"Jimm, I don't think-" Noy began.
"And all you had to do was switch ID cards before the tests or when you handed in the papers. I wouldn't even be surprised if you switched names for the entire time you were there. Your faces were similar enough. And heaven knows, we Asians all look alike. Now, the rest of this-you can just stop me if I'm wrong. Your duchess was an average student with no motivation. But her family expected excellence from her. It's a system that goes way back. So many of her ancestors had traveled the same route. Brain-box study buddy. No risk. The daughter passes with honors. The shadow either fails in the end or, if she's very lucky, squeaks through with poor grades. The sponsor has to do the very least to keep the shadow in class right up to the final semester. She can't fail too many courses before then or they'd send her classmate home. But in that final term she doesn't need the shadow anymore, so if she's of a mind, she could just not attend any classes. Send the shadow home with no degree at all. No problem. Who cares?"
The Noys said nothing. Their faces contorted in the candle flickers.
"But, Noy," I said, "you cared. You were an excellent student. The material was easy for you. You loved the courses. You devoured them. But at the end of each semester, you'd reluctantly hand over your student ID card and accept whatever grade she'd deign to eke out for you. And what was she doing while you slaved over books? She was in the nightclubs, wasn't she? Driving the BMW around with her high-society friends? And I bet she didn't show any respect at all. Not a word of thanks after those A grades. You were the maidservant. You labored for her. You and your family were taken care of financially, so why give thanks, eh?
"And it built up in you," I continued. "All this injustice. You knew the duchess was intent on failing you. She hardly attended classes that final semester. You were a brilliant student, yet people looked down on you as a dunce. And after three years of it, you were Mount Etna. The humiliation bubbled up inside and you blew. You marched into those exam halls, turned up with your term papers, and brushed past the outstretched ID card of your duchess. And you hammered everything that final semester, just like you did the entire course, but this time the honors were in your name. You'd stayed on for the Honor Council inquiry, passed the extra oral tests, suffered the humiliation of the lie-detector test. And all because your foolish courage would have meant nothing if they'd stripped you of your degree. You were in a red funk. A mad rush of blood. And it wasn't until it was all over that you realized what you'd done. What danger you'd put your family in. You probably called your parents then and told them. It was no small matter. You'd broken a contract. But, more important, you'd broken the face of a dynasty. You'd destroyed a century-old tradition. And, Noy, do you know what?"
"What?"
"Good for you, is what. Screw the tradition. You're a bloody heroine. It was one in the eye to the classes who believe their heritage allows them to break the rules. Left to her own devices, the little duchess probably failed the final semester, and they're still conducting an inquiry to see where she went wrong. As far as they're concerned, she was a top student who suddenly went bad. They'll invite her to resit those last finals, but for reasons you and I know, she'll have to decline. She still doesn't have her degree, does she?"
Noy blushed and sighed. There was a long period of silence that seemed appropriate.
"They came to see me in the dormitory," she said. "A couple of Thai goons in safari shirts…in the middle of D.C., I tell you. They asked me if I wanted to see my parents hurt. It would be a shame, they said, if they were to have an accident. The goons were very matter-of-fact about it. They told me all I had to do was go to the dean and confess that I'd switched my ID card with the Mom Luang's. She hadn't noticed I was a cheat. That, in fact, all my final semester scores should have been hers. Of course, I would have been thrown out of Georgetown in disgrace. My name…my family name would have been dirt. So I ran. I jumped on a Greyhound bus and headed south. I don't know why. It was all a little bit overwhelming. I was starting to get paranoid that they were after me. I was certain there'd be some way of checking passenger lists on aircraft out of the country, so I decided to leave overland. I met up with a tour group of Taiwanese students, and somehow, in the confusion that happens at borders, I got lost in the chaos when a large group came up against an underpaid immigration officer, and I arrived in Mexico in a tour bus. There was no record of me entering the country. I flew home from Mexico City. I think that was what gave us the time to get away from our house. They were still looking for me in the States."
"I respect her for what she did," said Mamanoy.
"You lost your jobs and your house," I said.
"We'd already lost them," she said. "My husband's debts…Noy's time in America gave us a sort of stay of execution. That was all. They paid off our bills as part of the deal, but they're in a position to put more pressure on us. My husband would never get work in his field again. He has accepted full responsibility."
"Oh, what a wonderful man. Frankly, I'm amazed that you're still together," I said.
"Love is-"
"Yeah. Don't bother."
"Being a family is all we have."
"Being a family's really going to make everything so much better on the road and in hiding for the rest of your lives."
"Do you have a better solution?"
"I can fix this," I said, with more confidence than I was actually generating.
"How?"
Good question.
"I'll get back to you on that," I said. "We have time. You'll be safe here for the foreseeable future. We can work together on a strategy."
They didn't look inspired. They still saw me as the cook. They didn't know I had contacts beyond Maprao. I had skills. But I did not reveal my secret identity just then. When the time was right, they would see my super-self.
11.
