“Could I ask that you shred these for me?” Shepherd said. “They are only copies of the original documents and I would prefer that they be destroyed now that they are no longer needed.”
Tanit nodded and accepted the envelope. He smiled. Shepherd smiled. They were getting along just famously. Shepherd figured the grand climax of their little duet was drawing near, and just then it arrived.
“Have you completed the other formalities necessary for me to execute the remittance?” Tanit asked, his eyes sliding away from Shepherd.
“What other formalities are you referring to?”
“Because of the amount involved, you must obtain a certificate of approval from the Bank of Thailand to send the funds out of the country.”
“I assumed you would obtain that for us.”
“I cannot.”
Tanit still wasn’t making eye contact and Shepherd just sat and waited for what he knew was coming.
“I can suggest someone at the Bank of Thailand who might assist you,” Tanit said after a moment.
“I would appreciate that.”
“Her name is Khun Sumalee Suchinda. She is one of the deputy governors.”
“Can you suggest how I could best approach her?”
“Khun Sumalee has two daughters in school in England,” Tanit said.
To most people, Tanit’s response would have seemed like a non sequitur, but after living in Thailand for two years Shepherd had no doubt at all what it meant.
“Do you know the amount of their school fees?” he asked.
Tanit tilted his head back and studied a spot on the ceiling.
“I would say about thirty million Thai baht would cover them,” he mumbled after a few moments of suitable contemplation.
Shepherd did the math in his head. Thirty million Thai baht was about one million United States dollars. He briefly considered reminding Woody Allen that it wasn’t necessary to buy the school in England in order for the deputy governor’s daughters to attend it, but decided not to bother. Besides, what did he care? It was Charlie’s money and he was just following his instructions. Anyway, Charlie thought it might cost him as much as two million dollars to get his money out of Thailand and here he was getting it done for the bargain price of one million. He was a heck of a negotiator, wasn’t he? Just imagine how much money he might have saved Charlie if he had actually said something.
Tanit slid a piece of paper across his desk. “Here are the names of Khun Sumalee’s daughters, their London banks, and their account numbers.”
Shepherd picked up the paper and glanced at it. There was nothing on it but two names that naturally meant nothing to him, each accompanied by an account number at the National Westminster Bank. He wondered how much of the million dollars would eventually be kicked back to Tanit for negotiating the deal. Thailand was indeed an amazing place. You paid bribes to facilitate the payment of bribes.
“There is one other thing I would like to ask then, Khun Tanit,” Shepherd said.
“Yes?”
“Could you arrange two more wire transfers for me?” Shepherd slid the same piece of paper he had just been given back across his desk. “Five hundred thousand US dollars to each of these two accounts at NatWest, please.”
Tanit nodded gravely. He carefully transcribed the bank account information he had just given Shepherd onto two forms that had conveniently appeared on his desktop. When he was done, Shepherd signed them as well.
Only one step of the process remained. The final movement in a Thai art form that was as precise as a Bach cantata.
“In order to complete the transfer of my client’s funds, I understand that a certificate of approval from the Bank of Thailand will be required,” Shepherd said, playing his part to the hilt.
“That is true.”
“Would it be possible for you to obtain it for us, Khun Tanit?”
“Of course,” Tanit said. “It would be my pleasure entirely.”
Shepherd thought it probably would be.
SEVENTEEN
WHEN SHEPHERD LEFT the Bangkok Bank building, he walked out onto Silom Road and straight into the biggest crowd he had ever seen on the streets of Bangkok.
Shepherd knew the sidewalks in that part of town were always a mess. Gangs of street vendors selling everything from pirated DVDs to fried grasshoppers took up most of the available space. Since they paid off the police to let them do business there, the vendors acted as if they owned the sidewalks, which in a way he supposed they did. The locals who had their offices around there and the mobs of tourists drawn to the neighborhood by the cheap goods were left to compete for whatever tiny bit of public space the cops hadn’t rented out.
Still, it seemed to Shepherd that things were even more of a shambles than usual and he wondered what was going on. He slipped behind a metal cart from which an elderly woman was hawking Chinese-made Rolexes and Cambodian-made Patek Phillipes and took a couple of steps out into Silom Road.
About two hundred yards away on his left, a band of marchers was trooping slowly toward the spot where he was standing. There were a lot of them. They completely blocked the roadway from one side to the other and Shepherd couldn’t even begin to guess how far back they stretched. The marchers were led by a pickup truck with a huge loudspeaker on top through which somebody was shouting unintelligible slogans. The demonstration didn’t seem very threatening. It was more or less like the one he had stood and watched with Liz Corbin earlier in the day. The only differences he could see was that this march was going in the opposite direction, and the people in it were wearing yellow shirts instead of red ones.
Then Shepherd looked the other way and all at once he saw the real problem.
A couple of hundred yards to his right, an even larger band of red shirts had taken up a position completely blocking the roadway on which the yellow shirts were marching. Perhaps it was the same group of red shirts he had seen earlier. Perhaps it was a different group altogether. But either way, the yellow shirts were heading directly for them.
