by Robert Daley
For five years Koy had not budged - had waited for citizenship, had waited for the return of Marco, his distributor, had waited for an incident that would enable him to take over the Nam Soong Tong, for he needed the tong’s sanction in order to move goods in and out of Chinatown. The first two events had occurred but not the third, preventing the fourth, until at last Koy had felt obliged to create the incident he needed - the restaurant massacre.
This had been somewhat out of character for him, because it was an impetuous act. He was a man of immense power in the only true meaning of the term - being rich, shrewd and most of all patient. Until then he had always considered patience the most important of his three great gifts because it alone permitted optimum use of the other two. But New York had come to feel like a jail cell to him. He came to see himself as a virtual prisoner. He was a man who obeyed no laws except those he set personally, and those he set he could also change. At last, instead of condemning himself to further patience, he had allowed his restlessness and especially his vast energy to overcome him. He had sent the Hsu brothers into Ting’s place.
The result was that he now could move forward again - had to move forward. For the first time in a long time he felt completely happy. He felt as eager as a sprinter bolting from the starting blocks. He felt rejuvenated, a middle-aged man granted a new life, a new career, the chance to earn a second fortune. He was on the move again.
In London he walked out through customs, bought himself a ticket to Amsterdam, and walked right back in again. Within an hour he was in the air, and less than an hour after that, stepping in and out of streambeds fast, he was in a taxi between Schipol Airport and the city. He rode past fields of wet green grass delineated by canals. In the distance, here and there, windmills poked up. It was the flattest, wettest-looking country he had ever seen. The taxi driver who dropped him off at the Rijksmuseum had deposited a thousand others there this year, and would not remember him. He went inside and stood in front of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch,” one of the most famous paintings in the world, but to Koy only a landmark, neither more nor less, a place to meet someone. He was not interested in Western painting, and this one, a grouping of seventeenth-century Dutch burghers occupying an entire wall, seemed to him heavy and gross, lacking the refinement and delicacy of Chinese art. Chinese artists, to Koy, painted with butterflies’ wings; Western artists painted with tree stumps. The one was subtle, with three or four thousand years of civilization behind it, and the other was as violent as the violent games - football, hockey, rugby - that the foreign demons so much admired.
Waiting, he stared dutifully at the painting, his mind elsewhere, the perfect tourist, a tall Chinese wearing dark glasses that rendered him, like film stars, both conspicuous and anonymous - definitely someone, though who? His hands hung crossed at his crotch, as demure as a Greek’s fig leaf, as protective as a fighter’s cup, though the blow, if any, would not fall there. Behind him he heard tour groups moving in and out of the room, heard the painting described by guides in many languages, none of them Hakka.
Having traveled three thousand eight hundred miles overnight, Koy was early by five minutes, and Hung Hsui-ch’uan, the Hakka Chinese he had come to see, was late by the same amount, having had to cross the city through traffic by taxi. They came together with proper smiles and bows, formally, almost distantly, speaking Hakka. There was no handshake, no embrace, no touching, even though they had grown up together in the same village in China, had served as station sergeants together in Hong Kong, and had not seen each other in five years. Hung had been part of the combine - Koy’s combine - that had dominated the Hong Kong police department. He was one of the five dragons. Koy would meet the other three in Hong Kong in a few days, but Hung could not go because there was a warrant outstanding for his arrest.
In Amsterdam, where the Chinese community had always been dominated by Hakkas, Hung had established himself in the import-export business against just such a day as this. He moved legitimate goods to and from many ports, including Hong Kong on one side of the world and New York on the other. For Koy’s purposes he was both ideally placed and, up to a point, totally trustworthy. Betrayal, in the normal course of events, would not come via Hung. However, life did not always proceed according to one’s wishes. Hung too had his investors, had payrolls to meet. He and his people had waited a long time. Money had been spent. Profits were wanted. He would follow Koy’s lead only as long as these profits seemed assured, and he was perhaps growing impatient. They were boyhood pals, and he would abandon Koy, would switch allegiance to another, only with regret.
