Black Tiger (45 page)

Somehow I endured it, struggling to keep my looks and my pride, because without them I had nothing.

I discovered there was another aspect to Akha life besides opium. There were three government-subsidised transistor radios in the village. Whenever Sya Dam was due to speak from Bangkok, groups of men gathered, grunting approval, thumping staves and bare feet on the ground, occasionally shouting. I was amazed to see those grim zombies aroused to such animation, as most of the time they drifted through their aimless days in drug-riddled apathy, apart from spasmodic outbreaks of violence, generally directed against a weaker creature, dog or woman.

I began to wonder what Sya was preaching that got them so excited—surely not the official doctrine of centralisation, loyalty, and stability. I began to suspect he was denouncing political corruption at the centre, discrimination against ethnic minorities, and calling for independence for ethnic groups. I hadn’t forgotten his fabled loyalty, his professed hatred of the Chinese, but I started to speculate about just where his true allegiance lay. I stored every scrap of information I could glean for future use.

Meanwhile, I had to endure my odious husband. As my fear and hatred of him grew, I became more deeply resolved to make a bid for freedom. I would shake him off like some loathsome insect. I steeled myself to his taunts and blows, his disgusting physical presence. Planning escape and revenge kept my spirit alive.

One thing was clear: only Vasit’s death could set me free. I would have to kill him. The thought held no terror for me, no moral dilemma. Living with Vichai had schooled me well in the ways of dealing death, both secret and overt. Daggers, guns, poisons, ropes, concrete boots. Death by water, death by fire. He taught me that anything at hand could be utilised. There were a thousand methods, a thousand weapons, many of them surprisingly simple. Fleischer had perfected my techniques in boot camp. When the moment came, I always knew I would be unafraid. My hand would be steady to strike, my heart strong.

I hoped they would suspect the idiot maidservant, Pawn, at first. This would buy me time. But unless I could make it to civilisation, I could not escape the Akha for long. Panic surged through me, filling me with a desperate energy as I ran.

Salikaa’s assumption was right: at first, the tribesmen had, indeed, accused Pawn. However, the absence of Salikaa was suspicious, and they set out to pursue her. They tracked her headlong flight without difficulty, spread out in a circle among the young trees, and closed in on her. She made a couple of breaks for freedom but knew she was cornered. She pressed her back against a tree trunk, panting, and then they were on her. Though she fought like a tigress, biting, clawing, and kicking, they dragged her back, half-fainting with fear and exhaustion. They tossed her into a hut under guard to await judgement.

As the nearest and most distinguished kinsman of the victim, they sent an urgent message for Colonel Sya to officiate at her trial. Two days later, during which time Salikaa had been given neither food nor water nor toilet facilities, during which she reeked and raved and bit her own arm and sucked the blood to wet her parched lips, a helicopter clattered over the hillside. The pilot dropped Sya Dam at the clearing and swooped away as fast as he could. He had seen the Akha from a distance, and had no wish to renew the acquaintance. Shortly thereafter, Sya Dam, the sun glinting off his cap badge, strode into the village wearing a pristine uniform and an impatient scowl. He met and talked gravely with the elders. Robed in their filth-encrusted black and silver, these were men of stout heart in their own territory. They did not flee in terror but stood their ground, even when the great metal bird alighted noisily out of the skies. Sya smoked the greeting pipes of opium they brought and accompanied the elders through the jungle to the village.

He took with him only one attendant: Archin, huge, mad Archin, with his loose, twitching face and rolling eyes. Archin who in his cups had prostrated himself before Sya, and had lifted Sya’s boot and placed it upon his own sturdy neck—Archin who feared every kind of ghost and spirit, but worshipped no god but Sya.

In Archin the Akha people found a kindred spirit. He proved himself a cut above other Thais, those city types and milk-sops. For example, he not only enjoyed beating up women, but he had a craftsman’s appreciation for the arts of torture and killing. He displayed an admirable indifference to creature comforts and cared not what he ate; he slept curled up upon the ground, snoring like a happy hog. He picked maggots out of the rotten fish and devoured them appreciatively, with a rumbling chuckle. He made a good tribesman. When the finer points of the execution procedure were explained to him, he savoured these with the relish of an Akha. Throughout Salikaa’s brief trial, he observed his colonel’s every gesture, squatting untidily like a large, faithful dog among the tribesmen.

