheap straw tourist hat. When she wore hats she generally wore cheap ones. They never seemed to last with her.

  Patty nodded resolutely. She didn’t have a hat. “And anyway, if anyone’s gonna be able to find us a halfway decent guide, he’s it.”

  Annja peered dubiously into the shade of the hut. It was hard to penetrate with eyes accustomed to the noonday sun’s blaze.

  “He looks,” she said, “stoned.”

  “Probably,” Ruhle said.

  A bus had brought them most of the way to this village in the Chao Phraya swamps half a day’s journey outside Bangkok. It was a yellow bus with twisty Thai characters painted all over it in maroon and blue. It was also perilously tall for the narrow wheelbase. The balance issues weren’t addressed—or not in any favorable way—by the crates and hampers all lashed on top.

  It was nothing too unusual for Annja. Local accents differentiated it from other buses she’d ridden in around the world, such as the distinctive, somewhat astringent Thai music tinkling from tinny speakers hung from the ceiling on brightly colored ribbons. But on the whole it was much like other Third World buses. Including the fact that the driver drove as fast as road conditions would allow, and usually a bit faster.

  Since their destination lay well and truly out in the boonies, away from Thailand’s more or less modern highway system, Annja wound up with a sore butt and a feeling as if her spine had been pounded shorter by eight inches from the bad road and worse shocks.

  They stood several hundred yards from a stream meandering to join the Chao Phraya a few miles away. The hut was raised up on stilts about three feet off the ground. That didn’t suggest a great deal of confidence in the creek keeping to its banks if the rains came, though fortunately the monsoon proper was over, tailing off into occasional slamming rains.

  The hut stood open to a thatch roof supported by joists lashed together with tight rope windings. Long rolled screens were hung just below it to keep the weather out in storms. Annja didn’t have much confidence in them, either, but she had to reckon the locals knew best. Probably they were as fatalistic about their weather as she was about their rural public transport. Anyway it didn’t look like rain anytime soon.

  In the hut eight men sat cross-legged, naked to the waist. She thought one of them was paler and taller than the rest, but it wasn’t easy to tell. As she was standing in the sun, her eyes weren’t going to get any more adjusted to the shade inside. The men swayed side to side, crooning in low, nasally, melodic tones as they passed a bowl from hand to hand.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Annja said optimistically.

  Patty shook her head. “Nope. That’s one of the reasons Phil gets along so well with the tribal types—he joins in their rituals.”

  “Which tend to involve consuming mind-altering substances,” Annja said.

  “Don’t they all?”

  As with a lot of such rituals, Annja suspected this was really all just another dodge for the men to get away from the womenfolk for a while, in default of bars.

  Not that these village men had gone to any great lengths to escape their women. The hut stood on the outskirts of the tiny village. But a number of women sat on the steps up to other huts and on mats on the ground nearby, smoking pipes and chopping vegetables or weaving more mats from long river grasses. They showed no more interest in the men than they did the lines of ants flowing everywhere like rivers of tiny gleaming bodies.

  The day wore on. The heat pressed down on Annja like an anvil. Lizards rustled in the roof thatch, hunting bugs. Birds chirped and fussed in the forest nearby. Chickens strutted about importantly, pecking at the ants. Little children, naked or half-naked, peered wide eyed at the funny-looking foreign women from behind the struts holding up huts nearby, and fled giggling when either glanced their way.

  The gathering broke up. The men ceased their ritualistic moaning. They began talking in normal tones, punctuated with bursts of high-pitched, tittery laughter. Annja didn’t know if that was an effect of whatever herbal decoction they had been passing around or just the way people laughed hereabouts.

  Several stood unsteadily. One unfolded himself to a greater height than the rest. Annja could now see his narrow torso was noticeably paler than the other men’s. He took a shirt from a peg where it hung, pulled it on as he turned and came unsteadily down the wooden stairs to the ground.

  He had dark brown receding hair, sharply handsome features behind a neat beard, blue eyes that under other circumstances might have pierced but were now notably muddy. He swayed on reaching the level earth, packed hard by many bare feet since the last rain. He noticed the Western women and walked toward them with immense dignity.

  “Ladies,” he said. Then he turned aside, doubled over and vomited into the black dirt.

  “SO,” ANNJA SAID, WALKING along the grassy bank beside a stream black with tannin from decomposing plants, “fill me in a bit on your background, if you will.”

  She kept a part of her consciousness cocked for some of Southeast Asia’s many noted species of venomous serpents. She’d heard they could get pretty aggressive.

  For a man who’d been barfing not fifteen minutes before, and still wore his white shirt with tan vertical stripes open over a washboard chest, Dr. Philip Kennedy walked beside her with great dignity. It spoke well for his presence of mind, anyway, Annja thought.

