“Please, sit on the chair,” the man said. “Don’t rise again.” He pointed at one of the chairs, and Moisey sat in it.
The man said something in Thai, then, and one of the uniformed cops walked into Moisey’s kitchen. Moisey heard the sounds of drawers opening, dishes being moved. He steadied himself, picturing the baggie in the bottom of the bin. Fine, he thought. Find it. Let’s just get this over with.
The man in the kitchen called out, and one of the other uniformed men went to join him. The man in the suit had moved to Moisey’s desk, and was calmly looking through the things he’d left on top of it.
What, Moisey wondered, would happen if he stood and kicked Thong Kon in the head? He thought he could do it before the cops could stop him. The humiliation of having actually liked this dirty-shirted hustler stung him the most.
The man in the suit walked to one of the windows, took out a walkie-talkie, and began speaking into it. Again for show, thought Moisey. A performance meant to inspire fear that his troubles were becoming bigger by the moment. He pictured kicking the biggest cop in the knee, and breaking it.
The men came back from the kitchen. At first, Moisey thought they looked disappointed: their expressions were flat, slack, tired. But one of the men, the youngest, held up a plastic baggie pinched between his finger and thumb. For a moment, Moisey thought this was the empty bag, but then he noticed a small girth to it. It held something.
The suited man stepped that way. When he’d taken the bag, he bent his head, tapped something out onto his palm, and examined the substance like a jeweler.
“You have methamphetamine in your kitchen. Very bad,” he said. The man shook his head. “Very bad for you.”
“It’s not mine,” said Moisey. He sat up taller.
The suited man nodded to the biggest cop, who handcuffed Moisey roughly. A series of calculations ran through his mind as the man yanked at his arms: planting evidence put these cops on a different level, more dangerous, more criminal, but it also decreased the likelihood that they were looking for a bigger arrest. He allowed himself to relax a little bit. He’d be done with them by the time the sun rose.
“I have a daughter,” said the suited man, holding his head back. “She is grown now. Twenty-three years old. She was in college, study to be an engineer, you know this? Then she meet a farang, look like you. Same shaved head. Same skinny, tattoos. He maybe is your brother?” The suited man looked at the larger cop, who nodded his head. “Maybe you know this man? He give my daughter this same kind of drug. Make her sick from it. You farangs bring it here, ruin our great country. You ruined my family.”
Moisey couldn’t help himself; the man’s story was ridiculous. He smiled. In response, the suited man slapped him in the face. The sound, like a loud clap, shocked him. He kept his head down, and felt tears come to his eyes. Rage swelled in his stomach, but he decided it would be better to seem scared.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry?” the man said. His anger seemed to expand. “You’re sorry? My family ruined because of you.”
“Those drugs aren’t mine, and you know it,” Moisey said. He couldn’t help himself.
“What about if we take you to the station, test your blood for illegal narcotics? You see?” With his thumb and two fingers, the man imitated the squishing of a syringe. Moisey shook his head.
The man grabbed his ear and pulled up on it. Moisey was forced to stand, and then to rise to his toes. The man let go and pulled his hand back, ready to slap him again, but then turned toward the other Thai men instead, and began to yell at them. Moisey couldn’t understand what he was saying. The large cop stood with his lower lip jutted out, shaking his head. Then he stepped toward Moisey, gazed into his eyes as if to make sure he was okay, and head butted him square in the face.
Moisey fell back onto the chair, and then off it onto the ground. Pain shot from his nose. He tasted blood on his lip.
When he opened his eyes he saw Thong Kon arguing with one of the policemen. The suited man lifted Moisey up and helped him back onto the chair.
“He said your attitude is ugly,” the man said, nodding toward the man who’d head-butted him. “You haven’t shown enough respect. He’s too bossy. I can’t control him. He’s scared. All these drugs in your home, you’re in such big problem now. He says he wants to arrest you. You go to Ratchada court. Next thing, you sleep in Bang Kwang, very bad place.”
Moisey closed his eyes and breathed deeply. His nose didn’t feel broken. “Maybe there’s some other way?” he said.