Give Me My Porpoise When You Get Home
(from "Respect" -OTIS REDDING)
The uneventfulness of the following morning made it all the more remarkable. At three A.M. the power had returned, and all the lights we'd forgotten to turn off and the utilities we'd forgotten to unplug came to life. There ensued the act of putting them all back to sleep. We'd awaken later to a cautious normality. The natural erosion caused by the backhoe ditch had turned our garden into the Grand Canyon. Water had gushed out onto the beach, and the rear flood waters had subsided. The tide had ebbed to leave one end of our latrine block embedded in the beach, as if it had dropped from space. The sky was clear, and the only reminder of the monsoon was a brisk wind blowing off the Gulf. The Noys sat on their veranda playing pre-breakfast mah-jong with Grandad and Captain Waew. Mair and the ladies of the cooperative continued with their exemplary renovation of the shop. Arny worked out by raking beach wood into pyres, which, if they ever dried out, would one day make spectacular bonfires.
Captain Kow announced that the small boats would be able to venture out that day. As they'd been docked during the temperamental tempest, he had no fresh fishballs to sell from his motorcycle sidecar. Undeterred, he was there bright and early in front of our shop with an honest sign saying THREE-DAY-OLD FISHBALLS-NOT THAT DELICIOUS. It was hardly surprising he sold not a one. I'd invited him to join us for breakfast. As always, he seemed flattered. Grandad Jah seethed, like the alpha old man, at the table but said nothing. And once everyone else was full and gone, I led the captain to my balcony. He admired my mobile shell collection.
"How far out can the little boats go?" I asked.
"Depends on the waves," he said. "Two meters maximum for most of us."
"But if it's calm?"
"Go all the way to Vietnam or until the diesel ran out. Why?"
I'd decided the previous night to tell the captain everything, from the head on the beach to the slave ships to the suspected involvement of the Pak Nam police force. He listened intently but didn't seem all that surprised.
"It's not just here," he said, when I was done.
"What's not?"
"T
he slavery. Happens all around the coast. Except the recruiting's done by agents over on the west. They put crews together, take their down payments, make promises, then vanish. The Burmese do a three-month stint, then queue up for their salaries only to be told that the wages are all handled through the agencies. It's in the contract-in Thai. As the agents have all shut up and shipped out, that's three months of free labor and nothing for the Burmese to send back to their families. Happens all the time."
I blame Buddhism, you know? Get yourself a soft religion and you can forgive yourself almost anything. No shame. No guilt. I'll do my penance in the next life. No worries. I wondered whether Captain Kow was one of those maipen rai characters. One of the "no problem, let's not get worked up over nothing" majority.
"I imagine you're going to do something about it," he said, and smiled.
Damn. I wish I could have put some teeth in that gap. I knew it would have been a grand smile if it hadn't been so vacant.
"I'd need help," I confessed.
"I could get about ten, maybe fifteen small-boat men together, I suppose."
"You could? And why would they cooperate?"
"They don't like the big boats much. And they owe me favors."
"And why would you cooperate?"
"Me?" He laughed. "I like your style, Jimm. I like your spunk. You're a credit to your mother. I'd be proud to be there beside you."
You tend to assume old men are flirting when they overdo the rhetoric, but Captain Kow's eyes sparkled and I really got the feeling he was up for the adventure.
"You got a plan?" he asked.
"Sort of," I replied. "Do I have to tell you it?"
"Too true you do."
It was almost lunchtime when Lieutenant Chompu called me from the police station.
"At last," I said. "How long does it take to read a few documents?"
"Ooh, what dominance," he said. "I love a forceful woman. If it had been just words, I might have finished yesterday evening. But it wasn't that simple. Our Lieutenant Egg uses his own shorthand, the type of which I'd never seen. It amounts to leaving out all the vowels and tone markers. So every word was a puzzle."
"But you cracked it?"
"I have a reputation for inserting my key into otherwise impenetrable locks."
"But the documents?"
"Yes, those too. I have entered his devious world, young Jimm."
"And did you find anything?"
"Not really."
"Chom!"
"Not a complete failure, however. I found no fewer than eleven official reports in normal script for beached bodies and body parts. These were cases he'd personally taken on. His success rate in finding relatives and solving the cases was-as far as I could see-zero. All 'Case closed, probably Burmese, domestic dispute.' "
"But he's only been here in Pak Nam for a month."
"Right. These reports go back six months to when he was stationed in Pattani. Your personal head is number eleven. It's his first up here."
"So if he's cleaning up, he's following a boat."
"Or a fleet. I checked out the movement of deep-sea vessels from Pattani to Lang Suan around the time of his transfer. There was a total of four that changed registration and fishing zones. One was a mackerel trawler bought by a conglomerate in Prajuab. But three others always traveled together. Same owner. Same catch records. They're now operating out of Pak Nam, but they spend most of their time at sea and transfer their catch to smaller boats. This deep-sea fleet has five local boats registered to collect and deliver. Doing good business, by all accounts."
"So somewhere out there are three big boats that don't come home much. I bet that's them. There I was imagining one slaver ship. Sneaking up on it in the dead of night. Surprising its sleeping crew. But three? You've just changed the odds."
"You mean from 'don't even think about it' to 'very don't even think about it'?"