Koy, therefore, would tell Hung no more than he needed to know. The two men began to stroll through the museum, being careful to determine that no one tailed them from room to room, sometimes standing a long time before individual paintings to be certain. But they noted no evidence of any interest in them whatever, and the business discussion both had come for at last began. By the end of the week, Koy said, each piece of the organization would be in place, which would be a satisfaction to all of them.
“You’re going to Thailand next?” said Hung.
“Yes.”
“You’ll see the general?”
Koy shrugged. “It’s been arranged.”
“He’s not happy.”
“So I understand.”
“Whoever you sent didn’t get the job done.”
Koy said nothing. Hung was not so much criticizing him as pointing out that they were all under pressure that would be relieved only when the goods started to flow.
“The general expected you before this,” said Hung.
“You yourself were unable to go,” Koy pointed out.
When Hung was silent, Koy said, “The first shipment should reach you here in under a month.”
“As fast as that?” said Hung in surprise.
The bane of the narcotics business was that the merchandise was condemned nearly always to move so slowly. Most large shipments had to be welded into the entrails of tramp steamers which then set out at five knots per hour on journeys of many thousands of miles. This tied up great amounts of capital for months at a time. In these days of high interest rates it was a problem. A very expensive problem.
“Yes, as fast as that,” said Koy, but he did not elaborate.
Hung clapped his hands together in delight. “You’ve thought up a way to move big shipments by air, haven’t you?
“I think so,” said Koy. Business being a serious matter, he did not so much as smile.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“No,” said Koy.
Hung began to laugh. “You are one smart son of a bitch,” he said in English.
“If we can move the new system into Amsterdam,” said Koy, “of course you and your people will be part of it.” Age and overuse dim all emotion in the same way that they dim a man’s eyesight and hearing. Nonetheless, Koy had once been extremely fond of Hung, and some of this fondness remained, so that he added, “I wish you could come on to Hong Kong with me.”
“Me too.” Hung’s voice was wistful. “It would be swell to see all the guys again.”
Koy lunched alone on the terrace of the Excelsior, Amsterdam’s most expensive restaurant, which stood at the confluence of two canals. The banks of the canals were planted in rhododendron and mountain laurel, both in bloom now in late spring, so that the colors of the flowers were mirrored in the water at his feet. The red brick buildings of the city were reflected too. Koy watched the launches go by, watched the fracturing of the colors into slivers of shattered glass. When the boats were gone, he watched the mirror reform itself over and over again as no true mirror could ever do.
It was an elegant lunch in an elegant place and he was enjoying it. He was pleased to have seen Hung again, pleased that the Amsterdam-New York connection, the final stage in the journey of the merchandise, was firmly in place, and he was in no immediate hurry to move on, for at his next stop he would have to deal with the general in Thailand,
and it would not be this simple. Koy was like a director shooting his movie out of sequence, last scene first, because it was more economical and efficient that way, and also because it gave the director (Koy) and the cast (also Koy) confidence to start with something easy. One scene at least was already in the can. But the most vital scene of all had to be shot next; it would be a good deal more complicated, and it was time to move on to it. Koy paid his check, caught a cab out to the airport, and boarded another plane.
Twenty-two hours later, freshly shaved and fed, still wearing his tan silk suit, he landed at Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport, cleared customs and crossed to the domestic side, where he bought a ticket aboard a propeller plane for the local flight to Chiang Rai, about 600 miles north, the last major town below the Burma-Laos-Thailand border and the closest to the Golden Triangle any airline flew. It was steaming hot in Bangkok, but much cooler on the Chiang Rai plateau, where Koy was met by a Chinese Thai wearing army fatigues and thong sandals, who handed him a letter, then led him outside to a jeep. Koy, after tossing his small suitcase into the back on top of what looked like an M-16 automatic rifle lying on the floor, opened and read the letter. Bad news. The calligraphy was crude, and in some places illegible, which was neither here nor there perhaps. But the news was very bad indeed.
