Black Tiger, page 15
‘I will be in touch.’
Whatever deals she had conducted as she shepherded the farang visitor, struck dumb with wonder at the mysterious East, her good humour was apparently restored.
As I changed for dinner that night, I could not get the Chinese girl’s dazzling smile out of my thoughts. Cursing myself for a middle-aged fool, I decided it was high time to get Nancy’s picture out. Nothing so crass as comparisons. Nor did I need a photograph to revive my memory of Nancy—always vivid, although clouded with the unhappiness of our parting. I wanted to get a bearing on my life again. I rummaged in the drawer where I had stowed it. The picture still lay in the Kit Kat holder, still back to front. But something was different. I stared at it, puzzled. Then, suddenly, I knew. I felt cold and slightly sick.
The picture was no longer upside down.
Old, once-honed instincts arose, stiffening the fine hairs on my neck like hackles. I proceeded, in a frenzy, to investigate my belongings, my papers, my clothes.
Superficially, everything seemed just as before. But someone had been going through my possessions with great precision, and, except for the careless mistake with the photograph, fairly professionally. I lifted up my folded clothing, sniffing for the alien scent of the searcher. The photograph must have been removed, then replaced hastily. Perhaps the intruder had been disturbed. I cursed; had I slipped up, attracted attention through carelessness? Or had I changed the photograph myself and forgotten?
Fortunately, with a practical caution, I had purposefully left nothing to link me with anything but my cover story. It was natural that Dr Raven, visiting lecturer, should have a picture of his beloved. As I removed the snapshot, smoothed it out, and was about to replace it in my wallet—where, until the rift, I had carried it—I studied Nancy’s elegant, spare features and realised with a shock that it seemed the face of a stranger. I seemed a stranger to myself at that moment, a stranger in a strange land.
I closed my wallet and slipped the photograph into the pocket of my suitcase. I sat down on the bed among my scattered possessions, dropped my head into my hands, and took stock of my position.
Someone had been in my room. Perhaps the same person who had straightened my bed, laid out fresh towels, placed orchids and foil-wrapped chocolates on my pillow and a newspaper on the bedside table. My thoughts were going round in circles. Chee Laan. Nancy. My undercover mission. The fact that someone had thought it worthwhile to snoop through my few possessions.
If a text is in front of my eyes, I feel compelled to read it. It is in most circumstances a fairly innocuous neurosis. I took up the newspaper and I read the article on the front page.
Thailand’s Conscience Slates Beauty Circuses
This week Thailand’s most delectable young misses gather in the City of Angels for the annual Miss Thailand contest.
Yet, if the country’s most glamorous military personality, Colonel Sya Dam, has his way, it may soon be farewell to beauty contests as a way of life.
The 29-year-old colonel, who is of tribal origin, has been dubbed Thailand’s Conscience for his courageous moral stance, including the denunciation of his own officers for corruption.
Now the righteous colonel has protested, in an open letter to the Minister of the Interior, that the current situation calls for austerity and self-sacrifice.
‘How can a country ravaged by insurgents, flooded with refugees and agitators by its disloyal neighbours, its borders violated by infiltrators and terrorists payrolled by our communist foes, justify dissipating energy dallying with frivolous beauty pageants? This pandering to the light-minded exploiters of the vanity of foolish young girls must stop! It is a national disgrace. It is an insult to our gallant soldiers!’ fulminates the fiery colonel.
Unofficial sources predict that in the light of such powerful opposition, the city’s most exclusive venues may find themselves suddenly ‘unavailable’. The Miss Thailand competition may find itself homeless.
Colonel Sya Dam is not a man to be trifled with. Few care to risk his displeasure.
Siam Rath News
The blurred newsprint photo was captioned: Colonel Sya Dam calls pageant a disgrace.
I peered at the photograph. The uniform cap was pulled so far down that his eyes were concealed. Only the mighty square jawbone, the steel trap of the tightly closed lips, betrayed the character of the man. I was mildly surprised by the tone of the piece. Nothing I had heard about Sya Dam so far had suggested a role for him as moral crusader. A weariness flooded my veins. Everything seemed bewilderingly chimeric. Perhaps I was slowly learning about layered Asian subtleties. Or, more probably, I was enervated by the realisation that I never would. Like so many before me, I should flounder in this morass. Kipling got it right. ‘East is east,’ I murmured to myself. I had to learn the work by heart in school. Nowadays, of course, it would be deemed politically incorrect.
