The Scoreless Thai (aka Two For Tanner)

by Lawrence Block

  I decided that he must have found the object of his search, but it seemed unlikely that he could still be busy with a woman. Even taking his youth and the fervor of his desire into consideration, the fact remained that one could only continue that particular activity for a certain amount of time. Of course, I thought, if he had given full vent to his desires, he might well have driven himself past the point of exhaustion. Even so, a night’s sleep would have brought him awake again. Of course he might have resumed the original activity, but I hated to think it of him. We were friends, after all, and I couldn’t believe he would leave me shivering in the underbrush forever while he screwed himself silly.

  What, for that matter, had become of Tuppence and the Kendall Bayard Quartet? I had the feeling that they were the prisoners of whom the old man had spoken and that they were somewhere in Tao Dan. But where were political prisoners lodged in Tao Dan? I didn’t know and I didn’t trust myself to ask directions.

  I found one street that was a little less crowded than the others and hitched the bullock at the curb, tying his lead rope to a small concrete pillar erected for that express purpose. I shuffled along the street, then followed a small crowd of men into what seemed to be a cafe. Inside, men were drinking out of small handleless cups of tea. I couldn’t have any tea because I didn’t have any money. I moved to the rear of the cafe and tried to stay as deep in the shadows as possible. A dozen conversations went on at once around me. I listened to them in turn. The dialect was difficult for me to follow, and most of the conversations seemed to revolve upon the various problems inherent in the life of a peasant in Laos. The agricultural trade terms were largely unfamiliar ones, and I was pretty much at sea.

  Until at length I heard a large, heavy man with a deep voice begin to talk about a criminal event that had transpired during the night. A small crowd gathered around him, anxious for details. I shouldered my way forward and listened to the storyteller.

  He knew his trade well, beginning slowly, letting the excitement build. “And so you know the girl of whom I speak,” he said. “Her father is the commanding officer of the troop garrison. Just a young thing, she is, with the softest and purest skin, and a waist one could span with one’s hands, and breasts exquisitely shaped like cups of tea, and hair like fine black silk…”

  He paused for a chorus of oohs and ahhs.

  “And this stranger appeared, no one knows from where. A young man, crude in his ways, and followed the girl down the street. Some say she did not know she was being followed” – he lowered his voice – “and others say she well knew a man was behind her, and let her hips sway from side to side, eh? Eh?”

  A low giggle rose up from the crowd.

  “And he followed her, or perhaps she led him, into the house of her father. The house of her father!” The crowd bubbled at the thought, a mixture of indignation from the puritans and grudging respect from the libertines. “And in the house of her father, in the bed of her father, this wayward one prepared to take her. Some say he meant to force himself upon her and to overcome her resistance with beatings and terror” – again the voice went conspiratorially soft – “and others have it that no terror was necessary, that the girl would have willingly participated in what he wished!”

  More hubbub from his listeners. It may not astonish you to learn that I had guessed the identity of the male participant in the drama. Poor Dhang, I thought. I hoped at least that he had attained the object of his desires before they killed him. At least he would have died happy.

  But such was not the case.

  “Fortunately,” the fat man continued, “the chastity of the little one was preserved. Fortunately her own father arrived in the nick of time, reaching his beloved daughter’s side before the culprit could complete his evil mission. With tears of frustration in his beady eyes the criminal was led away screaming.”

  I could well believe it.

  “And the criminal?” someone demanded.

  “He shall receive the punishment that is his due.”

  “Death?”

  “What else?”

  What else indeed? Dhang, I thought wearily, led a profoundly uncharmed life. First he had attempted to ravish a girl during the Week of Tears and Sighs, and the tears and sighs were all his own. And now, when he had settled on a succulent young Laotian girl, he had had the ill luck to select the daughter of the most powerful man in Tao Dan, the commander of the military garrison. It did not surprise me that he had been sentenced to death. But had the sentence been carried out yet?

  Someone else asked the same question. “He shall die this evening,” the storyteller replied. “By nightfall” – he pointed off to his left – “his head shall decorate a post at the command headquarters.”

  Not, I thought, if I could help it. Poor Dhang! I thought of the times during the night when I had accused him of treachery while he had trembled under the sentence of death. No doubt he had had the opportunity to betray me then. He could have attempted to tell them my whereabouts in exchange for his freedom. But he had kept his silence, and now, somehow, I had to find a way to free him.

  I slipped unquestioned from the cafe. I stood for a moment on the sidewalk, getting my bearings. Then I retrieved my bullock and led him off in the direction the storyteller had indicated. The streets of Tao Dan were a maze, and I had to stop to ask directions to the command headquarters. I managed to select a myopic old gentleman who didn’t seem to pay much attention to my non-Laotian face.

  He pointed the way and mumbled directions. I walked on, hauling the bullock along behind me. I turned a corner as indicated and stopped in front of a large whitewashed concrete building from which an unfamiliar flag was flying.

  There was no question about it – this was the place. The armed guards at attention on either side of the front doors indicated this, but something else confirmed it beyond question. There was a row of high metal posts off to the side of the doorway, one of which the storyteller had said Dhang’s head would decorate.