Koy had been as far as Chiang Rai, but no further, about ten years before. A Hong Kong police sergeant at the time, he had done his business at the airport with a one-eyed Chinese general known as Sao Mong Khawn, then the principal opium warlord of the region, and afterwards had gone back. This time he was to deal with the new warlord, Khun Sa, because Sao was either dead or deposed, and he had expected to meet him either at the airport or in the city. But Khun Sa had refused, according to this letter, to leave the hills. He would await Koy at his headquarters in the jungle.
Koy tried to decide what to do. He could not argue with a letter, and if he sent a message in with the driver and waited in a hotel it might take days for an answer to come back. With important appointments in Bangkok and Hong Kong, he did not have time for that. Were there other warlords who could supply the merchandise? Yes, but none had access to the same quantity as Khun Sa, and it was this quantity Koy needed. Besides, it was nearly harvest time and he was not in contact with them.
Still trying to decide on a course of action, Koy ordered his driver to take him to an outdoor marketplace, and they moved through traffic through the town. Traffic amounted to a few buses, some taxis, and many pedicabs and bicycles. Small, busy people in broad straw hats. The buildings were low and flat, with the roofs of Buddhist temples rising above them like blisters on paint.
His decision, whatever it turned out to be, was an important one. Not because he dreaded the brutal trek into the jungle to Khun Sa’s encampment, though he did, but because at stake was the most prized commodity of all in any negotiation between Chinese: face. To go all the way to Khun Sa’s doorstep was to grant him an immeasurable amount of face. It would make him impossible to deal with. His price would rise by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Worse, his attitude would change. He would become superior, contemptuous, and his own attitude toward Koy would be transmitted to his underlings in the form of bad jokes and carelessness, with a consequent risk to the security of Koy’s organization. Attitudes were transmitted from person to person more casually than disease, and faster, and often with more deadly results. Attitudes were far more critical than bullets, which killed one man at a time. Attitudes could wipe out whole armies.
The open market, Koy saw, sold principally food. There were pyramids of fruits on mats on the ground, durians, lichees, mangos, rose apples, mandarin oranges. There were wicker baskets of green vegetables, and chickens and pigeons that hung in squadrons from hooks. Tables held simmering caldrons of boiled rice, of soups, of various steaming curries whose odor cleared Koy’s nasal passages as he strolled by.
Face was as precious to Koy as to any Chinese, and his own, if he went in there, would diminish even as Khun Sa’s rose. It would practically vanish. He bought some lichees and broke them open and munched their sweet flesh, spitting out the seeds, and reviewed what he knew of Khun Sa.
There were in those hills, under that triple-canopy jungle, tigers, elephants, cobras and other wild creatures, and there were at the moment four or five private armies in opposition to Rangoon. All purported to represent noble or semi-noble causes, such as independence for various hill tribes, of which there were six or seven. The major tribe was the Shan, and Khun Sa called his group the Shan United Army even though he and his chief lieutenants were not Shans but Chinese. Formerly an enlisted man in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army, Khun Sa had evidently succeeded the one-eyed general and was now a general himself, self-appointed. He was about fifty, and commanded about ten battalions of about three hundred men each, with which he pretended to be making war on Rangoon so as to free the Shan tribe from the yoke of Burmese oppression. This rallied popular support. Khun Sa’s real business, however, was opium, though he also smuggled gemstones from Burma into Thailand as a sideline. The purpose of his private army was to protect his mule caravans from the other private armies, and also to war on them in order to hold his territory astride the main smuggling route. He was said to conscript his men in the hill villages, assigning them seven-to-twelve-year enlistments. He paid them in kerosene tins of rice, plus thirty bahts a month, and ruled through terror. He executed anyone who crossed him, and he moved a great deal of opium. He once organized a caravan 300 mules long to carry sixteen tons of raw opium down from the poppy-growing region further north to his own refineries near the Thai border - he had about fifteen mobile refineries. But another army attacked the caravan and there was a pitched battle which left more than 200 dead.
