Thai Horse (40 page)

jo sahn

As they headed back downriver, darkness settled over the boat like a shroud. Cohen and Hatcher had stripped off their wet clothes. Now they were huddled in the cabin of the big boat to keep warm. Daphne had remained on deck.

‘I can’t believe you do this kind
o
f
thing for a living,’ Cohen said.

‘Did,’ Hatcher corrected.

‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re still doing it,’ Cohen said. ‘In the last twenty-four hours I’ve had all the excitement I’ll ever need.’

‘If it’s any consolation, so have I,’ Hatcher said with a smile. ‘Got any brandy on this tub?’

‘All I’ve got is some Amaretto.’

‘Not on an empty stomach.’

Cohen huddled deeper into the blanket. He stared at Hatcher for a moment and then said, ‘Give it up, Hatch.’

‘Give what up?’

‘Don’t be thick.’

‘I told you, before, China, I can’t do that.’

‘Yeah, I know. Honor, integrity, old school tie. Isn’t it a little late for that?’

‘It’s not a little late for Murph if he’s in trouble.’

‘You heard what the Dutchman said. He was a junkie!’

‘He said he thought he was doing a little pot, for God’s sake.’

‘And collaborating.’

‘All guesswork.’

‘God, you really are giving him the benefit of the doubt. You know enough already to
—,

‘Look, here’s all I
know,’
Hatcher said, cutting him
off. ‘I
know
that Cody
could have gotten out that plane fifteen years ago. I have
reason to
believe
that he was in the Huie-kui camp and that Taisung was his warden and the girl was with him there. I
know
a man named Wol Pot claims to have seen Cody in Bangkok and now Taisung is in Bangkok calling himself Wol Pot. I also
know
that Windy Porter was tailing him and got killed for his trouble, probably by a Chiu Chao killer. And I have reason to
believe
that Wol Pot may have ‘worked for Tollie Fong and got in trouble and that’s why he came to us. You put that all together, China, and that’s good enough reason for me to go to Bangkok.’

‘You also
know
that Tollie Fong’ll kill you on sight.’

‘He made a promise,
yen
dui yen,
to lay off both of us.’

‘And you trust his word? His
c
h’uang tzu-chi
ends only when one of you dies. A blood oath, Christian. If necessary he’ll create an excuse to break the
yen
dui yen.
C’mon, don’t act naive.’

‘China, when I set out on this job, I didn’t believe for a minute that Murphy was alive. Then I had doubts. Now the equation is swinging the other way. Now I think he is alive. And if he is, I’ll find him. And fuck Tollie Fong.’

‘Be sure to kill him first.’

Hatcher reached over and ruffled Cohen’s hair. ‘I love you too, buddy,’ he said. ‘I always seem to be taking something away from my friends, never giving anything back.’

‘It’s always worked both ways.’

‘That’s a kind thing to say.’

‘Kind my ass, don’t get maudlin,’ Cohen said. ‘We lost you once. Then we found you. Now we’re going to lose you again, this time for good. I know that, so does Daffy.’ He waved his hand toward the deck. ‘Why don’t you go say good-bye to her.’

He lowered his head, staring at the
fl
oor, and shrugged the blanket up around his ears.

‘Thanks, China.’

‘Yep.’

Hatcher started out the door. Cohen did not look up. He said, ‘I’d like to know you’re safe and sound on that island of yours. How about a call when it’s over, if you can still whisper.’

These were people who loved him e
n
ough to risk dying for him, and there was no proper way to say goodbye. Each clue took him closer to the past and then led him further away from it. But Hatcher had no choice. His mission was to find Murph Cody, and -there were no more answers in Hong Kong, the answer had to be in Bangkok. And the closer Hatcher got to solution, the more he feared what it would be.

She was sitting in the bow, watchi
n
g the wake boiling behind the boat in the moonlight. He sat down beside her and, holding the blanket, wrapped it around her shoulder and pulled her to him.

‘Was it worth it, Hatcher?’ she asked

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘It confirmed a lot of questions.’

‘Such a price!’

‘Yes, isn’t that always the way it is.’

They sat quietly for a while and then she asked, ‘Do you have a woman?’

Hatcher hesitated for a moment. Was Ginia
his
woman? She certainly would object to the ter
m
. But in his heart, Hatcher now realized he had made an unspoken commitment to her. He had never expressed it, but she
was
his woman. He felt for her, wanted to care for her, to make her happy. He wanted some semblance of permanence in his life. Ginia meant all these things and more.

‘Yes,’ he said finally.

‘You had to think a long time.’

‘I’ve never really thought about it before,’ he said. ‘I’ve assumed a lot.’

‘What is her name?’

‘Ginia.’

‘Ginia,’ she repeated, as if testing the name. ‘And what is she like?’

