Black Tiger (40 page)

‘Stop that bloody snivelling!’ Salikaa cried. Salikaa’s bridegroom, slumped in a corner seat, his clothing undone, giggled. He belched and tilted his head back, pursing his lips to receive the bottle. The train shuddered violently and whisky spilled down his neck.

Pawn glanced at her new master and mistress and continued to sob, but more discreetly. She was worried for the baby she’d had to leave behind, and sick with fear for herself, summarily dispatched with these terrifying people to the wild lands—inhabited by ghosts, terrorists, and the notorious tribes—by the man she feared with an almost superstitious dread, Colonel Sya Dam.

Pawn was fifteen years old. Her story was banal, typical of many Bangkok’s teenage prostitutes. At thirteen, employed as a servant in a wealthy Thai household, she was seduced by the teenage son of the family. The boy was mildly admonished. Pawn was thrown out on the street. In her new line of work, fate occasionally rewarded her with a GI, his pockets stuffed with green. She could wheedle as much out of a GI in a few hours as a maidservant earned in a month. If she got lucky, she could encourage the man to drink so much that he was incapable of exacting value for money. The next day, Pawn would roll her eyes in exaggerated admiration of his virility. All men believed that sort of lie, Pawn learned, even if the last thing they could remember was falling upstairs. Pawn liked Americans. They bought her trinkets and took her to the movies. Her baby was an Amerasian redhead, sired by a GI whose hired wife she had been for a few weeks. She’d had six rough-and-ready backstreet abortions already, and the abortionist warned her she was unlikely to survive another, so she’d let the baby happen, secretly hoping the Yank would marry her and take her to the States, which she imagined as one huge PX, crammed with desirable consumer goods and large, smiling people.

But Pawn’s luck never lasted. The spirits were against her. She’d tried, had a steel bridge hammered into her flat Asian nose, and her eyes slit, to open them out and create eyelids. These agonizing operations had cost a lot of money. Her American took her to Thai Daimaru, the glittering Japanese department store in Rajprasong Shopping Centre, to buy things for the baby. He kissed Pawn, told her to take care now, you hear, and then left.

When the little girl was born, Pawn boarded her out with an old woman who minded five other Amerasian redheads in a khlongside slum. The toothless hag was a slutty semi-retired old-timer from the Khlong Tooey circuit, who occasionally, for favoured customers, still performed fellatio. The rest of the time she reclined in a deck chair, fanning herself and chewing betel. Meanwhile, her infant charges crawled about on the slimy duckboards among the refuse and the flies. Their noses ran constantly, and their arms and legs were encrusted with sores, which never seemed to heal. But not everyone welcomed a red-haired, half-caste brat, and the woman only charged five dollars.

Now that Pawn was properly organised with a Mama-san, she could manage that. Nobody bothered the organised girls, or bullied them into giving it away for free to anyone wearing a uniform. The local police often came in for a drink with the Mama-san. When they left, they were mellow, and the back pocket under their gun holsters bulged. Every so often, the Mama-san would say it was Pawn’s turn to do her a favour and show the officers a good time.

But not on Sunday, as Sunday was Pawn’s day off. She rose late, and dressed herself in her Sunday best, and played her favourite game of respectable housewife. She collected her baby and covered its weeping sores under pink lace tights and frilly frocks and a sun bonnet, and paraded it in a push-chair, window-shopping and dreaming. And then, one Sunday, Pawn went to collect her baby, and there, instead of the old woman, sitting in the chair and fanning himself, sat Sya Dam.

She thought he’d come for some other purpose, and was about to protest that it was her day off, but he pointed to where the infants normally crept in the dirt. She saw then that there was no sign of the children, and she screamed.

Sya Dam said loudly and accusingly, ‘These children were not being cared for adequately. They are unkempt and riddled with disease.’

‘What have you done with my baby?’ She stared around, wild-eyed, as if to conjure up the vanished infants. She shouted again, with mounting hysteria, ‘Where is the old woman?’

He stood up then, towering over her. Before his natural authority, Pawn cringed, as though she were guilty of some crime.

‘She has been charged with selling babies. The children found here will be sent to a state orphanage,’ he said severely.

‘No!’ she shrieked. ‘They’ll die there. I’ve seen those places!’

‘So sorry!’ He spread his hands, staring her down impassively. ‘The law is the law.’

