by Robert Daley
The streambed was full of boulders that had to be skirted, and loose round stones that skittered away under foot. It was like walking on billiard balls. Koy, climbing grimly, was as resolved as ever that this loss of face must not happen, though he could not imagine at the moment how to prevent it.
About thirty minutes later the guide pointed ahead. A building was visible through the trees. They were almost to the encampment, and the stupefied Koy, now that he listened, became aware of voices.
Employing parts of various Chinese dialects, he ordered the guide to go forward alone and to announce the imminent arrival of the Cho Kun, Mr. Koy.
Sitting down upon a rock, he waited until he had caught his breath and had stopped sweating, then changed back into his tan silk suit, into his reasonably clean shirt and Dior tie. He combed his hair. Leaving his hiking clothes and boots behind, he stepped forward into the encampment.
A clearing under teak trees. Some sunlight came through but not much - the clearing would not be visible to the American-supplied, Thai government helicopters that patrolled these hills, usually with American drug agents aboard. Eight or ten buildings. Bamboo walls, thatched roofs. A corral full of mules, and another of elephants. A shed under which stood two jeeps and a truck - as to whether an alternative route led in here, the answer, obviously, was yes. The most imposing of the buildings had a veranda all the way around, on which waited five men. The driver stood in his thong sandals in the dirt talking up at them, at one of them in particular, who must be Khun Sa.
There was a post - an execution stake from the look of it - driven into the forest floor in the center of the clearing exactly where, in a cultured place, a flagpole might stand. Koy crossed in front of it and approached the veranda, approached Khun Sa, eyes never leaving him, as if approaching something beautiful, or something dangerous. A short stocky man. Close-cropped, graying hair. Worn army fatigues and a red beret with a military crest. Broad, flat, Mongol face. Broad, flat, mirthless smile. Began an immediate speech of welcome in Yunnanese. Strong peasant accent. Koy would have understood an educated man, for the Yunnan dialect was close to Mandarin, but Khun Sa’s accent was so thick as to be unintelligible. Could he speak no better? Was he doing it on purpose? If so, for what reason? Face again? He had looked astonished to see the New York fashion plate, Koy, step out of the jungle. His jaw had dropped. Surprise, both men knew, automatically conferred face on the man who caused it. Meaning Koy had regained a certain amount of lost ground, which almost made him smile. Almost. It was too early to say how much ground, and matters of face were too serious for smiles of any kind.
He was invited onto the veranda and there introduced to the other men, all Chinese, Khun Sa’s lieutenants. One was chief of staff; he went by the Shan name of Phalang, which meant thunder. Koy had heard of him. He was reported to be Khun Sa’s enforcer and executioner, a man hated and feared by the troops. A second man controlled the roving refineries, a third had charge of the business side of the operation - Koy understood him to be Khun Sa’s nephew, and he was said to have excellent connections with corrupt Thai officials. The fourth man was Khun Sa’s link to the peasant farmers in the inhospitable hills further north - his source of supply. Up there thirty or forty villages grew nothing but opium. It had been a traditional cash crop for hundreds of years, though never before on a scale as large as now. Not that the farmers ever earned much from it. Khun Sa’s men drove hard bargains. In fact, they would not bargain at all. They bought raw opium for the equivalent of 2,000 bahts a kilo, take it or leave it. If a farmer said no, they burned his fields.
Khun Sa clapped his hands and servant women appeared with tea and rice cakes. The six men sat at a table on the veranda, and the other five, excluding Koy from their conversation, talked and joked in their peasant Yunnanese. It was as if Koy were not there. They were like teenagers reminding an outsider of his status. They were like adults spelling out words so that any child or mental defective who also happened to be present would not understand.