  “I was born in a whitebread suburb north of Boston,” he said. “My father was a dentist. My mother was a terribly socially conscious housewife.”

  For a man who wore his leftist political views on his sleeves, and not infrequently let them fall off onto his academic publications, he didn’t seem respectful of his mother’s liberal activism, or so it seemed to Annja. She had researched him online in her hotel room before heading out before dawn on the hair-raising bus ride. She wanted to hear his account in his own words, and make sure it squared with his published bio. Also she had some questions.

  Maybe his famed disdain for all things Western was coming out. Or maybe he was working through some other issues, she thoug
ht.

  “I got an academic scholarship to Harvard—a terrible waste of resources, given my upper-middle-class background. Typical. My undergrad was in Southeast Asian social anthropology through the East Asia center. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii.”

  “I understand you spent some time here in Southeast Asia as an undergrad,” she said. He must have known Patty Ruhle would have told Annja something about him. They had left the red-haired woman snapping photos of the village. To keep her hand in, she said—and also because there was no telling what a professional with her contacts could sell somewhere along the line. Annja was not going to lie to him and pretend she hadn’t looked him up. But she wasn’t going to volunteer it, either.

  Philip nodded. His beard was streaked gray down both sides. His temples were also silvered. The gray and even the way his hair was getting a little thin to the sides of his forehead only made him look distinguished. Annja couldn’t see Kennedy coloring his hair or using any of those baldness cures they advertised on television. She suspected the very fierceness of his disdain for such vanities was part of an attitudinal package that helped him pull the whole thing off.

  He was actually a fairly handsome man in a weather-beaten way.

  “I did,” he said. “In fact I worked with tribes in the very area of Burma you say you’re interested in. I became fascinated with the region because of an early interest in Hinduism and Buddhism.”

  What Annja had read indicated he had established a reputation as an utterly intrepid field researcher with a gift for the difficult Thai family of languages spoken throughout Thailand and Burma. He had also made a name for himself for the ease with which he won the confidence of tribesfolk. Centuries of threats and oppression by heavy-handed neighbors, European colonialists and the Japanese, followed in many places by virtually continuous guerrilla warfare at varying levels of intensity, had given little reason to trust outsiders of any flavor.

  “That’s good,” she said. “So, uh, what was going on back there with the chanting and the puking?”

  “Oh, we were simply sharing a local entheogen.”

  “A what?” Annja asked.

  “It’s a psychoactive compound used in shamanic rituals. This one’s an alkaloid derived from plants. Probably fly agaric.”

  That made her miss a step. “Fly agaric? You mean—”

  “Amanita muscaria, yes. The mushroom. It’s the most common source for such compounds. Unfortunately, various other herbs used in the decoction tend to produce a marked emetic effect. That accounts for what you termed the puking. As for the rest—”

  He shrugged. “In this case what you witnessed was nothing quite so formal as shamanic ritual. Merely a means of bonding and socializing.”

  “I see,” she said. “So, how did you get interested in ethnobotany?”

  He looked at her with a glint in his eyes. “You sound skeptical. I assure you it’s a highly legitimate field.”

  “All right,” she said neutrally.

  “I encountered entheogen use with some frequency during my undergraduate work on the Shan Plateau in Burma,” he said.

  “And since then I’ve both actively researched entheogenic compounds and their uses, and employed them myself as an aid to harmonizing with and understanding indigenous cultures.”

  “Great,” Annja said. “But can you keep a lid on it?”

  He stopped with a low-hanging limb endangering an unruly cowlick. “What do you mean?”

  “If you sign on with this expedition I need you focused and on track,” she said. “That means no getting stoned on duty.”

  She had little enough against recreational chemistry—if you screened out the dope smokers and the drinkers, you’d pretty well screen out field archaeologists and anthropologists.

  He scowled at her in outrage. “I’m not talking about recreation here. I engage in serious research!”

  She nodded. “I’m sure you do. I just can’t have you engaged in research that’ll interfere with what I need you to do.”

  He frowned at her a moment longer, then looked away. “As I say,” he said, for the first time not speaking forthrightly, “use of psychoactives is something I do for professional reasons. I don’t let things interfere with my fieldwork.”

  “All right,” she said a little more confidently.

  He looked at her. “And speaking of this expedition, what exactly is it you have in mind? You said you had a line on an undiscovered site in Myanmar. What do you intend? To uncover it, exploit it, rape what time and nature have hidden away?”

  She frowned and set her jaw at his use of the word rape. She thought that was an offensive use of the word. Let it go, she commanded herself. That’s not what you’re here for.