In a sudden attack of lassitude, I dropped the newspaper to the floor and lay back against the silk cushions and the carved teak headboard. I began to wonder when I would see Chee Laan again, what I would do when we met. How she would bring about a meeting with Sya Dam, and how that would play out. My head buzzing with conflicting impressions and desires, lulled by the hum of the air conditioner and the scent of the purple orchids I had placed in my tooth glass, I dropped off and snoozed.
Lee Residence, Bangkok
As Ah Lee listened to the account of Chee Laan and Raven’s outing from her nephew the Lee chauffeur, her eyes grew hard and bright as abacus beads. She hissed her disapproval through the scarlet stubs of her remaining teeth.
When she brought Chee Laan her morning jasmine tea, she set the cup down with unnecessary force on the ebony table, her whole person rigid with outrage. A lifetime of subjugating her hair, now at last fading to battleship grey, had dragged her loose banana-coloured skin upward to her skull, pulling her eyes open in a permanent expression of childlike surprise. There seemed hardly enough skin left to afford decent coverage to her long mare’s teeth, but she managed to purse her lips and avoided Chee Laan’s eyes.
Ah Lee came from the old world and was proud of it. She no longer fled shrieking upon hearing Chee Laan’s voice on the radio, hands over her ears, crying out that the girl’s spirit had been stolen and put in a box. But she still regarded it as against nature. Sometimes Chee Laan caught the old woman studying her, as if assessing how much of her soul had been lost in her involvement with this newfangled medium.
‘Thank you, Ah Lee.’ Chee Laan sipped her hot tea sedately and studied the old woman through the steam.
‘Heap bad joss!’ Ah Lee mumbled. ‘Paint, scent, same-same low woman. Ride about all day in Honourable Old Lady’s car with foreign devil. Eat foreign devil food—ice cream, coffee with cream, cheese.’ She grimaced in disgust at this ultimate proof of depravity. ‘Stink like foreign devil. Maybe now Little Miss ride in cage-go-up-and-down with farang, not gag at foreign-devil-cheese-eating-dead-man-decaying stink!’
Chee Laan remembered Raven’s big sunburned hands hurling the water at the river urchins, the deep hearty ring of his laughter. Even the smell of him, musky-sweet, had not been so bad at all, once she was used to it.
‘Something upset Ah Lee,’ Chee Laan soothed. ‘Will she tell her loving precious one?’
‘Who cares for the troubles of an old woman? Lambaak, bad joss. Honourable Father and Honourable Old Lady,’ panted Ah Lee, kneeling to retrieve Chee Laan’s red silk slippers from beneath the bed.
Chee Laan set the tea on her little round inlaid table. ‘I saw Father sent a whole carload of gold leaf to the Pratumwam temple.’
‘Gold leaf, plump chickens, joss sticks,’ Ah Lee recited, shaking her head, bedazzled by such extravagance. ‘Honourable Father, mighty fierce, beat up on kitchen girl very bad. Doctor come. Much money for doctor to mend kitchen girl, more money for make doctor forget. Doctor, very clever man. Honourable Old Lady say fetch priests.’
‘What did the priests say?’
‘Priests, what do they ever say?’ Ah Lee mimicked in singsong, ‘“Is your conscience clear?” Honourable Father shouts,’ here she nodded vehemently, her topknot wobbling, ‘“I honour the gods. My spirit house is better furnished than my own. The spirits want for nothing, slaves, horses, cattle I give them—even elephants! Every year I burn Kitchen God, so He can take record of my good life, my well-conducted household to Heaven.”‘
Chee Laan smiled sceptically. Ah Lee noted the smile, and continued, this time in an elevated tone, with a certain grandeur. ‘Honourable Old Lady say, “Well, Number One Son, I hope you smear plenty honey on that Kitchen God’s lips so he speaks sweet words to the chairman of the gods.”‘ She clapped her hands and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, reverting to her own hoarse staccato. ‘Oh, the anger devil entered that man then. How he roared! Like a dragon, breathing foul fumes! But Honourable Old Lady, she fears neither dragons nor devils!’ Ah Lee closed her eyes and spoke again in that soft, commanding tone quite unlike her natural voice. ‘“Are your accountants honest?”‘
‘What did he say to that?’ Chee Laan snuggled down into the bed and regarded Ah Lee with fascination. Ah Lee, with the indelible memory of the illiterate, enjoyed recreating for an interested audience scenes she had witnessed as an invisible observer. Now the old servant slumped dramatically like a discarded puppet. She squinted up at Chee Laan and shrugged convulsively, with an air of aggravation. ‘Who knows?’ She clapped her hands loudly. Sound effects were important. ‘Screen fall over. Honourable Old Lady says, “Ah Lee, worthless old skin, skulking behind screen? Shake carcass, go fetch tea!”‘
‘So you heard nothing more?’ Chee Laan was disappointed.
