“What have I done to offend you?” I ask.
His hair is gray and so close cropped it is almost shaved; at his height he cannot help but strut. He stands up and walks around his desk, making the flagstones ring with his steel-tipped boots. When he is standing about an inch from me, he pokes my chest with one index finger, as if to push me over with it. Only the rage I feel on Lek’s behalf gives me the courage to grab it and turn it back. Instead of flinching he stares into my eyes, waiting to see if I will have the guts to break it-then what? Go on, his eyes say, make my day. I hurt him as much as I dare, stopping just short of breaking it, before letting go. I have to admit his pain threshold is a lot higher than mine. He looks at his hand curiously for a moment, then nods at me to sit down on a crude wood chair while he stands.
“Explain why you were at that women’s holding prison with your geek and you can go.”
“He’s not my geek. He’s my assistant, and whatever you’re up to, he has nothing to do with it. Are all your men queer? They seem to have fallen in love with him.”
The question seems to amuse him. Some laughter lines open around his eyes. “Suppose they are, is it against the law? Are you going to arrest them?”
“No,” I say, “might is right. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” He nods in agreement. “A great pity your boss Colonel Vikorn still doesn’t understand that after all these years.” He takes a couple of steps back to assess me. “I think you went to see that Australian cunt.” He pronounces the word with a contempt you can taste. “Are you the one who busted her?” When I don’t say anything he yells to his secretary on the other side of the door and a private soldier in his thirties comes in. That he is more than six feet tall and built like something made of iron is not as disturbing as the mind behind the body. This is not a mischievous young recruit; this is a killer who enjoys his work.
I cough. “Look, I think I can cut this sh-, sh-, short,” I say. “You think Colonel Vikorn busted your mule to get an edge because your ten-year agreement with him is coming to an end and you’re both maneuvering for position. Well, you’re wrong. Vikorn would never be that crude, and anyway it’s not the kind of strategy that could succeed against a man like you. Everyone knows that. There’s a third party involved here.”
I have raised a flicker of interest. “Oh, really? Who?”
“A Tibetan.” The word produces a strange effect. The General exchanges a glance with his enforcer, then draws up a chair to sit down and watch me. More than five minutes pass without anyone saying anything. Finally, Zinna says, “Name?”
“Dr. Norbu Tietsin.”
I have the most curious impression that both Zinna and his enforcer twitch at the same time. Now Zinna stands up and paces up and down for a while, hammering home his authority with every ring. Finally, he tells his enforcer to go. “Talk,” he orders, as the door closes.
“No. I’m not talking until I see my assistant in good health standing on the other side of your window.”
“Are you giving orders here?”
“You can get the answer by torturing me, but it will take a while and Vikorn will feel obliged to retaliate. It would be a much more efficient use of your precious time if you just put Lek outside the window. It would also make negotiations for the next ten-year treaty that much smoother, don’t you think?”
Zinna shrugs and picks up his phone. “Looks like true love,” he says to me with a leer before talking into the receiver. “The katoey the boys just brought in, take him into the compound where I can see him/her from my window. If there are any visible signs, someone’s going to get their ass kicked.”
During the interval, Zinna and I find ourselves incongruously reminiscing, for want of small talk. He asks me if I remember the last summit meeting between him and Vikorn, more than a decade ago, when I was only a few years out of cadet school. I surprise him with my total recall of the event; it wasn’t something anyone could easily forget.
Both men were in their fifties at the time, at the height of their power and eager to demonstrate prowess in the most extravagant pissing contest I have ever seen. The negotiations took place over the border in Burma, where Zinna had set up a yaa baa factory capable of producing a million pills per day, manned by Karen tribeswomen whom the Burmese military had enslaved and made available to Zinna for his operation-in return for a big slice of the profits, of course.
I replay the fragments I have retained while Zinna and I are talking about it. In my mind’s eye I was no more than a kid: impressionable, fascinated, excited, and totally under Vikorn’s thumb. He sent me up into the tribal area, traditionally owned not by the Karen but by the Hmong, to reconnoiter prior to his arrival by helicopter. He astonished everyone by arriving not in one black chopper but in a squadron of thirteen which he hired for the day from an arms dealer based in Cambodia. Zinna was infuriated and intimidated, but tried not to show it while the two men negotiated at a military-type table in a valley mostly given over to poppy cultivation by the Hmong. Then something went wrong, and some very angry-looking soldiers with shoulder-fired rocket launchers appeared over the brow, running toward us in what bore a close resemblance to a charge. Now we were legging it like loonies to the last chopper to remain on the ground-and there we were, swinging away while making obscene signs at them indicating their genetic proximity to buffalo, while at the same time keeping our fingers crossed that they wouldn’t be able to get their rocket launchers on their shoulders and fire while we were still in range.
“Close one,” Vikorn sang out after a beautiful corkscrewing incandescent missile (which put me in mind of a fully realized soul zooming back to nirvana and made me kind of jealous) went shooting past.
But when the chopper tilted the other way, I could see the Hmong women below collecting their little packets of opium sap in piles for other women to hump back to the village by means of a bamboo rod across their shoulders, as they had done for a thousand years.
“Never saw Vikorn move so fast in my life,” Zinna chuckles. Obviously, he believes he got the better of Vikorn in the somewhat fraught negotiations that followed, even though Vikorn worked loopholes into the agreement you could ride a buffalo cart through.
Zinna jerks his chin at the window. Two soldiers have brought Lek to stand in front of the glass. He looks thoroughly humiliated.
Now I’m so angry I’m fantasizing about kicking Zinna in the crotch; I can even feel the blow as I would deliver it with the tip of my shoe. I would enjoy him writhing on the floor, it would be worth the beating. Then something odd happens to my mind. Tietsin’s mantra starts repeating itself automatically in my brain. I experience the same sensation as in the teahouse, a kind of floating in which consciousness is withdrawn from the tyranny of the here and now. All of a sudden even Lek’s suffering is unreal. Now Zinna is staring at me.
“Well?”
I force my attention back into the five senses. “The day the Australian Rosie McCoy was arrested, we got a tip-off. The call came from Kathmandu in Nepal. We checked the origin of the call. Apart from the fact that it came from the Himalayas it was the standard sort of thing. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s a trafficker stabbing a former partner in the back. When the tip-offs are specific we notify Immigration. This was very specific, so I showed up and assisted with the bust. That’s all I can tell you.”
“But you went to see her today?”
“Of course. I wanted to see if I could get any more information. I’m a cop.”
Zinna sneers. “You’re not a cop, you’re Vikorn’s poodle. You jump at your master’s voice.” He lets a beat pass for the insult to sink in. “But you knew she was one of ours, didn’t you?”
“We didn’t know anything.” I scratch my ear. “But she was carrying a lot of smack. Since she wasn’t one of ours, we did rather think she might belong to you.”