by John Burdett
So when their car and escort were stopped just outside Ruili by masked men who held themselves very much like soldiers and seemed armed with standard-issue military weapons all of the same Chinese type and make, Vikorn and Ruamsantiah couldn’t believe that they’d violated the first rule of sophisticated professionals: never underestimate the other guy’s possible amateurism. They were kicking themselves.
“Suppose the general has been recording our conversations for entrapment purposes?” Ruamsantiah whispered to Vikorn while they were being professionally frisked by one of the masked gunmen.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that our conversations together over the past several days have been recorded. After taking legal advice, I have reached the conclusion that I have no choice but to report you to the authorities for conspiring to transport prohibited narcotics across Chinese territory, a criminal offense with a mandatory death penalty,” General Xie explained twenty minutes later, when they were in a military-style cabin in an army camp less than a mile from the Burmese border.
“How much?” Vikorn said.
“Two million dollars,” Xie said.
“Okay,” Vikorn said, concealing a smirk of contempt. In the general’s position, he would have started at twenty million and stood firm at ten. Two million? It wasn’t worth bargaining about.
“In cash,” Xie said.
“Ah!” Vikorn said.
“Used notes,” Xie said.
Now Vikorn reassessed Xie. He had thought he was dealing with a brain-dead thug, of a model not dissimilar to Zinna. Now he switched models. This was classic Chinese small-and-medium-enterprises thinking: modest returns with quick turnarounds and near-zero risk; used banknotes were the caviar of money laundering. Smart operators would give as much as a 60 percent discount for used notes.
“How often have you done this?” Vikorn asked.
“Not telling you,” Xie said.
“More or less than ten?”
“More.”
“More or less than a hundred?”
Xie could not resist a smirk.
“More or less than-”
“Can you get the money by tomorrow? The price goes up ten percent per day thereafter.”
Vikorn thought about it. “You really need it for tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Xie said, “I really need it for tomorrow.”
Xie didn’t know it, but Vikorn was giving him a chance to be reasonable. “Really really?”
“Yes, really really really. What’s wrong with you?”
“And if we don’t get it, you’re going to have us executed for narcotics trafficking?”
“Sure.”
“So we don’t have any choice?”
“Right.”
“Just tell me one thing. Are you really connected to a Burmese general named U-Tat?”
“He would corroborate if I needed him to,” Xie said. “Or I’d send some men to talk to him. He does what I want.”
“Okay,” Vikorn said, “I can get it for you by tomorrow night. Before midnight, anyway. But I have to make phone calls.”
“Only one,” Xie said.
“Okay,” Vikorn said with a sigh.
Which was when he called me.
“Hey, Sonchai, we’ve been kidnapped. It’s okay, they only want two million dollars, but it has to be in used notes. I want you to get the money from the bank and bring it. You have to come alone, unarmed.
Got it?”
I knew what to do. Once, a long time before, he had called me into his office and said, “If you ever get a call from me to say I’ve been kidnapped and held for ransom and I use the words You have to come alone, unarmed. Got it? you go to my bank-you know the one I mean? — and you tell them you want to speak to Mr. To on behalf of Colonel Vikorn.”
The bank in question was a mid-ranking Chinese merchant bank based in Hong Kong with an outlet in Chinatown, not far from the Chao Phraya River. I took a motorbike taxi and arrived within thirty minutes of putting the phone down on Vikorn. At the same time I used my cell phone to book a flight to Lijiang City. The travel agent doubted that I would be able to arrive before midnight the next day, but she would do her best.
The banking hall was of the Chinese-gaudy school, clearly intended to outmarble any rival in the area. When I asked for Mr. To at the information desk, the Chinese receptionist checked her computer and told me there was nobody there of that name.
“So, what are your instructions for when someone like me arrives and says I’m from Colonel Vikorn and need to speak urgently to Mr. To?”
She nodded and plugged the question into the software. “Just a minute please. I will try to get you Mr. Ng.”