Ah Lee refused to lose face by admitting to this defeat. She pattered over to the shuttered window and stooped to peek through the slats into the sunlit courtyard beyond. She clicked disapprovingly. ‘No-good useless maid come now.’
‘Nee?’ Chee Laan sat bolt upright in the big carved bed. ‘Send her up. She brings back my calligraphy books. I lent them to that foreign devil-woman with paint in her hair. Madame Drinkwater.’
Once admitted, Nee knelt by the bed and placed the books on the stool, squaring them delicately with a tap of her fingernail. Chee Laan regarded her with annoyance.
‘Well?’ she demanded. To show impatience was degrading. But, she reflected, she had fifty years to gain composure to equal Tsu mu’s.
Nee murmured tonelessly, ‘I saw Queen of Songkran.’
‘Where?’
‘Riding Tiger, glittering crowns.’ Nee rolled her eyes. Chee Laan swooped from her silk pillows and struck the girl’s truculent face, her eyes narrowed into two black slits of rage.
‘Don’t talk nonsense! Tigers, crown! All Bangkok has seen that! That’s not what I sent you to find out! Where is Salikaa living? I know you followed her as I told you; you were watched!’ She forbore to mention the old noodles vendor.
Nee rubbed her cheek. Her hard eyes regarded Chee Laan calculatingly. ‘Bad place, bad people,’ she muttered. ‘I know more, too. First Grandson…’
‘Pao? My brother? What of him?’
‘He visits Black Tiger. I have seen him. He takes messages. He thinks nobody knows.’ She smiled evilly. The Lee servants held the self-indulgent youth in no high esteem.
‘Pao? That’s absurd! Who would trust him as a go-between? He’s a donkey.’
Nee remained obstinately silent. Infuriated, Chee Laan leapt off the bed, seized the girl’s hand and twisted the fingers upward so the joints cracked and the girl fell to the floor, screaming. Chee Laan clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
At first she could make no sense of the spluttered syllables. Then she was incredulous, angry. She prodded the girl with her bare toe.
‘Well, you found Salikaa. You will take me to her—but first I have business to attend to.’
Fifteen minutes later Chee Laan knocked on her grandmother’s door. Sunii Lee, resplendent in a crimson cheong sam embroidered with golden dragons, was changing the joss sticks and jasmine of her shrine. She smiled at her granddaughter but her face showed strain.
It had taken Chee Laan five minutes of blackmail and intimidation to extract her father’s accounts from his chief clerk, a toffee-complexioned, respectable-looking bureaucrat with a penchant for sexual exotica. Saved from prison by the powerful Lee family’s intervention, he laid his professional talents at their disposal for minimal remuneration. He had not realized Little Miss was so well informed about his past. He left the office in shock, aiming for the nearest singsong house and a stiff Mekhong whisky.
The calculations took Chee Laan precisely eight minutes. She noted the figures down solely for the purposes of evidence. She was comfortable with figures; people posed more problems. ‘My granddaughter calculates quicker than an abacus,’ her grandmother often proudly exclaimed.
Now Chee Laan brandished the books accusingly. ‘I expected to find irregularities, but not on this scale,’ she said tightly. ‘My own father! How could he?’
‘Your father has no head for business,’ Sunii sighed.
Chee Laan could not keep calm. ‘And who has altered this entry, and this, to protect him? Who cares so much?’
‘He is my son.’ The admission was almost inaudible.
