by Roland Perry
‘This is going to be rough,’ Dr Na said. He seemed uncertain about whether to navigate by reading the instruments or watching the oncoming weather. A continuous rumble of thunder made it difficult to be heard. A flash close to them rocked the plane so violently that Dr Na had to fight the controls to keep it upright.
‘Fly under it!’ Cavalier yelled. ‘We won’t make it through!’
‘Mountains are too close!’ the doctor shouted as sweat ran from his brow.
‘Let me take it,’ Cavalier said. Dr Na hesitated just as the plane was struck by lightning and the engine went dead. He struggled to start it again. With the plane at a forty-five-degree tilt, and after several nervous coughs, the engine kicked in. Cavalier gestured for them to change seats. The plane now resembled a feather buffeted in all directions. Visibility was down to zero.
‘Got to drop down,’ Cavalier called. ‘What height are the mountains?’
‘Seven hundred metres here!’
‘Shit! We must be skimming them!’
‘That’s what I told you!’
Cavalier manoeuvred the plane east for about twenty minutes until they were in less turbulent conditions, but visibility was still near zero. He asked Dr Na to unfold a map of the region, glanced at it and read the instrument panel. ‘We may be just east of the mountains,’ he said, ‘what do you think?’
‘Maybe. If we go too far east, we’ll have a fuel problem.’
‘Let’s concentrate on staying alive!’
Cavalier dropped altitude as cautiously as possible. The engine revved alarmingly but the weather cleared enough for them to see the terrain. The mountains were fifty metres away to the west. He directed the plane due north for Chiang Mai, and half an hour later, it was buffeted less, although the conditions remained poor.
Dr Na took over the controls again, admitting in several apologetic outbursts that he would never have made it on his own.
‘We managed it together,’ Cavalier said. ‘That’s all that matters.’
The flight, of about four hundred kilometres, in low cloud and close to mountains, took nearly three hours. Thunder kept rumbling and lightning flashed close for the remainder of the trip.
‘You stayed very calm,’ Dr Na said to Cavalier as they left the plane.
‘I’ve had plenty of bad flights. That was the worst.’
‘You are an exceptional pilot! Have you worked with an airline?’
‘Learned to fly in the air force, on light planes and choppers. After that, I flew for pleasure.’
‘I am a very bad pilot.’
‘That makes you a very brave one, then!’
Dr Na glanced at Cavalier and then laughed. ‘You remind me of my study days in Australia,’ he said. ‘The cynical, grey rather than black, Aussie humour!’
Cavalier followed him across the tarmac towards the domestic terminal. A contingent of soldiers was checking every male passenger as they entered the terminal. It crossed his mind that they were looking for him.
‘I’m not going through that,’ Dr Na said, with a dismissive wave. ‘I’ve patients to see. Come with me.’
He led Cavalier round the side of the terminal to a gate that he used an electronic card to pass through. When an airport guard challenged Cavalier going through, the doctor flashed a card he took from his wallet and, with a casual gesture at Cavalier said, ‘He’s my co-pilot.’
The guard stepped aside and made a deep wai.
‘Where are you staying?’ Dr Na asked as he strode to a BMW he had hired.
‘The Centara Hotel, near the night bazaar.’
‘It’s on my way to the hospital. I’ll take you there. What brings you, one of two million farang, to our most, as they say, culturally significant city of the north?’
‘Playing cricket.’
‘Oh, so it’s not the culture, the mountains, or our three hundred temples? Not even the Muay Thai boxing?’
‘All of the above too. I always wai the Buddha at your most famous wat, on the hill to the north-west . . .’
‘Ah, the Phrathat Doi Suthep! Our oldest temple. I’ve been to most of them. I am an amateur student of wat history.’ Dr Na paused as they reached his hire car. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I watched cricket at Sydney University, when there was nothing else to do. I like the game.’
‘You’d be one Thai in ten million!’
‘How come you know Chiang Mai?’
‘I used to be married to a local who’s now a doctor here,’ Cavalier said, placing his bags in the car. ‘We often flew over the mountains to, as you say, enjoy the cultural events.’