Within minutes a uniformed security guard led me to a private lift, which took us up to the top floor. When the lift doors opened, two more uniformed guards took me down a corridor, where a third man in a suit waited. He looked a lot more dangerous than the guards.
“Are you Mr. To?”
“No,” he said with a smile.
“Ng?”
“No,” he said, and knocked on a door. A male voice said something in Chinese. The man in the suit said something back that included the name Vikorn. The voice in the room said something that must have meant “come in.” We entered. The man in the suit left, closing the door behind him.
It was a small room with a small desk crowded with old-fashioned file covers bulging with documents. Behind the desk sat a very thin Chinese man in his forties with thick straight black hair and a black moustache and a bright smile full of optimism. On either side of him sat two women who seemed to be secretaries. One was very thin and boyish, the other about thirty and voluptuous with black-rimmed glasses.
“Are you Mr. To?” I asked.
“No,” he said with a sparkling smile, “I am not.”
“Ng?”
He shook his head. “Not Ng either, but what can I do for you?”
I told him all I knew, which was almost nothing. He thought for perhaps two seconds, said, “Won’t you please sit down,” in perfect English, and stuck a finger in the air to shut me up when I tried to say something more. Then he spoke rapidly to the boyish secretary, who grabbed a pad and pencil and scribbled in Chinese script while he spoke. “Please tell me where you have been told to make contact in Yunnan.”
“At Lijiang City airport.”
The man who was not Mr. To nodded and seemed to repeat this to the secretary, who wrote it down. Then he spoke to the other woman, who took out a cell phone and used it to take a photograph of me. Then she asked me to stand up. She took a ruler from the desk and made a rough calculation as to my height. Then she seemed to describe me and my clothes to her colleague, who wrote down the details. The man stood up.
“Thank you, that will be all.”
“D’you have the money now? I’ve got about an hour to get to the airport,” I said.
He looked surprised. “Oh, no. You do not go anywhere. You stay in Bangkok.”
“But Colonel Vikorn said-”
“No, no, no, no, no. You forget Colonel Vikorn. You stay here. Your job is over.”
In addition to being a very skinny man, he was also quite short, but I wouldn’t have disobeyed him for the world. He walked around his desk to escort me to the door and gave me a name card with no name on it, only a number. I looked at the number and said, “Thanks. Who should I ask for if I need to use it?”
“Ask for Mr. To,” he said. Just before he closed the door on me, he added, “There will be no need to use it immediately. It’s simply in case of unforeseen contingencies in the future. We like to be thorough.”
The next day Vikorn and Ruamsantiah arrived back from Yunnan looking sheepish but somehow pleased with themselves. Neither would speak about their escapade save to say that they appreciated my help. They behaved as if nothing had happened, except that, according to Manny, Vikorn spent the whole of the next day at his bank, talking, I presume, to the man who was not named To.
It was a good six mon
ths later that the media ran a story about a Red Army general based in Yunnan who had confessed, under interrogation, to smuggling morphine into and out of China. The hook for the story was his execution by single bullet in the back of the head the day before. His name was Xie. It seems he had been held in solitary confinement for half a year, after a commando raid on his Lijiang City HQ by the army’s internal security unit. The rumor that he had been holding two Thai fat cat narcotics traffickers hostage at the time was vigorously denied both by the army and General Xie (according to the army after Xie’s death).
So, here I am halfway down our soi with my cell phone in my right hand and that nameless name card in the left trapped between the pinkie and the finger of the sun so I can use my left index to plug the number into the keyboard (because my model is too broad for my delicate little Eurasian hand to hold and thumb simultaneously with the right-I knew you were wondering, DFR). “Hello,” a woman’s voice answers on the third ring.
“May I speak to Mr. To, please?”
Silence, then the ringing tone. When I try again, I get the engaged tone. On my way back to the hovel, I realize I left out the most important part of the formula: I should have said I was calling on behalf of Colonel Vikorn. Now there’s only one man left to call, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.
20
By way of small talk I say, “Can you get me some more dope? I’m totally out.”
