Crackdown Read online

  “Why do that?” said Oak.

  “It buys time.”

  “Who made this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Palm. “And I don’t fucking care.”

  “How did a nice guy like you become so sinister?” asked Oak.

  “Practice.”

  “All of Munny’s artwork is stored in my Dropbox, and yours too, Oak,” Palm continued. “And you have it, Fah. We’re backed up.”

  “There’s a big hole in this,” said Fah, folding her arms, looking between Oak and Palm.

  “Which is?” asked Palm.

  “What happens if all three of us are arrested?”

  She glanced over at Munny, who stood with arms at his side, expressionless, as if waiting for the three of them to finish their arguments and get on with the business at hand. The other two turned and stared at him. Munny shifted uncomfortably under their stare and their judgment. Was he really part of this group?

  “No way,” said Oak.

  “Why no way?” asked Palm.

  “Munny, are you following this?” asked Fah.

  “You trust him?” asked Oak.

  Fah rolled her eyes.

  “Munny’s one of us. He’s part of our group. Who do you think made these graphics? Of course I trust him.”

  “The high-tech stuff isn’t like drawing water buffalo or cutting stencils,” said Oak.

  “Can you work a cell phone, Munny?” Fah asked as she opened her handbag and fished around, waiting for him to reply.

  She removed her old iPhone 5 and handed it to Palm.

  “Load it with the app and show Munny how to use it.”

  Palm took the phone and moved beside Munny.

  “If I go too fast, tell me and I’ll slow down. We’ll go over it until you can do it in your sleep. You do sleep, don’t you?”

  Munny smiled.

  “When I can.”

  With these new friends Munny was having some new experiences. He listened with great intensity, taking in all they said. Something important was about to happen. And they’d decided to not spray the stencils on walls after all. The plans had changed. All of their talk about the apps, Dropbox and logins wasn’t that different from the world of diagrams and instruction manuals he studied to repair generators or tattoo parlor equipment. Palm taught him how to use the iPhone and how to log in to the email account, and Munny only had to ask Palm once to repeat how the fail-safe worked. Palm then slowly drilled him again on how to use the projection software.

  “And if Munny forgets what to do?” asked Oak.

  “What if you forget?” asked Palm.

  “I’ll remember,” said Munny as both of them turned and looked at him.

  “Do you have a better plan?” asked Fah.

  That shut up Oak, who had nurtured the ability to blow up other people’s bridges but failed as a rule to take the time to build any himself.

  “Then we’re agreed,” she said, holding out her clenched fist.

  Palm gave her a fist bump and exchanged a second one with Oak. Then all eyes were on Munny as he joined their little ritual as a full-fledged member for the first time.

  “Keep your phone safe, Munny,” Fah said.

  Fah had found Munny at the tattoo parlor in Khao San Road, trying to collect his back pay. He’d signed on to their venture not for political reasons—he’d drawn what he’d been asked to do for the money. It had been no different from designing a tattoo; the mission was to please the customer. Underneath, all Munny really wished for was enough money from his work to feed his family. Fah had made sure he’d be able to do that. All of the group’s preparation, which had caused him to run hours late, was about to yield dividends.

  TWENTY

  “In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away... past, present, and future together.”

  —Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  THE ROUGH, UNFINISHED concrete staircase was jammed with the sweaty bodies of several families and their belongings, each claiming the right of way. Munny pressed his back to the wall so that a fat woman from the fifth floor could squeeze past.

  “Hey, Munny, you’re going the wrong way!” said the woman.

  Her eyes were open wide with anxiety, and her jaw trembled.

  “What are you running from?” he asked.

  “The soldiers are coming for us. Haven’t you heard?”

  She continued down the stairs before Munny could respond, moving fast for a big woman carrying two suitcases. He climbed several more steps to find a woman carrying a baby in her arms, and in front of her was a kid of about five or six cradling one of the doped-out puppies the beggar kids used as sympathy props in their daily street performance. Behind them the husband juggled a battered suitcase with a busted lock on the right side. Their terrified faces resembled those of their countrymen back home when the Khmer Rouge had emptied Phnom Penh. Sudden evacuations seemed to all play out according to the same script. Another man followed, weighed down with two large garbage bags of clothes and bedding.

  As other fleeing residents shoved past Munny, all sharp elbows and bony arms, he recognized the man with the garbage bags.

  “What happening? Why the rush?” he said, touching the man’s chest with his hand. “What’s wrong?”

  The Khmer shook his head.

  “We’ve been given forty-eight hours to leave the country or the army will come for us. No one knows what the soldiers would do with us. No one wants to find out.”

  Coming from a country with a history of an army “taking” people, which was code for killing them, the man was leaving no room to chance. He told Munny hundreds were already fleeing toward the border, carrying what they could and abandoning everything else. Rumors circulated about how the army had set up roadblocks and was arresting anyone who didn’t have a Thai ID card, loading them into trucks and driving them away. One man, they said, had run had been shot.

  “Are you sure?”

