50
Tietsin is dropping the smack tomorrow: you did notice me coyly slip this dangerous intelligence between the plump thighs of the previous chapter, farang? Are your knees trembling the way mine are right now? Don’t you wish you were stoned? I do. Under the contract he only has to give us twenty-four hours’ notice within a certain time window. I faxed him a copy of the letter of credit so his bankers could check it, and he sent me a text message yesterday consisting of a single word-tomorrow-and I’ve been up all night. I’ve vomited in the sink twice already and it’s only six in the morning. I’m not going through with it, I tell my face in the mirror. Oh yes, you are, the face replies. My own mind has conspired against me: I have no options anymore. Supposing some of them are kids who use the stuff? I ask myself. You accepted Vikorn’s money, didn’t you, you took the job. Are you a man at all? So it goes on, the war of the self against the self. I do believe I might be turning 100 percent farang. But I have one of those wily Oriental solutions up my sleeve, which you’ll probably despise for not being confrontational enough, but it might just do the trick, even if Vikorn snuffs me for it, which he certainly will. I don’t care. I’d rather die early and (relatively) innocent. Look at my record: more than ten years in the Royal Thai Police and I’ve committed no major crime, nor even a minor one as far as I can recall. (I’m not including smoking dope; sometimes the law is wrong.) Is there another serving officer who can swear on the Pali Canon that he is equally clean? No, the hell with it, Tara is never coming to live with me in Bangkok, so there’s no use kidding myself I have a life at all; what’s to lose?
Do you also have the martyr cutoff psychology, farang? The kind that says, Only so much and so far, I prefer death to further degradation? It’s quite a powerful mantra, but you risk having to put your life where your mouth is sooner or later.
Now you’re saying, So why didn’t you think of this before, why leave it to the last minute? Answer: cowardice. I just didn’t want to face it. I’m coming out of an extended Hamlet moment: I just couldn’t make up my mind. Now I have. And the Buddha, for once, is quite explicit. He visited me last night in a dream, in the form of a child’s plastic Buddha. He actually told me how to get out of this fix. The only trouble with advice straight from Gautama himself, though: he doesn’t place any value on flesh at all. I mean, to him, there’s no difference between the two shores; he is master of both. Now I’m not sure if the dread in the bottom of my gut is from the crime or the Buddha’s plan to prevent it.
It is a common observation among Buddhists of all persuasions that after death one is not initially aware of one’s altered state; the clue comes from the people around who can no longer see or hear you, and in this sense the condition cannot be said to differ greatly from your basic urban paranoia: Am I dead already? Have I always been that way? These are the kinds of thoughts which illuminate a mind focused wonderfully by the knowledge that it may well be slotted before morning. Nevertheless, I’m off to the local hardware store at the bottom of the street, which sells gas bottles for cooking. I choose two of medium size-the kind that can supply the cooking needs of a normal Thai family for a month-then buy two little camping gas burners-are you beginning to get the picture, farang?-and take everything home in a taxi. Then I buy my first car. Well, why not? I’m consigliere, I deserve a car. In view of its short life expectancy, however, I go for a secondhand Toyota. The more I develop my secret plan, the prouder and scareder I become. It’s now midday. The next few hours are going to be tough; I see quite a few joints coming on.
Now I’m at the station not half as stoned as I would like to be, fiddling with paperwork, making constant checks on my cell phone to see if Tietsin has texted me again, even though I would have heard the bleep if he had. I’m waiting for the final signal that will tell me which of twenty named locations in Bangkok the Tibetan will actually use for the drop. He has calculated that even Vikorn and Zinna together cannot ambush twenty separate drop-off points to steal his product without paying for it-not without drawing undue attention to themselves, anyway-so he faxed a map with twenty different crosses on it. General Zinna immediately pointed out that half the locations were on the river, so the Tibetan was surely planning to come by water. Vikorn sees it differently: He’s probably trying to make us think he’s coming by river because he’s not.
The question-How is he going to bring the stuff into the country?- has brought the two old dogs together in a competitive kind of way. I have had to attend bull sessions in the General’s map room, as if the Tibetan were preparing to invade Bangkok. Basically, Zinna is convinced the stuff will come by sea and be taken up the Chao Phraya River by sampan. Vikorn doubts there is time for the sea route, which is exactly what intrigues him as a fellow professionaclass="underline" how do you shift that much smack across a modern border and get away with it? As far as he can see there are only two solutions: overland from Cambodia or overland from Burma. But in both cases, the Tibetan has to get the stuff out of the Himalayas first, not easy in the present climate. Even if he has bent people in the Nepali government, there is still India to deal with. Vikorn only pretends to have a view on how Tietsin will bring it off; in reality he is waiting to find out. You can see why the cop is richer than the general.
Five p.m. comes and goes. So does six. The letter of credit is in the safe in Vikorn’s room; I can get it in five minutes. The gas bottles are in the trunk of my car. Six-thirty: it occurs to both Vikorn and me at the same time: Tietsin will wait until the last minute. According to the contract, he has until midnight to reveal the precise location; after that we have the right to kill the deal. Vikorn calls me: “What d’you think, he’ll stretch it out till then?”
“I don’t know. What does Zinna say?”
“Zinna? He isn’t even guessing anymore. The Tibetan has done his head in.”
Ever felt, farang, that you just don’t have the constitution for modern times? That theoretically you could see how living a better life might be achieved, but the logistics of the nervous system are against you? I keep thinking about those gas bottles and how I’m going to use my consigliere status to follow the smack once Vikorn has paid for it, to whatever warehouse they’re using, and use the small gas bottles to heat up and explode the big ones-and my whole body starts to go into contortions at my desk and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to carry it off; I’m not sure my body will obey me.
At ten p.m. Tietsin texts me; within the same moment I’m calling Vikorn and Zinna on my cell phone, grabbing the letter of credit as Vikorn meets me at the door of his room, snatching my car keys-and I’m out of the station. “It’s location thirteen,” I’m telling Zinna as I’m walking down the steps to the garage. “Location thirteen, that’s right, on the river near Klong Toey commercial port.”
I get there first, so I position my car near where I think Vikorn will park his van, the one he’s going to use for the pickup. I’ve no sooner killed my engine when a tall camper van turns up with the two chemists, one representing Vikorn, the other Zinna: highly respected professionals, both of whom are aware that honest reporting is the likeliest way to stay alive. I’m pretty sure they are incorruptible, even by a Tibetan psychonaut. Now I hear the fairy crunches of army tires on the tarmac. Yep, Zinna’s here, with a twenty-man backup-Vikorn and I had to talk him down from a hundred-man squad. Speak of the devil, here’s the Colonel himself, rolling up in an ordinary police van with only a few bodyguards on motorbikes. He took the view a long time ago that there will be no trouble from Tietsin, as long as we come up with the cash.