Black Tiger (12 page)

‘I tell you, boy.’ Iolo, breaking into my thoughts, leaned forward and thumped the table, making the glasses skitter and swash. ‘We’ll bloody hammer ‘em next time they show their faces in Cardiff!’ He took a gulp of ale, raised his glass to me, slightly askew, and intoned with patriotic solemnity,
‘Y Ddraig goch am byth! Cymru am byth!’

I grinned idiotically. For a moment, I believe I actually imagined Iolo was speaking Thai, and that I understood it perfectly—but it was Welsh, after all.
The Red Dragon and the Welcome in the Hillside
.

Raven

Sourly I watched my fellow passengers manhandling their bulky hand luggage down the aisles. Royal Thai Orchid Flight 245 to Bangkok, via Zurich, Rome, Tehran, Calcutta, threatened to be packed. Nancy, thrusting her silver Porsche through the early morning traffic with cold fury, had tipped me out at Heathrow in sufficient time to secure a window seat. We Celts are not noted for our pragmatic optimism; nonetheless, as soon as I located my seat, I immediately dropped my well-travelled Zeiss Ikon with its ungainly lens attachment into the central seat. Repelling boarders. A black mood was upon me, and I was not eager for company, debilitated by the wrangling through a long, loveless night.

‘You get yourself into these things,’ Nancy had railed. ‘It’s the bloody Legion all over again. I bet that bloody Fleischer’s involved somewhere, too. I know you, Nat!’ She glared, her blue eyes glistening with anger. ‘Just don’t expect me to put my life on hold again while you fart about playing James Bond!’

‘All that’s dead and buried. And it’s nothing to do with Fleischer, Nance!’ I moved to kiss her but she turned her face aside.

‘Don’t call me that!’ she snapped.

One way or another, Nancy and I had made our farewells on terms worse than bad—terms of indifference. Foolishly confiding in my cups, I’d admitted my partnership with Fleischer during the previous summer. As I had feared, his name was a red rag to the proverbial bull. ‘He’s a rogue and a murderer!’ she’d screamed. Even I had to admit that his reputation was tainted. That was why, in the end, I’d terminated our association.

The morning dawned chilly, the atmosphere still bitter.

My bags stood ready by the door. She’d dressed without a word. I watched, fascinated, despite long custom and present rancour, as she deftly swept her blue-black hair clear of the collar of her cashmere coat. She looked exactly what she was, one of a frightening new breed, an independent alpha-female, a sharp, Bond Street–wise high-flier, exuding ambition and assertive sexuality. Nancy was a successful City dealer. My own modest salary hardly kept the Porsche in windscreen-wiper fluid. Most of the time, that suited both of us just fine. But not always.

Shrugging the strap of her black leather bag over her shoulder, she bent on me a withering glance.

‘You’ll never get a cab now!’

The Porsche squealed to a bone-racking halt in the drop-off lane, and I leapt out, slamming the door with unnecessary force, and collected my cases from the boot. The loaded atmosphere between us had robbed me of the buzz of anticipation. I stood stiffly beside my cases on the kerb, waiting for her to drive away.

The automatic window slid down. Through it, Nancy extended a small, expensively wrapped package.

‘What’s this?’ I moved out from under the overhang, and stood in the sooty drizzle, staring stupidly.

‘Bon voyage! Happy landings!’ The window slid up silently between us again. Nancy wiggled her gloved fingers teasingly, her eyes already on the driving mirror, then swerved out in front of a savagely honking taxi and was gone, my best beloved, into the clover-leaf-junction jungle. For a moment I forgot where I was and what lay before me, and clutching my farewell gift, I gazed after her with regret.

Now, seated, obediently harnessed, I tore open the flimsy gold designer wrapping paper and stared in disbelief at Nancy’s Parthian gift: a solid-gold Kit Kat holder, the chocolate-covered biscuit in its gaudy red-and-white wrapper already in place, the bauble still bearing its Asprey & Goddard price tag: £395 sterling. If I’d not been travelling by plane, but by bicycle or bullock-cart, I’d have hurled the idiotic object into the nearest ditch. I stuffed it into the back of the seat in front of me, along with the menus and the sick bag. I stared out at the rain-washed tarmac, remembering it was April 13. My mother’s birthday.

The overpriced trinket recalled to my mind my mother’s obsessive frugality; she considered electric light a wicked indulgence. This ironic extravagance of Nancy’s would have appalled her. She’d never said so, but I sensed that she did not care for Nancy.