‘Very independent. Very smart.’

‘Beautiful?’

‘Yes. But not in the same way you are.’

‘I do not understand that.’

Hatcher tried to think of a way to describe the difference between the exotically alluring Daphne and the naturally beautiful Ginia. Finally he said, ‘She does not take a man’s breath away as you do.’ Not exactly true, but a permissible white lie.

‘You are diplomatic with time,’ she said with a smile. ‘Does she understand you as I did?’

‘She doesn’t know anything about my past.’

‘Or your friends?’

‘Or my friends.’

‘And will you ever tell her?’

‘I suppose someday, if it seems proper.’

‘Do you love her, Hatcher?’

That stopped him. These were questions he had never asked himself; now Daphne was forcing him to deal with them.

‘That would be something new for me, eh, Daffy?’ he answered, avoiding a specific response. ‘The kind of love you’re talking about has been missing from my life for a very long time, if it was ever there at all.’

‘It was there, Hatcher. You never let anyone see that side of the coin, but I got a peek a few times. And China says you are two people. The man we all see and the man nobody sees. Does Ginia see that other man?’

‘I think that’s the only one she does see.’

‘Then she is very lucky.’

‘I still seem to be doing the same old things.’

‘There is a difference. There was a time when you seemed to
. . .‘
She hesitated, trying to find the right word.

‘Enjoy it?’ He finished the sentence for her.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Enjoy it.’

‘Perhaps. But nothing is accomplished by looking back. What’s done is done.’

He took her cheek in the palm of one hand and turned her to him.

‘I love you, Daphne. You have
n
ever escaped my thoughts. But I never thought of us
i
n
any settled-down kind of way. That kind of sharing? Hell, neither one of us ever seemed to want that.’

She looked
away.
Speak for
yourself,
she
thought, but she said nothing, and Hatcher realized that in trying to
b
e honest he had hurt her. To him, the relationship with Daphne had been like a long one-night stand for both of them, a wartime romance with no future and no permanent commitment. Now it was too late. He had made another world for himself, a world so different from hers that there could be no place in it for her, no hope of a permanent relationship between them. Life on his island would bore her to death. Besides, he had once cut his ties with this dark and dangerous world, the world of Daphne, China Cohen, Harry Sloan and the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, a world that was her whole existence. Now he had to cut those same ties again.

‘You are right, we were never interested in that kind of sharing,’ she said, and saved him the pain of hurting her even more.

As they cruised silently through the mouth of the Macao Runs the lights of Hong Kong twinkled to their left. He stared at them as they grew closer and t
h
e skyscrapers took shape in the darkness.

‘I will get off first,’ she said. ‘They kn
o
w where to stop.’

‘Daphne

She put her fingers to his lips.

‘We have said and done it all, Hatcher,’ she whispered. ‘You will not be back this time. But I k
n
ow in my heart that it is as painful for you as it is for us.
Choi qui see yong qup haipon.’

The Chinese said it well: ‘Killing the past scars the soul.’

339

S
et honour in one eye and death i’ the other, And I will look on both indifferently.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Act
1
, Scene 2

THE JUDAS FLOWER

In April the winds sweep down the mountainsides of northern Thailand, chasing away the last of the monsoon clouds and wafting across the fields of red, white and purple flowers. The flowers sway like rows of ballet dancers as the sun burns down on them and they burst into bloom and the mountainsides arid fields become a tapestry of color.

But like some species of
butterflies
that live only for a single day, the flowers die quickly, each leaving behind a pale green seed pod that looks like an onion on a stick. In the months before April the plants toil day and night to produce alkaloids, which are stored in these seed pods. When the pod is cut, the milky alkaloid oozes out and quickly dries and darkens.

When the petals fall, the hill people in their flat straw hats appear on the steep slopes where the flowers grow and move through the rows, slicing the sides of the pods and gathering the thick sap with ir
o
n spoons before it hardens.

General Dao, the
phu yai ban
of the Hsong hill tribe had watched the previous spring as his villagers tapped the pods. As village headman it was his custom to sit like a god on his black horse on the crest of the hill with the strap of his M
-
14 draped around his shoulders like a sling, his arms resting on the butt and barrel of his weapon, observing the harvest while his two shotgun guards sat nearby. The guards took turns scanning the sky and valley with powerful binoculars, watching for signs of federal troops or helicopters, while below, on the sides of the hill known as Powder Mountain, the field workers tapped the pods.

As
phu yai ban,
Dao was elected by his fellow villagers. Like his father, he settled disputes of every kind, listened to the problems of his villagers, and negotiated for the Hsong with the o
ut
side world. The Hsong were part of a tribal sect called the Phui Thong Luang, the Spirits of the Yellow Leaves, a small, elusive group whose isolation had enabled them to maintain customs and traditions that were centuries old.

