by Simon Royle
Dr. Tom came back, a pack of anti-septic wipes, scissors, and tweezers in hand. He wiped the eye down and started snipping. There was a soft knock on the door. I couldn’t turn and wasn’t facing the door but I heard Pim say.
“Hey, how was the golf?”
“It was good. Your dad and I had a good man-to-man talk?”
“Ooh, what did you talk about?”
“Well, that’s why they call it a man-to-man talk.”
“Fuck off. Tell me.”
Dr. Tom poked the sharp end of the scissors into my eyebrow. I pulled my head away. Dr. Tom hadn’t been exposed to Pim’s way of communicating in English and her ability to flip flop. Switching between immaculately polite Thai, and cursing worse than a trucker on a wet road, in upper class accented English, is one of her trademarks.
“Tom, I don’t believe I’ve had the opportunity to introduce you to Pim yet.”
“Pim and I met at your funeral. Sit still.”
“Yes of course.”
He pulled the last couple of stiches out, placing them in the antiseptic towel. Then he sat back and looked at his handiwork, turned to Mother.
“The scar will blend in with the line of his eyebrow over time. The bit where it cuts through the eyebrow and runs down onto the edge here - that might be better having some more cosmetic work done.”
“Thank you, Thomas, and thank you for all your work today. It’s a relief to have him home.”
Thomas waied Mother. If he’d had a tail, it would be wagging. “I must be going. I have an early surgery to perform.”
“I’ll see you out.” I walked with Tom out around the main house and showed him to his car. Before he got in, I asked him.
“Tom, what is going on with Por? This coma, how long is it likely to last? What’s the prognosis? Truth please, Tom, no sugar coating.”
His owlish eyes blinked a few times. “Chance, Por was exposed almost directly to the blast. You were behind a wall and in an elevator and look what it did to you. An explosion creates intense energy. The shockwave, and the trauma that results is often more internal damage than external. I mean excluding shrapnel, of course. Your father suffered heavy trauma to the brain. Now his body is trying to heal itself. The biggest danger we face is that of secondary infection. We have to be particularly vigilant against pneumonia. We are still within a period where the statistical chance of a full or partial recovery is high. That chance diminishes greatly after about four months. There’s no quick cure. Don’t expect a miraculous overnight recovery. When he does wake up it may only be for a few minutes in a day and the likelihood is that he will be very confused. In the meantime, we have to keep him properly fed, keep moving him, and keep him aware of us through his tactile senses. Soon, I am sure, he will respond. The brain scans are clear and he is stable.”
“Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it.”
I walked back to the guest house. Tom’s words replaying in my mind. They were encouraging and Tom wouldn’t bullshit me on this. Pim and Mother were laughing about something when I went in.
“Come on then. What did you talk about?”
“We talked about Khun Por and…”
“Not Dr. Tom. I mean you and my father and you bloody well know it.”
I grinned at her and took her hand, enough teasing. “You father and I agreed, that we didn’t like each other and that it would be excellent if we never had to meet again for the rest of our lives. We also agreed that we both loved you and we would not let our dislike of each other to interfere with that.”
“Oh, well that’s not too bad. At least he didn’t try to shoot you or anything.”
She laughed at her own joke. We joined in. Mother’s phone rang. I heard her say “special delivery” and after she hung up she turned to us.
“I’ve got to head out to the farm. I won’t be long.”
After Mother left, I lay down on the sofa, a pillow under my head. Pim fitted nicely into the crook of my arm, my fingers on her stomach, softly drawing circles around her belly button. She wriggled her backside further back. I whispered in her ear, “I’ve got to go take a shower. Why don’t you join me?”
She whispered back, “Sounds like a plan.” Her backside did another little wriggle.
I went over to where Por lay and pressed the nurse button. Waiting for them, I took his hand. It felt like I was holding a small bird, scared to squeeze for the fragile bones. The nurse who appeared was, I assumed, the cute one, because she was, and if the other was cuter, then she’d be a stunner and that would make Pichit a very fussy man. Still, beauty’s perception is individually subjective. Pim and I went up to my room.
We shared a long, wet, tongue dueling, feast of a kiss inside the door to my room. I was all set to jump straight to Phase 2 of the plan.
“You need a shower. You stink.”
A hand against my chest pushing me back, she started unbuttoning her shirt, slowly, a raised eyebrow, her tongue poking out a little, a naughty look. I must have been a virtuous hero in my last life to deserve such a reward in this one. She reached the last button of her shirt and flicked a finger in the direction of the shower. Five seconds later I was in the shower.
I wrapped a towel around my waist and stepped into the bedroom. Pim was lying on the bed. Naked. Raging bull. And the phone rang. Lest you think me more insane than you already do, perhaps I should explain a bit about my phones. I hardly ever use the same phone for more than a day. Everyday a different set of color coded phones are dropped off, pre-programmed with all the other new numbers for that day. The only thing the phones have in common day to day is the color. Red, appropriately, is the color for Mother. If she was calling me now it was important.
