“As I said, not the finest. I am very sorry for that.” Anderson beckons him. “It’s this way.” He strides across the room and pulls aside the curtain, revealing the inner theater.
Emiko lies on stage with Kannika kneeling over her. Men crowd around as Kannika draws out the telltale movements of the windup girl’s design. Her body twitches and jerks in the light of glow worms. The Somdet Chaopraya stops short and stares.
“I thought only the Japanese had them,” he murmurs.
28
“We found another.”
Kanya starts. It’s Pai, standing at her doorway. Kanya rubs her face. She was sitting at her desk, trying to write another report, waiting for word from Ratana. And now drool soaks the back of her hand and her pen leaks everywhere. Asleep. And dreaming of Jaidee who simply sits and pokes fun at all her justifications.
“Were you sleeping?” Pai asks.
Kanya rubs her face. “What time is it?”
“Second hour in the morning. The sun’s been up for a while.” Pai waits patiently for her to gather her wits, a pockmarked man who should be her senior, but who Kanya has overtaken. He is of the old guard. One who worshipped Jaidee and his ways, and whom remembers the Environment Ministry when it was not ridiculed, but feted. A good man. A man whose bribes are all known to Kanya. Pai may be corrupt, but she knows who owns which parts, and so she trusts him.
“We found another,” he repeats.
Kanya straightens. “Who else knows?”
Pai shakes his head.
“You took it to Ratana?”
He nods. “It wasn’t tagged as a suspicious death. It took some effort to find. This is like looking for a silver minnow in the rice paddies.”
“Not even tagged?” Kanya sucks in her breath, lets it out in an irritated hiss. “They’re all incompetent. No one remembers how it always comes. They forget so quickly.”
Pai nods easily, listening to his mistress rant. The pits and holes of his face stare back at her. Another worming disease. Kanya can’t remember if it was a genehack weevil that did it, or a variation on phii bacteria. All Pai says is, “This makes two, then?”
“Three.” Kanya pauses. “A name? Did the man have a name?”
Pai shakes his head. “They were careful.”
Kanya nods sourly. “I want you to go around to the districts and see if anyone has reported any missing relatives. Three people missing. Get photos taken.”
Pai shrugs.
“You have a better idea?”
“Perhaps forensics will find something to link them,” he suggests.
“Yes, fine. Do that as well. Where is Ratana?”
“She has sent the body to the pits. She asks for you to meet her.”
Kanya grimaces. “Of course.” She tidies her papers and leaves Pai to his futile searches.
As she leaves the administrative building, she wonders what Jaidee would do in this situation. For him, inspiration came easily. Jaidee would stop in the middle of the road, struck suddenly by enlightenment, and then they would be off, running through the city, hunting for the source of contamination, and invariably, the man would be right. It sickens Kanya to think that the Kingdom must rely on her instead.
I am bought, she thinks. I am paid for. I am bought.
When she first arrived at the Environment Ministry as Akkarat’s mole, it was a surprise to discover that the little privileges of the Environment Ministry were always enough. The weekly take from street stalls to burn something other than expensive approved-source methane. The pleasure of a night patrol spent sleeping well. It was an easy existence. Even under Jaidee, it was easy. And now by ill-luck she must work, and the work is important, and she has had two masters for so long that she cannot remember which one should be ascendant.
Someone else should have replaced you, Jaidee. Someone worthy. The Kingdom falls because we are not strong. We are not virtuous, we do not follow the eightfold path and now the sicknesses come again.
And she is the one who must stand against them, like Phra Seub-but without the strength or moral compass.
Kanya strides across the quads, nodding at other officers, scowling. Jaidee, what is it in your kamma that placed me second to you? That placed your life’s work in my fickle hands? What joker did this? Was this Phii Oun, the cheshire trickster spirit, happy to see more carrion and offal in the world? Happy to see our corpses piled high?
Ahead, men wearing filter masks jump to attention as they spy her pushing open the gates to the crematory grounds. She has a mask issued, but leaves it dangling around her neck. It does no good for an officer to show fear, and she knows the mask will not save her. She places more faith in a Phra Seub amulet.
The open dirt expanse of the pits lays before her, massive holes cut into the red earth, lined to keep out the seep of the water table that lies close below. Wet land, and yet the surface bakes in the heat. The dry season never ends. Will the monsoon even come this year? Will it save them or drown them? There are gamblers who bet on nothing else, changing the odds on the monsoon daily. But with the climate so much altered, even the Environment Ministry’s own modelling computers are unsure of the monsoon from year to year.
Ratana stands at the edge of a pit. Oily smoke roils up from the burning bodies below. Overhead a few ravens and vultures circle. A dog has gotten into the compound and skulks along the walls, looking for scraps.
“How did that get in?” Kanya asks.
Ratana looks up and spies the dog. “Nature finds a way,” she observes dully. “If we leave food, it will reach for it.”
“You found another body?”
“Same symptoms.” Ratana’s body is slumped, her shoulders bowed inward. Below them, the fires crackle. A vulture sweeps low. A uniformed officer fires a cannon and the explosion sends the vulture screeching skyward again. It circles. Ratana closes her eyes briefly. Tears threaten at the corners of her eyes. She shakes her head, seeming to steel herself. Kanya watches sadly, wondering if either of them will be alive at the end of this newest plague.
“We should warn everyone,” Ratana says. “Inform General Pracha. The palace as well.”
“You’re sure now?”
Ratana sighs. “It was in a different hospital. Across the city. A street clinic. They assumed it was yaba stick overdose. Pai found them by accident. A casual conversation on his way to Bangkok Mercy to look for evidence.”
“By accident.” Kanya shakes her head. “He didn’t tell me that. How many could there be out there? Hundreds already? Thousands?”
“I don’t know. The only good thing is that we haven’t seen any sign that they themselves are contagious.”
“Yet.”
“You must go ask Gi Bu Sen for advice. He is the only one who knows what sort of monster we face. These are his children, coming to torment us. He will recognize them. I’m having the new samples prepared. Between the three, he will know. ”
“There’s no other way?”
“Our only other choice is to begin quarantining the city, and then the riots will begin and there will be nothing left to save.”
Rice paddies sprawl in all directions, emerald green, bright and neon in the tropic sun. Kanya has been inside the sinkhole of Krung Thep for so long that it’s a relief to see this growing world. It makes her imagine that there is hope. That the rice grasses will not wilt red under some new variant of blister rust. That some engineered spore will not float over from Burma and take root. Flooded fields still grow, the dikes still hold, and His Royal Majesty King Rama XII’s pumps still move water.
Tattooed farmers make wais of respect as Kanya cycles past. By the stamps on their arms, most of them have already done corvée labor for the year. A few others are marked for the start of the rainy season when they will be required to come to the city and shore up its dikes for the deluge. Kanya has her own tattoos from her time in the countryside, before Akkarat’s agents tasked her with this burrowing into the very heart of the Environment Ministry.