by Zolbrod, Zoe
“What do you mean, it’s not our business? Of course it is. We’re taking risks, and we expect a gain in return. That’s what we want, right? That’s business.”
“It’s our business to do what you say, but not to know more. Not at this time.”
“Piv, how can we make this worth our while if we don’t even know what’s going on?”
Bite of turtle feels smooth. When you chew that, it’s still smooth. Not too much taste. It tastes like underwater. Why does NokRobin want to know this?
“How can we look in those boxes? They’re closed tight. If we do it, Vol will see. Then we have no more business, or maybe some other bad thing will happen.”
NokRobin tells me those boxes aren’t closed in any special way. She already looked to see this.
She has beer in her Singha bottle. She picks it up, but she doesn’t pour beer in her glass. She holds that bottle up to me. “Cheers, Piv. To you and me.” We touch our bottles, then drink big sips of beer. When we finish, she looks at me. “Now’s our chance. Before we give him those boxes, we have to see.”
Chapter 12
Side by side, Piv and Robin walked back up the narrow market lane toward their borrowed car. The air smelled tangy-swampy—they were passing stalls that sold freshwater seafood. Vendors called out to shoppers; they slid scoops of dehydrated shrimp into opaque pink plastic bags, reached into wooden barrels and hooked slick black eels that they rolled into newspaper. Piv stepped into Robin to let a cart of cut fruit go bell-ringing past. The cushion of his suit against her bare arm made her want to wrap her limbs around him right there. She nuzzled her elbow into his. He’d had a stressful day; she’d supply the energy from here. He gave her a small, indulgent smile. When she had even modest heels on, they were almost the same height.
She wanted to stay pressed next to him, but they resumed walking. They moved through to the produce section, where the smells turned garlic-bitten but sweet and ripe. The sunset colors of guavas, papayas, and mangoes popped out of the dominant green. Two monks walked past in perfect harmony with the color scheme, the saffron fabric of their slung bags a shade lighter than that of their robes. Robin shrank so as not to touch them, pleased that, thanks to Piv, she knew to do so.
At the car, Piv opened her door first. She didn’t get in. While he walked around to his side, she unlocked the back door and bent over to reach into it.
“What you doing?” he asked her.
She hoisted a box from the floor well and gathered it to her breast, giving a little grunt when she straightened. The package was about two feet long and heavy enough to ache her muscles. She kicked the back door shut and shoved the box in the front seat before squeezing next to it. “Whew,” she said. She arched away from the seat to straighten her dress. The box had left a thin triangle of red where it had pressed into her chest. “The big moment. How should we do this?” She looked in the mirror and dabbed at the sweat in the groove of her chin. “Or do you want to drive around to get the air conditioner going?”
He didn’t answer, just started the car and pulled into traffic. For a moment, they moved in tandem with a couple on a motorbike, the woman sitting sidesaddle, black pumps dangling from her feet. She carried a yellow shopping bag in her lap. Her eyes met Robin’s. Then the car was snarled by congestion. The motorbike moved freely on.
“How much money you have?” Piv asked.
“Six hundred. Why?”
“Give me five. We buy private time.” Robin reached into her purse, not sure what he meant but glad he had a plan, that he wasn’t just passively following along.
“What do you think’s in there?” she said. Piv was monitoring the cars beside him, trying to switch into the next lane. He didn’t answer. “I’d bet with you about it, but I have no idea. I mean, drugs I guess, but if it is, can you believe I carried that suitcase into Malaysia? How stupid.” Robin hugged herself. “Well, but it turned out all right. And if I was carrying drugs, I guess I’m glad I didn’t know it then. Although I should have gotten more money. Not that I’d do it again if it was drugs. Not to Malaysia. God! But I really do think it’s something else. I have a feeling. Come on, make a guess, just one thing.”
Piv lifted his foot from the brake and the car moved forward another few inches. “Abu said it’s not drugs, so I believe. If Vol says that, I don’t believe.”
“Me too! I don’t know why, but I believe Abu. So do you think it might be like he said? African curios? Like old tribal art, or anthropological artifacts?”
