Bangkok Burn (3 page)

The Poo Yai noticed the little old man and asked him to come out to the front and explain to everyone how it is that he alone is not afraid of his wife. The little old man shuffled to the front, his eyes darting left, right, and back to the door. The mayor lowered the microphone a little and said, “So come on tell us the secret.”

The little old man took the microphone, and in a quavery voice said, “Well, this morning when I got up. My wife said, there’s a secret male-only meeting being held at the town hall today and every male in the town will be asked by that fool of a mayor.” At saying this he shrugged apologetically towards the mayor, who in return shrugged his shoulders, nodding his understanding, and waving at him to continue speaking. The old man continued, “So my wife told me, that when that fool of a mayor asks you to raise your hand, if you’re afraid of your wife. I do not want you to raise your hand. So that was why I didn’t raise my hand.”

Thai women have carefully cultivated and crafted a legend around their being innocent demure females. They get together for card games and laugh about it.

An ice cold fear went through me. Uncle Mike. He wasn’t involved, well, not directly, in the family business but he was known, in certain circles, to be “family”. Chai looked at me; we had that kind of understanding. Por had put us together when I was six. We’ve been on the street together since then. I raised a fist with my thumb to my ear and my little finger to my mouth. Chai handed me a cell phone. I dialed Uncle Mike’s number. I checked the time on the cell.
Four am
. It rang, and rang, and rang some more, until a polite recording of a female voice said to leave a message. He slept with his phone on. Always. I’d never not been able to reach him.

All thought of sleep vanished. I felt a deep shame for not thinking of Uncle Mike. I remembered Por’s simple words, ‘Too busy to go and see your uncle’, and here I was too busy to even think of him. Shame and anger: ‘Griengjai’.

***

It was mid-morning before all the preparations were made. These are tough times in Thailand. Yesterday another M-79 was fired. These seemingly random attacks had been going on for weeks. All part of the red shirt versus every other color that Thai politics had divided itself into. These attacks had put a strong military and police presence on the roads. Clearance to drive Por and myself, armed, out of Bangkok, to the East and the South was needed. Clearance cost money or favor; sometimes both.

Mother finished another call to Aunt Malee, distributing orders like a general in a live fire zone, which in a way she was. She hung up without saying goodbye and hit the green phone button again, this time calling an army colonel. It was trade favor time. I recognized his name as Mother sweetly said hello. She introduced him to his wife, the daughter of her third cousin. I wasn’t paying attention and only caught the last fragment. Something about Pornsak’s college fund. If I remember right Pornsak was his son. I was too busy trying to work out who was moving on us. So far no one had showed their hand.

“All right, yes, he’ll meet you downstairs. Yes, now.” She pressed the off button on the phone with a flourish and put it on the table in front of me. Legs straddled, hands on hips, she looked down at me.

“It’s arranged. You’re to leave now. You’ll have a police escort as far as Chumphon. There’s a black VW van waiting downstairs.” Her phone beeped. She snatched it off the table, attacking the screen with her thumbs. “Okay, Beckham has checked them out. It’s all okay. Call me when you get there. Do you need money?”

I nodded and she went to the sofa. Picking up a Nike shoulder bag from the floor, she tossed it on the seat and spread it open. Then she lifted a pilot's suitcase onto the sofa, flipping open the twin back lids. 1,000 baht notes wrapped in bundles of a hundred thousand. I counted about fifty bundles before she zipped the bag and handed it to Chai. He slung it over his shoulder. I got up and gave her a deep respectful wai. I felt worried for her and was scared for her. She smiled, stepping forward, and mindful of my wounds, gave me a soft hug. Stepping back she looked deep in my eyes.

“Don’t worry. I will be fine. And Por, if Buddha wills it, will survive this. You don’t worry about us. You get well.” Then her eyes turned tough, taking me back years. “You take care of things, Chance”

“Yes, Mother.”

She leaned in close. I could feel her breathe on my ear. “Promise me. Kill them all.” Each whispered word said distinctly.