  “I intend to do research of my own, yes,” she said as evenly as she could. “But my main intention is to prevent what could be a trove of unique artifacts from being plundered by one of the world’s worst tomb robbers.”

  He allowed himself something resembling a smile at that. “So you’re a treasure preserver,” he said.

  “I’m looking to preserve it, yes. And see it properly conserved.”

  He smiled openly. “Well, well,” he said. “I find I might actually have something in common with you after all.”

  He stuck out his hand. “I’m in,” he said.

  17

  “Going to Burma, hah,” the plump man in the red-tasseled pillbox hat said. He might have been muttering to himself, but his use of heavily Chinese-accented English suggested he spoke for the benefit of his guests. “Bad business, go to Burma. Very bad.” He shook his head.

  Chinese music played low in the background.

  Philip Kennedy fixed the shopkeeper with a lofty look. “We’re not interested in business,” he said, inflecting the word as a curse. “What we’re doing may be bad enough. But at least we’re not grubbing after profits.”

  A fly buzzed past Annja’s nose. One or more of the various forms of incense alight in the crowded, stuffy shop was threatening to bring on a major allergic reaction.

  Annja cast her other companion a look. Patty Ruhle rolled her eyes toward the roof beams of the crowded little shop in a particularly decrepit and disreputable section of the long sprawl of the Bangkok waterfront district.

  It was an interaction that had taken place many times in the day since they’d collected the Harvard-trained anthropologist.

  Kennedy was laser straight today. It didn’t exactly make him easier to deal with.

  Kennedy said something in an Asian language. It was singsong, tonal. It didn’t sound to Annja’s ears—and she had a definite ear for languages, even if she knew no useful amount of any East Asian tongue—like what she heard slung on the crowded streets and in the bright-bannered kiosks outside. She wondered if Kennedy had also picked up a usable amount of Mandarin along the way. Supercilious he may have been, but he was a keenly intelligent man, and ingesting all those entheogens didn’t seem to have dulled him appreciably.

  Annja found herself grinning at Ruhle as the two men became engrossed in singing and gesticulating at one another. Having spent time in the ethnic enclaves of New Orleans the tourists never saw, in the back streets and on the docks, she had always known that the movie version of Third World haggling was not only truthful but somewhat understated.

  Then again, the people who haggled seriously were people who were often seriously poor—usually on both sides of the transaction. It was a Darwinian proposition, and sometimes the party who got the better of the deal was the party that survived.

  Of course Master Chen didn’t seem to have missed many meals. Skinny though he was, Kennedy wasn’t hanging on the raw edge of starvation, either.

  “Boys enjoy this too much, don’t they?” said Patty sotto voce, putting her curly red head near Annja’s. Annja laughed. She thought the same thing.

  She wandered among crowded shelves and counters. She moved with extreme caution to avoid brushing anything for fear high-piled goods would tumble
down on her. She suspected Master Chen strictly enforced a “you break it, you buy it” policy. And in any dispute she had few doubts as to whose side the Bangkok cops would come down on. If anything, Bangkok was more adept even than most of the Third World at the fine art of shaking down wealthy Westerners.

  “See anything you like?” Patty asked.

  “I hardly know,” Annja said, shaking her head.

  Chen’s shop appeared to be a combination of modern sporting-goods store, old-time general store and combination apothecary and magic shop. Nylon rope lay wound in gleaming coils between spoils of hairy natural-fiber line. Coleman lanterns vied for shelf space with pink Hello Kitty purses, above jars full of colorful herbs and bins of fleshy roots of doubtful virtue, Joss sticks, road maps, CDs and octagonal feng shui mirrors. “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she said.

  Patty held up a piece of wood carved to look like a short sheathed sword with Chinese characters and unfamiliar symbols. “How about a seven-star sword for luck?”

  Annja laughed. “If only it were that easy to get luck.”

  “Lots of Asians think you can buy it,” the photographer said. “They look set to take over the world in a few years. Maybe they’re onto something.”

  Kennedy walked up to them. He looked grave. Even on short acquaintance Annja had learned not to take that too seriously.

  “Master Chen says he can supply us,” he said. “He ought to have everything we need. Of course, he’d have a better idea if he knew precisely where we were going. But then so would I.”

  Patty laughed. “Just get used to being a mushroom, Phil,” she said. “Ms. Annja has her reasons for keeping us in the dark. She’s a girl who’s always got reasons for what she does.”

  “What kind of price?” Annja asked.

  Kennedy’s look of disapproval deepened to a frown. He named a figure in baht, the local currency, which he quickly translated to dollars. “I know it’s high,” he said. “But I think you’re looking at carrying along a great deal too much prepared food.” He said prepared as he might say tainted.