“Mmm. Perhaps.” He was trying to cut over one more lane.
“Because they have restrictions about taking stuff like that out of the country. Museums are even giving a lot of tribal art back now. You can’t just buy the really important pieces in a gallery. But of course it’s still in demand.” Black market art dealer. This squared with her image of Abu, and she’d heard that thugs like Volcheck had turned Russia’s museums into their personal stockrooms. “In Southeast Asia, though?” she murmured, losing the energy to explain her thinking to Piv. “Makonde carvings and Orthodox icons?”
Piv gave a short nod. “Mm.” His eyes were on the red meter taxi in front of them.
“Are you listening?” she asked. She hated it when he tuned her out and responded rotely—why didn’t he tell her if he didn’t understand? But she didn’t quiz him further.
Traffic moved more easily when they turned off the main thoroughfare onto a tree-lined road. The air conditioner began to work. Then Piv steered the car into a driveway shaded black as a cave mouth. Robin’s body lurched with the quick swerve. She blinked her eyes. That fast, a blue-vested man leaned into Piv’s waiting, rolled-down window. The two tossed words between them without moving their lips. Piv’s hands on the steering wheel now held a numbered plastic chit. “What’s going on?” Robin said. The car rolled with a tidal pull into a marked spot, and instantly heavy curtains closed around three sides of it. In the gloom, Robin sat facing a cinder block wall broken by one metal door.
Piv got out of the car, then leaned back in to pick up the box. “Come on,” he said. Robin listened to the thunk of his car door slamming. He turned a key in the metal door, opened it, flicked a switch. Silhouetted by the electric light, he cocked his head at her.
What kind of boyfriend jumped out of the car with no concern for whether or not his companion would follow? Whether or not she knew where they were? “Where are we?” she hissed, suspecting the curtains hid rows of ears. Then she realized she was in the sealed up car. Piv couldn’t hear her. She opened the door and put her foot out. “Where are we?” she repeated.
“Shh,” he said. He cocked his head again. Not a single piece of his hair moved. He lacquered it now with Robin’s gel. The carport’s curtains hung from a horseshoe-shaped runner. She panned the vinyl-backed fabric for a crack of daylight, but none showed through. She followed Piv into the building, frowning.
Rough brown carpeting covered the floor and went halfway up the walls; wallpaper with metallic gold swirls finished the trip to the lowered ceiling. Piv set the box down on a round wood-grain table. Robin leaned against the door. She saw her crossed arms reflected in the smoked mirror headboard of the king-sized bed. The clean room smelled musty from being windowless and air-conditioned and too close to the ground. No stilts raising it to the air, no basement carving out space underneath, Robin could sense dirt under her feet. She shot her head forward and goggled her eyes at Piv.
“We don’t know what’s in this box. Could be anything, but you want to open that on the street? This is better.” He picked up a bottle of water from a small tray on the dresser and peeled back the aluminum cap, then poured a glass and brought it to her. She drank, eyes closed, hearing her own squishy gulps. She handed him back the glass. She saw the shadow on his upper lip, the thin baby hairs. He’d never have a full beard. “How do you know you can wrap again so Vol won’t know you opened?” he asked.
She felt lonely. She wanted him to touch her. She pressed herself more tightly
against the cool door. “We’ll pay attention when we open it, then we’ll seal it up at the Banglamphu P.O.”
He reached for her hand and took three steps backward, pulling her into the room. “Okay?” he said, bending his knees a little to meet her eyes squarely. “You still want to? This place is better?”
She tried to rally, smiled. “You can’t learn anything without breaking some eggs,” she said. She moved to inspect the package, running her finger along its shiny seam then thumping the box over and over again, memorizing its particulars. He was right. Better to be in a motel room than out in public. Her curiosity returned. She picked at the thick brown tape with her fingernail. “We better peel the tape, not cut it, huh?”
“If you peel, too much box will come off.”
“Well, we can’t slice it open. What if we do it slow?” She eased one corner of tape away from the box. A skim of cardboard came with it, spreading like a scratchy stain.
“Careful,” Piv said.
“Use my knife.”