Koy in the marketplace had come to a stall selling rough clothing and heavy rubber boots, and abruptly he decided that he wanted to meet this man Khun Sa. There were ways to preserve face whatever the situation. He had never been humiliated in his life and did not intend to be now. He would teach this Khun Sa lout something about face. He bought the clothing and boots he needed, stowed them in the cardboard box in the floorwell of the jeep and got back into his seat.
A few minutes later they were out of town and rolling north along a rutted track, and Koy stopped the jeep, got out and changed to the work clothes he had just bought, repacking his suit in the cardboard box. Then they were in the jungle. The trees closed down on top of them. The bushes sometimes brushed the sides of the jeep. Driving was like punching a fist through a sleeve. The sky could not be seen. It was as if a storm were coming. There were many insects. Koy had just spent most of four bumpy hours in the propeller plane, flying low over mountains, landing four times, he had not slept in a bed in two nights, and as they bounded along he began to feel distinctly unwell.
With the road climbing all the time, they passed through a village belonging to one or another of the hill tribes - Shan or Lisu or Karen or Akkha, Koy did not know which, or care. The village was poor. Thatched huts surrounded by fields slashed out of the jungle. Small lean people in baggy black pants and broad straw hats, sometimes with straw baskets containing produce strapped to their backs. Then more jungle. The track came out at a high lake, and wound around it. Fishermen stood one-legged like storks on long flat barques, spare leg wrapped around an oar or pole, poling themselves along while manipulating their nets with their hands. On the bamboo posts that anchored the nets birds perched, some of them one-legged also. They swooped toward the water, roiled its surface, then rose again, gullets working, swallowing triumphantly.
And still more jungle. It was as if the earth had put on too many clothes - sweaters, vests, overcoats. In crushing heat the jeep pitched and yawed like a boat. To Koy the ride seemed unending. He was holding himself down, gripping the tubular chair frame in both fists. It was impossible to talk to the driver, whose dialect was a corrupt form of Yunnanese; Koy could not even understand how much farther they had to go.
At length the guide stopped t
he jeep and jumped out. He grabbed the rifle and Koy’s suitcase, and signaled him to follow. The forest lay on a slant. They started up on foot, Koy carrying the cardboard box containing his suit.
This was a teak forest here - the trees were as tall as towers, 150 feet or more above the forest floor, and from them dropped great dangling leaves up to two feet long, leaves big as awnings. Then the teaks ended, the trees became shorter, the undergrowth thick and knotted, and they were forced into a dry streambed, the only trail through it. Koy had long since soaked through his work clothes. He was dripping with sweat. This stream would be a torrent once the monsoons came, and as he stumbled upwards, he realized that the rains were due any day. The stream would be impassable. Khun Sa’s headquarters would be unreachable, unless there was another way in.
There probably was, thought the sweating Koy. The one-eyed general he had dealt with last time had been a reasonably cultured man and a graduate of the same military college as Chiang Kai-shek. But this Khun Sa would be a lout, you could count on it, and he began brooding about him. What else but lout could he be, holed up in these hills now for over thirty years? A king with a mini-kingdom, but a lout in all other respects. Face would be everything to him, as it was to Koy, the Chinese curse. To a Chinese, face was everything. His face was his fortune. It was face that made business success possible. It was only face that made the rest of life possible. In a New York office Khun Sa would keep his visitor waiting two hours for no other reason than to gain face at his expense. He was doing the equivalent to Koy now. The worst of it was that Koy would stumble out of the jungle bedraggled, exhausted; and Khun Sa, being fed, rested, and freshly bathed would stroll forward to meet him, smiling warmly no doubt, and to his assembled subjects the man would gain face until he assumed godlike proportions, and the visitor, Koy, would seem no more important than one of the hill peasants who grew the opium. If this face carried over into the negotiations that followed, and of course it would, this would be a disaster for Koy.