‘I want my baby!’ Emboldened by grief and rage, she flew at him. He caught her wrists and laughed mockingly down into her stricken face.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘if you ever want to see your child again, you must listen very carefully to what I have to say. And then you must follow instructions. Someday it may be possible to trace your child and have her returned to you. Or not…’ He allowed his voice to trail off menacingly. He let go of her wrists, and she stumbled backward, rubbing at the red finger marks left by his grip.

‘I’ll do anything you say,’ she whispered abjectly. ‘Anything.’

‘You are a sensible girl, Pawn,’ he said. ‘My officers have given me good reports of you. Many women of your kind are too stupefied by drugs or drink, or too selfish, to care about their children.’

‘My baby is all I have in the world.’ Pawn was weeping noisily. ‘What must I do?’

She was to don the black-and-white uniform of a maidservant again, and to attend Miss Thailand, the lady Salikaa, more beautiful and more vindictive than anyone Pawn had ever met. Already her arms were black and blue with Salikaa’s pinches; her dented shins ached with the impact of Salikaa’s sharp-pointed Italian shoes. As for the bridegroom, he was, if possible, even more terrifying. Learning she was to live among the Akha, Pawn’s world collapsed; she felt she had been handed her death sentence.

Now, her face still stinging from Salikaa’s slap, she huddled wretchedly on the hard wooden seat, peered out at the dramatic landscape, and wished she were brave enough to hurl herself out as the train steamed over a deep gorge and end it all. Only the thought of one day being reunited with her baby stopped her. The slow tears trickled down from her Westernised eyes. She dared not rub them again.

Raven

Why did Chee Laan decide on our excursion to Chinatown? Was she making some obscure ethnic point, or did she know what was going to happen in the city, and wanted me out of the way?

I didn’t know then, and I still don’t, though I’ve since turned it over in my mind innumerable times.

Laila Drinkwater handed me a note. I recognised Siegfried’s elegant hand. He was ‘charged by the Prince and Princess Premsakul to invite Dr Nathaniel Raven to an impromptu twenty-four-hour riverboat party to celebrate the princess’s fifth cycle birthday.’

‘That means she’s sixty,’ Laila said. ‘Premsakul never normally marks her birthday; he must have a hidden agenda, this sly old fox. Siegfried is Master of the Revels—he devises the entertainment and décor. All the diplomatic corps and the media will attend. One does not refuse Prince Premsakul.’

‘I have a prior engagement.’ I said it as casually as I could, but Laila, sharp and world-wise, knew instinctively that I planned to meet Chee Laan.

‘I’ll make your excuses to Siegfried. He will be devastated, but he will recover immediately. As will the prince. You have recently been the victim of a savage mugging. Everyone will understand. Your poor head still hurts!’

There was to be no Mercedes today. Chee Laan haggled with a passing samlor and we embarked on a noisy, smelly ride to the heart of Chinatown. We crouched, cramped together on the torn blue plastic seat. The violence of the driver’s death-defying swerves meant that our bodies were often flung against one another, and we clung, exhilarated, laughing and breathless as children on a carnival ride, with the same spice of apprehension, of pulse-quickening risk. Plunged into the bewildering hurly-burly of a country fairground, with its bustle, lights, noise, and colours, we clung to each other, daunted and impressed.

Gradually I regained focus and the hive of industry and commerce that was Chinatown began to take shape. Stalls offering books, clothing, pirated records, cosmetics, bolts of cloth, spilled over onto the narrow, crowded sidewalk. Jewellers’ shops with scarlet boards emblazoned with golden ideograms jostled with antique shops full of porcelain vases and dark furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Already the Chinese movie theatres were ablaze and blaring. Everywhere, in baggy pants and shapeless
blouson
, in miniskirts, in elegant
cheong sam
, the Chinese went about their business. Some squatted before their shops, chewing, fanning themselves with plaited rattan fans, yet it was a scene febrile with violence: above every shop, one glimpsed the metal blind, which the shopkeeper bolted to the pavement each night before retiring to his quarters over the store.

The herbalist advanced to meet us. His own medicine did not appear to have done much for him. He was sere and wizened as a gnome. He bared several yellowish, horsy teeth. Behind him, in glass cases, the coral branches of the ginseng root, pigs’ bladders, dead snakes and lizards were displayed. He handed Chee Laan a parcel, and she handed over a bundle of twenty-baht notes. He bowed and accepted them without counting them. I appreciated this courteous token of respect for Chee Laan.

