Five hundred dollars, thought Hatcher, and the girl was probably holding back another hundred or two. Wol Pot did okay.
‘Why did you keep it from the police?’ the Thai whispered.
‘I thought he might come back,’ she lied, and he said, ‘Then get it and I will deal with the farang.’
He did not say the word for foreigner with any contempt and he was perfectly at ease and relaxed, as if he and Hatcher were old friends. If his whore’s swiping the wallet upset him, it didn’t show. He motioned Hatcher inside the hooch, so the other river people could not see them. Nervously Sy moved closer.
Sukhaii went to a chest, took out a snakeskin wallet and gave it to the Thai, who opened it, took out a handful of purple bahts, and stuffed them in his pocket.
‘I am sorry,’ she said repentantly. He shrugged and said casually, ‘Mai pen rai,’ motioned her to leave and then leafed through the wallet and found a small gold amulet in one of the compartments. It joined the money. He looked back at Hatcher.
‘Sixty dollars American,’ he said. His smile grew a little larger. Hatcher had forgotten that in Thailand the first price was never the final one.
‘Khit waa phaeng pai,’ Hatcher answered, as was expected of him. ‘Fifty-five,’ he countered.
The Thai’s smile grew larger still and he shrugged. ‘Fifty-seven, if it is what you want,’ he said with a broad, broken-toothed grin and handed the wallet to Hatcher to check, and Hatcher leafed quickly through the contents.
‘Good,’ he said, handing the Thai the fifty-seven dollars. ‘Khop kun. Sawat-dii.’
‘Now, one more thing,’ Hatcher said to the girl, taking out a twenty-dollar bill, ‘another twenty American if you will tell me what the man with the knife said to you.’
‘He said nothing!’ she cried out quickly.
But the Thai was eyeing the twenty. He looked at the bill and then looked out of the hooch at the river for several seconds. ‘Tell him.’
‘But they said —,
‘Tell him!’
The girl was almost out of breath with fear. ‘They said they would cut my face until I looked like a grandmother,’ she said weakly, staring at the floor.
‘Why would they do that?’
‘If I told the police anything about them.’
‘What else?’
‘They asked if I knew an address’
‘Whose address?’
‘It did not make sense. It was the horse in the myth.’
‘Thai Horse?’ Hatcher asked eagerly. The girl nodded. The Thai reached out slowly and plucked the twenty from Hatcher’s fingers. The seventy-seven dollars joined the rest of the booty. Then the Thai reached to the back of his belt and brought out a teak billy club a foot long. He stood four or five feet in front of Hatcher and smacked the club in the palm of his hand.
‘Maybe you give me rest of money or maybe you gold Rolex, hey?’ the Thai said, still smiling.
Hatcher backed up a foot or so. His body began to tense up and his eyes narrowed. Not another sateng,’ Hatcher whispered hoarsely.
The smile stayed, but the Thai’s eyes got a little crazy. He spread his feet and stood with the club held out at his side.
‘I hurt you,’ the Thai pimp said.
The words were hardly out of his mouth when Sy jumped on the boat behind him. The Thai spun around and took a hard backhand swipe at Sy but it was wide, and before he could swing again, Sy kicked him twice, hard kicks, one in the chest, one on the point of his jaw. The Thai fell back against Hatcher but jabbed the stick underhand into Hatcher’s stomach. Though the blow glanced off Hatcher’s side, it caught him off guard, and the Thai broke loose and charged Sy. The little man hit him with three hard jabs straight from the shoulder. The Thai’s head bobbed, but the punches did not stop him. He kept coming. He grabbed Sy in a bear hug and lifted him off the deck. Before he could throw him overboard, Hatcher reached out and dug iron fingers into the Thai’s shoulder. He dug deep, found the nerve he was seeking and ground it against the Thai’s shoulder blade.
The Thai was temporarily paralyzed. His arms dropped, the club clattered on the deck and Sy twisted loose, stepped back a step and hit him in the face with a double combination: whip, whip whip, whip.
The Thai staggered backward clutching a bleeding nose and fell against the side of the hooch. The small shack collapsed, and he toppled to the deck covered with bamboo strips and lay dazed for a moment. Hatcher stooped over him, picked up the billy and tossed it into the river. The Thai wiped the blood off his surprised face.
‘I am boxer,’ Sy said and motioned to Hatcher to follow him off the hang yao.
Hatcher looked down at the stricken Thai and smiled. ‘Sawat dii,’ he said with a half-assed salute.
They went back up the bank of the klong with Sy strutting ahead of him, brushing aside the roving vendors and prostitutes. When they got to the car, he held the door open for Hatcher.
‘You looked real good in there, pheuan’ Hatcher said and crawled into the sedan. He went through the papers and found the passport. According to the information on it, Wol Pot was five six, weighed 154 pounds and lived on Raiwong Road, which was in Chinese Town. But Hatcher had something even better than a description.
He was staring down at the passport photograph of Wol Pot, the Vietnamese whose real name was Taisung, the commandant of the Huie-kui prison camp.
ROGUE TIGER
He would come to be known as Old Scar. He lay in the tall grass at the edge of the pond watching the chital stag rutting in the mud fifty feet away. He had been stalking the herd for three hours, sometimes lying motionless for thirty or forty minutes at a time as they moved down through the sandy nullah and out of the ravine into the flat plain and from there through the ten-foot-high bamboo grove to the water hole.
In his day, Old Scar had been a magnificent tiger, over five hundred pounds, faster than any male within a hundred miles, indomitable, and so powerful he had once brought down a seven-hundred-pound buffalo and hauled it with his iron jaws almost a quarter of a mile to his family and then hid the carcass twenty feet above the ground in a tree. This had been some tiger.
Now he was old and crippled by rheumatism. Old battle wounds ached when he crawled. His teeth were yellow and one of his cuspids was broken off. And a huge, ragged scar etched his face from between his eyes down the side of his muzzle to his jaw, the signature of a younger, more aggressive male who would have killed any other tiger of that age and infirmity. But Old Scar had still been a little too tough for the young buck, and he had shown enough stuff to take a draw and walk away from the fight with only his wound.
Old Scar carefully placed one enormous paw in front of the other, creeping by inches toward the unsuspecting deer so as not to rustle the dry leaves under him. For all his twenty-two years he had hunted the same way, with the stealth and patience and speed he had learned watching his mother. He was moving by pure instinct now. Except that all his tricks were failing him.
The stag raised his head suddenly and sniffed the air. There was no wind, so he had not yet picked up the tiger’s scent, but he was wary. The herd was spread out and knee-deep in the water. They knew better than to go any deeper, for the pond was also the home of several crocodiles. But they were vulnerable and the big five- hundred-pound buck was responsible.