  In recent times there had been many rumors, most of them false, of Khmers who had been detained, “disappeared,” jailed or deported. Most of the time the person had turned up with a sheepish grin and no money in his pockets.

  “This time is different,” the man said. “The soldiers are tearing up documents and saying they are no good now. Go home, or you have a problem. Give me three hundred baht, they say.”

  Shakedowns were nothing new. Neither was a rogue cop or soldier tearing up valid documents for no reason other than he could. What was different this time no one could say. It was more a deep, instinctual feeling that the lion cage had opened and it was feeding time. The man scurried off carrying the plastic bags on his back.

  On the way up to the third floor, Munny heard the sounds of children playing, a baby crying and pots and pans rattling, along with the chopping sound of fish heads severed against a hard wooden board. Sewage smells from beneath drifted lazily across Munny’s dark path, making his eyes water. Now he could hear the sound of mahjong tiles slapping against a hard surface. On the third-floor landing the narrow beam of a flashlight panned across the wall and the walkway and stopped on Munny.

  “Munny, is that you?” asked his wife.

  “A lot of people are in a big hurry.”

  “We’ve been waiting for you. We gotta leave this place tonight.”

  He pulled her closer and, taking the flashlight, turned it toward her. Caked tears showed on her face. Her hair smelled from gutting fish, and her hands were raw. For the first time, he thought she looked old and defeated.

  “We have some money. So don’t worry.”

  “They’ll just take whatever we have.”

  “I’ll hide it.”

  “They’ll find it.”

  “Who?”

  “The army, the Eight-Niners. Two of them have taken off, but the others are still in the building with clubs and knives, and they’re demanding an exit tax.”

  “I won’t pay.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t think so.” />
  “Munny, what can you do? You are one man. They are a gang. Pay what they want or they’ll take away our son. They have children they’ve taken already. They told people they’ll be selling the children to fishing boat captains in the South.”

  Her talk about children being taken as hostages made Munny feel numb as he leaned back against the wall, pointing the flashlight toward their space and calling out his son’s name.

  Sovann shouted back, “Father, I won a prize at school.”

  He could hear the pride in his son’s voice as he walked over and hunched down next to him, arms hanging loosely at his side.

  “What kind of prize?”

  “For mathematicians.”

  Munny stroked his son’s hair.

  “That’s good.”

  “Mother says we’re going to Cambodia. I don’t want to leave.”

  He saw that his wife had packed the clothing, bedding and kitchen stuff. The cases were stacked in the far corner of their space. He’d seen across the way where neighbors had already left. Looking around with the flashlight, his gaze stopped at the generator. It wasn’t among the things they could take home.

  Munny pointed the flashlight into the darkness ahead of him.

  “Hello?” he called.

  “They’re gone, Munny,” said his wife.

  Only then did it sink in. They were the only family left on the third floor. Munny suddenly felt guilty for spending the whole day and most of the evening at the shophouse with the Thai university students. Fah had said it was probably the last time they’d meet. Their business was done. She’d mentioned a problem with their professor. None of those matters concerned him.

  Just before he’d left the room for the last time, each of them had waied him. He couldn’t believe his eyes; it was a moment Munny would never forget. He felt he’d won a prize. Indeed he had, and a rare one, too. His father had taught him that a genuine display of respect was the only gold medal worth getting in life. All the rest were silver medals. Second prize. Munny thought maybe that was why men fought so hard to win it.

  Munny hugged his son, kissed his hair. His hand reached out to his wife. She grabbed it with both hands and put it against her lips.

  “What are you gonna do, Munny?”

  Three of the Eight-Niners arrived with flashlights running their beams over the walls, floor and ceiling. The three flashlight beams settled on Munny and his family.

  “You working again today, Munny?”

  The men held weapons—an ax, clubs and knives.

  “Looking for work.”

  He stood up and walked toward the light.

  “Nobody’s hiring, just bosses firing people like us,” Munny said.

  He hadn’t intended this as a play for pity but a statement of fact. The Eight-Niners had no time for excuses or sob stories. They held to a basic reality of illegals: no matter how down and out, people always held something back in case they had to make a run for it.

  “What do you have for us?”

  Munny glanced over at the generator. The machine was the envy of others in the building and the only power source for four floors.

  “Take it,” he said.

  “Munny we don’t need your permission to take what is ours. But you need our permission to leave. You understand us? We have to be fair. If we make an exception, what will the others say?”

  “I can’t give what I don’t have.”

  The iPhone 5, Fah’s old phone that she’d given him earlier that night, vibrated in his right sock where he’d hidden it. Munny had had a bad feeling as he’d headed home. He couldn’t say why he had it, but there it was, to be acted upon or ignored. He’d hidden the phone while sitting in the back seat of the taxi. He’d come to the Aquarium prepared for bad news. Over the taxi radio he’d heard a report about the Khmer roundups. He couldn’t understand it entirely, but he understood enough to know that trouble was brewing for people like him.

  The eyes of the Eight-Niners were on him as he tried not to react to the vibration that was tickling his calf. He hoped the sound of the vibration would be masked by the background noise coming from the stairwells. The one with the ax waved it at Munny.

