Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle

by Dorothy Gilman

  For just a moment, her tiredness bringing an odd detachment, she saw herself and Bonchoo in pursuit of Cyrus somewhere ahead of them, and the two naklengs possibly giving chase behind them, and here she was, Emily Reed-Pollifax, in a jungle in northern Thailand, hurrying along behind a man she scarcely knew. Her thoughts went back to a sunny kitchen and Bishop saying, "It's a very small errand, just pick up a package for us..." She was appalled at his naiveté and his miscalculations angered her now, she admitted it.

  But the horror of the situation, and what kept her trudging after Bonchoo in spite of growing exhaustion was why Cyrus had been taken, what they wanted of him and what they would do to him when they learned he was of no use to them. And she did not even know who "they" were, and such helplessness was always enraging. She glanced up into the thick unruly wall of trees groping toward sky and sunlight and suddenly the forest seemed a very sinister place to her. To watch the trail was kinder, and she lowered her eyes, shook her head, sighed, gritted her teeth and walked on, one step after another, feet hurting now, legs trembling from walking downhill and then uphill, and thirsty.

  "Almost there," Bonchoo said.

  She lifted her eyes: they had come out on the ridge and had reached the clearing which had begun greening over with soft tender grass.

  "Slash-and-burn," Bonchoo told her. "A rice or poppy field once—for the hill people—until the earth grew tired." He led her across the field to its far edge and she sank down gratefully on a rock shaded by the forest ahead.

  "Something to drink, please," she said.

  He handed her a lukewarm cola. "Not too fast," he warned her. "We have two bottles left, and you—you being farang you must not drink water."

  "It's lovely, it's so wet" she said, licking her lips.

  "We stop for fifteen minutes only. Eat," he said, and handed her a hard-boiled egg.

  She was reviving; just to sit was glorious, and putting down the cola, she began to peel the egg. Glancing at Bonchoo, seated cross-legged on the grass, she said, "It's time you talk, Bonchoo... those men wanted to kill you and I want to know why."

  He nodded cheerfully. "Yes, and you chop-chopped the second one, which saved my life. I am grateful—much merit for you!"

  "Grateful enough," she said dryly, "to explain this— this cast of characters I've been thrown among? I mean, all I did was walk into a hut with bougainvillea over its fence and now I've lost a husband, and here I am on a jungle hilltop with you."

  He nodded judiciously. "That is true, yes... okay," he said, and thought a minute. "I will tell you a story."

  "Yes, tell me a story," she urged.

  He took a deep breath. "To begin, I live in Chiang Saen, where lives also my friend Ruamsak, who needed help from me."

  She was careful not to react to his naming Ruamsak. "That's the town up on the border?" she asked coolly.

  He nodded. "Yes. There is also this American there who calls himself Jacoby, which may or may not be his name."

  "Jacoby," she repeated—and Ruamsak, she added to herself triumphantly, feeling that at last a connection was being made that she could understand.

  "When there were Americans here," Bonchoo said, "this Jacoby came with the CIA but he got into drugs and when the Americans left Thailand in '76 he stayed. In Chiang Saen there are always drugs, you understand? Because in Mae Sai and Chiang Saen—well, that is the Golden Triangle, as it is called. So he stayed there in a guesthouse."

  She nodded and watched him efficiently slice his egg with the murder knife.

  "But this Jacoby," he went on, "would still pass information to his CIA people in the U.S.A. Drugs are cheap in Chiang Saen when a man is not a drug agent and can be trusted, but drugs still need money to buy. Sometimes, with my connections, I would hear things and tell Jacoby; I would earn some baht from him in that way and he would earn some U.S. dollars for his opium. He still had that U.S. connection—I knew about that, when he was smoking opium he would boast of it to me."

  Bonchoo sighed. "It is important never to trust people who smoke opium, this I know, so I was very careful. I did not trust Jacoby, I did not trust the few friends he had, I only trusted his baht."

  "Very sensible," agreed Mrs. Pollifax.

  He shrugged. "So when my friend Ruamsak comes to me to ask how he can sell big information he has—big political information—I ask myself how this could be delivered without Jacoby taking all the money. But only Jacoby knows what to do, so finally I have to go to him and speak of Ruamsak; I tell him Ruamsak will share money but not information, which is political in nature. Of course Jacoby tries to find out who Ruamsak is and what he knows but this I refuse." He stopped and added very seriously, "It had something to do with a coup planned soon in my country."