Robin knew Piv loved her Swiss Army knife, its weight and its thickness, its twenty different blades. He’d told her that he’d had one once, the fisherman’s version, but a real fisherman had boated him out to Ko Chang, where he was supposed to meet someone on a stormy day when no passenger ferries were making the trip, and Piv had given the knife in gratitude. The person he’d gone to meet hadn’t been there, he told Robin when she’d asked. Now she let him carry her knife. He took it from his pocket and nudged her slightly, centering himself in front of the box’s seam. Since Robin had loaned the knife to him, he’d had all the blades sharpened. He flattened the second longest one, the thinnest, against the kiss of adhesive and cardboard and lifted the tape slowly, finessing the knife like a violin bow. The separation made a long puckering sound. The tape curled in on itself, revealing its feathered belly, and the top flaps of the box parted to reveal the shine of white plastic sheeting. When Piv was done, he held the tape aloft, a triumphant snake hunter showing his trophy.
Robin pulled back the box’s flaps, touching them only on their corrugated ends. The plastic was the same kind her mom had covered windows with during the winter of 1984, when temperatures hit record lows in Palatka and their old oil heater couldn’t keep them warm. Layers of the stuff padded the top of the box, but Robin could see the shadowy promise of substance beneath, like a bulky fish poised under the freeze of a pond. She tried not to be too hurried, too greedy, too clumsy. She thought of fingerprints as her fingers searched through the folds and Piv breathed beside her. Then she touched a tighter plastic, the hard resealable joint of an extra-large ziplock bag, one of several. It had heft. She drew it to her, sheeting and balled up newspaper spilling out of the box as she reeled it in.
And there it was: a brown chunk the shape of a bent arm straining against the bag bottom, dirty flakes crumbling off. For a moment, for all she knew, it could have been anything illicit—a huge hunk of hashish, heroin, a bomb-building chemical compound, an art object pilfered from civilization’s most ancient ruin. She held the bag by its seal, and the air conditioner reused the silence. She brought the thing closer and spied flecks of black crimson. Her lungs fluttered with hope. A slab of corundum waiting to be polished to ruby?
But no, as she focused she could see that it wasn’t rock solid; it was almost fibrous. And it wasn’t simply a rough chunk. It arced, narrowed on one end to a smoother point, a giant incisor. The tooth of a prehistoric monster? And then the visual evidence coalesced with some prior knowledge and Robin pictured a rhinoceros charging toward her, bellowing, blood running down its face: she held its horn. “Uh,” she breathed. She dropped the bag.
“Careful with that one,” Piv said. He picked it up again out of the box, looked into it as if surveying the weather through a window. Robin waited for his reaction, hoping it would guide hers, put her on firm ground. “This thing’s not mine. Not mine. But if I have this ...” He stared for a moment then shook his head. “I don’t know who to sell this to, how much, nothing.” He lowered the bag, stroked his chin. “But maybe. Maybe I could find out something. I could ask very careful. I could find out how much they pay for this. Maybe. Sure. Okay?” Piv took Robin’s wrist and looked at her watch.
“Who could want that?” Robin said. The brown carpet turned into a rocky downhill under her feet. Piv’s indifference chafed Robin. Even if he were being practical, shouldn’t he show at least a lip-tightening stoicism?
He smoothed out a piece of plastic and folded it over once, twice, cradled the horn in it. He put the newspaper back in the box, then the wrapped bag, then tucked a second sheet of plastic neatly around, just as it had been. “It’s not my specialty, but some farang tell me Chinese people want it for strength of the man.”
Robin lay down spread-eagled on the bed. Even if it was leaving the place it belonged, black market art went to collectors who loved it, who’d preserve it, who’d display it under the best conditions. And she had a silly notion that beautiful things placed artfully together created a sort of celestial hum. But rhinos? Just the boxes of horns had weighed down the car so much that the exhaust pipe scraped the pavement going over a bump. Where were the bodies?
“We must go,” Piv said.