  Four posts were already decorated. I stood, holding the bullock’s rope with one hand and my own jaw with the other, and gazed horrified at the four disembodied black heads of the Kendall Bayard Quartet.

  Chapter 10

  Bad as it is to discover a worm in an apple, it is considerably more unpleasant to find half a worm in an apple. By the same token, there is something infinitely more grisly in the discovery of a portion of a corpse than in stumbling upon the deceased as a unit. I stared at the heads of the four musicians, and they stared back at me. I blinked, but they did not go away. They went on staring.

  “American devil dogs,” said a voice at my elbow. “Thieves and conspirators captured by our noble soldiers. See how their sightless eyes shine with evil.”

  I swayed on my feet. A hand gripped my arm. I turned shakily and looked down into a gnarled and wrinkled face. “You are so pale, young one,” the old woman said. “Have you an illness?”

  “I do not feel well.”

  She looked over my shoulder at the four black heads. “The spectacle bothers you?”

  “I have never before seen such a sight.”

  “Nor have I. For all time I had thought that the American devils were white, like the accursed French. But now it seems that they are black devils. You have the pallor of a white devil yourself, young one. You are not of Tao Dan.”

  “I have come from the north.”

  “Ah, there is a northern touch to your speech! I thought I had recognized it. What is your village?”

  My mind whirled. “I am from the countryside,” I said helplessly.

  “Which village lies nearest to your home?”

  “Kao Pectate,” I said. The diseased spirit offers up its own unbidden puns. I said Kao Pectate because, at the moment, I damned well needed it, but when I realized what I’d said, I wanted to crawl under a flat rock. The old crone was still clinging to my arm like a barnacle to a ship – a foundering ship, in this instance.

  “I have never heard of this town,
” she said.

  “It is many days travel from Tao Dan.”

  “So it may be.”

  I felt it might be time to change the subject. “They have told me that another devil is to be beheaded,” I said.

  “A madman. He attacked a young girl last evening.”

  “I was told that there was a woman. A black woman.”

  The hag peered shrewdly at me. “Some say that this is so. Others say that it is not. There is little talk in Tao Dan of the black woman, and few have heard of her. Who told you she was within the command headquarters?”

  “There was talk in another village.”

  “Oh?”

  I felt increasingly horrible. I didn’t want to look at the old woman, who was behaving more and more like an agent for the Pathet Lao’s secret police, and my only alternative was to watch the four heads baking in the morning sun.

  “The sex criminal,” I said desperately. “When is he to be killed?”

  “Today.”

  “At what hour?”

  “It is of no importance, young one. All executions are carried out within the building. Then the head is brought outside for display.” She clucked her tongue in disappointment. “In old times criminals and devils were put to death in the public square, where all could see. And it was not done with a single stroke of the sword, either. All executions began at noon, with the sun high in the sky, and often the condemned man would not draw his last gulp of air until the sun had set.” She sighed, remembering. “And the entire populace would come to view the spectacle, and the peasants from miles around would make their way into Tao Dan. Much business was done on such days. The cafes carried on a great trade. It is with sadness that I witness the disappearance of the ancient customs.”

  “But this criminal – when will he die?”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Why does it concern you? Are you of the same blood as this crazed one?”

  “A wager. A man at a cafe, we wagered on the time of death.”

  She nodded, at ease now. This made perfect sense to her; the Laos, like the Thais, will gamble on almost anything. Like the Siamese, they raise specimens of Betta splendens, hazarding great sums on the outcome when two male fish attempt to assert their respective territorial rights in a small bowl. That two strangers should bet on the time of a third stranger’s death was wholly reasonable.

  “Then, you must wait for the officials to determine the outcome of your wager,” she said. “The criminal will die by evening prayers, but the exact time I do not know.”

  I managed to get away from her. I took my bullock’s lead rope in hand and headed him around the corner. A few blocks from the command headquarters I picked out another hitching post and tethered the bullock. I was sweating freely now and had to sit down somewhere before I collapsed. I climbed on top of the mound of straw in the cart, stretched out, and put my hat over my face. I had seen natives resting in this fashion and hoped I would look ordinary enough.

  My mind simply wasn’t functioning. The stark horror of those four heads atop those poles had evidently had dire effects upon a brain already numbed by a progressively heightening fever. I tried to put myself into the Yogic relaxation state, tensing and relaxing muscle groups in turn, letting myself go utterly limp, blanking my mind. To do this properly takes twenty minutes, which I couldn’t afford, and a healthy mind and body, which I couldn’t supply. I gave myself a few minutes to loosen up and unwind a bit, and then I tried putting together what I knew.

  The Kendall Bayard Quartet was beyond salvation, at least in this world. For reasons that remained unfathomable to me, some in power had seen fit to separate their heads from their bodies, displaying their heads publicly and doing God-knew-what with the rest of them.

  Tuppence was probably inside the building, but maybe she wasn’t. She was probably going to be executed, but that was no foregone conclusion, and official policy seemed to be to pretend she had never existed in the first place. That seemed like a sensible policy, I thought idly; if I had followed it, I would have stayed in New York.

