Eventually Kheng spoke:
“Well, Mr Meebor, I for one am not going on the run from the authorities for masterminding a multi-million nham bank heist and creating the biggest scandal in the history of Maklai, and possible in Feiquon as well. We’re here to get the extra that Mr Salt needs to pay for his wife in hospital. And yes, you have got the most experience at robberies, but you also have the most experience in going to jail for robbery, and that’s not something I’m trying to compete with you on. How is Mr Salt going to carry on paying for his wife’s treatment if the police are watching us all and monitoring how much money he’s spending? If we’re suspected and have to go on the run he can hardly take his wife with him if she’s sick in a hospital bed. You’ve got a respectable job now, you’ve gone straight. You need to focus on that and save yourself from further trouble. And also save the homes of Mrs Khamgenn and Mr Navey from yourself as well.”
Kheng looked on in frustration at Meebor. Meebor knew this operation was about helping Salt’s wife, and about the dream. It had all been explained and discussed before they got inside the bank. Meebor was wrong. Kheng was following the guidance of the spirits that had visited him. This was not a simple act of petty theft. It was about doing the right thing, harnessing positive energy. After all of the effort to get into the safe room, now was not the time for a big change of plan.
“Well I may have gone down for a few burglaries, but I didn’t go down for murdering someone. Before we all decide that only Mr Salt is worthy of this incredible windfall, let’s all ask ourselves why he’s so strapped for cash and not able to support his family properly in the first place. Yeah, okay, so I ended up in the clink because I was poor. Salt was in there because he killed a man!”
Mr Salt let out an exasperated sigh.
“He’s right you know, Mr Kheng. You’ve been a law abiding citizen all of your life. You served your country. Now you have the most amazing chance. You can make the rest of your time so much easier. Live in comfort. You should get as much as you can out of this. Don’t worry about me.”
“Well, Salt, that’s not how the dream worked, if you remember? I’m only in this because of the dream. There was the tree and wild boar forest spirit, the triangle for the number three, and the full moon, and the drips of gold, but just the drips of warm gold, not an entire moon-full of gold that would burn us. We’re only here for the drips. Enough to make everything all right with Mrs Salt.”
Meebor wasn’t convinced:
“And what about your Aunty ‘K’ then?”
Meebor shone the light again at Kheng, forcing him to hold up his hand to shield his eyes.
“Where does you Aunt ‘K’ fit into all of this? Currently she seems a bit absent from the interpretation of the dream story. She sounds to me like she was a fiery old battle-axe. She probably would have wanted you to take as much of this cash as you can. Invest in a lifetime supply of whisky and lay around all day getting drunk. Have you thought about that? I’m just not sure I trust you. Either of you. We hardly know each other. You got me here to show you how to climb into the safe room, and now you want me to leave with nothing! You and Salt are probably planning to come back once I’ve gone and then take it all!”
“All right, Meebor. Fine. Get that light out of my face, will you. This bickering isn’t getting us anywhere. We’re going round in circles. I suggest we should sit down and discuss this calmly. And stop waving that torch around. There might be someone daft enough to be wandering around in this storm who passes by and starts to question why there’s a light being waved manically around inside the bank and the sound of people arguing. Right now we leave the money exactly where it is. All of it. It’s not going anywhere until the bank opens again. Agreed? Sit down and I’ll tell you who my Aunty Kaylin was. Maybe you’ll feel like you know me a bit better afterwards as well.”
Meebor shook his head in bewilderment.
“We’re already in this together. The only way you can cut me out of the money is by killing me. Maybe that’s why Mr Salt is part of this robbery. That is his specialty after all.”
After a brief period where nobody spoke, Meebor picked up the sack of money that he’d dropped. Noisily he put the sack back where he’d found it. He used the rustling of notes and the thud of the re-dropping to show he was disgruntled, as the darkness prevented him from communicating this with his facial expressions. Kheng was the first to sit down on the safe room floor, Mr Salt followed. Eventually, feeling he had delayed enough to make his point, Meebor joined them sitting cross-legged on the floor. The three men had resumed the same positions in which they had sat to make the oath.
“Well,” said Meebor, “this has got to be the most ridiculous robbery I’ve ever been part of. Probably the most stupid bank heist in history. Sitting in my underpants, in the safe room of a bank, surrounded by cash, just so I can be told by you two why I’m not going to steal any of it on account of some eccentric relative. Go on then ‘Mr Morals’, tell us all what’s so important about your Aunt Kaylin.”
Kheng leaned back on his elbows and stared up through the bars of the high window. The rain had slowed to a gentle patter and the moon was starting to show again as the clouds cleared. It was bright tonight and seemed to have positioned itself just right so as to shine down onto their deliberations, and spur him on with their mission.
This time of year the moon always seemed a bit bigger. It reminded him of when he was a boy in the village and his mother had shown him how, if he squinted at it hard enough, the shadows in the moon looked like a giant rabbit. His neighbour said it was more like a woman standing under a tree pounding rice with a long pole. He could only really see the rabbit. Kheng pulled himself up from his elbows, returning to an upright sitting position. He looked at Salt and Meebor before taking a deep breath.
