I was beginning to like the sound of this.
“You leave the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Not much advance warning, but the passport and visa took longer than planned. Sooner gone, sooner home, eh?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “There’s one thing, though.”
“Oh?”
“Either I wasn’t paying attention,” I said, “or you haven’t told me yet. But I’m not too clear on what I’m supposed to do once I get there.”
“Ah. Well, the first thing you’ll do is take a sounding. Put out some feelers, get the lay of the land. Then you’ll want to go to ground so you don’t have some SLORC lackeys following you around all the time.”
“And then?”
“Then you want to look for the best way to destabilize the government, don’t you? You’ve got the dissidents in the cities, and you’ve got the ethnic minorities in the outlying regions. From where I stand, Aung San Suu Kyi looks to be the key.”
“So should I make contact?”
“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “What the boys in the Company would call ‘contact with extreme prejudice.’”
I looked at him.
“Kill her,” he said. “What better way to make the balloon go up?”
He got a faraway look in his eyes. “The noon balloon to Rangoon,” he said. “Sailing far overhead.”
Chapter 6
“You Americans,” Suk said. “Hopeless sentimentalists, and so illogical. You don’t eat dogs, you don’t eat cats, you don’t eat monkeys, you don’t eat horses-”
We don’t plant taters, I thought. We don’t plant cotton. But them that plants ’em…
“But you use monkeys for torturous laboratory experiments,” he said, “and dogs and cats as well. And you slaughter no end of horses and feed them to your dogs and cats. And the surplus dogs and cats, the ones nobody wants as pets, you put to death at great trouble and expense. You kill them, but you don’t eat them. You cremate them or bury them. What an absurd waste!”
“I suppose we could ship them over here,” I said. “Dead dogs for the tables of Thailand.”
He gave me a look. “You make a joke,” he said, “to hide the fact that you are squeamish.”
“Who says I’m squeamish?”
“Here comes our dinner,” he said. “Let’s see how squeamish you are. You speak like a Thai, but can you eat like a Thai?”
The plates arrived, little cubes of meat broiled satay-style on small wooden skewers, with a mound of white rice alongside and a smaller mound of curried carrots. This once ran around and barked, I thought, and nuzzled people companionably with its cold nose.
Even so, I thought, how much cuter was a puppy than a bleating wooly lamb, or a bunny rabbit, or even a baby chick? All the animals available for our delectation are either endearing, like the dog and the sheep and the hare, or disgusting, like the snake and rat and the lizard. I’d eaten some strange things in strange places, and I’d had my share of mystery meat. More dishes have been called lamb than ever wore wool. In the present instance, I was fairly sure that what they served in this klong-side outdoor café was in fact dog and nothing else. And they brought it on a clean plate.
I unskewered my meat, picked up my fork, and took a bite. Chewed, considered, chewed some more, and swallowed. I’d been prepared for a gamy taste, but if anything it was on the sweet side.
“Not bad,” I said.
“I should take another look at your passport,” Suk said. “I never thought I would live to see an American eat dog.”
“Americans were eating dog two hundred years ago,” I told him. “Lewis and Clark would have starved to death otherwise. They kept trading with the Indians, taking dogs in exchange for blankets and meal and such. And the mountain men of the Old West ate anything that turned up in their traps. Beaver and muskrat, of course, but also weasel and otter and skunk.”
He looked a little queasy himself, I was pleased to note.
“Some of those mountain men took Indian wives,” I went on, “although they may not have felt wholly committed to the relationship, no doubt for lack of a proper church wedding. In any case, there were men who got through a bad winter by slaughtering their wives and roasting them a piece at a time. I don’t suppose it happened terribly often, though you could argue that once was enough.”
He was fairly dark-complected, was Mr. Sukhumvit, but all the same he was beginning to look a little green around the gills.
“I myself,” I went on, “have never eaten human beings. Except in Africa, that is.”
“In Africa…”
“In a place called Modonoland,” I said. “There’s never been any cannibalism there, so far as I know, but there was this one madwoman there who called herself Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a white girl, as a matter of fact, and when her men massacred people they cut off certain portions of the male anatomy. Now I can’t swear they went into the stew pot, but I can’t think what else they did with them.”
“And you…”
“I spent a few days with her merry little band,” I said. “You might say it was eat or be eaten, and don’t ask me what it tasted like because it’s hard to remember.” I took another bite of dog. “As a matter of fact…”
He held up a hand. “Please,” he said.
“I was just going to say this isn’t very spicy,” I said innocently. “Do you suppose we could get some hot sauce?”
I’d told the truth about Lewis and Clark, and about the Rocky Mountain trappers, too. And Sheena, née Jane, and her version of missionary stew. The only time I’d stretched the truth was when I asked for hot sauce. Our satay aux chien was spicy enough the way they served it. So I was showboating, but what the hell. A little hot sauce never hurts.
And Suk was impressed. That’s what he’d told me to call him, shortly after I asked for the hot sauce. I told him to call me Evan, but he seemed happier staying with Tanner. Between the plate of dog I put away and the stories I told, he evidently decided my macho credentials were authentic. I won more points when they put a bottle of Johnny Walker Black on the table between us. By the time we got up it was empty, and I’d knocked back my fair share of it.
In return, Suk told me what he could about Burma, and the hill tribes and the opium trade and the smuggling of rubies and antiquities and Buddha images. (A drug lord in the Shan state controlled the opium, and SLORC was officially at war with him, but some of the generals seemed to be helping him launder his profits. The government controlled the ruby trade, and forbade the export of anything more than a hundred years old. You couldn’t take Buddha statues out of the country, either, new or old, but unless they were old there was no reason to smuggle them. Unless you were a tourist who wanted one for a souvenir, in which case merchants throughout Burma would be delighted to sell you one, and the customs inspectors would be every bit as delighted to confiscate it on your way out of the country.
Why? I wondered.
“They are afraid,” he said. “What use could a non-Buddhist possibly have for a statue of the Buddha? They might be used for a sacrilegious purpose.”
“Like what? A ring-toss game?”
He spread his hands. “They are afraid of everything,” he said. “Remember, they were afraid to have tourists, afraid to allow foreign investment. Now they see the money come in and they like that. One of these days someone will figure out that they can levy an export tax on antiques and Buddha images. ‘You want that bronze statue of the Enlightened One? Very good, it will no doubt make a splendid ornament in your fish pond. That will be twenty dollars tax, please, payable in hard currency, not in kyat. Thank you very much.’”
“‘And have a nice day.’”