“You’ve got a better offer than the one that had him threatening to have you trampled?”
“The price is the same. The gift is the same.” Anderson sips again. “But maybe Akkarat is willing to listen to reason now.”
Carlyle stares out at the green glow of methane lamps. Grimaces. “I’m losing money every day.”
“I thought you had leverage with your pumps.”
“Stop smirking.” Carlyle scowls. “You can’t even threaten these bastards. They won’t take messengers.”
Anderson smiles slightly. “Well, I don’t feel like waiting until the monsoons for the white shirts to come to their senses. Set up a meeting with Akkarat. We can offer him all the help he needs.”
“You think you’ll just swim out to Koh Angrit and lead a revolution back in? With what? A couple clerks and shipping captains? Maybe some junior trade rep who sits out there drinking all day and hoping the Kingdom will have a famine and drop its embargoes? Pretty threatening.”
Anderson smiles. “If we come, we’ll come from Burma. And no one will notice until its too late.” He holds Carlyle’s eyes until the man looks away.
“Same terms?” Carlyle asks. “You’re not changing anything?”
“Access to the Thai seedbank, and a man named Gibbons. That’s all.”
“And you’ll give what?”
“What does Akkarat need? Money for bribes? Gold? Diamonds? Jade?” He pauses. “Shock troops.”
“Christ. You’re serious about the Burma thing.”
Anderson waves his glass toward the night beyond. “My cover here is blown. I accept that and move forward or I pack up and head back to Des Moines with my tail between my legs. Let’s be honest. AgriGen has always played for keeps. Ever since Vincent Hu and Chitra D’Allessa started the company. We’re not afraid of a little mess.”
“Like Finland.”
Anderson smiles. “I’m hoping for a better return on investment, this time.”
Carlyle grimaces. “Christ. All right. I’ll set up the meeting. But you better remember me when this is over.”
“AgriGen always remembers its friends.”
He ushers Carlyle out the door and closes it behind him, thoughtful. It’s interesting to see what crisis brings out in a man. Carlyle, always so cocky and confident, now harried by the realization that he stands out as if he were painted blue. That the white shirts could begin interning farang or executing them at any time, and no one would mourn. Suddenly Carlyle’s confidence is stripped away like a used filter mask.
Anderson goes to the balcony and stares out at the darkness, to the waters far beyond, to the island of Koh Angrit and the powers that wait so patiently at the Kingdom’s edge.
Almost time.
24
Amid the wreckage of white shirt reprisals, Kanya sits, sipping coffee. In the far corner of the noodle shop, a few patrons squat sullenly, listening to a muay thai match on a hand-cranked radio. Kanya, monopolizing the customer bench, ignores them. No one dares to sit beside her.
Before, they might have hazarded the companionship, but now the white shirts have shown their teeth and she sits alone. Her men have already proceeded ahead of her, ravening like jackals, cleaning out old history and bad alliances, starting fresh.
Sweat trickles off the owner’s chin as he leans over steaming bowls of rice noodles. Water beads on his face, glinting blue with the flare of illegal methane. He doesn’t look at Kanya, probably rues the day he decided to buy fuel on the black market.
The radio’s tinny crackle and the faint shout of the Lumphini crowds competes with the burn of the wok as he boils sen mi for soup. None of the listeners look at her.
Kanya sips her coffee and smiles grimly. Violence, they understand. A soft Environment Ministry they ignored or scoffed at. But this Ministry-one with its batons swinging and spring guns ready to cut a body down-elicits a different response.
How many illegal burn stands has she already trashed? Ones just like this one? Ones where some poor coffee or noodle man couldn’t afford the Kingdom’s taxed and sanctioned methane? Hundreds, she supposes. Methane is expensive. Bribes are cheaper. And if black market fuel lacked the additives that turned the methane a safe shade of green, well, that was a risk they all took willingly.
We were so easy to bribe.
Kanya pulls out a cigarette and lights it on the damning blue flame under the man’s wok. He doesn’t stop her, acts as though she doesn’t exist-a comfortable fiction for both of them. She is not a white shirt sitting at his illegal burn stand; he is not a yellow card that she could throw into the towers to sweat and die with his countrymen.
She draws on her cigarette, thoughtful. Even if he doesn’t show his fear, she knows his feelings. Remembers when the white shirts came to her own village. They filled her aunt’s fish ponds with lye and salt and burned her poultry in slaughter piles.
You’re lucky, yellow card. When the white shirts came for us, they didn’t care about preserving anything at all. They came with their torches and they burned and burned. You’ll get better treatment than we did.
The memory of those sooty pale men, demon-eyed behind biohazard masks makes her want to cower even now. They came at night. There was no warning. Her neighbors and cousins fled naked and screaming ahead of the torches. Behind them, their stilt houses erupted in flames, bamboo and palm roaring orange and alive in the blackness. Ash swirled around them, scalding skin, sending everyone coughing and retching. She still carries scars from that burning, pale pocks where flakes of burning palm landed hot and permanent on her thin childish arms. How she hated the white shirts. She and her cousins had huddled together, watching in awe and terror as the Environment Ministry razed their village, and she had hated them with all her heart.
And now she marshals her own troops to do the same. Jaidee would appreciate the irony.
In the distance, shouts of fear rise up like smoke, as black and oily as farmers’ hovels burning. Kanya sniffs. It’s nostalgic, in a way. The smoke is the same. She draws again on her cigarette, exhales. Wonders if her men have gotten ahead of themselves. A fire in these WeatherAll slums would be problematic. The oils that keep the wood from rotting ignite easily in the heat. She takes another puff of her cigarette. Nothing she can do about it now. Perhaps it is only an officer torching illegally scavenged scrap. She reaches out to sip her coffee and eyes the bruise on the cheek of the man who serves her.
If the Environment Ministry had anything to say about it, all these yellow card refugees would be on the other side of the border. A Malayan problem. The problem of another sovereign country. Not a problem for the Kingdom at all. But Her Royal Majesty the Child Queen is merciful, compassionate in a way Kanya is not.
Kanya snuffs her cigarette. It’s a good tobacco, Gold Leaf, local engineering, better than anything else in the Kingdom. She pulls another cigarette from its switchgrass-cellophane box, lights it on the blue flame.
The yellow card keeps his expression polite as Kanya motions for him to pour more sweet coffee. The radio crackles with the stadium’s cheers and the men huddling around it all cheer as well, momentarily forgetting the white shirt nearby.
The footsteps are almost silent, timed with the sound of pleasure, but the yellow card’s expression gives the arrival away. Kanya doesn’t look up. She motions for the man standing behind to join her.
“Either kill me or sit down,” she says.
A low chuckle. The man sits.
Narong wears a loose black high-collar shirt and gray trousers. Tidy clothes. He could work as a clerk perhaps. Except for his eyes: his eyes are too alert. And his body is too relaxed. There is an easy confidence to him. An arrogance that has difficulty fitting into his clothes. Some people are simply too powerful to pretend a lower status. It made him stand out at the anchor pads as well. She bottles her anger, waits without speaking.