“My Aunt Kaylin was my father’s oldest sister.”
Kheng looked at his co-conspirators to be sure he had their attention, and then began to share his story.
35. Still no Sleep
Mr Tann was once again lying wide awake in bed, staring through the open shutters at the large full moon. It was just starting to move into view; now that the rain had stopped its light was quite vivid, casting moon-shadows of the window frame across the far wall of the room. In the distance he could hear a drum banging at the temple, in recognition that the waxing moon had achieved its task.
Stealing the money from the safe room was supposed to end Mr Tann’s torment of sleepless nights, not add to them. The original intent to extract the cash without suspicion had gone rather well and he had congratulated himself several times when reviewing the facts of his theft in his mind. However, a restless sleep can be tormenting, and small problems can start to become major and irrational worries. He imagined what would happen if he were accused directly of taking the money. Would his poker face hold or would he collapse into a babbling confession? What if Hua Lin had marked the notes in some way to try to catch him out? What if Yeo-bo saw him leaving the safe room and remembered that he had no specific reason to be there? Guilt was being magnified by his insomnia and manifesting itself as an uncontrollable ache in the pit of his stomach.
One of his biggest worries was that he had unfortunately added the unforeseen complication of a meeting with his boss the next morning so that he could present his ideas on how to redesign and retrofit the safe room. Right now he had no ideas. He’d not slept properly for weeks. A recent history of insomnia was no basis on which to develop innovative plans. On top of that, Mr Hua Lin had seen him coming out of the safe room. The combination of the potential discovery of missing money and the fact that his alibi was based on a safe room design that didn’t exist was not really helping to settle Mr Tann’s peace of mind. These kinds of worries always seemed far worse when he was exhausted and trying to get to sleep – knowing that he was being irrational due to sleep deprivation didn’t help either.
Mr Tann rolled out of bed, wrapped a large scarf around his middle, and wandered across the
room to the bed where his wife lay and then shook her awake.
“Mrs Tann. We have a family emergency. You need to phone up your sister and get that builder husband of hers round here. Before I go to work tomorrow, I need to have come up with a new design for the provincial bank’s safe room. If I don’t have some designs to present then the consequences could be pretty bad for all of us!”
36. Kheng’s Aunt Kaylin
“I was thirteen years old when Aunt Kaylin came to stay. She just arrived in the village one day, and there she was, part of the household. She was family. Family can just turn up and stay, and that’s how it is. You never turn away your family. We made space for her and my father treated her like she was any other adult in the household. Except that she wasn’t. She helped a bit in the rice fields, but never really did anything or made a contribution that compared to the efforts of my mother or her sisters. As Aunt Kaylin was spending less time in the fields, it was assumed that she was helping more with taking care of the children. I was the oldest, and I had two brothers and three sisters. She was mean to them, and to me, so I ended up taking care of the little ones most of the time. If one of them started to cry then she would beat them to make them stop. I would have to find a way to sneak them out of the house and use compounds from the plants in the forest to rub on their sores so that they felt less pain. My mother and her sisters assumed that Aunt Kaylin was watching over us so paid less attention to the children. They were hoping for a good harvest that year and spent days at a time in the rice fields, sleeping in a small hut on the hill beside the paddy. My father was usually out hunting for most of the day and didn’t have time to check on the children when he got back. I made sure that any bruising from the beating was kept hidden so that no one asked questions which would inevitably lead to more beatings.
“In the afternoons, Aunt Kaylin used to drink the local wine. She used to drink it in the mornings as well, sometimes. My father had jars of wine brewing at the back of the house. She would start after the other adults had gone to the fields. Then she would get a bit drunk. It would lead her to get angry and hit the children.
“One day, she realised that the jar of alcohol that she’d been discreetly drinking from was becoming almost empty. She didn’t want to be the one to empty it completely as my father would start to question where it had all gone. She called me up to the house, handed some money to me, and told me to go to the market in town and buy her a bottle of local whisky. She said that I needed to get back quickly, or there’d be trouble. I knew what that meant. My younger brothers and sisters would get a thrashing. The problem was that I wasn’t allowed by my parents to walk all the way to the market on my own. It was in the town a couple of kilometres down the hill and my parents didn’t want me going there. We were children from the village, we were not streetwise enough to be in the town on our own. Besides, if I wasn’t in school I should be working in the family’s fields and helping in the house.
“I quickly thought about it and decided that if I ran I probably had just enough time to make it into town, buy the whisky and get back before my father returned from hunting. Normally he’d get home in the early evening to give the women of the house time to prepare and cook whatever he’d caught that day.
“Aunt Kaylin told me she expected to get some change out of the money she’d given me. I didn’t know what whisky cost, I’d never bought it before, but I took the money as I needed to hurry. I ran all the way to the town. It took me over an hour to reach it. I got to the market and started to look around.