  "Oh," said Mrs. Pollifax, startled. "But—how would this Ruamsak know?"

  "Because Ruamsak travels many places," said Bonchoo solemnly.

  "Why?" asked Mrs. Pollifax. "How?"

  "He is a smuggler. He is a smuggler of teak."

  "Of what?

  "Oh yes. Teak is not legal to cut now in my country, there are laws against it, the government is busy with programs to grow new teak before it's all gone. So Ruamsak goes into Burma—" He pointed toward the mountain range behind them. "He buys teak logs and floats them down the Mekong at night to sell on the black market. When he goes back into Burma he takes spare auto parts, lipsticks, radios, flashlights. Sometimes he smuggles things across the Mekong into Laos, too—he goes many places and hears many things."

  "All right, I understand," she said, nodding.

  "So Ruamsak I trust but not Jacoby. Jacoby makes arrangements, he tells me Ruamsak is to go to Chiang Mai to meet a person who will come to him there. I am suspicious and decide I follow my friend Ruamsak to make sure it's all okay."

  He leaned forward, waving his knife. "And I am wise to not trust Jacoby, you see how he betrays Ruamsak. He sets a trap to kill him. Jacoby is in very bad shape from his opium smoking so I think he turned to the only people he knows now: the men he buys his drugs from." Bonchoo shivered. "Wen Sa's men."

  Mrs. Pollifax, about to bite into an egg, paused.

  "And who is Wen Sa?"

  Bonchoo lowered his voice. "Please, it is not a name to speak loudly. He is general of the biggest rebel army in Burma, a Shan warlord. He also controls most of the opium trade, a dangerous man. They say he conies often into this country in disguise, just comes and goes."

  Astonished, she said, "But if he's that big, why on earth would he pay any attention to Jacoby? Why should he help an American who's a drug addict?"

  Bonchoo scowled. "I think and think about this since we left Chiang Mai. He would help Jacoby only if Jacoby told him something clever and sly. I think Jacoby must have lied to him and told Wen Sa's men that Ruamsak learned where opium refineries are hidden in the jungle... Americans are very interested in this; your people spend millions to help the Thai police stamp out opium. Why else would Wen Sa's men follow Ruamsak to Chiang Mai and kill him? They are not interested in political information."

  Mrs. Pollifax frowned. "So it was one of Wen Sa's men who killed Ruamsak in the hut?"

  "He was very dead," pointed out Bonchoo. "With a Shan knife in him, and as you know they sent a number of men to be sure the job was done. The blue van. The two naklengs on the motorcycle. There is much determination there!"

  "Yes, and kidnapped Cyrus as well," she reminded him. She studied his broad, high-cheekboned face, trying to sort out the facts he had given her and to weigh them. This was not New York or even Bangkok, she thought dryly, it was a very strange world to her; she was not accustomed to warlords and smugglers and it was necessary to translate his story into something she could understand, to forget that she was seated in a hilltop jungle and to reduce Bonchoo's story to facts, understandable facts. And the longer she thought about what he had told her the less satisfied she became: there was something wrong, it was too complicated and it did not match what she knew of human nature.


  There were too many people in his story.

  She said idly, "And you insist that Ruamsak's information had nothing at all to do with this Wen Sa and his—uh —opium empire?"

  Bonchoo said firmly, "Absolutely. Ruamsak I trust."

  She nodded, and having gone over his story again a twinkle came into her eyes and she smiled. "You know, Bonchoo," she said, "you make an excellent storyteller but I don't believe your story. If I'd not been so worried about Cyrus—"

  Affronted, he said, "You call me a liar!"

  She shook her head. "Oh no, but a very good teller of tales, except that your story simply doesn't add up."

  "Add up?" He scowled at her. "Why? How?"

