Black Tiger (43 page)

The next moment the mob swept into the alleyway, surging toward us. I seized
Tsu mu
’s hand and we began to run like two frightened children, staring wildly around for somewhere to hide.

A huge spirit house stood on a pink pedestal in the centre of the courtyard. It was wreathed in garlands, littered with food offerings and half-full bottles of 7-Up, the fragrant incense sticks still smoking.
Tsu mu
and I clung together behind the spirit house platform, cowering, as the mob surged past us down the lane. In the distance we heard the crash and tinkle of breaking glass, yells of pain and anger, a percussion staccato of sticks and stones on wood and metal. Then the piercing screams began. Beneath the screams, somewhere at the dark, confused centre of the racket, there emerged a constantly repeated cry, a groundswell of contrapuntal rhythm: ‘Kill, kill, kill the Jeks! Kill the Jeks!’

The image of Ah Lee, her hair and clothing ablaze, assaulted my consciousness like a physical blow. Suddenly nauseous, I retched with terror. My mouth was dry, and I gulped greedily for air like a diver too long submerged. I glanced at my grandmother. Ah Lee had boasted often that the Honourable Old Lady’s slender eyes were the ideal of Chinese beauty. Now they were as wide as a feverish child’s. There was a reddening blaze on her parchment cheek.

With relief, I became aware that the cries of the rioters were growing distant again. Mercifully, they had passed, surging on in their murderous quest. Silently, we eased ourselves from our hiding place and made our cautious way along the deserted street. We reached the crèche without incident. Nobody came into the street. The houses stood silent, their windows covered.
Tsu mu
rattled the door of the crèche, then rapped briskly on a windowpane, sharply and persistently. Minutes passed as we stood in silence, our hearts in our mouths. We were both trembling. I felt hollow and slightly sick. Finally the bamboo curtain was twitched aside. The lemon-pale face of a young girl peeked out at us without recognition, eyes rolling, blank with fear.
Tsu mu
pushed her face close to the window. She announced clearly, in a voice that brooked no demur: ‘It is I, Sunii Lee. Collect your wits, girl. Do not leave me standing in the street.’

The curtain fell. We stood in the empty street, horribly vulnerable. At last the bolts crashed back and the door opened. The supervisor of the crèche, a neatly dressed, middle-aged Chinese woman, stood aside politely to let us pass. As soon as we were inside she reached past us with a muttered apology. The bolts slammed back into place behind us.

‘Honourable Sunii—too much honour!’ the supervisor murmured. ‘Come in, come in. Are you in good health?’

‘I have received your enquiry,’ my grandmother acknowledged the courtesy.

‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes, I am ashamed to say.’ There was reassurance in the formula. I felt torn between impatience and familiar relief.

‘Here you will be safe,’ the supervisor said.

‘We are blessed in our friends. The blind cat stumbles on the dead rat,’
Tsu mu
said.

‘The honour is ours.’ The supervisor turned on her heel and led the way into a simply furnished inner room. A bare light bulb glared from the ceiling. I wondered, irrelevantly, how we Chinese, so exquisite in matters of form and colour, remain impervious to the barbarity of unshaded light bulbs. Returning from the West, I found myself constantly shielding my eyes against that glare in rooms full of priceless inlaid furniture, porcelain, and silk. I dropped my head, allowing my hair to block out the brightness.

‘Please sit!’ the supervisor cried, in a display of frenzied hospitality. The maid who had first looked out at us stood by, shifting her feet; the supervisor clapped her hands almost in the maid’s face. ‘Drink tea!’

‘With thanks.’
Tsu mu
seated herself neatly, folding her hands on her lap with doll-like dignity, as if this were a social call, mob rule and mayhem a thousand worlds away.

The maid scampered off. The supervisor sighed. ‘People have lost their minds, lady! Lies, slanders…such hatred, such violence!’

‘Evil will be rewarded with evil, lady,’
Tsu mu
said. ‘Perhaps not immediately, but eventually.
Ji suo bu yu, wu shi yu ren
! As you treat others, so will they treat you!’

The supervisor nodded. For a while we all sat in silence, considering the Confucian principle of reciprocity, while the rioters, murder in their hearts, ravaged Bangkok’s Chinatown. I knew my companions were remembering other days, other Chinatowns.