“It was a large open-air country town market, busy and confusing to a village lad like myself. At the front were lots of local villagers who had come down for the day to sell what they had gathered from their farms. Mostly there were local vegetables and forest roots laid out on mats for people to buy. Behind them were the regular market vendors, selling rice from large baskets, green vegetables and seasonal fruits. To the side was the area where they sold fresh meat. Thick tables displayed hunks of raw meat from buffaloes and wild boar, whilst owners wafted at the flesh half-heartedly to reduce the swarm of flies that crowded over them. Beyond that were the small wild animals that had been caught in the forest, their legs bound, still alive so that the meat would be fresh for the buyers. Beneath the tables were baskets with live chickens ready for sale. The stalls that were deeper inside the market were the more permanent ones where they sold cooking oils, salt, kitchenware, farming tools and so on. I didn’t really know my way around, so I decided this was the part of the market where I was most likely to find whisky, and made my way inside.
“I found a stall that had local whisky in glass bottles. I asked for a bottle but the man didn’t want to sell me any. The owner was a wiry and slightly aggressive man. He told me to keep on going, whisky was no drink for a kid like me. He didn’t want to hear that I’d been sent to buy it by an adult from my family in the village. The second stall owner was not too bothered, once I’d made up an excuse and said that my father had sent me because he was sick and so couldn’t make it to town himself. The owner of the stall told me how much it cost. The price of the whisky was almost double the amount of the money that Aunt Kaylin had given me. I asked at another stall and at another. The story was the same. There was no way I could buy the local whisky with the money I had, and time was running out. I needed to get home. First I needed to calm Aunt Kaylin down so she didn’t hurt my family, secondly I had to be back from town before my father found I had gone.
“I panicked. I went back to the first stall that I had asked at. It was two tables long and had many different types of goods, so I guessed that the owner was one of the richer ones at the market. I waited until I thought he wasn’t watching. I then rushed behind the table, grabbed the first bottle of whisky and tried to run as fast as I could out of the market. There had been an old woman tending the vegetable stall nearby and she saw me. She started yelling out: ‘Thief! Thief! Stop him!’
“Soon I had all the stall holders from the market chasing me and trying to grab me. I was thirteen years old and so fairly nimble, even if I wasn’t quite as small as my brothers and sisters. I was diving under tables, and knocking into people, causing them to drop the things they’d just bought. I almost made it out. I was near the main entrance and made a dash for it, just as a woman selling broom-grass saw me running out with the mob of stall holders giving chase. She stuck a broom stick into my legs as I ran forward. I fell. I fell on my face. The bottle smashed underneath me. Shards of glass cut into my flesh, stinging all the more for the strong alcohol rubbing into the raw wounds. A couple of guys grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. People from the market were jeering at me. The store owner I’d stolen from was yelling at me, whilst giving a piece of his mind to the crowd that was gathering. I was dragged across the district town to the police station. I was exhausted from having run to the town, the chase in the market, the fall, and the injuries. Despite the state I was in, they made me stand up against a wall at the back of the police station and wait. My legs were shaking with the pain of having to stand for so long, but I dared not sit for fear of the beating I imagined I would get. The sergeant then sent one of his men to go to the village and fetch my father.
“It seemed like hours later when my father eventually appeared at the station. He was furious and demanded an explanation. I didn’t have one. If I told the truth about Aunt Kaylin taking the wine and sending me to town for the whisky, he might not believe me. It was just as likely, if not more so, that his thirteen year old son had wanted to get hold of some whisky to try it out with his school friends. If I told him about Aunt Kaylin I would undoubtedly inspire her to violently take her loss of face out on my sisters and brothers once my parents were back on the farm and away from the house. I kept quiet. I took the blame and I took a beating from my father for punishment.
“The next day, a captain from the army at the local barracks came to the house. He was a mean looking man. Meaner than the market stall owner I’d stolen from. He had h
ard dark eyes and an unforgiving stare. I’d seen him once before on a previous visit to town. He’d been getting drunk with some of his officers at a noodle shop and yelling at the quaking owner, telling him how bad his food was, bullying him as a show of strength to his men. I’d steered clear that day, but this time luck was not on my side.
“After the captain spent time talking with my father, I was called to the room to meet him. My mother was there as well, looking upset. I was told that I had become uncontrollable. My behaviour had embarrassed the family. My father was ashamed to send me to the village school. The only option he could see was that I should stop my schooling and join the army. At that time there was a desperate need in the country for more soldiers. The conflicts both outside the country and on the borders had taken their toll. It seems crazy looking back on this now, but I left my home that evening, and followed the captain back into town where the barracks were. I said goodbye to my mother and my brothers and sisters, and then off I went. A few days later, I was sent to a camp in the north of the country where they were training other young recruits. From then on I was army, and there was no going back. Within a few months I was supporting the other troops up on the border. I was a soldier on active duty, I wasn’t a kid in a village any more, with a family, and a school. My childhood had ended right there.
“I think my Aunt Kaylin left the village about six months after that. Maybe she worried that I’d come back from the borders a bit tougher for the experience, wouldn’t be such a pushover, and do something about the abuse she inflicted on us. She didn’t come back. I remember hearing several years ago that she’d passed away. She’d been living with a man she’d met in a village near to Khoyleng. She’d died of some kind of natural causes. I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I haven’t thought of her since, until the dream that is.
The Feiquon Heist Page 14