Salikaa, steeped in filth and faint with hunger, sat ramrod straight and unflinching. She faced Sya stoically. Solemnly she listened as the evidence was presented. Gravely Sya studied her face for any sign of remorse, for any hint of fear. Her gallantry mocked him until the moment when he said, ‘
Khun
Salikaa, are you aware of the tribal punishment for a wife who murders her husband? They will bury you alive, with the corpse of your victim on top of you. You understand? You will not die by suffocation, but slowly, gradually, by the contagion of putrefaction.’

She stared at him, horror dawning as he described the penalty for her offence. The effect of his words was gratifying.

The sentence was to be carried out immediately, as his presence was required in Bangkok. There would be no delay.

The women of the tribe came to wash her. Their hands were rough. In their eyes there was revulsion and horror, whether for Salikaa or for the water spirits she could not tell. They refused to meet her gaze. When they had finished, they led her out under the judgemental gaze of the elders. Sya, in his spotless uniform, stood at ease, legs slightly apart, and his hands behind his back. Salikaa made no attempt to resist. Later, she would be drugged, as she had been for the wedding—injected with poppy juice, swaying mindless through the shifting clouds of opium, every capillary tingling like fire. Now, her eyes raked their expressionless faces. There was no mercy there.

She walked obediently, occasionally stumbling on the rough ground, to the grave site. If she were put to death too near the village, the tribe dreaded the vengeance of her ghost. The group slowed as they reached the appointed spot. Somehow, Sya had gotten there before them. He stood waiting, arms folded. Beside him an open pit gaped in the red earth. Close to the grave was a vile object to which her eyes were inexorably drawn. She glanced once, shuddered, and plunged her face in her hands. Decomposition had begun. The maggots were already about their work in the dead flesh. The features of the corpse appeared to have melted and had acquired an oily green viscosity.

‘Into the grave!’ Sya commanded with quiet authority. The women, squeaking with hysteria, seized Salikaa roughly. She tried to fight them off, but they were too many. Then the men impatiently cuffed the women aside and they tumbled and scattered, screaming like monkeys. They pushed Salikaa down on her back into the pit, laughing as she clawed at them, breaking her nails. They plucked her fingers away when she tried to grasp their hands and arms. They spat on her, and dribbled in their excitement. Salikaa tensed her limbs and braced her body. She shut her eyes, half-fainting. Then she felt the dead weight drop onto her chest, felt the clammy touch of dead flesh. Close to her face, the grave-smell clogged her nostrils. She was suffocating. She could not bear to draw a breath through that stinking pall. The dead limbs pressed down. From above, the faces peered gloatingly into the grave. Through swollen, half-closed lids, her last sight was their eyes, gleaming in the half-light like wolves around a kill.

She heard Sya bark a command. Clods of red earth fell heavily, blocking out sun and air as they filled in the grave. They did not stamp the earth down firmly. As Sya had explained, the sentence was not death by suffocation. The rotting corpse of her victim must have its revenge. The husband-killer should not have a swift or easy death.

As Salikaa sank into unconsciousness, the last sound she heard was the heavy red earth falling endlessly over her head.

Sya Dam took the first watch at the graveside. When his fellow tribesmen were deep in their opium dreams, halfway through his watch, he ordered Archin to bring the servant girl. Archin returned with Pawn slumped on his shoulder. Her neck was broken and she was slung behind his head like a dead deer.

‘Sorry,’ Archin mumbled, shamefaced. He put his hands over his ears. ‘Archin hates them yelling,’ he explained. ‘Have to keep them quiet, see. Yelling, women’s yelling, hurt Archin’s head.’

‘No matter. It is well. Set her down here.’ Sya pointed to the turned earth beside the grave. ‘Now, Archin, dig away this earth.’

Archin complied. He did not need tools. His big hands were strong as spades.

‘Good,’ Sya said. ‘Now down into the pit.’

