48
Johnny Ng has a maid, a Filipina who brings us breakfast on his vast balcony overlooking downtown Hong Kong. Ng points at some buzzards hanging in the sky above the tall apartment buildings. “Their numbers diminish every year,” he says. “I think it’s a miracle they’ve hung on this long.” After the coffee and fresh croissants, he drives me to the rail terminal in the city center, and I take a train to the airport. It is not an ordinary train: there is a “train ambassador,” who walks through the carriages making sure everyone is okay on the twenty-minute journey. She gives me the standard Hong Kong money smile, but takes in my clothes as she passes. From the airport I call Sukum to tell him about my evening with Johnny Ng. Sukum refuses to comment over the phone; all he communicates is fear, so it seems I have to carry the burden of enlightenment all on my own. As soon as I touch down in Bangkok, I call him again. “That was the deal, wasn’t it? I do the investigative stuff, then you corroborate or not?”
“Not on the phone. I’ll come around to your house. No, wait, I don’t want to be seen visiting you, I don’t want them to think we have a personal relationship.”
“D’you want me to wear a disguise?”
“Would you?”
“I was joking, Detective.”
He coughs. “How about Hua Lamphong?”
“Thirty minutes.”
So now I’m sitting at a café in the train station with an iced lemon tea, watching some backpackers hump their packs to the platform from which the train for Chiang Mai and all points north will depart. The station is crowded, as usual, mostly with rural Thais who have come to find fortune in the big city, or to depart in sorrow that they have failed. There are plenty of food vendors and taxi hustlers, as well. There is a big clock under the old-style rotating noticeboard that carries the departure times and makes it possible to imagine it is a hundred years ago when the station and its clock were new. Sukum is late. Sukum is terrified.
Finally he shows up in a pair of jeans, a black T-shirt, and dark glasses. He is carrying a Thai newspaper, which he has opened and raised to eye level, so that he has to take precautionary peeks before every step. He still walks like a cop. When he sees me he makes a sign to say, Don’t say hello. Instead of taking the seat next to me at my table, he sits at an adjacent table and takes out a pack of L &Ms. Sukum never smokes. I try not to stare as he opens the pack, thumps it to extract one, and lights it clumsily with a butane lighter. Ad-libbing as best I can, I wait for a few moments, then ask if I can have a cigarette. He shoves the packet at me. When I take one I use the opportunity to go nearer to him to beg a light. All the time his eyes are darting, and I see a fine patina of sweat has covered his face and soaked his T-shirt into a still darker shade. “Get a newspaper,” he hisses. So I find a vendor, buy today’s copy of Thai Rath, sit down at my table again but nearer to him, and carry on the conversation as if I am making remarks about the day’s news.
“You really met Johnny Ng?” he whispers. Despite his fear, he is fascinated that I may have penetrated further into the heart of darkness than he did ten years ago when he first started investigating Doctor Moi.
“Yes.”
“And he talked?”
“Yes, he talked. But that guy is a born survivor. What he said is all unat-tributable. I need you to fill in the gaps.”
He shakes his head at the incalculable depth of the void that has opened under his feet. “Okay,” he croaks, “talk.”
I tell the tale of a Chinese soldier of fortune whose tragedy was not entirely without a silver lining. True, Ng was shuttled around between family members after Mao’s Cultural Revolution had claimed his parents, and finally found a long-term foster home with a British family living in Hong Kong when it was still a British colony. All along, his surrogate families tended to be quite well-off and very well educated. He himself was also very, very smart. The youngish bisexual man-he was in his mid-to late twenties-who went to Bangkok to check out the possibilities of a distant family connection with a well-to-do pharmacist only a few years older than himself was cocky, adaptable, fluent in English and three Chinese dialects including Teochew, excessively good-looking, and entirely without moral sense. He married Moi within three months of meeting her, without expecting much in the way of love or normal family life. He had no illusions. Mimi Moi was weird within a tradition of upper-class Chinese women and not in the least interested in sex. That made a deal easy to reach. He would provide her with a respectable and attractive front for social events; in return she would have him trained in the most esoteric, and profitable, aspects of the gem trade. Theirs would be a symbiotic arrangement between what one might call “married singles.”
When I introduce the word gem into the narrative I watch Sukum’s face very carefully. He sinks into depression. I say, “Except that Moi doesn’t know much about precious stones at all, does she, Detective Sukum?” Sukum groans. “Oh, I expect she can tell a real sapphire from a fake-she would have learned that at her mother’s knee, no doubt.”
Sukum lights another cigarette. I don’t think this one is a prop. “Go on,” he gulps.
“The story at this stage, as with everything to do with China, plunges into a historical sidetrack. I’m talking about the 14K Triad Society.” Sukum drops the cigarette as he’s tapping ash into a tin ashtray, and has to retrieve it; now it’s covered in black ash, so he has to light another. “I didn’t know how widespread their operations are. I didn’t know they’d colonized half of the Pacific Rim.”
“You don’t call it the 14K outside of Hong Kong,” Sukum hisses. “Didn’t he tell you the unoriginal Thai name they’ve adopted?” I raise my eyebrows. “Kongrao. I want you to use that name when you talk to me about it.”
Kongrao means “our thing,” and, like cosa nostra, can be used in conversation without invoking anything sinister. It’s a phrase you hear a thousand times a day. I say, “Okay, so, Kongrao goes back to the eighteenth century-”
“Seventeenth.”
“Whatever. Chinese secret societies are genuinely religious at their core. All that Westerners see in the ceremonies is a lot of mumbo jumbo designed to brainwash and terrorize members into total obedience. Like with the Sicilians. What farang don’t understand is that no Asian society, especially not a criminal one, lasts for hundreds of years without a spiritual foundation. The rites work because they have something behind them.”
“Right,” Sukum says, lighting another foul-smelling L &M with shaking hands.
“And as so often in Asia,” I continue, “the priestly line was dominated by one family. One family whose duty it was to provide a priestess to preside at the rituals.”
Now that I’ve really let the cat out of the bag, Sukum seems almost relieved. I explain, “We’re talking about an exceptionally successful operation built up patiently over a period of centuries by dedicated men and women who never think of themselves as criminals at all, merely as people making a living in a difficult environment which requires absolute loyalty and absolute secrecy and includes an apprenticeship that lasts more than fifteen years. That’s why the rituals are so important and why the priestess has to be perfect for the part. Using this age-old system based on Confucian values, Kongrao has long dominated loan sharking throughout the Rim. All the big illegal logging operations in Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia, for example, are financed by Kongrao. But even logging is secondary to the most consistently lucrative trade, which has never failed for three hundred years and is the most closely guarded of all Kongrao’s operations. Comparatively, heroin and methamphetamine are like cash crops that, though good for turnover, do not bring in anything like the steady income generated by this business: the buying, cutting, polishing, faking, smuggling, and selling of precious gems.”