“Yes, Mother.”

Behind every powerful man, there’s a powerful woman. In Por’s case, five of them.

Tricks For Free

13 May 2010 Bangkok 11 am

We cleared Bangkok’s traffic
and were well on our way south. The VW was comfortable with in-seat DVDs and individual mp3 listening. I plugged in my earphones and sat back. It would take at least eight hours, depending on traffic, to reach Uncle Mike’s place in Phuket. It’s about 840 km or 530 miles from Bangkok. We’re cruising at a steady 160 Kph, about a hundred miles an hour. No one’s going to stop us. Everyone is profiting from our speed and uninterrupted passage. Chai's in the seat opposite me, cleaning his Uzi.

The question of who was trying to kill us was gnawing at me. I shut my eyes listening to Edgar Cruz playing Bohemian Rhapsody, singing along in my mind about it being too late, time's up and my body aching. Yeah, that’d be about right.

The most obvious choice was Big Tiger. Big Tiger was the younger of Por’s generation and hung out near the Ancient City. He’d grown in wealth and power under Por’s umbrella of peace between the gangs of Samut Prakarn, Pak Nam. Was he making his move before I came on the scene? Ironic, since I didn’t want it. According to the radio broadcast we’d heard, as we passed Hua Hin, I was dead. There’s something quite liberating about that.

Khun Por’s funeral rites and mine were announced on the news. I checked the time on my cell phone. Two hours since we’d left Bangkok. Por should be in the army hospital in Cambodia by now. It was announced the governor would send his deputy to the funeral as he had to be away on a foreign trip; code for I can’t be there but I need to show respect. All he could do in the circumstances. I received an SMS from Beckham: A-okay. The news of Por’s death was big news. Even with the red shirt stand-off and politics dominating everything, all the local Thai stations reported on the funeral.

Using my wireless Air from True Move I plugged into the social networks: HiSO and Dara facebook pages awash with the same article. Comments about tears ran freely. Many no doubt hoping that their debts had died along with Por. I turned the radio off. We understand crocodile tears. We have a farm of them. An SMS from Mother confirmed she was okay. We’d brought ten new phones on the way out of town, and Chai had stocked up on SIM cards, spending the first part of the trip out of Bangkok sending the numbers to Beckham, Mother and the aunts. It wasn’t likely anyone could trace the calls.

I called Uncle Mike again with no more success than the earlier times. Frustrated.

Uncle Mike and Por had run together in the early days. A New Zealander by birth, Uncle Mike had met Por a couple of years before John and Barbara. Uncle Mike only smuggled weed. Lots of it. That’s how he met Por, who supplied the weed - those days, Thai Stick, these days, Cambodian. Sailing the ocean blue from Thailand to Perth, dropping the loads off on islands before coming in to drink gin and tonics in the Royal Perth Yacht Club. He’d made a fortune and the cops never knew he existed. Until one sad day he was pulled over for speeding with fifty kilos of weed tightly packed in the boot of his car. Arrested and jailed with his trial date near, he bribed a federal judge and got bail. Por waited just over the horizon in a Thai fishing boat, the decks covered in drums of diesel. Enough to get them home.

A lot of guys who smuggle drugs never make money from it. They always reinvest and eventually they all get busted or killed. Part peer pressure, part nature of the business, they don’t know when to quit. Uncle Mike did. He put his hard earned money into land in Phuket in the late sixties - huge swathes of beachfront property. He used Joom’s name to do it. We don’t let Farang buy land in Thailand. Yeah, right. Apart from the land, he’d bought technology stocks. Everything that Warren Buffet did, he followed. It made him a very wealthy man. But you’d never know or think that the guy in shorts, flip flops and a t-shirt full of holes, riding the little Honda Dream motorbike was worth about 450 million dollars: a conservative estimate of a moving number. Some reckon, my aunts in particular, that he’s worth over a billion. Thinking of my aunts and Uncle Mike made me smile.