“I’m where I said I would be. You should come.” She hung up. I looked at Pim. She smiled and spread her legs leaning back on the pillows.
“That’s evil. You know I’ve got to go.” She sucked a forefinger and brushed her hand lightly down from her jaw, across a breast, she circled her nipple a couple of times… and I jerked the pillow out from under her elbow. Giggling, she started doing sexy moans while I was trying to put on my jeans.
“I will return.” She started moaning faster. I ran for the car, pinged Chai on the cell phone.
“Drive as fast you can.” I thought I saw a smile. The farm is two and a half kilometers from Joom’s house on the Chao Phraya River. We were at the farm in less than sixty seconds. Mother’s car, with Beckham standing next to it, was parked outside the warehouse. In the warehouse, a pick-up truck, and in the back of the pick-up, covered by a tarp, the face visible, Nong Um. Mother was standing at the back of the warehouse away from the two guys who’d brought Um in. I went over to her.
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
“We don’t take it. See what happens.”
She nodded and we walked back to the two guys. I recognized both of them as the two playing cards at the farm house. One of them stepped forward as I approached, a fat envelope stashed in his belt.
“What’s the problem? We’ve got the payment.” He took out the envelope and tried to hand it to me.
“We can’t accept the body. It would be a conflict of interest for us. Under the rules by which we operate, you have thirty minutes before we come looking for you.”
His eyes widened, he didn’t look too bright, but he got the last part of what I’d said. Then he got stupid.
“What the fuck. You too good to take our money? You know who we are? You know who we work for? You’re fucking dead. You…”
The sound of a silenced weapon is something you’ll probably never hear, Farang. The closest you’ll probably get is when you use the air compressor at the garage to fill up your tires. The sound the compressor makes when you release it from the valve is similar, but a silenced weapon’s is a bit shorter and flatter. Chai shot him twice, once in the face, just below his eye, and the other in his chest. His partner didn’t move. Which was a smart move.
“Now you’ve got two dead bodies to get
rid of and,” I checked my cell phone, “twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds before we come looking for you.” I looked at him in the Glock’s sights.
Ronin
24 May 2010 Pak Nam 12:05 am
The system by which people can reach out to us is also governed by the phones. Just as red was Mother’s line, black was the general line. Usually Chai answered it, often just listening to whatever was said, and then hanging up. Some, a small fraction, of this 'noise' he passed to me. Most he handed off to other boys in the crew to handle. The call that came in thirty-five minutes after he had shot Mr. Impolite, as he’d been dubbed by Mother, was handed straight to me.
“We’d like to meet. We think there’s a misunderstanding happened. Is it possible?”
“Possible. Corner of Chakkaphak and Sai Luat, there’s a seven-eleven. Next to it there’s a car park, an hour from now?”
“An hour from now is okay.”
“See you there then. Two of you only. One of you should be the guy who was asking the questions at the farm. My questions are not political.”
“We understand. See you there.”
Chai came out of the 7-11, a cup of coffee in each hand. With snipers set up around the car park, he wasn’t concerned about his hands being full. He handed a cup to me. I was sitting in the Maserati, engine and air-conditioning on, door open, feet on the ground, thinking about Pim, and enjoying a smoke. At one o’clock in the morning, with a cup of crappy coffee, it tasted great. I had to quit them. I had to quit a few things, but quitting anything was on hold until I found out who tried to kill Por and me. It appeared even sex was on hold. I looked at the cell phone, 12:59 am. A Benz turned slowly into Chakkaphak and at the 7-11, the indicator came on. Game on.
Chai gave everyone a quiet ‘heads up’ and to not move unless he or I gave the signal. I swallowed the rest of the coffee and stubbed out the cigarette. Then I stood outside the car with my hands clearly visible by my sides.
The Benz pulled up alongside me but not too close. The car door opened, hands on the top of the door. Polite. Smart. The face that followed the hands was the guy who had been interrogating Um. His number two was the guy that Um had met in RCA. We closed the distance between us, palms open.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet.”
“I appreciate the call. Always ready to clear up a misunderstanding.”
He nodded. He wasn’t young. In his early fifties, his eyes jaded but honest.
“The guy who went with him, the guy you let go, told me what happened. I apologize for his behavior. He had no cause to speak like that to you or your mother. Deserved what he got. Perhaps it was his karma for killing Nong Um.”
“No problem. He’s dead. I’m not here for him. I’m here to find out why Um was killed.”
“Why do you want to know?”
It was a fair question. If he had been doing what I think he’d been doing then he was playing a high risk game. Probably a very profitable game, but high risk for sure.
“Um was the boyfriend of a girl who died in an apartment when a bomb went off. My father was in the apartment.”