Sergeant Ruamsantiah opens his cheroot tin and picks one of the thin dark sticks, which he holds to his nose and rolls as if it were a Havana. The girl behind the bar looks unhappy because he’s already given her a big tip and a lot of smiles so she doesn’t want to tell him he’s not allowed to smoke in here, but Ruamsantiah takes out his police ID and the girl looks at it and grins. Everyone likes to have at least one cop as a friend. She even finds a butane lighter behind the bar, which she holds for him.
Now the sergeant is merrily puffing on the cheroot, making the other smokers in the bar jealous as hell. Nobody says So how come he’s allowed to smoke and not me? because they’ve all guessed why the girl lit the cigar. One farang lifts his nose and tries to follow the fragrant trail as it diffuses. It’s not often you see a Westerner awed by a local boy, but this guy would also love to be able to walk into any bar in town and light up without fear of getting yelled at. Maybe it would be less cruel if the sergeant were smoking something tiny and apologetic with low tar: the full aroma of the unfiltered cheroot is making that forbidden statement about power, manly badness, indifference to death-and to hell with the anal-retentive white mafia-esses who would like to kill anything big and hairy that has the balls to turn an entire bar into a crowd of passive smokers. After a few minutes the gasping farang can no longer maintain resistance; he goes out into the street for a puff on a Marlboro Light.
“Okay,” the sergeant says, not noticing the distress he has caused. “Do you want export quality? It’s quite expensive, even at cost.”
“Can you get Thai sticks?”
The sergeant makes a face and frowns. “How many times do I have to tell you, they just don’t make them anymore.”
“But it’s depressing,” I say. “And it affects our international reputation. Thai sticks, from the best marijuana stock in the world, grown under tropical conditions and laced with opium-it was the greatest high terrestrial life had to offer.”
“Too much fucking law enforcement,” he says. “It’s this farang obsession with detail. You have the law on the books, okay, that means you can control the trade and make sure only the more responsible traffickers survive, the ones who don’t mind paying a little tax to the cops, which is like community service in advance of conviction. So why would you need a conviction? Why all the expense of a court case when the cops have already imposed the punishment? This is natural village capitalism. But nowadays, thanks to Pressure, they’ve got us checking every damned truck or car coming out of Isaan. It’s killed businesses, broken up families, and destroyed the quality of our dope. It won’t be long before they criminalize the chili in our somtam. This is not my fault. No, I cannot get Thai sticks, not even for you.”
I use techniques drawn from Buddhism to cope with this depressing news. I focus on a beautiful beach on an ocean without a shore; it’s better than one hand clapping. “Okay. Supposing I wanted to make some Thai sticks myself, how d’you do it?”
“Easy,” the sergeant says. “Opium sap is water soluble, so the best way is to add a solution of sap and water while you’re drying the weed. So when the weed is dry, it includes a deposit of opium. Set fire and inhale.”
“So why can’t they do that today?”
“They’re balancing risk. If they get caught with cannabis, they’re on the five-to-ten prison scale. If the dope includes opium, they risk the injection. Since farang these days don’t know the difference, why take the chance? Want me to get you some raw opium so you can make the sticks yourself?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Let me know how you get on-we might want to sell the product. We could even package it as a retro thrill, put it in a box with an old Chinaman smoking an opium pipe on the lid: nostalgia for the good old days, full of Eastern promise. Start off selling it at around the same price as that damned hay we’re getting from Laos, then when they get addicted, charge like a wounded elephant.”
“It doesn’t worry you that a lot of people would become addicts?”
“If they become addicts, it’s because they’re suckers. Why should they be exploited by someone else’s capitalism? Why not mine?”
“You ever think of getting a job on Wall Street?”
