Black Tiger (19 page)

Chee Laan was less sentimental. ‘How do you think Miss Gen-tee van Hooten’—she pronounced the name in an exaggerated tonal singsong, some obscure racial joke that escaped me—’finances her drug habit? She and her friends run an underage sex service. Much patronised by Chinese businessmen’

‘God! But she can’t be more than fourteen!’

She nodded. ‘Caucasian juveniles are regarded as exotic.’

‘Do her parents know?’

‘I am sure her mother does not know. Is it not strange, how people from republican countries are entranced by royalty? Madame van Hooten cares for nobody but the Princess Regent. She is obsessed with her. ‘

‘How about the general? Does he know?’

‘He is CIA, so he knows many things. But not, I think, about his daughter.’ She beamed again, her head tipping sideways, the dark eyes dancing. ‘We have had a useful day, yes?’

Interesting, I thought. Not useful, in the sense that it seemed to have brought me no nearer to meeting Sya Dam. I was wondering how to mention this tactfully, when she said:

‘I will be in touch.’

Whatever deals she had conducted as she shepherded the
farang
visitor, struck dumb with wonder at the mysterious East, her good humour was apparently restored.

As I changed for dinner that night, I could not get the Chinese girl’s dazzling smile out of my thoughts. Cursing myself for a middle-aged fool, I decided it was high time to get Nancy’s picture out. Nothing so crass as comparisons. Nor did I need a photograph to revive my memory of Nancy—always vivid, although clouded with the unhappiness of our parting. I wanted to get a bearing on my life again. I rummaged in the drawer where I had stowed it. The picture still lay in the Kit Kat holder, still back to front. But something was different. I stared at it, puzzled. Then, suddenly, I knew. I felt cold and slightly sick.

The picture was no longer upside down.

Old, once-honed instincts arose, stiffening the fine hairs on my neck like hackles. I proceeded, in a frenzy, to investigate my belongings, my papers, my clothes.

Superficially, everything seemed just as before. But someone had been going through my possessions with great precision, and, except for the careless mistake with the photograph, fairly professionally. I lifted up my folded clothing, sniffing for the alien scent of the searcher. The photograph must have been removed, then replaced hastily. Perhaps the intruder had been disturbed. I cursed; had I slipped up, attracted attention through carelessness? Or had I changed the photograph myself and forgotten?

Fortunately, with a practical caution, I had purposefully left nothing to link me with anything but my cover story. It was natural that Dr Raven, visiting lecturer, should have a picture of his beloved. As I removed the snapshot, smoothed it out, and was about to replace it in my wallet—where, until the rift, I had carried it—I studied Nancy’s elegant, spare features and realised with a shock that it seemed the face of a stranger. I seemed a stranger to myself at that moment, a stranger in a strange land.

I closed my wallet and slipped the photograph into the pocket of my suitcase. I sat down on the bed among my scattered possessions, dropped my head into my hands, and took stock of my position.

Someone had been in my room. Perhaps the same person who had straightened my bed, laid out fresh towels, placed orchids and foil-wrapped chocolates on my pillow and a newspaper on the bedside table. My thoughts were going round in circles. Chee Laan. Nancy. My undercover mission. The fact that someone had thought it worthwhile to snoop through my few possessions.

If a text is in front of my eyes, I feel compelled to read it. It is in most circumstances a fairly innocuous neurosis. I took up the newspaper and I read the article on the front page.

Thailand’s Conscience Slates Beauty Circuses

This week Thailand’s most delectable young misses gather in the City of Angels for the annual Miss Thailand contest.

Yet, if the country’s most glamorous military personality, Colonel Sya Dam, has his way, it may soon be farewell to beauty contests as a way of life.

The 29-year-old colonel, who is of tribal origin, has been dubbed Thailand’s Conscience for his courageous moral stance, including the denunciation of his own officers for corruption.

Now the righteous colonel has protested, in an open letter to the Minister of the Interior, that the current situation calls for austerity and self-sacrifice.

‘How can a country ravaged by insurgents, flooded with refugees and agitators by its disloyal neighbours, its borders violated by infiltrators and terrorists payrolled by our communist foes, justify dissipating energy dallying with frivolous beauty pageants? This pandering to the light-minded exploiters of the vanity of foolish young girls must stop! It is a national disgrace. It is an insult to our gallant soldiers!’ fulminates the fiery colonel.