For years Por had tried to give one of them to Uncle Mike. When he’d send me to Phuket, he’d take the newest wife or girlfriend, sometimes both, with him, me riding in the back. He’d stay at Uncle Mike’s place, back then, a simple villa with a pool overlooking the Andaman Sea. Por would stay for a few nights and then head back, always suggesting to the aunt that she stayed on with Mike. It wasn’t that Por didn’t want them. He just wanted his best friend to have a good wife, and he’d done some pre-qualifying. The aunts weren’t opposed to the idea either. They would look at Mike with that “I promise you everything” look - another tool in the Thai women’s toolkit of Man Management. He’d smile and say nothing. Por would leave, pressing a few thousand baht in my hand, leaving me with Uncle Mike for the summer.

Bangkok time was surviving the streets, learning the rituals of structured society, and the responsibilities and intricacies of a modern mafia business. Time with Uncle Mike was learning how to be free. To abandon preconceived ideas and live simply; eat, drink, think, play, and sleep. Rock climbing in the Hindu Kush so we could watch a sunrise; Rock music at Madison Square Garden and my first joint; sailing across the Malacca Strait to Langkawi, reading Frost under a full moon, to the sound of water slopping against the hull.

When a friend calls to me from the road

And slows his horse to a meaning walk,

I don’t stand still and look around

On all the hills I haven’t hoed,

And shout from where I am, What is it?

No, not as there is a time to talk.

I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,

Blade-end up and five feet tall,

And plod: I go up to the stone wall

For a friendly visit.

With a groan that didn’t get past my lips but wracked my body, I thought again of Por’s admonishment. Frost reaching me from the grave.

He took me back to Goa, had me showered by a Yogi, for a karmic body wash. The images flashed, warmed, and scared me. Por was left brain and Uncle Mike was right brain. Is this all I will have from them, melancholy thoughts?

Suppose it wasn’t Por. Suppose it was me. The reluctant hit man had gone straight to my room, not Por’s. Was that simply because it was first in the corridor or was it the only target? I couldn’t know but it presented at least a fifty percent chance of being a problem. Staring out of the black tinted windows as the isthmus narrowed and we got closer to our goal, the road through the mountains twisted, slow, frustrating.

Dr Tom’s final instructions about rest and staying on the drip for at least two more days came to me as I took the IV Tube out of the needle. I taped the female needle to my arm - might need it later. The evening air was warm and carried the smell of Jasmine and burnt cooking oil. Patong’s lights glittered in the distance. The dirt road quiet, dusty. Uncle Mike’s house was about half a kilometer further up the road. The driver on loan from the army colonel was taking a piss on the side of the road - the splashing noisy. Chai standing next to me poked out his elbows sideways horizontally and swung sharply side to side. I heard the crack. He rolled his shoulders, and shouldering the Uzi, nodded at me. We never talked much. We didn’t need to. Given our track record of visiting people over the past 24 hours, I had decided to approach with caution. We set off.

We stuck to the dark shadow of the bushes lining the dirt road until we were a hundred meters from the house. Chai moving faster and with an impatient flick of his head at me, slipped away into the bush. Uncle Mike owned all the land around his villa and left it as it was. Free grazing for buffalo earning a fortune as a land bank. Uncle Mike hated guns almost as much as any form of authority. The Glock 17 is light, compact, and reliable. I had two of them. One in a shoulder holster supplied by the Colonel, and the one in my hand. Slide racked back ready to fire. Some things I agreed with Khun Por and some things with Uncle Mike. Guns I went with Khun Por. Uncle Mike lived in paradise. We lived in Pak Nam.

Uncle Mike’s villa was surrounded by a twelve foot high wall made of red brick. The sliding gate was metal alloy, colored to look like teak, with a door set into it. I tried the handle on the door. It opened. The front of the villa was dark. Uncle Mike had to be missing or worse. I kept to the side of the sandstone paved driveway, staying on the grass. I edged around the deck and to the steps leading to the front door. The smell of death came heavy, crushing the Jasmine-scented air. I walked up the steps, Glock ready but knowing there was nothing there.