Archin’s eyes rolled in terror. He forced himself to obey, braving the evil spirits of the dead and dying, because he was even more afraid of Colonel Sya Dam. Sya stood on the edge of the pit and scrutinised Archin sternly. Archin was as superstitious as any Akha when it came to demons. Archin, still struggling to avoid unnecessary contact with the loathsome decomposing flesh, which was at the point of liquefaction, managed to drag Salikaa out from under the corpse. She was still unconscious. Her limbs were entangled with those of her former husband. He had to raise the dead man, roll him aside, and pull. Archin was not easily nauseated, but the odour of putrefaction, combined with his superstitious terror, made him vomit.

‘Is she still alive?’ Sya barked.

Archin shook his head. He wasn’t sure. She looked dead, or perhaps in a fit: her eyes were turned up, blind and marble white, like the unseeing eyes of a stone temple gargoyle. Her mouth hung open. As Archin pushed her clear of the grave, Sya bent, wiped her mouth, and pressed his own against it. He felt the breath. She was still alive.

Sya took a syringe from his pocket, filled it, and plunged it into her arm. She neither stirred nor moaned. Sya wrapped her limp form in the thick army blanket that lay at his feet.

‘Put the other one in her place, and hurry up!’ he commanded. Archin pushed Pawn’s body into the grave and kicked Vasit’s corpse in after it. Finally he picked up handfuls of red earth and threw them in. When he had filled in the grave, Sya gestured at Salikaa, wrapped in the blanket. Archin carried her shrouded form to the Land Rover concealed in the margins of the forest, which Sya had commandeered days ago.

It was a rough ride over the unmade tracks, and at a breakneck speed, though Sya was used to worse. He had no time to waste. This Salikaa business had been an unwelcome interruption to his plans. He was involved in a high-risk venture in the corridors of power. He could not afford diversion; he needed to be on the spot. It was imperative that he return to Bangkok as quickly as possible. As he raced against time, preoccupied, driving like an automaton, he considered his position.

Happily for them, his passengers gave him no trouble. The drugged girl lay as one dead; the big man had fumbled in his shabby pants for the pipe presented to him by his new Akha friends, and now slumped in his seat, slack-faced. Occasionally he belched and chuckled softly in his dreams. The hazy sweetness of opium permeated the air until Sya, too, felt lightheaded.

Chee Laan had spent two days since the Chinatown riots moving her desk and files into the new office she had been given in the cosseted luxury of the Rachanee Hotel, on the very top floor of the building. She still felt a sense of unreality, as though she had stepped into a parallel universe. The violence and tragedy she had witnessed only forty-eight hours previously seemed a bad dream. But Chee Laan’s nerves were ragged. A series of dreadful images and sensations—the death of Ah Lee, the terror she had felt in the riot, the roar of the fire, the shouts and screams of the mob—flickered through her mind like a horror film playing on a loop she could not stop, even in the seclusion of her new executive suite.

Only the penthouse suite, on the same floor but on the opposite side of the building, offered such privacy and such a breathtaking panorama over the city. Chee Laan’s new office had two floor-to-ceiling glass walls swathed in purple Thai silk drapes. Outside the glass walls lay the roof garden, which commanded a view of the intricate mosaic of houses, crowded streets, and khlongs. At the garden’s centre, ringed by flowers in tubs and small palm trees, was a smooth, bare plateau, which Chee Laan had often considered would make a splendid helicopter pad. The windows of her office suite could be covered and the view blocked out at the touch of a switch, which released huge blackout blinds. But Chee Laan needed light about her just now.

Without realising what she was doing, she rose and began to pace about the room, picking things up and putting them down again, rearranging. She aimed a kick at a carved wastebin. She rolled down the blackout blinds and snapped them up back up again with a satisfying noise, and would have done it over and over but she pulled up, telling herself that it was not a toy and she would break the mechanism and the system had cost a lot of money to install. She could just imagine her grandmother’s disapproval, and Ah Lee’s growl of remonstrance. At the thought of Ah Lee, she gave a dry sob.

She closed the blinds again to shut out distractions and turned her new music centre on full blast. Joni Mitchell’s mesmerising lilt filled the room. ‘Bows and flows of angel hair…’ She felt the room sway. Delayed shock, she told herself severely. She must not allow herself to descend into hysteria. She must move on.

She shook herself and sat down at her desk again. With a sigh she turned to the sheaf of documents already piled in her In tray.