It seemed inconceivable to Shepherd that a street battle would take place right there in the middle of the financial district. Thais famously avoided face-to-face confrontations and nothing like that had happened yet in spite of the political turmoil that had gripped Bangkok for months. It wasn’t that Thais were shy about attacking their enemies, it was just the face-to-face part they didn’t get. The locals had never been able to understand the Western obsession for duking it out toe-to-toe with your adversaries. To Thais, it seemed silly to square off against anyone. That was why Thais generally nursed their anger, waited patiently until their enemy’s back was turned, and then brought everything they had.
“Excuse me, sir?”
Shepherd glanced at the two women standing next to him. They were what in less politically correct times people might have called hippie chicks. Long greasy hair, shapeless grey clothing, open-toed leather sandals, and huge, top-heavy backpacks. Shepherd wondered what the proper term was these days for people like that.
“Do you speak English?” the taller of the two girls asked him.
“If I have to,” Shepherd said.
The woman looked puzzled. “So… then you do speak English?”
This time Shepherd just nodded.
“Can you tell us what’s going on here?” the other girl asked, pointing toward the yellow shirts matching toward them.
Shepherd thought of telling the two women the real truth, which was that nobody ever really understood what was going on in Thailand, but in his experience irony seldom played in conversations with strangers. Instead he settled for giving the girl the simplest answer he could think of.
“A political demonstration,” he said.
“You mean like against global warming?” the tall girl asked.
“No,” Shepherd said, “like against each other.”
The yellow shirts were now within fifty yards of them. The old green pickup truck leading them was dusty and dented and, as it rolled slow
ly down Silom Road, the Thai national anthem began to blare out of the metal bullhorn mounted on top of the cab. Behind the bullhorn there were at least a dozen men standing in the bed of the pickup, one of whom had his arms uplifted and was exhorting the yellow-shirted ranks behind the truck.
Some of the marchers carried large Thai flags on tall poles and others waved homemade posters written in Thai. Most of the rest of the marchers Shepherd could see had the palms of their hands pressed together in front of them in a graceful gesture of humility and respect that Thais called a wai. The flags flapped in unison and the posters bobbed in time with the music. The whole effect was anything but threatening. It was more like the cheering squad from a poorly funded local college taking the field for halftime at a football game.
The two women just stood patiently and waited for Shepherd to go on. He doubted any good would come of it, but he continued anyway.
“The yellow shirts support the present government,” he told the two women. “They include a lot of people of Thai-Chinese background who see the government’s embrace of China as the best course for Thailand.”
Then he pointed in the opposite direction toward where the red shirts had now begun moving as well.
“The red shirts support General Kitnarok, who has always had the support of the United States and Europe,” Shepherd continued. “He was defeated in the last election and left the country when the new government charged him with corruption and tried send him to prison. The red shirts say the election was stolen by pro-China Thais and that General Kitnarok is the victim of a political persecution. They’re demanding that the government resign so the general can return and form a new government.”
“Was this general really corrupt?” one of the girls asked.
“Almost everyone in government is corrupt to some degree. Government in Thailand is a just another business you go into to make some money.”
“But then what happens to the people?”
A good question, Shepherd thought to himself. A damned good question actually. He didn’t even try to answer the girl. He just shrugged.
The reds shirts had their pickup trucks, too. Two of them were now cruising slowly side-by-side, leading their marchers. Not surprisingly, both of the trucks were red, but other than that they were pretty much like the truck leading the yellows: old and dented and with loud speakers mounted on top of their cabs. Men stood in the beds of both trucks and waved their followers forward while martial music blared out of the loudspeakers at an ear-splitting volume.
Many of the red shirts, at least the ones Shepherd could see in the front ranks just behind the pickup trucks, were wearing long strips of white cloth tied around their heads like the headbands worn by Indian extras in old cowboy-and-Indian movies. There was something written in red on the headbands, but it was in Thai characters and Shepherd couldn’t read Thai characters. Still, he very much doubted the headbands said Have a Nice Day.
Some of the marchers carried flags and Thai-language signs like the yellow shirts did, but the reds also had huge posters with smiling images of General Kitnarok and even a giant banner that stretched from one side of the road to the other. It said, in English no less, The People Will Bring Back Democracy! Apparently the red shirts were more concerned about their appeal to the international media than the yellows were, or at least they had the money to hire Western political consultants.
“Is there going to be a riot?” one of the women asked.
“No,” Shepherd said. “Thais don’t riot.”
“Cool,” she nodded.
The yellows were now no more than thirty yards to their left and the reds were a little less than thirty yards to their right. The racket from the competing loudspeakers had melded into a single formless din and the sound of the contending groups of marchers became nothing more than an incoherent, angry-sounding rumbling. The two groups were moving slowly but steadily toward each other.
Shepherd saw that he and the two girls were standing very near to the point at which the reds and the yellows would most likely converge. He glanced around for the police and was anything but surprised not to see the slightest sign of them. All the local cops would no doubt be at the station, probably knocking back a few cold drinks and pretending that nothing at all was going on. There was simply no money to be made out of getting between two angry mobs.