When pressed for an opinion, she would say, ‘Such a smart lass.’

I shook myself free of my recollections and watched as the stewardess greeted each passenger. If I’d been a sociologist, I’d have gotten a whole thesis out of the Thai greeting ritual alone. Smiling, the stewardess pressed her palms together, placing her fingertips to her nose; foreigners all received the same degree of reverence, I noted, but, when the passengers were Asian, a lightning assessment of their social standing dictated the precise grade of respect they commanded, to be reflected in the angle of her graceful
wai
.

Three elegant young Asian women boarded; I jumped as if shot, recognizing the trio from Fleischer’s boot camp, though they looked so different without their army fatigues, spattered with mud, camouflage paint, and blood. I hunched in my seat, having no desire to be recognized myself, and studied them covertly.

Chee Laan Lee entered first, wrapped in a tangerine-coloured coat of soft wool, its collar raised, her round, smooth head protruding like a pistil from the corolla of a lily. Her hair could have been painted on, in one sweep of blue-black model paint; two more daubs for the merrily sparkling black eyes. The flame coat shrieked ‘couture’, though I could not have conjured a name; despite Nancy’s attempts to educate me, I still couldn’t tell my Balenciaga from my Christian Espiritu. I was surprised that she rated only a rather perfunctory salute from the stewardess.

Behind her, at the head of the queue, a shimmer of wolfskins quivered with impatience. Salikaa’s small booted foot, adorned with golden spurs, tapped the floor.

‘Vous permettez?’
she demanded in a grating tone, for the benefit of the onlookers. I chuckled at the stage-French mimicry, the shrug and imperious nasal whine, so incongruous in Salikaa, with her dazzling dark-gold face, her slanting eyes, the cascade of hair so black it had the greenish sheen of a rook’s wing when, as now, she swung it imperiously.

The stewardess bit her lip. I sympathized with the poor woman’s dilemma. I recalled Iolo Ellis’s briefings on Thai society, about the potential upward mobility of the beautiful. Looking now at Salikaa, I knew she would raise high stakes on her single ace, what poker players call holding the tiger by the tail. She flung her furs into the outstretched arms of the waiting hostess like a bundle of rags and struck a pose in her blood-red dress.

The stewardess, staggering under her load, struggled to greet Princess Pim, making deep reverence. Pim’s face, as she returned the greeting, was gentle. She wore a sober garment of pale lemon wool, without ornament of any kind, but the stewardess had recognised her status. This was the genuine article, a Princess of the Blood—as Iolo would say, ‘The real bloody McCoy or I’m Shirley Bloody Temple, boy!’ Much later, the curious coincidence of the colours—lemon, crimson, and flame—would strike me.

Salikaa oozed past the stewardess. With her extravagant make-up, one might be fooled into thinking she was a
poule de luxe
. Bangkok’s awash with them. It would certainly have explained the stewardess’s lack of enthusiasm. While I was gradually regaining the will to live, Salikaa flashed a provocative gap-toothed grin around the cabin, her gaze caressing the male passengers. She took her time looking me over. Last time my face had been smeared black and green, I’d worn a balaclava, a helmet and shades. I realized none of them had recognized me, and that suited me just fine. The fascinating trio were a complication I didn’t need.

‘Sit down, Salikaa!’ I heard her companions hiss disapprovingly. Her only response was to grin more wickedly than ever, while her eyes continued to rake the cabin, challenging. She caught my eye again and smiled, her tongue flickering over her pearly lipstick.

After she sat down, I realised she was still studying me, holding a compact at an angle through the gap between the seats. She saw I’d noticed, but she continued her appraisal for a moment unabashed, then snapped the compact shut and leaned over to Chee Laan, and said in English, loud enough for me to hear over the noise of the engine: ‘That
farang
. The big one. Behind. You think how old?’ The glossy furry eyelashes, her sharp little nose and glistening teeth, reminded me of a mink, released by sentimentalists on an unsuspecting countryside.

Chee Laan shrugged. ‘Who knows?
Farang
faces all alike. Same-same chickens.’

Farang
. It was fortunate I did not need to blend discreetly into the background on this assignment. I was branded an outsider from the outset. In North Africa, my natural swarthiness, plus my fluent Arabic, afforded some camouflage. But this was not North Africa. This was a new undertaking, unfamiliar territory. Now at last I began to feel it, the old heady tug of excitement, like the second before you jump. I was startled out of my thoughts by an arrogant nasal whine.