Unofficial sources predict that in the light of such powerful opposition, the city’s most exclusive venues may find themselves suddenly ‘unavailable’. The Miss Thailand competition may find itself homeless.

Colonel Sya Dam is not a man to be trifled with. Few care to risk his displeasure.

Siam Rath News

The blurred newsprint photo was captioned:
Colonel Sya Dam calls pageant a disgrace.

I peered at the photograph. The uniform cap was pulled so far down that his eyes were concealed. Only the mighty square jawbone, the steel trap of the tightly closed lips, betrayed the character of the man. I was mildly surprised by the tone of the piece. Nothing I had heard about Sya Dam so far had suggested a role for him as moral crusader. A weariness flooded my veins. Everything seemed bewilderingly chimeric. Perhaps I was slowly learning about layered Asian subtleties. Or, more probably, I was enervated by the realisation that I never would. Like so many before me, I should flounder in this morass. Kipling got it right. ‘East is east,’ I murmured to myself. I had to learn the work by heart in school. Nowadays, of course, it would be deemed politically incorrect.

In a sudden attack of lassitude, I dropped the newspaper to the floor and lay back against the silk cushions and the carved teak headboard. I began to wonder when I would see Chee Laan again, what I would do when we met. How she would bring about a meeting with Sya Dam, and how that would play out. My head buzzing with conflicting impressions and desires, lulled by the hum of the air conditioner and the scent of the purple orchids I had placed in my tooth glass, I dropped off and snoozed.

As Ah Lee listened to the account of Chee Laan and Raven’s outing from her nephew the Lee chauffeur, her eyes grew hard and bright as abacus beads. She hissed her disapproval through the scarlet stubs of her remaining teeth.

When she brought Chee Laan her morning jasmine tea, she set the cup down with unnecessary force on the ebony table, her whole person rigid with outrage. A lifetime of subjugating her hair, now at last fading to battleship grey, had dragged her loose banana-coloured skin upward to her skull, pulling her eyes open in a permanent expression of childlike surprise. There seemed hardly enough skin left to afford decent coverage to her long mare’s teeth, but she managed to purse her lips and avoided Chee Laan’s eyes.

Ah Lee came from the old world and was proud of it. She no longer fled shrieking upon hearing Chee Laan’s voice on the radio, hands over her ears, crying out that the girl’s spirit had been stolen and put in a box. But she still regarded it as against nature. Sometimes Chee Laan caught the old woman studying her, as if assessing how much of her soul had been lost in her involvement with this newfangled medium.

‘Thank you, Ah Lee.’ Chee Laan sipped her hot tea sedately and studied the old woman through the steam.

‘Heap bad joss!’ Ah Lee mumbled. ‘Paint, scent, same-same low woman. Ride about all day in Honourable Old Lady’s car with foreign devil. Eat foreign devil food—ice cream, coffee with cream,
cheese
.’ She grimaced in disgust at this ultimate proof of depravity. ‘Stink like foreign devil. Maybe now Little Miss ride in cage-go-up-and-down with
farang
, not gag at foreign-devil-cheese-eating-dead-man-decaying stink!’

Chee Laan remembered Raven’s big sunburned hands hurling the water at the river urchins, the deep hearty ring of his laughter. Even the smell of him, musky-sweet, had not been so bad at all, once she was used to it.

‘Something upset Ah Lee,’ Chee Laan soothed. ‘Will she tell her loving precious one?’

‘Who cares for the troubles of an old woman?
Lambaak
, bad joss. Honourable Father and Honourable Old Lady,’ panted Ah Lee, kneeling to retrieve Chee Laan’s red silk slippers from beneath the bed.

Chee Laan set the tea on her little round inlaid table. ‘I saw Father sent a whole carload of gold leaf to the Pratumwam temple.’

‘Gold leaf, plump chickens, joss sticks,’ Ah Lee recited, shaking her head, bedazzled by such extravagance. ‘Honourable Father, mighty fierce, beat up on kitchen girl very bad. Doctor come. Much money for doctor to mend kitchen girl, more money for make doctor forget. Doctor, very clever man. Honourable Old Lady say fetch priests.’

‘What did the priests say?’