‘Name?’
‘Pin Patea Cavalier.’
‘Ah! I met her once. If I may say, an exceptional beauty!’
Cavalier had mixed feelings hearing this. He didn’t react.
‘So, you lived in Thailand?’ Dr Na asked as they drove off.
‘No, but I visited often, to see my wife’s family and so on. I’m based in Melbourne.’
‘Do you like Thailand?’
‘I love a lot of things about it.’
‘Are you one of those foreigners who thinks we would have been better off being colonised? After all, we’ve had the Malays come from the south, Chinese from the north, the Khmers from the east and the Burmese from the west. The British colonialists pressed us for a time on one side, and the French imperialists had a good look from the other side.’ Dr Na paused to chortle before adding, ‘The Japanese invaded, and when the Americans defeated them, they took one look at our lack of natural resources and didn’t bother with us.’
‘I think you’ve kept an identity different from other countries that’ve been colonised. You have your food, your dance, your Buddha, your music . . .’
‘Don’t forget the women!’ Dr Na said with a laugh.
Cavalier smiled but did not respond.
‘Forgive me,’ the doctor said, ‘but you did marry a Thai woman. A most beautiful one.’
‘In every way!’
Dr Na laughed again. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘instead of fighting fire with fire, we have wisely fought fire with water. Nothing is more yielding than water. Nothing, no matter how hard or resistant, can prevail against its movement. The yielding conquers the resistant and the soft overcomes the hard.’
‘I like this philosophy.’
‘We are creative and have the capacity to evolve, while respecting the past. We believe in the old and the new coexisting in harmony.’
‘The harmony sought by the junta?’
‘To a point. Their stated aim hits home with the average Thai. Happiness and harmony are life and national goals.’
‘The generals are smarter than Western observers think.’
‘They have had plenty of experience at ruling here!’
They drove on in silence for a minute. Cavalier took in the passing parade of cars, tuk-tuks, motorbikes and bicycles.
‘How long are you here this time?’ Dr Na asked.
‘A few days.’
‘Where do you go after that?’
‘Bangkok.’
‘I am flying there in four days’ time, to a conference on our provincial doctor network. I would appreciate you joining me. Especially if the weather is bad!’
THE SIGHTING
It was dusk and the storm was hitting Chiang Mai when Cavalier checked into the Centara Hotel, using one of his false passports. He made his ritual tour of the building, its fire escapes and precautions, and discovered a useful lift at the building’s rear right corner, well away from the ones in the lobby that patrons used. Cavalier felt as if he had his own private elevator.
After settling in, he visited the fourth-floor gym and was the only guest swimming in the open L-shaped pool as torrential rain sheeted in. Cavalier stopped between laps to watch the spectacular lightning show that sprinkled and danced across the mountains as the bright red–orange sun sank into them under the clouds. He pondered how, only a few hours ago, he had been caught in the eye of the storm. But he smiled r
uefully and shrugged it off. He had come through uninjured and that was what mattered.
Back in his room, he flicked on the government TV channel to see an Australian journalist interviewing one of the three generals running the junta. She pushed him on his reasons for detaining journalists.
‘We are concerned that some reporting may incite riots,’ he said. ‘At this time, when we are trying to reach a state of happiness and harmony in our country, such media coverage may be damaging and retrograde.’
‘What lovely terminology,’ Cavalier muttered to himself, recalling his discussion with Dr Na.
After dining alone in the night bazaar, he made a call to the captain of his cricket team—David Rafferty, known as ‘Chips’. He was a retired Sydney businessman who lived in Chiang Mai with a Thai partner, Kampeerada. Rafferty claimed he had ‘made his pile in the shit business’, having owned an operation that hired out toilets for big events in New South Wales. He had sold it a decade ago for ten million dollars. The two men had first met on one of Cavalier’s many trips to the city.
‘The news has daily items about journalists—foreign and local—being rounded up by the junta,’ Rafferty said. ‘Knowing your predilection for adventure, Kampy and I were concerned.’
‘The only adventure on this trip’ll be cricket.’