To allow this conversation to continue without him was to lose still more face, Koy saw. Speaking a mixture of pidgin Mandarin and pidgin Cantonese, he interrupted. He began to brag about his relationship with the late one-eyed general years ago, when these five men were younger and of less exalted rank. It was a way of suggesting that Koy had dealt with generals at a time when these others were still assigned to load the mules, and it was, he saw, so perceived. The late general had been a great man and a close friend, Koy said, and his memory was no doubt greatly revered here. Khun Sa jumped up and gestured impatiently with his chin. Koy followed him down the dirt street to a shack made out of wattles and straw. The others had trailed along. All six entered the shack. Inside in the dark sat the one-eyed old man. All his teeth were gone and he was grinning at nothing.
Khun Sa said, “We feed him heroin in his soup. It keeps him happy. He feels no pain.” Khun Sa’s accent, Koy noted, had suddenly improved.
So much for Koy’s privileged relationship with the “greatly revered” general. He had again lost much face.
As they stepped out into the daylight, Koy said with pretended piety, “Being so old, he is of course very close to the gods.”
Khun Sa said nothing.
“The Chinese revere the old for that reason,” said Koy.
“This way,” said Khun Sa.
They entered a warehouse made of stout logs, with armed guards out front. Cases of transistor radios, steam irons and other appliances - all destined for the Rangoon black market - were stacked to the roof tree. Khun Sa lifted two five-liter kerosene tins onto a table. They were filled to the brim with raw gemstones, rubies in one, emeralds in the other. Khun Sa, as gleeful as a child, lifted handfuls above the cans and let them sift through his fingers like loose rice. The gemstones, Koy knew, having been mined in Burma, were bound the other way, to the black market in Thailand.
Khun Sa was showing off, gaining face every minute. He selected a green stone resembling, both in size and in the irregularity of its surfaces, a walnut. It was clotted with impurities. After studying it a moment, he handed it to Koy as a gift.
The room fell silent. All wondered what Koy, now studying the stone in his turn, would do. To accept the lavish gift was to lose face. But to refuse it was an insult.
“Such wealth as this,” said Koy, “is indeed proof that fortune has favored Khun Sa. May the gods continue to smile on him.” Pretending that no gift had been made at all, that the emerald had been handed him only to inspect, Koy tossed it casually back into the kerosene tin. “What’s in the warehouse next door?” he said, and stepped quickly outside before that emerald, or another, could be offered to him again.
The adjacent warehouse, equally stout, equally guarded, was Khun Sa’s arsenal. It was stacked with some of the best weaponry unlimited funds could buy. Koy, as Khun Sa handed over gun after gun for his inspection, was furious. In this game of face he was not staying even, might at any moment lose definitively, and they were still a long way from negotiating for the merchandise he needed. He thought he should never have come to this place, at least not alone, he had been swayed by the nearness of the harvest, had been overeager and impatient, errors he had never committed in the past, errors frightening to him in their implications for the future. He had believed he could overcome Khun Sa on his own ground, another grave error, and he was paying for his arrogance in the hardest of all currency, face.
Behind Khun Sa, who described each weapon, Koy was obliged to tour the arsenal, to handle Soviet Kalashnikov rifles, Moisin-Nagant pistols and U.S.-made Mi6s. There were grenade launchers, bazookas and recoilless rifles. There were wooden crates of ammunition. Koy understood that some of this stuff had been donated by the Russians because Khun Sa’s army opposed Rangoon, and some had been stolen in raids on Burmese Army arsenals, although not lately. The Russians had stopped giving arms, and the army arsenals were better guarded. Lately everything had had to be bought abroad with hard currency earned from opium - Burmese mon
ey was worth nothing outside of Burma, and the Thai baht was not much better.
As a result every new bullet, by the time it got here, cost nearly one American dollar. Khun Sa’s voice, reaching the end of this explanation, had taken on a plaintive whine so that Koy thought: the man is dollar-poor. This was information that could be used, the first of its kind, but Koy, lifting a British Webley revolver out of a bin, merely digested it. He thinks we have deliberately held up the flow of dollars he needs, Koy thought. That’s why he is so angry. Koy pretended to examine the revolver. He did not look up or give any sign.