Dao was a compact man, hardened, as were all the Hsong people, by the harsh life of the mountains. He was thirty-seven and looked fifty-five, although he was still handsome, with a face that was a bronze square, a wide mouth and a broad, flat nose. He preferred dark green military clothing to traditional garb, as did his men. His black hair was wrapped with a red bandanna. Occasionally he would take the binoculars and watch the women workers, who wore brightly colored blouses with striped yokes, colorful pants fitted tightly around the hips and draped at mid-calf
—
called
pasin
and resembling old- fashioned pedal pushers
—
and large, flamboyant turbans of gaily colored material woven with silver beads.

The sap they were gathering was opium gum.

The natural alkaloid was morphine.

And the pretty little purple, white and red flowers were
Papaver somniferum,
which proliferate like weeds in Southeast Asia. No innocent garden flowers, the somniferum poppy is a metaphor for the best and worst in man, a symbol of good and evil. It is both heaven and hell contained in a white pod that is not much bigger than a man’s thumb. Like the mythical song of the Sirens, the promise is alluring but the reality is deadly, for while opium begets painkilling morphine, it also begets heroin.

Dao did not know any of the statistics or demographics of drug use. He did not know where his packages were going, who would buy them, or who would eventually use the product of his crop. He had never heard of a spike or a jolt or a rush or a high or uppers, downers, hash, pot, boo, toot, coke, smack, crack, H, horse, lid, hit, popping, chipping, mainlining, tripping, acid or poppers. He did not know that his crop might kill some pitiful junkie half of a world away or that teenage gangsters might die in the street fighting over an ounce of the white powder that would eventually be refined from the sap of the little flowers. He had never seen a hypodermic needle. It was the cash crop of the village and had been for years, and to Dao and the rest of the Hsong tribe there was nothing wrong with selling it.

But the government had said it was wrong and had begun a program to coerce farmers into growing coffee, mushrooms and maize instead of p
o
ppies. There had been trouble in the hills. The Leums and the Lius and many other hill tribes had been attacked by the army and had their crop confiscated and burned, but the government had never approached Dao. His tribe was large and controlled a difficult, rugged section of the mountains. He was a fiery and independent leader as well as a dangerous adversary. Dao controlled only 250 hectares of poppy fields
—
about a hundred acres
—
hardly enough to start a war over. Besides that, the young general, as
phuyai ban,
was supposed to report to the government’s district director, but two years earlier he had expelled the
nai amphoe
fr
o
m Hsong and the government had never replaced the
m
an.

But the young general still followed the same precautions. When the sky had turned red and the river sparkled like gold, Dao rode dow
n
to a small hooch located at the center of the fields and went inside. The place smelled sweet like new-mown grass. The opium gum had been brought there and wrapped in one-and-a- half-kilogram packages called
joi.
There it would retain its potency indefinitely unless refined.

The packages of gum, which looked like dark brown cake icing, were stacked in saddlebags. A ten-kilo package of gum and another containing one kilo of the same substance lay on the wrapping table. Dao took out a knife and twisted the point into one of the packages, drawing back a small, sticky dab, which he rolled between his fingers until it was a small ball called a
goli.
He put it under his tongue, closed his eyes and sucked on it, rolling it around in his mouth. Then he smiled. Excellent.

That night the packages were loaded on mules, and before dawn, Dao and four of his most trusted men led the mules off through the forest toward the House of the Golden Lady. They rode for two hours through dense brush, staunch spears of bamboo as tall as pine trees, enormous teak trees choked with crawling vines. They rode along paths only the best-trained eyes could spot, paths that were
crawling
with deadly krites and patrolled by black panthers and tigers.

They stopped when they heard the familiar deep rumble through the towering overgrowth ahead, tethered their horses and walked the last mile as though mesmerized by the rumble, which finally crescendoed into a roar. When at last they broke out of the jungle, they were at the mouth of a deep, rocky gorge, veiled by sprays of mist that billowed out around them from the thundering waterfall called the Golden Lady at the far end of the vale. Struggling over slippery rocks at the edge of the river until the earth was trembling underfoot, they finally found the entrance to the cave known as the House of the Golden Lady.

Hsong leaders had been hiding their opium gum here for centuries. Now the place was better than ever, for it was not only suicidal to reach on foot but inaccessible to government choppers. They stacked the
joi
of opium gum deep in the cave, covered them with straw paper, and there they remained until the time to deal.

Now it was fall and the previous day the Chiu Chao boss had sent his messenger to the Hsong village to request a meeting. Dao had sent the Straw Sandal back to his boss with the kilo of gum as a gesture of goodwill, so they could check the quality.