‘A wise move. We’ve seen tanks everywhere. It’s a bit nasty in the north. The red shirts are threatening all sorts of action. The military’s being very tough and apprehending red shirt leaders. Watch your step.’
‘I don’t possess a red shirt and I’m going to bed early tonight. Thought I might drop in to the jazz club.’
‘It’ll close at 10 p.m. Don’t forget our game starts on Saturday, at 10 a.m. sharp, at the Prem School. How’s your form?’
‘Outstanding, even though I haven’t played since last year.’
‘We have a few people of note playing. One’s the governor of Chiang Mai province, Chana Pinawat. His, very rich, parents sent him to Eton and Oxford, and he fell in love with cricket . . .’
‘The fool!’
‘Exactly! But he’s a fair cricketer. He was twelfth man for Oxford a couple of times.’
‘Like Bob Hawke.’
‘And he drinks like him too. You’ll enjoy meeting him and he’s looking forward to meeting you. His favourite cricketer of all time is Victor Trumper, and he says he’s read your biography of him several times. But, of course, he has no literary taste.’
At 8.45 p.m. Cavalier stepped out the front of the Centara but was forced back into the foyer as a wall of rain descended. He and several tourists waited for the weather to abate before heading off to various destinations in flooded streets. A convoy, headed by a stretch limousine and followed by six black Humvees, two military trucks and a police vehicle, crawled by.
Cavalier pulled his white fedora down tight, and crossed the road behind the convoy. He hurried along the street to see the line of vehicles sliding into the forecourt of the five-star Meridian Hotel, which was diagonally opposite the Centara. As Cavalier reached the street beside it, the limousine’s occupants climbed out. Some of them wore Stetson hats, sleeveless leather vests and high cowboy boots. Cavalier froze as he saw a dark-haired man smoking a fat cigar walk up the steps to the Meridian’s foyer. Two women in tight miniskirts and high heels were holding on to him as bodyguards swarmed around.
Mendez! Cavalier froze for a second or two, then composed himself. No one was reacting to him. The guards watched him but he knew they had no reason to think he was anything other than a passer-by. At least, it looks like him, Cavalier thought. And those guards—all Mexicans, supported by soldiers and police. He hunched his shoulders against the wind and rain, and kept walking. He was the only person going past the Meridian and he judged it too dangerous to start using his phone’s camera. He glanced back to see more people—Mexicans, Thai women and others—piling out of the Humvees and scurrying into the hotel.
The rain stopped. Cavalier strode on to the roof-covered night bazaar, through an outside cafe and upstairs to the Boy Blues Bar, where a local named Boy led a band playing Thai-style blues. There were about sixty patrons—a surprising number, given the curfew restrictions. Four musicians were on the small stage. A New Zealand singer in her sixties, called Miranda, was energetically belting out a rock number, ‘Route 66’. Cavalier remembered her from other visits to the bar. He waved to her and she smiled back, although he was sure she didn’t recognise him. Cavalier’s resolve not to drink melted in the face of his emotions at his possible sighting of Mendez. He downed a malt Scotch on the rocks and ordered another, rationalising his need for whisky as medicinal. But he drew the line at two, knowing he had to have his wits about him.
It was approaching 10 p.m., curfew time, when Cavalier went downstairs to find a toilet. He was about to return to the club when six soldiers bounded up the stairs in front of him. He backtracked and went to the other side of the open-air cafe, so he could observe any activity in the Boy Blues Bar. He saw the soldiers lining up the male patrons, who all seemed to be middle-aged, like him. They ignored a couple of younger men, as they did two men who looked in their seventies. The twenty or so middle-aged patrons were frisked and their identities checked. Cavalier, who had again left all his travel documents in his room safe, could hear the soldiers bellowing ‘Passport! Passport!’ at the men. The raid spurred him to slip off down the road, past the Meridian and across to the Centara.