  She held up one hand, and finger by finger ticked off the discrepancies. "One, if you didn't trust Jacoby you would scarcely have gone to him and placed Ruamsak's life in his hands. Two, after doing that you allowed Ruamsak to go to Chiang Mai and then you followed only to see if it was a trap. Three, you were there in the hut with the dead man and you certainly didn't act as if a good friend of yours had been murdered, and four, if you're not involved in all this, why did those two men try to kill you on the road?" She sat back, smiling at him. "As I say, if I'd not been so upset about Cyrus I'd have realized at once that Ruamsak wasn't killed in that hut in Chiang Mai."

  "But you saw him dead!" he protested.

  She shook her head. "I saw someone dead but I don't believe at all in your Ruamsak; I don't, for instance, believe he's dead at all. I think Ruamsak is very much alive and it was someone else who was killed back there in the hut."

  His mouth dropped open. "Not Ruamsak!"

  "No," she said, smiling at him, "because I think I am sitting here and eating eggs with Ruamsak and I've been traveling with him all this time." Pointing a finger at him, she said, "You're Ruamsak."

  His eyes narrowed. There was silence while they regarded each other warily, a silence long enough for her to realize that if Bonchoo preferred not to be identified as Ruamsak he could easily kill her and dispose of her right now.

  But she had misjudged him, it was his pride that had been wounded, as she realized when he lifted a hand and hit himself on the forehead, a gesture both despairing and oddly touching. "Yai, but I am no damn good at this game," he said sorrowfully. "Yes, I am Ruamsak. But Ruamsak is only a name, the name of my grandfather. I did not lie, I am really Bonchoo, you understand."

  She smiled. "Then I'm terribly glad to meet you at last—both you and Ruamsak—because I thought I'd lost not only Cyrus but Ruamsak. You see, I didn't just wander into that alley to take snapshots, Cyrus and I were the ones sent to meet Ruamsak and pick up his package of information."

  He startled her by bursting into laughter. "This is so? I ask you," he said, "who would have thought it? They send me a clever one! I thought maybe it could be your husband but it is true that after seeing you back there—" He lifted an arm and slashed at the air.

  "Cyrus is very clever, too," she told him primly, "but if you're Ruamsak then where is the information you were to give us?"

  He stopped laughing. "It didn't occur to you?" he said in surprise.

  "What didn't occur?"

  "Your husband must have the package, or why else would they have seized him and taken him away?"

  CHAPTER

  8

  "Cyrus?" she gasped. "How could Cyrus possibly have it? He was captured out on the street, he didn't even enter the alley!"

  Behind them in the jungle a parrot gave a fierce derisive squawk that was answered from a tall tree to their left. "Don't throw those eggshells," Bonchoo said quickly, "they would be noticed by anyone behind us."

  "Bonchoo," she repeated sharply, "how could Cyrus possibly have your package?"

  He sighed. "Very easily, I am sad to say. You must understand what I had was a letter to hide. The information I carry in my head but of what use without proof, who would believe? It had to be hidden cleverly so I took it yesterday to a man in a lacquer shop to have it made into a phyot arm-ring, which wards off evil spirits." He explained to her how he had rolled the letter into a tube, and what the man had told him. "It's too bad the lac needed time for drying; I should have thought of something else but it was too late. He was to bring it to me this morning, early. Before you came I was hiding outside the window, trying to think what to do next, when someone rushed into the hut, gave a cry and ran out." He lifted both hands in a gesture that was both rueful and apologetic. "I think it was the man delivering the arm-ring, I think it had to be."

  She thought back to a more carefree hour of the day. "Someone did run out of the alley," she said slowly. "I'd forgotten that, he nearly ran into me. He was certainly in a great hurry."

  Bonchoo sighed. "Can there be any other reason your husband was taken away? The man from the lacquer shop came to deliver my arm-ring; he found a dead man and rushed out. In a panic the man must have dropped the arm-ring and your husband picked it up, or even maybe he gave it to him, anything to be rid of it." He added thoughtfully, "You notice the men did not kidnap the man from the lacquer shop, it was your Cyrus they chose."

  She frowned over this. "You mean they were across the street watching and waiting?"

  "Yes, waiting for the man who tried to kill me to come out and say I am dead. And for him to bring with him the package they had been told I had."

  "I must have proved rather useful, then, as a shield." She reflected that the hut had certainly been a busy place for that hour, and she winced as she remembered how casually she had walked down that alley. She said, "It was you who killed the Shan in the hut, then."