He sighed, nodded, and seemed to reach some kind of decision. He gestured to a wooden plank on the side of the car park. Empty now, it was usually occupied by the motorcycle soi taxis waiting for a fare. “You want take a seat? This might take a while.”
I nodded. You get a feeling when someone is sincere. You also get a sense when someone is professional. We walked over to the bench and sat down. He took out a pack of Marlboro, offered me one. I took it and held out a lighter to his smoke.
“So what’s the story with Um?” I asked him, glancing over at Chai and RCA guy, stood off a little, next to each other, relaxed. All calm.
“Before the riots, over the last couple of months, we used him as a driver on a few jobs. He did well. He was reliable and didn’t freak out when things got messy. When Seh Daeng got shot, we had to up the ante. Toon, the guy your guy put down - nice shooting by the way.” Chai’s head inclined slightly in acknowledgement. “Toon spent time in the south. We all have. He was demolitions. The cell phone and the Semtex were put together by him. The army busted a load coming down from Ayuthya, and all we had left at a critical time, this was the 10th May, was what we had in Bangkok. We needed the bombs to sow a bit of terror, up the ante at the right time while the backdoor negotiations were happening. Um was keeping the bombs for us. He used the girl. We paid her to deliver them. Fifty thousand a delivery.”
“Why didn’t he deliver them himself?”
“He was under watch. The army and other forces had turned up the pressure by then. We were on the move constantly. Still are, but I reckon we’ll be stood down soon. I hope so anyway. I’ve had enough of this shit.” He smiled but you could tell the truth in his words. He looked tired.
“How were the bombs detonated?”
“You just call the number of the phone strapped to it. It sends an electric charge into the detonator and boom.”
“So what happened on the day?”
“I got a call. Make something happen. I called Um I asked him to deliver me the birthday cake at three. He said he would arrange for it to be delivered but he couldn’t do it until maybe six at the earliest. That was okay for me. I asked him to take care of it. The bomb never arrived. This was the first time that he let me down, but what was supposed to happen didn’t. Some powerful people wanted to know why. The next day, Um called my guy over there,” he nodded at RCA guy, “told us the girl had died when the bomb went off and he was on the run.”
“What time did you get the call to make something happen?”
“It was late morning, maybe lunchtime already. I think it was lunch because when I called Um he didn’t answer. Called me back about ten minutes later and apologized, said he’d been at lunch. So it could have been even later.”
“You said he was under watch. Who was watching him, do you know?”
“A secret section within DSI charged with hunting terrorists. They’d started operating out of 11th Infantry Regiment barracks. Let’s just say that we had it on good authority.” Large sections of the national police were known to be sympathetic or allied to various groups of politicians. The recent 'troubles' had divided these, more recently, into red and non-red. The idea that a senior policeman was sympathetic to the red shirt cause was entirely plausible.
“Did he say who he was on the run from? After the bomb had gone off.”
“No. I assumed he had help. He wasn’t unknown amongst the core. I thought one of them had warned him. He told my guy a different story, but this was much later, same night you followed us out to the farm. He said someone called him. Didn’t know who it was and the caller didn’t say, just said “they were a friend’. Knew the bomb came from him. Told him his bomb had killed an important man and that he better run.”
“Why was he killed?”
“Toon panicked. He took Um back to the apartment. They were going to move all the stuff out. When they got there, they saw the place had been compromised. Toon asked around a little, heard about the army Humvee and two guys – one wearing a DSI cap. Toon made a command decision to cut the connection to us. That was it. He called me. I told him to use your service, based on a recommendation. The recommendation was solid. You run a professional service.”
“Thanks, although it’s not me who handles that part of the business. Thanks for being straight with me. We don’t have a problem.”
“That’s good, Khun Oh. Again please accept my apologies for the impolite behavior of my man tonight. You can be assured that if he had lived, he would have faced a severe reprimand from me, if not the same fate as your man delivered.”
“Apology accepted. No hard feelings.”
He got up and offered his hand. Maybe because I looked like a Farang or maybe he just wanted to test my grip. I don’t know, but I shook his because we always work with sincerity. He turned to leave and stopped.
“What I heard, it wasn’t only the old man and the
girl who got killed. I heard it took out a couple of his guys but one guy miraculously escaped, was that you?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard that the next day a number nine appeared on your chest. That true?”
“No, it was the same day.”
His eyes scanning for a lie. Not finding one. “Can I see it?”
I undid the second button on my shirt and pulled it sideways so he could see the 9.
“Wow – I’ve seen some stuff in my time, but that’s pretty fucking amazing. Could you do me a favor? I don’t forget them. Take care of a loose end for me.”
“Depends.”
His eyes flicked to RCA guy. RCA guy saw it and started to move. Chai put his right hand on his head – code for take out the one on the right. Three bullets smacked into RCA guy. He lay flat on his back, half his head missing, brains on display, blood black in the poor light of the car park. His arm lay across his amulets, hand near the butt of the gun that it hadn’t reached. We hadn’t moved.