The suited man shook his head. “Too big,” he said. “No other way.”
“Please,” said Moisey. “Please, no trouble.” He tried to insert the right tone of regret into his voice. “I can make it right. I promise.” He decided to set an upper limit of three hundred and thirty thousand baht. Ten thousand US seemed like it would be more than enough to cover this stupid fucking night. He waited for the other man to begin.
The suited man walked back to Moisey’s desk. He looked at his computer again.
“You have Bitcoins?” he said.
“I don’t know what that is,” Moisey lied. He scanned the faces of the other men in the room. It was a bad start, he realized.
“You have a computer. You live in Thailand. You use crystal meth. Surely, you are familiar with what Bitcoin is,” the man said.
“I don’t know it,” Moisey said again.
The suited man turned toward the computer, bent down, grabbed the mouse, and brought the thing to life. Moisey felt relief at the sight of the lock screen.
“What can I give you?” he asked. There was nothing on his computer, but he still didn’t like the man being near it.
“Open your computer,” said the suited man. “Uncuff him. Open your computer and show us your bank account.”
This had gone too far. “I don’t have a bank,” Moisey said. “I can call a friend, and have him bring you a hundred thousand baht. Tonight. Now.”
The suited man’s mouth twitched, but he said, “Not enough. You have too much trouble.”
“Okay. The most I can do is two hundred thousand. Otherwise, you have to arrest me, because I can’t get any more.”
“Open the computer, log on to your bank, and show us your balance.”
Moisey glanced at Thong Kon. The boy still had his eyes down, but his face carried a slight smile. It was the final straw. The planted drugs, the slap, the head butt—none of it angered Moisey as much as that quiet smile. The world tipped on its axis.
“Fuck you,” he said.
The suited man’s head snapped to attention. He looked genuinely concerned.
“Fuck you,” repeated Moisey. “Fuck all of you. You don’t know how easy it would be to have you all fired.”
“Fired?” the suited man said.
“Listen to me,” Moisey said, dropping any pretense of deference. “Call this number: 66-2-494-6601. He can pay you whatever you want. Okay? Or maybe he’ll convince you that you’ve made a mistake.”
“What? What is this?”
“Take your phone and call the number: 66-2—” He waited for the suited man to bring out his phone, which he finally decided to do, and then started over. “66-2-494-6601.”
“Who is it? Whose number?” the suited man asked.
“Ask for Mr. Sukhontha,” Moisey said. “He’s someone who will listen to you.” As he said this, he knew he was making a terrible mistake, but he couldn’t stop himself. The new course he was setting lacked any kind of map.
“Call him,” he said. “He’ll either pay you what you want, or he’ll convince you that you’ve made a mistake. Either way you win, right?”
The suited man’s nostrils were flaring. The other men had shrunk back into themselves. Moisey wasn’t sure whether they spoke English, but he suspected they recognized something in his tone. He turned and stared at Thong Kon, working to memorize his face. After what was about to happen, the boy would probably want to delete his Grindr a
ccount.
The suited man made the call. He stood with the phone pressed to his ear, his sad eyes watching Moisey. The sound of the air conditioner filled the room. Moisey thought he could almost hear the ringing on the other end of the line. But then the suited man shook his head slightly, looked at his phone, and ended the call.
“No answer,” he said.
A new wave of fear rose in Moisey. The confidence he’d felt disappeared; his hunger for revenge vanished. Everything was about to change. His mind raced through ways to turn back. He’d pay the cop anything, he realized, if, in a few moments when his phone lit up, he would just tell Sukhontha that he’d dialed the wrong number.
But it was impossible. He couldn’t even begin to explain it to the man.
Before anyone in the room could speak, the suited man’s cell phone vibrated. Moisey’s stomach rolled under his heart. The cop answered the call, bending his head down and plugging his left ear with his finger. He murmured something in Thai, then looked at Moisey and asked, “Name?”
“Segal,” Moisey said.
“Segal,” the man repeated, pronouncing the word Say-go.