The sergeant is playing me along. He knows I didn’t invite him out tonight just to ask if he can get dope. Dope is his sideline, an SME that he runs independently of the Colonel. I could have ordered some by phone. I think he knows exactly the question I want to put to him, but for some reason he slides away from me just when I’m getting close. “Sergeant, there’s just one-”
“Tell you what,” he says. “Shall we change bars?” He checks his watch. It’s eight P.M. When we met at around seven-fifteen, the go-go bars were not yet in full swing. There were no girls gyrating around the poles on stage because they were using the stage as a table while they ate their evening meals, just like the katoeys in Nana. The bar we are in, which boasts no stage and traffics only in alcohol, is just a pit stop until the action starts. The sergeant lets me pay for the drinks with Vikorn’s black Amex, then snatches the card when the girl returns it to me. He shakes his head, indicating naked jealousy. “What’s it like, having one of those in your pocket?”
“It’s better than a gun, a Ferrari, or an erection,” I say. “You can take it into any hotel, office, or department store and get treated like the sultan of Brunei. Even ATM machines work faster.”
Outside on the street we can hardly move for traders, tourists, pimps, and whores. Ever since Pat Pong achieved worldwide fame, merchandisers have been annexing territory, so now you have the whole street taken up with stalls selling clothes, watches, videos, incense, and other tourist junk, which creates an interesting sociological study: farang who arrive in a family group for the safe, clean crime of buying a couple of fake Rolexes to show friends at home maintain a strict seclusion from those farang men who arrive as lone wolves and hardly notice the stalls in the middle of the street because they’re focused on the girls in shiny swimming costumes and long silver cloaks who beckon them into the bars. Farang wives watch curiosity work their husbands’ libidos, no matter how good a boy they married; farang husbands don’t notice the curiosity their wives also feel. Respectable women, who would die a thousand deaths rather than sell their bodies, wonder for a moment exactly what it must be like to do such a thing. I see a mother cover the eyes of her son of maybe nine years: too late, the kid saw his dad’s pupils dilate in a most undadlike way at a glimpse of a forbidden world.
Ruamsantiah pays no attention to the stalls, though, as he pushes between bodies to get to the other side
of the street where the Shangri-La bar is situated.
Like my mother’s bar, the Shangri-La is known for the extra care it takes with the pay and selection of its girls. As a result, you have maybe the most beautiful women in the world strutting their stuff and inviting offers: gracious smiles greet us at the same time as loins gyrate and chests inflate. Ruamsantiah goes for the back seats and sags into one with a sigh. I know he’s been here before and that he was looking forward to this moment, which replicates an earlier moment, and so on all the way back to puberty. “It’s always the same,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. “There isn’t a single one I don’t want to fuck. I could sit here all night and still not make up my mind.”
“You remember the run-in you and the Colonel had with that Chinese general in Yunnan a few years ago?”
He orders a bottle of Mekong whiskey with ice and water on the side, now brought by one of the staff, also a beautiful young woman who can be hired, though for an extra premium because a replacement would have to be found to serve drinks. The sergeant gives her a long, appraising look, accompanied by a magnificent smile, and tells her to give the chit to me. He is pretending he didn’t hear my question. I groan. I won’t get any sense out of him for hours, and we’ll both be drunk by then. Such is his plan.
It’s 1:25 A.M. The evening went pretty much as I expected, and now I’m in a cab on the way home.
Ruamsantiah kept inviting girls down off the stage and buying them drinks, so that after a couple of hours we were buying drinks for six girls, all of whom had lightly groped, and been lightly groped by, the sergeant, who with every grope given and received was that much further away from deciding which two he would take with him to the short-term hotel. He told me he needed to leave the bar for a while to clear his head, and we strolled across to Pat Pong II, where we climbed the stairs to the Wallabi bar. He sat in a corner where he got a blowjob by twin sisters who shared the labor fifty-fifty while he sent me to buy him Viagra. I walked across the street to the pharmacy where the owner, a Thai woman in her fifties, threw two blue pills into a tiny brown paper bag with a big sneer and charged five hundred baht per pop. I wondered if she’d ever thought of going on the game or trading in heroin to cheer herself up. How about body parts? By the time I got back to the Wallabi, Ruamsantiah had already ejaculated and the twins had disappeared somewhere to gargle with Listerine while he lit up another cheroot without bothering to flash his cop ID, because as a general rule the upper floors are lawless anyway.