‘Pardon
me
! I take it that this seat is not presently occupied?’

Glancing up, I encountered the eyes of an idol, glittering coldly within a mask.

Scalpels had slit and lifted skin; syringes had pumped liquid silicone and pops of poison. The woman was a triumph of artifice; the nose girlishly pert, the enhanced cheekbones smooth as new apples—they hadn’t been able to soften the stony eyes, though, nor prevent the hair, meticulously fluffed and glued, from appearing dead, coarse, dry and reddish as a wind-singed conifer. She scooped up my Zeiss and dropped it in my lap. Seating herself briskly, she established territorial rights, deploying hat, gloves and journals.

‘You like me take your purse, ma’am? Put overhead locker?’ the little stewardess invited. The woman curtly flipped a hand in dismissal, a gesture of colonial hauteur that surprised me. I had never before encountered a Yankee Memsahib. I removed the plastic from my headset and adjusted it. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed how the red-haired Memsahib clutched the bulky crocodile purse to her breast as though it were her firstborn, or as if it were stuffed with rubies. She accepted a newspaper from the stewardess and spread it out. Now, I’m a compulsive reader, a back-of-the-cornflake-packet man. I was struck, centre page, by the same picture of tangled wreckage I had first glimpsed illicitly in the Tube. Above it a 72-point black banner headline proclaimed:
A
N
A
TION MOURNS! Beneath a portrait of a muscular man in uniform, a subheading proclaimed: ‘“Vengeance on Assassins!” swears Colonel Sya.’

I studied the face of the man who was to become my enemy. It was an alert, intelligent face, with strong bones and remarkable Mongoloid eyes. It reminded me, with the broad flat nose and prominent cheekbones, the lazy yet intense gaze, of a tiger, his namesake.

With an unfriendly glare in my direction, the woman turned the paper over, folding Colonel Sya’s face up and crushing him brutally into the pocket beneath her table.

I fiddled the dial on my headset. Mozart flowed over me like aromatic oil, smoothing my brow quicker than Botox. I pulled the eyeshade from my flight bag and, turning my head away from my unwelcome companion, drifted into the easy light slumber of the seasoned traveller. Just before I nodded off, I noticed that it was Chee Laan who now held the compact, observing me in its little gold-rimmed mirror with an unblinking gaze, which I might have found unsettling, had sleep not blotted it out.

Salikaa

I had a good look at him, the
farang
. He reminded me of somebody. In the small mirror of my compact I studied him feature by feature like a painting, and found to my surprise the result was not entirely repulsive. There was the big beaky Western nose, of course, a firm chin too, but I quite liked that, and the sexy dark blue eyes. I caught them watching me and snapped the compact shut. I passed it over to Chee Laan. I saw with amusement that she was intrigued by the big foreigner also. I can sense that sort of thing. My instinct never fails. He wouldn’t get any change out of Chee Laan, though. She’d been practising that basilisk stare of hers for too long. She even practised it on Lieutenant Fleischer. Not that it made any impact there. Nothing had any effect on him, the crazy bastard.

Thinking of the lieutenant made me remember my bruises, and my anger.

‘Shit,’ I grumbled to Pim. ‘I still feel like I’ve been run over by a truck! My ass is black and blue!’

‘We learned a lot, though,’ Pim replied. ‘We should be grateful. But I will be glad never to see that man again!’ She’d told us that when they learned of her father’s plans to send her to Normandy, her secret political organisation, SWORD, had arranged for her to join Fleischer’s training course. SWORD stood for Students and Workers Organising Revolutionary Development. I don’t have time for that sort of thing myself; it’s every girl for herself as far as I’m concerned.

Chee Laan’s grandmother, the property tycoon Sunii Lee, had arranged for her to go on the course, too. All Chinese are twitchy, especially the ones with money. Always scared someone’s going to come along and take it off them. Fleischer seemed to know of old lady Sunii, and my guardian, Vichai, as well. ‘The famous drug baron,’ he called him. I just flashed my teeth at him. Fleischer was a sinewy blond animal with mad blue eyes. He smelled of sweat and grass. Good-quality grass. Even before we got to the training camp, when he stopped that filthy jeep of his to expose us to the first icy blast of his personality, I was provoked by his indifference. I dropped my hand on his thigh and awaited developments. I didn’t have to wait long.