Just then came a distraction - a commotion outside in the clearing. All hurried out the door to see what it was, Koy still holding the revolver into which Khun Sa, or someone, had previously inserted six dollars’ worth of bullets.
Men were dragging forward a soldier in fatigues and thong sandals - this seemed to be the uniform here, although how they could tramp through cobra-infested jungles in open sandals was beyond Koy. Now the soldier was being lashed to the post, and Koy realized that Khun Sa, in still another exercise in face, was about to provide him with an execution.
“Deserter,” said Khun Sa grinning. He seemed hugely pleased with himself. “Went back to his village. Caught in bed with his wife.”
This execution, Koy saw further, was to be a beheading, for the condemned man had been lashed in such a way as to hang forward off the post at a forty-five degree angle, and the executioner, carrying a great scimitar of a sword, had stepped into position. His assistant grabbed a handful of the victim’s hair and yanked the head downwards, nape now exposed to the blade, head turned sideways, cheek up, the terrified staring eyes facing Koy but seeing nothing.
How many chops would it take, Koy wondered. For the human neck was as thick as the bough of a tree and almost as resilient. It seldom ceded in less than six or seven sword blows, not counting the misses, the glancing strokes off the shoulder or the mastoid area. The victims were usually dead or at least unconscious before the final ones of course, often with their eyes still open, so that when the head finally dropped to the dirt and rolled, the eyeballs became covered with a film of dust, and one kept expecting the head to start blinking to clear them.
To be made to witness this barbaric spectacle would constitute, for Koy, the final loss of face, and he knew this. Doubtless Khun Sa expected that the sight of a human head bouncing at his feet would cause him to vomit up his tea and rice cakes. This would not happen. Any man twenty months a policeman had seen far worse, and Koy had been a cop more than twenty years. But his strong stomach would not save him with Khun Sa, who would have proven his life-and-death power over every man there, including Koy. Somehow, it seemed to Koy, he had to do something to thwart this execution, either to stop it or to perform it himself, or he would have no face left.
About fifty men had come out of the various buildings. Though they surrounded the execution post, they seemed only mildly interested, as if willing to accord this event which was of such moment both to the victim and to Koy, five minutes of their time, no more. Perhaps they had seen it too often. They seemed as jaded as American television viewers who had watched too many so-called world championships. They had lost faith. They no longer believed in the uniqueness of anything.
The executioner, sword raised high over his head, awaited a signal from Khun Sa, who was laughing about something with the man called Thunder. Victim, executioner and assistant were all held fast, as if in a frieze, a tableau of death. There was no other sound in the clearing except the two generals giggling over their joke, and nothing at all moved except for Koy’s mind, which was racing. For he had recognized the moment as the best he was likely to get here. It was time to act, and he stepped between executioner and victim, directly under the upraised sword.
Now he had delayed the execution by a few seconds, but he had not yet decided what else he should do.
He might shoot the condemned man with the revolver in his hand, spoiling the fun for everyone and usurping the role of Khun Sa, who had decreed a different execution. And with this act of arrogance (still another one) he would also be declaring his own stature here. Or he could take the sword and behead the condemned man in the executioner’s place. The wretch was a goner anyway, and either alternative was acceptable to Koy. Or perhaps he could buy the man’s life and freedom. He chose the one action by which he seemed to give himself two of these options instead of one. The gun went into his pocket. Stepping forward, he asked the executioner to hand over the sword. Only a second had passed, but the blasé event had turned suddenly into tense theater; no one breathed. Then the executioner’s upraised hands came down, he handed over the sword, and Koy raised it himself over the condemned man’s neck.
“As the guest of the august Khun Sa,” he intoned in a loud voice, speaking the closest approximation of Yunnanese he could manage, “I request permission either to slay this malefactor for him, or to buy the worm’s life, for although he is without value to Khun Sa, he can be useful to me.”