The supervisor raised her eyes to the wooden ceiling, as if in prayer. ‘Poor Mr Chang—tailor, next street—murdered. Last time the madness took them. Stabbed with his own scissors! Terrible!’ She shuddered.

‘Indeed. Alas, that we should see such times come again. I myself have today lost a worthy soul who grew old in the service of the Lee family. I must speak to Wong Kao, and arrange for the collection of the corpse.’

The supervisor exclaimed, with a burst of animation, ‘Nothing easier! Why, Mr Wong Kao is already seeking refuge in our humble home. It is fortuitous.’

‘Indeed, I am blessed in my friends!’

The maid, her eyes rolling with terror, bore in the tea. Her mistress slapped her cheek, lightly but firmly. ‘Ask Mr Wong Kao to join us, girl!’

Mr Wong Kao bustled in, sweating with excitement and fear, mopping his brow with a grubby bandana. Immediately embarrassed by this article of coolie’s clothing in the presence of distinguished ladies, he sought a place of concealment for it about his person. His options were limited, dressed as he was, for business rather than socialising, in a vest and white trousers. He compromised by binding the bandana about his ankle and dropping his trouser leg over it, hoping thus to escape attention.

‘Ah! Ladies!’ he exclaimed.

I had heard of, but never previously encountered, the famous funeral director, that excellent servant of the dead. I think I had expected someone more prosperous-looking, fatter, with greater gravitas, befitting his noble calling. But I could not fault the solemnity with which he listened to Grandmother’s account, pursing his lips, nodding gravely. The sweat rolled unheeded into his eyes.

Tsu mu
explained that her servant Ah Lee, sharer of the family name, had died valiantly, in the evening of her life, defending her employer’s property. She should be treated with all honour. Wong closed his eyes in respect. Only when the narration reached the account of the destruction of the Mercedes was his professional impassivity shocked into animation. His whole skinny frame shook with outrage.

‘I shall personally arrange for a paper Mercedes to be burned with the One Who Has Left the World,’ he assured. ‘Then she can drive it around heaven!’ He looked from one face to the other, spreading his hands, as if to say,
Well, I can’t say fairer than that, can I?

Tsu mu
smiled faintly at the absurdity of the notion—Ah Lee behind the wheel, racketing about heaven. I had a sudden uncontrollable urge to giggle.
I am growing hysterical
, I thought weakly.
My mind is breaking down.

‘Let it be pink,’
Tsu mu
said. ‘Ah Lee never wore pink, but she was nevertheless very partial to that colour. And there must be a paper ship, to sail her soul back home. And a hill of silver, of course, from which she can draw funds, during her sojourn in the Other World.’ I recognised, in my grandmother’s attention to detail, her need to make these arrangements, as if drawing comfort from her own meticulousness.
Tsu mu
and my
amah
had seen each other’s faces for many years, had been young and then old together.

Wong bowed low. ‘How else may this unworthy person serve? Servants in effigy, perhaps?’

‘Servants in effigy will not be required. Ah Lee was a woman of the people. But let her have a house, and a safe for the money she draws from the hill of silver. That is very important. Ah Lee was always careful about money.’

Wong bowed again. ‘All will be ready for burning twenty-one days from today, the death-day, when the priests jump. Although, with all this terrible violence…’ A gleam of avarice lighted the little man’s beady eyes briefly. ‘Things are not easy!’

‘People suffer; fortunately, business does not always suffer,’
Tsu mu
suggested flatly.

‘The craftsmanship will be of the highest level,’ Wong assured her hastily, with a sharp look. ‘Everything exquisite! As befits the worthy servant of an honourable house!’

‘Seems a waste, when it’s all just going to go up in flames,’ I blurted out ungraciously. These complicated arrangements, this lavish expense, seemed to have little to do with the real Ah Lee. They seemed almost a betrayal of her lifelong frugality—she who would beat down the price of a pineapple in Pratumwan market, for the gain of two satang and the satisfaction. Ah Lee, a woman as scathing of vanity and waste as any nun, as starkly courageous as any martyr, dying for her own notions of righteousness, a lone protest against a world gone mad. ‘Waste!’ I repeated, twitching my feet irritably. ‘Ah Lee would think it a waste!’

Tsu mu
flashed me a look of mild outrage. ‘My granddaughter enjoys the benefits of a Western education,’ she observed dryly. The harsh rebuke delivered before other people stung, as it was intended to. The supervisor jumped up and rushed about replenishing teacups in embarrassment. Wong busied himself with his notes, clearing his throat.