He said something to her in Taechew, and she frowned. ‘He wants my grandmother to come in person,’ she said. ‘For a competent diagnosis.’

The herbalist turned to me then, and, smiling, led me to a corner. Here he produced a shiny pyramid-shaped horn. With a series of suggestive grunts and a veiled pornographic pantomime, he intimated that this was rhinoceros horn, the remedy for failing potency.

‘I’ll certainly bear your advice in mind. Should the need arise.’ I backed off smartly.

Chee Laan burst into peals of laughter. ‘He is telling you that, in less advanced cases, snake is also very effective, but the gentleman should take care to patronise only a reputable dealer, meaning himself! Unwary customers have been known to have eel palmed off on them instead.’

We left the herbalist’s, to my relief.

‘Pim claims the demand for rhino horn in love potions caused the rhino to become extinct in Thailand,’ Chee Laan said, shaking her head, though her eyes still retained the merriment she had expressed at my momentary discomfiture.

‘Doubtless because of the unreasonable demands of polygamy,’ I grinned, privately reflecting it was no wonder the countryside was so denuded of fauna and well-intentioned conservation lectures were received with blank stares.

We entered a pavement-side noodle shop, and she ordered chickens’ feet. When the legs arrived, descaled and gelatinous, with yellow claws, she showed me how to snap them neatly at the ankle joint and bite off the fleshy nub of the sole. I sucked the flesh from those chicken feet like an old China hand. I would have swallowed hemlock, I think, gazing into her dancing black eyes. I felt quite unreasonably happy and relaxed. Nancy was pushed somewhere out of sight, into some sealed compartment in the back of my mind; Sya and all his apocalyptic works, war, death, and pestilence, had temporarily ceased to gallop through the wastelands of my brain. I chewed my chickens’ feet and looked at Chee Laan Lee, and all at once, I was mellow.

I had to blow it, of course. ‘What did you buy for your grandmother?’

‘Liver medicine.’

‘What’s that made of, Malay bear spleen?’ She slanted her eyes up at me, but forbore to reply. She toyed with the gnawed chicken foot beside her bowl. ‘Chee Laan, you can’t really believe all this disgusting mumbo-jumbo?’ I burst out before I could stop myself.

‘You mean,’ she said coolly, ‘I who have enjoyed the benefits of a Western education, I should know better?’ She sighed. ‘Did you know smuggling rare animals out of Thailand to Singapore and Malaysia is as profitable as smuggling opium?’ She looked at me hard. ‘If Chinese medicine were not effective, do you suppose for one moment that my grandmother would bother with it?’

Before I could reply, a waiter placed bowls before us crispy
mae krob
and succulent white boiled noodles lustrous as silk ribbons. A group of samlor drivers sat down at the next table and called for coffee made with condensed milk and chips of ice, which was served in tall, greasy glasses. Their voices grew animated.

‘Grassroots politics.’ Chee Laan listened to the men’s talk, her head lowered. I listened, too, though they spoke so fast, and with different accents, that I had to concentrate to follow.

‘Price of rice up again,’ a villainous scarecrow in a yachting cap grunted. ‘Poor devils upcountry are starving. Here in town, at least we can make a bit extra, delivering customers to the big bosses’ whorehouses at so much a head.’

‘All right down south, though. Ant army, smuggling Thai rice into Malaysia!’ another man said, through a mouthful of noodles.

‘Ant army, my arse!’ The scarecrow spat contemptuously beneath the table, to the disgust of a skeletal striped cat that was clawing at the chair legs, purring raspingly.

‘Big deal operation. Five-truck convoys, every night since the government brought in the rice price control bill.’

‘Five trucks! How you going to get five truckloads of rice past the checkpoints?’ a fat man asked scathingly.

A huge, very dark-skinned man with the look of a Malay Straits pirate pulled the excited man down to a chair in a rough, comradely way. ‘Keep calm! We all know any official is immediately struck dumb by the sight of a hundred-baht note!’ There were shouts of laughter. When it subsided, the big man said, soberly, ‘Except, of course, for the Incorruptible. The Black Tiger.’

The others glanced about apprehensively, and one hissed, ‘Keep your voice down, Yen! Gestapo are everywhere.’