  Dhang was definitely inside the building, where he would remain until they put him to death for rape. Attempted rape, actually – the poor son of a bitch was going to die without getting the only thing on earth he really wanted. Sometime within the next several hours he would be executed.

  I wondered what part of him they would hang on the post. If the punishment were to fit the crime…

  I decided I didn’t want to think about it.

  There were more important things to think about. I had to find a way to get into the command post, had to locate and free Tuppence and Dhang, and then had to get out again. Then I would have to find a way to get out of Laos or at least into the comparative safety of the southern part of the country, but all of that was a bridge that could be crossed when it was reached, not before.

  Step One – get in. Step Two – rescue Tuppence and Dhang. Step three – get out.

  Fine.

  But Step One stumped me all by itself. Get in? How? Get the bullock to kick a hole in the side of the building, I thought wildly. Throw a stone at a cop and get arrested. Or rape somebody – that way I’d be sure of winding up in the sex offenders’ cell with Dhang. Slug somebody, steal a uniform, and march importantly past the guards and through the corridors. Create a diversion – set fire to half the city, and when the guards ran to see what was happening, make a beeline for Tuppence and Dhang.

  I sighed. Everything seemed quite hopeless. My assets were limited: a bullock, a cart, some straw, the clothes I was wearing, and, if I wanted to go back for them, a mud-clogged rifle and a machine pistol, and a flashlight that was missing a battery. I also had one ally: a broken-down old Francophile.

  If Dhang hadn’t managed to get himself caught, there might have been a chance. There would have been two of us instead of one, and one to rescue instead of two, which would make an immediate change in the odds. Still more important, the time element might not be so crucial. We could have taken our time and made our plans, and Dhang himself could have passed easily in the crowds, and the two of us working together might have come up with a way to get Tuppence out of there.

  But I didn’t have Dhang’s help now. And by getting caught he had put a tight time limit on the game. If I was going to rescue him, I had to bring it off before evening prayers, whenever precisely that was. Because by then he’d have his head on a post.

  A chill caught me up, and I fought it, bringing my knees up to my stomach and wrapping my arms around them. I was getting fever cramps in my arms and legs, and my head felt like the before half of an aspirin commercial. James Bond never got sick, I thought resentfully. James Bond never had to worry about washing or shaving or changing his clothes, or finding a toilet when amoebas played jumprope with his lower intestine. James Bond, in my particular situation, would pluck a button off his cuff and flick it at command headquarters, whereupon all of the enemy would be blown to bits to the tune of “Rule, Britannia.”

  James Bond was a hell of a lot better suited to this sort of idiocy than I was.

  The old man drew on his pipe. Moisture gurgled in the pipestem. He took it from his mouth and looked in turn at it and at me. In his heavily accented French he said, “My young friend, I do not know how I can help you.”

  Neither did I. I had left Tao Dan to lead my bullock all the way back to the old man’s hut, not because I thought he would really be able to help me but because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. He took one look at me and made me lie down on his straw mattress and cover myself with his few blankets. While I babbled wildly about Tuppence and Dhang he poured cup after cup of strong herb tea into me. It came out through my pores in rivers of sweat. My stomach calmed down after a while, and finally the fever broke.

  “You must sleep,” he assured me. “You must spend a week doing nothing but sleeping and drinking the tea. Or you will die.”

  And then I had told him why I couldn’t sleep, not the medical reasons but the immediate
, practical ones. A Senegalese princess and a Thai agent of France were under sentence of death in Tao Dan. It was my mission to rescue them and rush them to safety in Paris. In their hands, I said, they held the future of the French colonial empire in the Orient.

  Perhaps, I suggested, he had comrades in the area, other men who had known the glory of French leadership, other men whose thoughts and feelings were akin to his own. Men who would help us in our noble task, men who would join with us to…

  As rhetoric goes, it certainly went. I don’t think I could do it justice in English, but the French language is an ideal vehicle for the expression of such sentiments. The speech fired the old man’s blood – it was even beginning to rouse me, for that matter – but at the end he merely shook his head.

  “I am such a man,” he said unhappily, “but I know no others. This is a nation of slaves and fools and traitors, and the times are bad. Here there are only knaves who bow down to those in power and peasants whose thoughts never rise beyond their rice bowls and their yokes and plows. If the Communists seize a man’s bullock, he puts the yoke upon his wife’s shoulders. If they beat him, he apologizes. If they kick him, he polishes their shoes with his tongue.”

  “If we had just a few men-”

  “But there are none but myself.”

  I sank back on the straw pallet. I had succeeded only in wasting more precious time, the time I had spent walking from the village and the time it would take me to return to it. It was hopeless, and I should have known as much, but there was nothing else to be done and no one else to whom I could turn.

  “You say that this son and daughter of the beautiful France are in the command headquarters?”

  I gulped herb tea. Hopeless, I thought. Better to stay on the old man’s floor until the fever either ran its course or killed me. Better to keep out of Tao Dan entirely and later to make my way back through Thailand to Bangkok. Better to let them lop off Dhang’s head and Tuppence’s head. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you –