"Why do I not feel a deep sense of police cooperation?"
"Jimm, there are three boats bobbing fifty kilometers from the nearest impartial witness. They'll each have burly, unshaven ex-convict types with automatic weapons patrolling the decks. They would have already massacred so many random Burmese that they'll not even consider murder to be a negative thing. They'll have spotlights on their boats, radar even. I have no idea how you'd sneak up on them without being cut into little bloody pieces. My love remains undying, but my cooperation ended with this report."
"You aren't even going to tell your boss?"
"Tell him what?"
"That…"
No. He was right. No evidence. No proof. No point.
"Chom. Don't you have an urge to see justice done?"
"It's not nearly as strong as my urge to reach forty with a complete set of limbs."
"Then do it for me."
"Valor, you mean? Chivalry?"
"Don't tell me it's dead."
"You know in your heart it is."
"Fine. Never mind. I'll die without a hero by my side. Without ever knowing what it's like to have a man stand up for me, put his life on the line out of love."
"So I'm excused then?"
"I suppose."
"Good. Oh, and there was a message from the post office."
"What? Are you moonlighting for the Royal Thai Post now?"
"They have my number because I receive a lot of FedEx packages in plain brown envelopes full of evidence, if you know what I mean. And they know that you and I are seeing each other."
"In the romantic sense?"
"Naturally. In a place like Pak Nam they always hold out hope that people like me can see the folly of our ways."
"So?"
"So, Nat the manager said he'd had a suspicious visitor. A woman. She wanted to get in touch with her sister who'd given the Pak Nam Lang Suan post office as her return address. He'd told her that the sender sounded like the girl and her mother who were staying at your resort."
"Oh great."
"After she'd gone, it occurred to him that they'd only typed that information into the system at eight this morning and the parcel wouldn't be arriving till tomorrow. So he couldn't see how anyone would know. He tried to phone your mother. As he was calling, a cell tone rang out from his pile of outgoing mail. He hung up and tried again. And it rang again. He found a letter from your mother with a phone inside. He wondered whether she'd put it there by mistake."
"When was the woman there?"
"Just before I called you."
"About ten minutes?"
"About."
"Damn. We need help."
How on earth could they have traced it that soon, and how could they get down here so quickly? It was fifteen minutes from Pak Nam to our resort, if you didn't get lost. Most people got lost. But I couldn't count on that. I ran to the Noys' veranda and interrupted the mah-jong tournament.
"OK, I don't want anyone to panic," I said.
My hands were shaking and my legs were wobbling. The mah-jong players stared at me curiously. I was the only one panicking. But my mind was clear.
"Noy and Noy," I said. "We might have had a security breach at the post office."
The clock in Mair's cabin chimed midday. Our calm was over. The afternoon of the big chaos had arrived.
"They've found us," said Mamanoy.
"We have about five minutes," I said. "This is what I want everyone to do…"
Once they'd heard me out, they set to work. The Noys apologized to the old men for interrupting the game and calmly collected the tiles. I jogged over to the shop, selected two members of the cooperative, and dragged them and Mair back to the cabins. I'd barely made it wheezing back up to the shop when a metallic gray BMW pulled into the car park. "Mamma Mia" rang out from my back pocket. I took out the phone. Sender-Aung. Not now. Please don't let it be the message from Shwe. I turned off my phone and went to greet the new arrivals. The four doors opened simultaneously, and three middle-aged men in gray safari suits and a young woman in a skirt and blouse leaped out. It felt like a raid.<
br />
"Can I hel-" I began, but the visitors weren't in the mood for my reception niceties. Mair walked across to intercept them.
"Where do you think you're going?" she asked, stepping in front of the meatiest of the men. He grabbed the wrist of the hand she laid on him and attempted to fling her to one side. He obviously hadn't figured Mair's jungle training into that rash decision. With some innate sense of direction, her knee found the nest of his testicles. He sank slowly to the ground and issued a sound like a slow puncture in a whoopee cushion. But his colleagues were unconcerned. They hurried on to the cabins. Two of them held short metal bars, they used to jimmy open first door number one, then number two. We stood back, amazed. At room three they dragged two screaming women out to the veranda. They were in a state of undress, but nobody listened to their pleas.
The raiders moved on to the back tier of bungalows, using their bars to prise open each door of our family cabins, even though none of them was locked. In one of these rooms they found two frail old men, and they too were dragged to the veranda of cabin three. All this was completed in less than two minutes. We'd been rounded up like cattle, and every room had been searched. All businesslike and silent. Not even the gang of local women at the water's edge, dragging their cockle trays through the sand, had noticed anything untoward.
I'd been hoping the young woman was the head of this invading army. I like to see my gender assume dominant roles even in illegal activity. But I didn't hear her speak at all, so I had to assume she was the terror-pretty of the group. "Pretty" had become a noun in Thai to describe women who use their sex appeal to show men how pathetic they are. The meaty man whose family jewels had been devalued by my mother walked uneasily up to the veranda. He was about fifty, short-haired, and I could smell military about him, about all of them. He glared at Mair, who gave him a glimpse of her Titanic smile.
Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach jj-2 Page 16