She could see her reflection divided up among the circular mirrors glued to the ceiling above the bed. Her hair was falling out of its twist. The flesh of her cheek pulled toward the mattress, giving her features a Down’s syndromish slant and breadth. “Let me lie still for a minute,” she said. “Come on. We’re here. Lie down with me.” She didn’t know whether she’d be embarrassed or excited by making love in a mirrored bed. Probably both. She just knew she’d feel better if they lay naked together.
“We pay for one half hour in this room. That time’s over. And Volcheck ...” Piv folded the peeled tape-snake and put it in the wastebasket. He picked up the gaping box.
“You can rent by the half hour?” One mirror showed only her curled pink hand.
“Many Thai people live with their family; sometimes there’s too many people, so it’s hard to make something. This room is for private things. Maybe for love. For one half hour, one hour, two hour, sure, something like that.”
“It’s not just a Thai thing, Piv. We have places like this, too,” Robin said. “Husbands go there who want to cheat on their wives. Prostitutes go there.”
“For private things. Okay?” He walked over to the bed, sat down with the box on his lap and made to draw Robin up by the arm. “We go now.”
“So how did you know about this place? Who have you been here with?” She pulled her arm away from him. She pictured pieces of Piv’s golden body filling the circles above her head. She felt queasy. “Mostly Thai girls or farang?”
“Everyone knows. But I don’t come here. I never come here before today.”
“You don’t need to lie to me. I’m not jealous, I just want to know.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He widened his eyes. Gave a small, quick smile, a little shake of his head. “I have nothing to tell you. I have not been here before.”
“I don’t care, Piv. Really. I just want to know what your life was like before now. Who your girlfriends were. What you did. If you didn’t come here, then where did you go?” The words bounced dully between her ears, echoes of questions she’d asked before. She was hollow. She lacked the blood or muscle that would let her rise from the bed.
“Nowhere like we go now. Let’s go back to there. Let’s go to Volcheck so we can go back to Star Hotel, where we can lie down.” He flashed his full smile at her, tugged her arm again.
“What did you think would be in those boxes?”
Piv’s body deflated in the manner of a sigh. “Before this time, I don’t think about that.”
“Oh, come on Piv!” He sat slouched on the bed facing the headboard mirror. Robin tried to use a ceiling mirror to spy on his reflection, but she couldn’t get the right angle. She gave up. “I don’t think I would have gone to Malaysia if I thought it was drugs
. I really don’t think I would have. But I didn’t think it’d be this. It’s sort of sad. It’s ugly. Don’t you think so?”
“No one thinks about this. That’s why it’s good business. We already make three hundred dollars.” Piv stood up. Robin lashed her eyes at him—he had been to this room with other women; he hadn’t cared that he might have been setting her up to carry heroin into Malaysia.
He held the box to his hip with one arm. He looked at her impassively. “Before now, I don’t know what’s in this box. But I know one thing. Volcheck pays too much money. Now he’s waiting. Maybe he’s called that mobile phone already.” He turned and walked to the door. Wedged it open with his shoe. “Now we go,” he said to her. He gestured with his head, then stepped out and let the door close.
When she took a shower that night, she didn’t shave her legs, not caring that Thai girls probably didn’t have sharp stubble, that raspy legs might offend Piv. She was bone weary. At twilight, Volcheck had made her, too, carry boxes up four flights of back stairs to a hotel room. But first, she and Piv cowered under his tirade about where had they been, who the fuck had answered his mobile phone. When he learned what happened to it, he towered over Piv and drew up his arm as if to backhand him. Robin broke into a sweat. Still glowering, Volcheck let his hand drop. “Bastard cocksucking fucker you owe me,” he hollered. He kicked at the one box already in the room, the box they had opened, and Robin’s heart raced. Her bones and blood and skin hurt. If he hit her, jacked her to the wall... With shame she heard herself pleading. Piv had collected fourteen boxes, perhaps fifty rhino horns altogether, and the violent force that had killed a hundred tons of animal was there in the room with them. She began to shake.
But Piv smiled. He apologized once, twice, ducked his head a little. Finally he said, “Excuse me, but I need many people to help me. Impossible without that. I give them what you give me, then I need more. I give my own money. They want more. How I can say no? Excuse me for your mobile phone.”