Inside the hotel and to his left was a bar where a singer was finishing up as curfew time was reached. In front of him, a dozen soldiers mingled beyond the lifts, thirty metres away. Cavalier slipped up an escalator to the first floor and the back lift that would take him to his twelfth-floor room. Entering the room, he searched for signs of illegal entry. There was none. He checked on his coffin, especially Big Betty, and his Nikon camera. His iPad was in the safe with his other valuables. Cavalier looked down from his south-facing window, from which he could see the Meridian forecourt. He moved to the left and pulled the curtains across. Soldiers, automatic weapons at the ready, were darting in and out of cafes to the right in the bazaar area, and left along the Loi Kroh Road.
Cavalier retrieved his iPad from the safe and hooked it up to the wi-fi. He rummaged in the coffin for his binoculars and scoured the area, including the pool eight floors below and the small stinking canal that ran down beside the Centara. He suddenly remembered he had a handful of methamphetamine tablets in his backpack, and shuddered at the thought that they could have been found on him. Cavalier flushed them all down the toilet. He then used a nail brush and soap to wash out the small side pocket of the backpack and his jean pockets, in case a detector, or airport security dogs, could uncover minute grains of the tablets.
He checked his bank account and was pleased to see that his redundancy payout of $907,768 dollars and forty-five cents was in his account. It was not enough for him to invest and live off, but it gave him a sense of financial independence that he’d never had before. If he concentrated on the negative, he was now unemployable, without even a three-day-a-week job. By contrast, the optimistic viewpoint was that his experience would get him work somehow, somewhere. His swollen bank account also increased Cavalier’s confidence regarding his current assignment. Lack of funds would not restrict his activities, at least in the short term.
Cavalier took his binoculars from the coffin and trained them on the Meridian. Ten Mexican bodyguards surrounded one man, as they walked about two hundred metres down to a building on the left and opposite the night bazaar. He focused, but could not be sure it was Mendez in the middle, such was the tight crab-like movement of the bodyguards. He looked up at the pink–red sign on the building: Foxy Lady. Cavalier could guess what kind of establishment this was but googled it anyway. It was a pole-dancing bar, boasting ‘quality girls from Thailand’s north’ who could be bought for a ‘short time’—two hours—or a ‘long time’—all night.
Cavalier’s first instinct was to go to Foxy Lady and chec
k out Mendez, if it was him, at closer quarters. But that could blow his cover. If someone, anyone, tied him to his reports about the murder of Mendez’s number two, Virgillo Labasta, in Melbourne, he would not be spared.
Cavalier looked at his watch. It was after 11 p.m. The next day, Friday, would be free and he wanted to check out Mendez’s fortress compound on the River Ping, and the soccer stadium he was building north of the city.
After midnight, Cavalier adjusted the air conditioning and slipped into bed with his book on Iraq. He read for about twenty minutes, then fell into a deep sleep.
SMALL ITEM ON PAGE FIVE
The refreshing cool of the previous evening was not present in the morning but cloud cover spared Cavalier from stifling conditions. He abhorred extreme heat and always said it was the one drawback of him ever being in Thailand for more than a few weeks at a time. He wandered out of the hotel and down over the small bridge across the unprepossessing murky little canal to the air-conditioned Café de Siam. He ordered muesli and fruit, fresh orange juice and coffee. He opened his iPad and read the Chiang Mai Mail online.
An item caught his attention: ‘Nearly 2 million Yaba pills and 100 Kg of crystal meth seized in 12 days’. The story told of drug seizures along the Thai–Burma border and the arrest of a prominent mayor. The litany of police finds and arrests seemed to indicate that, at least around Chiang Mai and to its north, attempts were being made to clamp down on drug smuggling. But even the reporter was sceptical about the impact of this, quoting a local police chief as saying, ‘These detentions and busts are a mere drop in the ocean compared to what is really going on.’ Near the end of the article, which was a plea for more funds to combat the drug flood, Cavalier nearly spilled his coffee when he read: ‘Police report that a desperate local at Three Pagodas Pass has taken matters into his own hands. A heavily armed Thai is believed to have crossed the border into Myanmar on Wednesday night and risked his life to intercept a truck carrying millions of dollars’ worth of methamphetamine tablets hidden in crates under pumpkins. The truck was hijacked on the Myanmar side and driven into the Song Kalia River separating the two countries.’