The enormity of the crime against the family washed over Chee Laan like a wave of nausea. ‘He abandoned his filial rights when he set out to defraud the family!’ she stormed. Her voice grew dark and harsh; even her grandmother’s raised eyebrows could not deter her. ‘He is just a puppet-man, a painted bird for whom you have created a gilded cage. Worse than a criminal, he is a fool.’
‘He is your father!’ The rebuke was sharp.
‘The thought sickens me!’ Chee Laan laughed mirthlessly. ‘I know why he did it—his little pleasures, his whores and catoys, his opium and whisky and gambling, and every other damned thing. Selfish, self-indulgent…but how could you condone it?’ Her voice was bitter. The older woman was silent, her face in shadow; Chee Laan thought perhaps she had finally overstepped the mark.
When Sunii spoke, not turning her head but still arranging her votive offerings, her voice was soft and threatening.
‘You are quick-witted, Granddaughter. I did not tell you because parents must be respected. I expected you to discover this for yourself, and so you did. I am disappointed in my son.’ She moved over to the shrine, and shook the jasmine and rose wreath gently. The heavy scent lay on the air like a tint of purple. ‘Do not let me be disappointed in my granddaughter. Yesterday,’ Sunii said, watching Chee Laan, ‘a farang visited me. He sniffed these offertory flowers like a bird dog, great snuffs! So sacrilegious! Now, of course, I must throw them all away. These farangs are primitive brutes. No respect for ancestors. No dignity, no discipline.’
Her voice held a note of warning. She sat on her silk couch; Chee Laan, with the habit of childhood, crouched at her feet. Sunii took out the sweetmeat box. Its red lacquer was flaking a little now, since that day long ago when she had crammed Chee Laan’s mouth until she could not breathe, the day of the kite girl’s death. Chee Laan recognised its role as a ritual accessory to debate. She murmured thanks in their secret language. The sharp, guttural Hakka dialect so closely resembled classical Mandarin that Sunii Lee had been able to engage a Mandarin tutor for Chee Laan. She alone was permitted to address Sunii in comparatively direct terms, a unique privilege.
‘If you had attended an ordinary Chinese school here in Mang-ko, Granddaughter, with state-produced, state-controlled textbooks, you would not have achieved such proficiency in Mandarin. They are so fearful of “racial glorification.”‘
They were silent, remembering. The Hakka, the Chinese Guest people, were accustomed to a turbulent existence characterised by extremes.
‘My granddaughter has neither been brought up to be disrespectful nor to gallivant about the city with foreign devils like a low woman of no family.’
Chee Laan gasped at the suddenness of the attack. But Sunii Lee continued mercilessly:
‘Remember the family’s origins. We were once small, insignificant people in the eyes of the world; we are not Yip-in-Tsois, longtime shipping owners. We are Lees of Mang-ko; we carry knowledge of our own value in our hearts, but to others we always need to prove it. Beware of this foreigner, Granddaughter. Tell him nothing, put no trust in him. They are very charming in their rough-and-ready way, no doubt, but make no mistake. Not one of them is to be trusted. This one will get what he wants from the East. Then he will return to his devil-woman. They are cunning…’
‘What devil-woman?’
Tsu mu took from her pocket book a photo. Chee Laan stared at it. Nancy Raven stared back, her high-cheekboned face and delicate aquiline nose perfectly matched with the craggy landscape in the background.
Chee Laan, forgetting to speak in a low tone to indicate respect and good breeding, demanded sharply, ‘Who is this woman? Where did you get this?’
Sunii Lee did not deign to acknowledge the ill-bred insistence. Suddenly links and connections clicked into place. Without being told, Chee Laan knew instinctively that she was looking at some young woman who was important to Raven, and that the copied photo had been stolen, possibly by the servant Nee. But on whose orders? Nee’s initiatives were invariably mercenary. Chee Laan baulked at the notion that her grandmother had taken such a dishonourable course.
Then with chilling certainty she knew who was to blame. Loathing for the Black Tiger swelled her breast. The relationship between her grandmother and General Sya had already puzzled and alarmed her. Now she thought of a possible way to cause a rift between them. She handed the photo back politely, cradling her right hand in her left as if it were a salver. She shrugged, and said with careful casualness, ‘Who is this foreign devil-woman? Why are you showing her to me? I am not interested in these pale ghost women—I am interested only in business.’
Sunii Lee closed her eyes and inclined her head faintly in acknow-ledgement.