  He nodded. "Yes, and for such a matter I lose great merit, even if it is to save my own life. We fought hard, he was very strong." He shivered. "I have never killed a man before, this is a grave matter for a Buddhist."

  She said soberly, "But you're earning back much merit by your kindness in helping me now."

  "Kindness!" he exploded. "You think I can go back to my family and to my village when Wen Sa's men think I am informer?" His hand darted to his throat and with a finger he slashed it from left to right. "Nobody is safe from Wen Sa's men when it's believed he's a spy. No, it's not kindness. I have no future, I am not safe until I find the phyot-ring and prove Jacoby is a big liar."

  "You hope to find Wen Sa, then?"

  "Nobody finds Wen Sa," he told her, "but I know many of his men, our paths cross in the mountains, all of us being smugglers—"

  "So you really are a teak smuggler," she broke in.

  He nodded. "—and they will take my words to him. I told you I know them." His lips tightened. 'This Jacoby is a snake, I tell you, a naga."

  She looked at him curiously, again seeing him differently. "How on earth did you become involved in this?" she asked. "How on earth did you ever contact people in the—well, the United States?"

  "Oh, I wrote letter to them," he said simply.

  She stared at him in astonishment. "You wrote to them, you simply wrote a letter?'

  "Of course. Jacoby was all the time smoking opium... I grow suspicious how he earns so much U.S. money to buy it when he pays so little baht to me for the gossip I bring him. One day I sneak a look in the steel box in his room, and just as I suspect, everything he is paid for is what I, Bonchoo, pass on to him. I am earning all his money for him!

  "But there was more," he said. "He had made certain changes in what I tell him, he was sending lies." He shook his head. "Jacoby was—how you say—playing two games against a middle, working for the Vietnamese across the river in Laos, too. And the address I found there, a Mr. James T. Carstairs—"

  "In Baltimore, Maryland," she said with a smile, nodding.

  "Yes, so I write to this Mr. Carstairs, I offer a deal. I tell them if interested they can write to me—but I took such care," he said, scowling. "I was so careful! They wrote to me in care of the jade shop in Mae Sai which my hnawng kuhee—brother-in-law—owns. That was a few months ago, and that is how it began."

  "I don't know why I'm
surprised," she said contritely. "I myself applied in person for work as a spy. You hoped to make money doing this?"

  He sighed. "I smuggle teak but when I tell you I have five children, a wife, a mother-in-law, a father-in-law living in my house you will understand there is never enough money, not with all the bribes I have to pay the patrols. I was greedy," he said sadly. "But I was also very careful, so I do not understand. Jacoby must have seen me going through his papers—I don't know—or maybe when I stopped coming to him with news he turned sly and paid someone to follow me and learn why. I have not been careful enough, I see this," he said ruefully.

  "Did Jacoby come to Chiang Mai? Was he one of the men in the blue van?"

  "Oh no, Jacoby is too sick to walk far, he could never leave Chiang Saen."

  "And you really believe he turned to Wen Sa's men?"

  Bonchoo shrugged. "In my village, where else could he turn, who else would he know? There are many Shan in my country, and they are peaceful. The man who tried to kill me was a Shan, and he was not peaceful. It was very well planned, too, and Thai people are not such good planners."

  "How can you be so sure?" she asked curiously.

  He smiled. 'To you we look all alike, eh? 1, for instance, am not pure Thai, I am hah7 Chinese—a Thai-Chinese person. The hill-tribe people have Tibetan blood and dress like Laotians. The Vietnamese are tall. A Shan does not have to wear a towel wrapped around his head like a turban for me to know he's a Shan, it's in his face. But we have stopped long enough," he told her, with a glance at the position of the sun. "We've rested long enough, it's time to go."

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded and stood up, stuffing banana skins and eggshells into her pocket. She had not been relieved of her worries about Cyrus but she could admit to relief at learning that Bonchoo was as motivated as she was in finding him. She would have liked to ask him about the political information that he carried in his head but that would have to wait for the next rest. She also longed to ask him what he thought of Cyrus's chances in the hands of Wen Sa's men but she needed very much just now to hang on to both optimism and hope and she wasn't sure that Bonchoo could provide either.