‘I take pride in carrying on the craft of my ancestors. For how long, who can tell? Demand is slackening, especially here. Irreligious land, irreligious times, lady! All pop and plastic nowadays! But I still take pride in it. It’s a useful occupation for a worthless man. Reminds him that death has an appointment with each of us. We should never forget that!’

‘Indeed,’
Tsu mu
quoted smoothly. ‘The wary avoid death. The reckless are as good as dead.’ The sound of rolling thunder invaded the street, reverberating off the house walls.

‘The riot squad! So it’s over!’ The supervisor tweaked the slats of the bamboo curtain and squinted at the scene outside.

‘Over for now, perhaps!’ Grandmother did not sound convinced. I joined my grandmother at the window. Lifting a corner of the curtain, I peered out at the tanks lurching through the street like gigantic reptiles, crushing their tiny prey. The street was narrow; there was a mere eighteen inches between the vehicles and the wall. Tanks, guns, helmets, even the soldiers’ faces: all seemed composed from the same dirty grey-green putty—featureless, alien, a menace out of proportion to the narrow alleyways, crashing like a trapped electric storm.

When the column had rolled by, my grandmother rose. ‘It is time for us to leave. Thank you for your hospitality.’ She extracted her wallet from her purse. ‘Allow me to contribute a trifling donation toward your excellent work.’

‘Honourable Lady,’ Wong Kao burst out excitedly, ‘how will you get home? Your car! Your fine Mercedes car! A tragedy! I only have my poor hearse, but it is at the ladies’ disposal. Most gladly, if unworthy!’

Wong Kao possessed a hearse of the latest model. He now reversed this precious example of modernity gingerly from its place of concealment behind his shop.
Tsu mu
, smiling archly to indicate that this was certainly not loss of face but rather an absurd whimsical fancy, took the front seat beside Wong Kao. So, although Wong apologised profusely and fussed with rugs and an embroidered pillow, there was nothing for me to do but to scramble in and lie on the space normally occupied by the coffin. As the hearse trundled through the streets, I lay on my back studying its polished wooden ceiling. The inside of the hearse smelled faintly of polish, flowers, and an unidentifiable, pungent chemical. It was not unpleasant, not unlike the smell of the refectory at the convent. But the reality of death, the image of leaping flames, and of Ah Lee, silhouetted against them, dominated my thoughts.

An impatient Colonel Sya Dam scowled about at the eighth hole of the Hua Hin golf course. He checked his watch and set off toward his rendezvous, stomping purposefully over the artificially watered green, oblivious to the divots thrown up by his heavy military boots. He walked where he pleased.

In the distance, nestling soft and palest rose-pink amid its bright flower gardens beside a gleaming blue and silver sea, lay the Royal Summer Palace of Klai Kangwon, Sans Souci. The two men meeting him had already dispatched their caddies in search of refreshment. They were comfort-loving men whose chauffeurs had been instructed to bring up the cars so it was a shorter walk from the final tee. Sya took up a position atop a bunker, so that they were forced to blink into the sun, and, when they reached him, they were obliged by his elevation to look up at him, despite their superior birth. He noted their ill-concealed resentment at this gross breach of etiquette, and his smile broadened.

‘Well, gentlemen?’ he said. The other men recognised the invitation to report the state of play.

‘I think we can credit ourselves with a great success in pinning it on the Chinese,’ Prince Premsakul said, wringing his plump paws in satisfaction. He did not need to spell it out, to state, damningly, where the blame for the massacre of the students at the Monument to Democracy lay. Neither of his companions would have expected him to. To lose a daughter like that…a charming girl, though headstrong, a Princess of the Blood, and alas, the fat princeling’s only remaining child—making such a tragic spectacle of herself, hobnobbing with Reds, rebels, enemies of the state for all to see. Field Marshal Praphan, an emotional and sentimental man, harrumphed in sympathy and covered the sound with a cough.

‘Naturally, the Chinese business community were aiming to establish a branch of the Hong Kong Triads, whose functions would include undermining confidence in the government,’ Praphan contributed helpfully.

‘We need to tighten security,’ Premsakul pronounced. Praphan bristled, blowing out his field marshal’s moustache. ‘But it must be done with subtlety.’ Premsakul raised a hand and described minute circles in the heavy air to indicate the nature of this quality.