If Khun Sa said kill, then Koy would obey, and he was already thinking about it, because a different set of imperatives would then apply. It had to be done cleanly. He was hoping for three strokes or less. But beheading a man with a heavy sword was a difficult athletic feat for which he was untrained. If he got blood all over his suit, if he butchered the job (literally) then in terms of face he was worse off than ever.
“Buy?” said Khun Sa. His flat Mongol eyes darted this way and that. He had been totally surprised by Koy’s action, a loss of face in itself, and for the second time today, and he did not like it. He was trying to think out what to do or say, but he was so unaccustomed to resistance of any kind, that his mind worked slowly. Koy saw this. From under the upraised sword he called out: “Five thousand dollars for the worm’s life.”
“Dollars?”
Koy rammed the sword point into the dirt and the bait onto the hook. “American dollars.”
The blade stood quivering. Koy’s whole being quivered also, though nothing showed, for he realized that behaving this way he could get himself killed. Approaching Khun Sa, he withdrew the envelope from the breast pocket of his tan silk suit, and fanned out the bait.
Khun Sa displayed no emotion. His greed, if any, could not be seen. “Come into my office,” he said, and strode off without looking back.
They sat opposite each other. Light entered principally through chinks in the bamboo walls - slices of light that lay white and irregular across the desk, like elongated noodles.
Koy counted out five thousand dollars and placed it to one side. He emptied out the revolver and pushed it toward Khun Sa butt first, standing the bullets in front of him like stacked chips in a poker game. “I want one ton of morphine bricks delivered in one week’s time to an address in Bangkok you will be given. Do you have access to that much?” It was, Koy guessed, the largest single order Khun Sa had ever received. It would require gathering ten tons of raw opium up in the hills, necessitate a caravan of at least two hundred mules down to the labs on the border. The labs would have to work day and night.
Khun Sa’s head inclined in the slightest of nods. It was as if he had become suddenly thoughtful, suddenly mute. He was perhaps counting his money.
Koy had judged him to be, on a long-term basis, entirely unreliable. In a month or a year, perhaps sooner, someone would kill him, and it would become necessary to make a new deal with his successor, or else find a new source of supply. Which would take time. Koy’s plan was to make a huge initial purchase, and transport it immediately to Hong Kong. There it could be stockpiled in perfect safety. The stockpile was vital. No business was sound if conducted without an adequate reserve against shortages.
“Payment will be in American dollars,” said Koy.
“On delivery.”
“No, half on delivery.” Until the merchandise was out of Bangkok, Khun Sa must share the risk. Otherwise he or his agents might be tempted to hijack the load or to inform on it in exchange for the rewar
d. Chinese or not, Khun Sa, to Koy, could not be trusted. “The other half one week later.”
Again the almost invisible nod from Khun Sa.
They began to haggle over money. They were talking about a million dollars in cash. Koy’s figure was under this amount, Khun Sa’s over, and he offered to refine the morphine into number four heroin in his own labs as part of the deal. But Koy refused, being determined to refine it himself in Hong Kong, thereby controlling the quality of the finished product. This detail settled, they reached agreement on price quickly, for Koy was more than willing to pay Khun Sa a small premium to get exactly what he wanted.
“Now,” said Koy, “I must go. Please instruct someone to drive me back to Chiang Rai in one of those jeeps outside under the shed.” It was the final test of how much face Koy had regained.
Khun Sa picked up the five thousand dollars, counted it, put it in the pocket of his fatigues, and gave one last nod. Out on the veranda he called out orders, and they strolled together to the shed, soon joined by the original driver, who came running up.
The condemned man stood sheepishly beside the jeep. Koy, in his dark glasses and tan silk suit, stared at him, as did Khun Sa and the driver. “The worm is yours,” said Khun Sa. “What will you do with him?”
The temptation was strong to throw him back like a too small fish, saying: I don’t want him after all. It would be Koy’s last and best victory of the day, Khun Sa’s final loss of face. He would be enraged. And if he beheaded the worm as a result, what was this to Koy? But it was against all principles of good business to deprive business associates of face. Only a lout like Khun Sa behaved that way, and Koy refrained.