Moisey watched the man’s eyes move as he listened. He watched him look at the other cops in the room and wet his lip with his tongue. The man said something he couldn’t understand, then inserted the English word ice, followed by more murmured Thai.
Then Moisey heard him apologize.
The man in the suit repeated the apology a few times, then hung up. With a softened face, he turned his attention to Moisey.
“I am sorry,” he said in English. “I made a mistake in coming here.” He put his hands together at his forehead and bowed. “We all made mistake. Wrong house. I am deeply sorry.”
He said something to the large cop, who moved to uncuff Moisey. Then the suited man began cursing at Thong Kon, stepped toward him, and slapped him hard in the back of the head.
“This one,” he said, pointing at Thong Kon. “This man’s fault.” He slapped him again. Then the men, all five of them—Thong Kon still cuffed—left the apartment.
Moisey didn’t move from his seat. He stared out the window. Somewhere out there, among the lights of Bangkok, Sukhontha was making more phone calls.
Moisey wasn’t able to sleep until the next afternoon. Instead, he paced his apartment and thought about what he’d done.
Aawut Sukhontha was an attorney in Bangkok. Moisey had never met the man; he’d been given his number by Eugene Nana, his connection to the Burmese outfit. Nana had told him to memorize it. Sukhontha, he’d said, had connections within both the Phak Phuea Thai and the Phak Prachathipat, the two rival parties in power. He also had men inside the Royal Thai Police Special Branch. He could get rid of any kind of trouble with a single phone call. Moisey, though, was supposed to use the number only in the event of a great emergency: specifically, if he were to be stopped while transporting the Burmese merchandise. This had not been one of those situations.
The fucking police had been digging around. If they’d kept digging, who knows what they would have found. But he knew this argument wouldn’t hold up; they wouldn’t have found anything, not in his apartment. Why hadn’t he just paid the men? Why hadn’t he shown them his bank account? He had nineteen thousand US sitting in his Bangkok bank; the rest—just as the cop suspected—was in Bitcoin. Why hadn’t he shown them that, and then emptied it for them? Why had he chosen that fucking Lump of Gold in the first place?
When he woke, his cell phone showed no missed calls. No texts. No e-mails. A dull hangover settled in on him. He thought about getting in touch with Eugene Nana, but felt overwhelmed by it all. He could reach out to Isaak Raskin in Miami, but that felt too dramatic. What could he say to him?
Around nine thirty that evening, just as he was starting to think maybe it would all pass unnoticed, his phone buzzed in his hand. A Bangkok number he didn’t recognize.
“Hello?” he said, answering in English.
“Mr. Segal?” asked an accented female voice.
“Yes.”
“Your friend would like to see you.”
“Which friend?”
“Mister from up north, please.”
Moisey understood this to mean Eugene Nana.
“Where?” he said.
“There is a ride waiting outside your door.”
When Moisey stepped outside, the car he’d expected was nowhere to be seen. An orange-vested motorcycle taxi driver got his attention by waving his hand like an English queen. Moisey shuffled toward him.
“Yes, yes, Segal, this way,” said the man, lifting the visor of his helmet to speak. Moisey climbed on the back of the bike, touching what felt like a holstered gun underneath the man’s orange vest.
The man sped out into traffic. Moisey turned and saw two other men in identical orange vests following close behind.
“Two men are following,” shouted Moisey over the wind.
The driver, accelerating, looked at his side mirror, raised his visor again, and shouted, “With us.”
My God, thought Moisey. A rather large production. He tucked his knees in and held on as the driver cut between a bus and a truck. They skirted north through small side streets, toward Ratchathewi. Everywhere the madness of the close-packed city pressed in on them. The sun had set over an hour ago, but the heat remained. Every few seconds, the driver slid through some new obstacle without slowing down. Moisey, more than once, felt compelled to close his eyes.
Finally, somewhere near Chatuchak, in a neighborhood he had never been to, they entered a parking garage beneath a mall. The two other bikes had stopped outside; Moisey’s driver sped through a few turns and then shot out the other side of the building, back out onto the street. They traveled down two more back alleys before entering another garage, this one below a nondescript glass-covered tower. The man at the entry booth waved them forward.