In another two or three minutes the pickup trucks would be bumper to bumper. Shepherd could not imagine what would happen when that occurred, but he was still certain it could not possibly be what one might expect to happen under similar circumstances in almost any other country anywhere in the world.
He was wrong.
Later, when Shepherd thought of the moment in which the reds and the yellows came together, it would be the sound of the screams he remembered most clearly.
EIGHTEEN
EVERYWHERE SHEPHERD LOOKED, reds and yellows were flailing at each other with crude weapons. And, as more and more people joined in, the carnage grew.
Along the roadside, vendors carts had been pushed onto their sides and shoved together into makeshift barricades. What a few moments before had been merchandise for tourists—T-shirts, copy watches, pirated CDs, and fake Louie Vuitton bags—was now just debris under the feet of the battlers.
Shepherd knew he and the two women had to get out of the way, but he couldn’t see exactly how they were going to do that. They had no chance to get back onto the sidewalk or into the buildings that lined Silom since some of the demonstrators were already slugging it out behind them. The pickup trucks leading both marches had stopped nose-to-nose right in front of them and the only safety seemed to lie in moving further into the street, toward the trucks. Shepherd put his hands on the two women’s backs and herded them forward.
At that moment, the main mass of the red shirts gave a terrifying roar, broke ranks, and swarmed toward the yellows. Both groups had now armed themselves. Metal bars, paving stones, wooden planks, and homemade clubs were everywhere. One man even swung a golf club overhead. Shepherd thought it was a four iron.
At the front of the attacking reds was a man hefting a wide, flat board a little longer than a baseball bat. The yellow-shirted woman closest to him carried a Thai flag on a long staff. Neither the man nor the woman was young and they were ordinary enough looking people. Later, what Shepherd remembered most about both of them was the rage that contorted their faces as they charged toward each other.
The woman attempted to bring the flag down and use its staff as a lance to spear the onrushing man, but she was too slow. The man caught the flagpole on his upper arm and swatted it aside. Then he lifted the board above his shoulders and swung from the hips, putting all of his weight behind it.
The flat of the board smashed into the side of the woman’s head and Shepherd saw her skull buckle. Her face bulged on one side like a rubber ball pounded by a mallet. It contorted into something that looked more like a Halloween mask than a human head and a spray of blood burst in the air like red fireworks. The woman dropped to the pavement; then the two mobs surged together and she disappeared under a hundred pairs of feet.
That was when the screams started in earnest. The two girls were beginning to panic so Shepherd kept them moving. He slipped his arms around them and hauled them toward the green pickup truck that had stopped directly in front of them. By the time they got to it, they were directly in the eye of a full-scale battle.
“Crawl under!” he shouted at the women.
They stood there motionless, too frightened to move.
“Get under the goddamned truck!” he shouted again and shoved them both toward it.
The taller girl suddenly snapped to her senses. She dropped her pack, went down on her belly, and tugged the other girl after her. Both of them squirmed underneath the pickup.
Shepherd crouched down and pressed his back to the truck. He watched the battle as it swirled around him.
A yellow-shirted man to his left was scything a golf club back and forth, whippin
g it through the air like he was clearing brush with a machete. A red-shirted man ducked under the golf club and drove his shoulder into the yellow shirt’s stomach. Yellow shirt lost his balance and went down, then red shirt jerked the golf club away and kicked him in the head.
Shepherd still wasn’t particularly worried. This was a Thai fight and foreigners had nothing to do with it. Still, Thais didn’t really like foreigners all that much and he knew that having a free shot at one who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time might be appealing to some of them. Just to be on the safe side, he stayed low and tried not to look too white.
For a while, that worked fine and the combatants ignored Shepherd. Then one didn’t.
Out of the corner of his eye Shepherd caught a glimpse of an iron bar coming straight at his head. He ducked and the bar whistled by just above him. It came so close he felt the breeze from its passage riffle his hair. When the bar crunched into the truck cab with a sickening thud, he thought about what it would have done to his skull if it had connected.
But Shepherd only thought about it for an instant. Then he jumped to his feet and grabbed the bar with both hands. He jerked it down and to the side and tried to twist it away. When his head came up, Shepherd looked directly into the eyes of his assailant.
He was just a boy, one no more than fourteen years old Shepherd judged. But the boy was strong and seemed desperate to do Shepherd serious bodily harm. He couldn’t imagine why, but there didn’t seem to be any point in asking right then.
Because of the boy’s strength, Shepherd gave up trying to twist the bar away from him and instead gave it a sudden jerk directly toward his midsection. The boy stumbled forward, momentarily off balance, and Shepherd swung his right foot upward like a field goal kicker going for a sixty-yarder. When his toe connected with the boy’s crotch, he felt a soft, squishing sensation and the boy lifted completely off the ground. Screaming in agony, he lurched away. Then he fell to his knees and started to vomit.
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