  “Give me your wallet.”

  Munny pulled his wallet out of his pocket and made an underhand toss to the man with the ax, who put it down and shone the flashlight inside, finding two hundred baht notes, one fifty baht note and three twenties. Just enough money for a mugger, a thief or a man with an ax, Munny had calculated. The rest of the money was stashed inside his clothes. The Eight-Niner’s head tilted into the beam of light and he sighed as he spread the wallet apart to find two thousand baht notes stuffed in a hidden compartment.

  “Munny, you’re a sneaky cocksucker.”

  One of the other gang members pushed the generator on its wobbly rubber wheels.

  “And we’ll be taking this as you already gave it to us.”

  His wife sobbed as the Eight-Niners laughed and made off with Munny’s cash and generator.

  “You are stupid, Munny. You didn’t think we’d find the two thousand? Well, we did.”

  “Let’s go,” Munny said, picking up two cases. “Sovann, you carry that bag.”

  His wife had a shopping cart filed with mats, pots and pans, and clothes.

  When they reached the ground floor, two large trucks stood before them with big funnels directed into the basement. The pumps groaned, and several men stood around smoking cigarettes. Munny looked over the side. Hundreds of fish flowed out of the funnels and into the basement aquarium. One of the men working a funnel said he had loaded the fish from a fountain at police headquarters. Someone else from the building whispered that was plain crazy talk. They’d tell us anything, he said, because they think we’d believe it. Why would the police have so many fish in the first place? Not to mention hiring a truck to suck them up, transport them across the city under martial law and flush the whole lot into an illegal basement pond in the bowels of an abandoned building.

  Munny saw the building owner standing near the truck with his nephew and counting out money to the two drivers. The man might be losing his Khmer squatters, but he had some good news, too. He saw the potential of a thousand or more exotic fish attracting the tourist market. People loved looking at fish, especially in a half-natural, half-urban sinkhole. Rather than a break in continuity, the transfer from police fountain to slum skeleton basement seemed to be happening smoothly, with no apparent warps or wafts in the fabric of the world seen through the eyes of the fish.

  What the observers didn’t know was that the owner’s nephew worked at police headquarters and had been tipped off that the fish in the fountain were looking for a new home. He’d offered a committee of generals’ wives a solution to their problem; he would remove the fish for free, leaving behind a few rare species of Chinese carp. Hearing the news, his uncle had shaken his head and spit, complaining that he’d blown the chance to have the rich wives dip into a secret fund to pay for the cost of transportation, plus assorted overheads and a twenty-percent profit margin. His sister’s boy might be a fine cop, but the sideline extortion rackets clearly hadn’t prepared him for real business. But even with the cost of the truck, the owner had seen an opportunity to profit from his folly of a building. The second aspect of a great business mind, he believed, was to find the right formula to turn lemons into lemonade. The owner had a lifetime of experience in applying just the right pressure to squeeze the last juice from the lemon.

  As they watched the fish pouring into the basement, a new idea flashed through the nephew’s mind. Surely all the exotic fish from the police had released a lot of karma over the years. Should his uncle decide to sell the Aquarium, a buyer might be persuaded to pay a premium for all of that good karma. This was further proof that, as the nephew said, there really was no downside. Meanwhile, they were free to collect admission from the Chinese tourists who had already been posting Facebook pictures of the best aquarium in Southeast Asia.

  TWENTY-ONE<
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  “We are all alone here and we are dead.”

  —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  AS MUNNY, HIS wife, son and relatives—two cousins, one aunt and his father’s broker—filed into the street and turned the corner with the Aquarium behind them, he pulled the iPhone 5 from his sock. Logging in to the email account just as Palm had showed him, he found three messages:

  “Goodbye: Palm 21.48.25.”

  “Goodbye: Fah 21.49.26.”

  “Goodbye: Oak 21.49.39.”

  All three of the Thais had been picked up, less than a minute apart. Something had gone very wrong, but Munny had no idea what it could be. What mattered was the fail-safe system had worked as Palm had said it would. He marveled at the three brief goodbyes stacked one above the other in his mailbox. Short death notices. Nothing long and drawn out. So direct and to the point that they could have been uploaded to Twitter.

  The news of the group’s arrest, or worse, left Munny feeling alone and scared, even though he had his family around him. He cursed himself for not thinking about them before taking the iPhone 5 and getting involved beyond drawing what they told him to draw. Standing in the street with his wife and son and everything they owned, Munny sighed.

  “Let’s go,” he said, taking his son’s hand.

  As their group walked, Munny heard a small voice inside his mind. It was telling him to forget those Thai students. But another voice was broadcasting a contradictory message—“Munny, they are relying on you. You got paid for the artwork. Is that all you wanted? Was it just for the money? Doesn’t it matter that other people might be inspired by your art?” The voice turned into Fah’s voice inside his head, saying, “Munny’s one of us.”

  Chamey could see that some demon other than fear was eating away at her husband.

  “We’ll be okay once we reach the border,” she said. “Where’d you get the phone, Munny?”