‘Priests, what do they ever say?’ Ah Lee mimicked in singsong, ‘“Is your conscience clear?” Honourable Father shouts,’ here she nodded vehemently, her topknot wobbling, ‘“I honour the gods. My spirit house is better furnished than my own. The spirits want for nothing, slaves, horses, cattle I give them—even elephants! Every year I burn Kitchen God, so He can take record of my good life, my well-conducted household to Heaven.”‘

Chee Laan smiled sceptically. Ah Lee noted the smile, and continued, this time in an elevated tone, with a certain grandeur. ‘Honourable Old Lady say, “Well, Number One Son, I hope you smear plenty honey on that Kitchen God’s lips so he speaks sweet words to the chairman of the gods.”‘ She clapped her hands and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, reverting to her own hoarse staccato. ‘Oh, the anger devil entered that man then. How he roared! Like a dragon, breathing foul fumes! But Honourable Old Lady, she fears neither dragons nor devils!’ Ah Lee closed her eyes and spoke again in that soft, commanding tone quite unlike her natural voice. ‘“Are your accountants honest?”‘

‘What did he say to that?’ Chee Laan snuggled down into the bed and regarded Ah Lee with fascination. Ah Lee, with the indelible memory of the illiterate, enjoyed recreating for an interested audience scenes she had witnessed as an invisible observer. Now the old servant slumped dramatically like a discarded puppet. She squinted up at Chee Laan and shrugged convulsively, with an air of aggravation. ‘Who knows?’ She clapped her hands loudly. Sound effects were important. ‘Screen fall over. Honourable Old Lady says, “Ah Lee, worthless old skin, skulking behind screen? Shake carcass, go fetch tea!”‘

‘So you heard nothing more?’ Chee Laan was disappointed.

Ah Lee refused to lose face by admitting to this defeat. She pattered over to the shuttered window and stooped to peek through the slats into the sunlit courtyard beyond. She clicked disapprovingly. ‘No-good useless maid come now.’

‘Nee?’ Chee Laan sat bolt upright in the big carved bed. ‘Send her up. She brings back my calligraphy books. I lent them to that foreign devil-woman with paint in her hair. Madame Drinkwater.’

Once admitted, Nee knelt by the bed and placed the books on the stool, squaring them delicately with a tap of her fingernail. Chee Laan regarded her with annoyance.

‘Well?’ she demanded. To show impatience was degrading. But, she reflected, she had fifty years to gain composure to equal
Tsu mu
’s.

Nee murmured tonelessly, ‘I saw Queen of Songkran.’

‘Where?’

‘Riding Tiger, glittering crowns.’ Nee rolled her eyes. Chee Laan swooped from her silk pillows and struck the girl’s truculent face, her eyes narrowed into two black slits of rage.

‘Don’t talk nonsense! Tigers, crown! All Bangkok has seen that! That’s not what I sent you to find out! Where is Salikaa living? I know you followed her as I told you; you were watched!’ She forbore to mention the old noodles vendor.

Nee rubbed her cheek. Her hard eyes regarded Chee Laan calculatingly. ‘Bad place, bad people,’ she muttered. ‘I know more, too. First Grandson…’

‘Pao? My brother? What of him?’

‘He visits Black Tiger. I have seen him. He takes messages. He thinks nobody knows.’ She smiled evilly. The Lee servants held the self-indulgent youth in no high esteem.

‘Pao? That’s absurd! Who would trust him as a go-between? He’s a donkey.’

Nee remained obstinately silent. Infuriated, Chee Laan leapt off the bed, seized the girl’s hand and twisted the fingers upward so the joints cracked and the girl fell to the floor, screaming. Chee Laan clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

At first she could make no sense of the spluttered syllables. Then she was incredulous, angry. She prodded the girl with her bare toe.

‘Well, you found Salikaa. You will take me to her—but first I have business to attend to.’

Fifteen minutes later Chee Laan knocked on her grandmother’s door. Sunii Lee, resplendent in a crimson
cheong sam
embroidered with golden dragons, was changing the joss sticks and jasmine of her shrine. She smiled at her granddaughter but her face showed strain.

It had taken Chee Laan five minutes of blackmail and intimidation to extract her father’s accounts from his chief clerk, a toffee-complexioned, respectable-looking bureaucrat with a penchant for sexual exotica. Saved from prison by the powerful Lee family’s intervention, he laid his professional talents at their disposal for minimal remuneration. He had not realized Little Miss was so well informed about his past. He left the office in shock, aiming for the nearest singsong house and a stiff Mekhong whisky.

The calculations took Chee Laan precisely eight minutes. She noted the figures down solely for the purposes of evidence. She was comfortable with figures; people posed more problems. ‘My granddaughter calculates quicker than an abacus,’ her grandmother often proudly exclaimed.