A heavyset man in a navy suit at the far end of the garage rose from a metal folding chair as they approached. He spoke to the driver when the bike had stopped, touching him like they knew each other. Then he ushered Moisey through a door and into a brightly lit hallway. At the elevator, his new guardian pressed the button for 12.
They rode in silence. The man kept nodding his head slightly, as though in some kind of commiseration. When the doors opened, he led him into an unfussy office, where a receptionist speaking on a headset looked at them and then looked away. The man opened the door of a conference room, gestured for Moisey to enter, asked him if he wanted water—which Moisey accepted—and then left him alone.
Moisey, his feet itching inside his shoes, sat looking at his iPhone. He didn’t want to be caught doing something that would make him seem guilty. He looked at pictures of his friends on Instagram and felt contempt for everyone in the world.
Ten minutes later Eugene Nana came into the room. His clothes, as always, seemed to suggest that he was a man of leisure: a black polo shirt, a Windbreaker over his arm, pressed khaki pants, loafers. He looked like a movie star. Even now, under these circumstances, Moisey felt attracted to him. Can’t we just work this out, he imagined himself saying. Can’t we just fuck and call it a day?
Nana shook his head, frowned, and sat down on the opposite side of the table. His face—his eyes in particular—looked uneasy. He peered around the room as though it were his first time in it, then turned his attention to Moisey.
“Do you know how the substance we sell you is made?” he asked in English.
“The ecstasy?” said Moisey.
“How do they make it?”
“The Burmese?”
“Yes.”
“From safrole oil?”
“Yes. But where does safrole oil come from?”
Moisey shook his head. “China?”
“Yes. But before that, where?”
Moisey didn’t know.
“We get it next door. Cambodia. A tree grows in the mountains: they call it Mreah Prew Phnom. A beautiful tree. Big—you see a statue of the Buddha
made of it in the market. Have you seen it? Hold it, smell the statue.” He mimed the act of smelling a small thing in his hands. “Smell like black licorice. Same smell. It’s the smell of safrole. You cut the tree down, distill the oil, right there in the jungle. Take oil, easy chemistry, make drug.” He paused. “Moisey, my friend, you know what happened to me this week? I had a man go to the jungle—he’s from Phnom Penh; he’s Vietnamese—but he always live in Phnom Penh. He went to the jungle, took a group of villagers, laborers, find the tree, cut it down, boil wood, distill oil. This man, he brought his driver with him, assistant, a Khmer boy from Phnom Penh called by the name Sang Munny. He is a young boy, twenty-two year old. They went into the jungle with the five laborers from Osaum Village, and you know what the young driver did?”
Moisey shook his head. He had no idea what this speech was about.
“He killed his boss. Shot him in the head. They call me, I have to go to Koh Kong Province, talk to the villagers, fix everything, talk to family. You know what they said? Villagers and driver—all Cambodian—they say the boss start acting crazy in the jungle. He start being—”
Nana waved his hand in front of his face, opened his mouth, let his tongue hang, made his eyes wide like a zombie.
“He act like a, like a, what’s the word in English? In Khmer, they say he got taken by a neak ta, you know, a tree spirit, a ghost. They say he became possessed, start hitting all the villagers, hitting the driver, he spit at them. He bit villager on the hand, break the skin. You know what the villagers said? The driver, all of them, they say his teeth turn bright black. Black teeth. Violent. He hit everyone. The villagers said he make a bonfire burn up into the sky, like a building, and the man, his name is Phan Van Duong, he went crazy. Hitting everyone, arguing. At night—before it happened—at night before his teeth go black, he sleep, yelling, talk in sleep, speak what sounds like Chinese to the villagers. Next day, he’s attacking everyone. The driver, the boy, Munny, got his gun and shot Phan Van Duong in the head. Killed him. All the villagers say the same thing. They say, ‘The boy saved us. The boy saved us.’”
Nana pursed his lips, looked at Moisey to confirm that he was listening.
Every Man a Menace Page 14