Crackdown Page 19

  At first he was going to say, “My employer,” but that didn’t sound right.

  “From a friend,” he said.

  “That’s an expensive gift. We can sell it.”

  “No, I can’t do that, Chamey. It’s got a use.”

  “Who you gonna call? Not that woman who was paying you?”

  He heard the jealousy in his wife’s voice.

  “She’s in jail.”

  The words spilled out of his mouth before he could consider what he was saying.

  “If we don’t get moving,” she said, “that’s where we’re going to be, too.”

  They increased their pace down the street, but the suitcases slowed them down. Sovann complained about being tired and hungry. They all looked to Munny to set the pace and to tell them everything was under control.

  “We’ve got money,” he said. “We’ll be all right. Up ahead we’ll find a van.”

  After that, Chamey stayed quiet, leaving Munny to return to his thoughts. The others in their group were silent, too. They would have followed Munny anywhere. He had worked for days on the generator—painstaking work in bad light with basic tools and makeshift parts—and after failure upon failure, one night he’d plugged it in and the power had suddenly run lights, fans and TVs. Munny, for his part, admired Palm, who could do something like that with a phone—reach out over space and time, and no one could stop him.

  It’s up to me, Munny told himself. Fah had been right about that, and everything else. Damn her, he thought. If only she had cheated him or treated him like dirt, then it would have been an easy decision to make. But that hadn’t happened. They’d waied him. Given him a gold medal. Munny couldn’t get those three wais out of his mind. He could hear Fah’s voice saying, “Munny, you’re not a frog in a coconut shell. You’re talented. You belong to the world. You’re our Banksy. You’re going places.”

  To a shallow unmarked grave, thought Munny. He looked at the driver seated in a van parked on the curb. The bearded man wore a Muslim skullcap.

  “As-salamu alaykum,” said Munny. “Peace be with you.”

  That was one of the few Muslim phrases Munny had learned from a Muslim prisoner when he’d been jailed along the Thai-Cambodian border for illegal entry.

  “Wa alaykum as-salam wa rahmatu Allah,” said the driver automatically. “May peace and mercy of Allah be upon you.”

  He looked Munny up and down. There was nothing to suggest that Munny or his family were Muslim. The driver was curious about this thin young man trailing a village of relatives behind him with their personal belongings.

  “Where you go?” asked the driver, as Munny set down his cases on the pavement and leaned toward the window.

  “How much to drive to Aranyaprathet?”

  From there, the city of Poipet lay just across the border in Cambodia, and once they crossed the border, they’d be safe.

  The driver’s eyes widened as he stared at Munny. That was a long drive from Bangkok—six, seven hours, and there would be roadblocks and checkpoints. He sized up Munny and the people standing behind him, trying to calculate the entire cost, including fuel and the bribes if they were stopped by the police or army. He decided to start out with the nice round amount of ten thousand baht.

  Munny stayed patient and calm, as he’d learnt to do when someone with half a tattoo started screaming that it hurt or it wasn’t what they wanted. The main lesson was not to throw gasoline on an emotional fire. Munny slowly shook his head and smiled as he leaned in through the window.

  “Wa alaykumu as-salamu wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh,” said Munny, “May peace, mercy and blessings of Allah be upon you.”

  They settled on four thousand, two hundred baht. He returned to his wife and told her the amount the driver had agreed to accept.

  She squeezed his arm, whispering, “Munny, we don’t have that kind of money.”

  “We’ll be okay. Besides, we don’t have any choice,” he said. “Look at all the people around, they all want to go home. If we don’t pay, someone else will. And there are seven of us. It’s not too much.”

  Chamey searched her husband’s eyes. He was a man who had always told the truth. She wrapped an arm around her son.

  “You hear your father, Sovann? It’s going to be okay.”

  Munny was happy to sit back in a van with his wife and son on the long road home. Soldiers in full combat uniform stopped the van at a military checkpoint outside of Pattaya and shone a flashlight on Munny and his family. He handed over five hundred baht and the soldiers waved them on. Why are they making it difficult to leave Thailand, Munny asked himself. If they don’t want us, why don’t they let us go?

  “It’s all about money,” said Chamey, as if she could read his mind.

  They’d entered Thailand illegally. Paying some cash on the way out was a kind of exit tax, he decided. They could have come out a lot worse. Munny wasn’t too upset. Half an hour later, when his wife had fallen asleep against the window, Munny slipped out Fah’s smart phone. He put a finger to his lips as Sovann watched him operate it.

  The screen light switched on. Munny covered it with his hand. He wondered what had happened to Fah and Oak and Palm. Where had the soldiers taken them? How long would they be detained? If it were only a few days, they could carry out their plans and they didn’t need him. But he was fooling himself, he thought. Once someone got arrested under martial law, it was serious. That’s why they’d made pledges to each other. It was up to Munny to follow through. But it wasn’t that simple.

  Munny considered the possibility that his friends might be tortured. As he was the last man standing, perhaps one of them would give him up to stop the pain. That was the purpose of torture. Pain was meant to retrieve information from someone who refused to give it freely. Pain, question, pain, question repeated in a loop, with interrogators replacing one another and no break in the process, until an answer other than “I don’t know” stopped the cycle. Sooner or later the person broke. In the torture business, that was known as the bingo moment. The torturers had a winning number.

  Munny thought about rolling down the window and throwing away the smart phone. His little interior voice told him to wash his hands of all that. It wasn’t his country, his fight or his problem. He had his family to think of. But it seemed to have come down to Munny to be the one to send out the messages to others through Line. Five hundred numbers had been queued up by Palm on his phone. Those people would receive the invitation to participate in a collective exhibition of Munny’s art. From his phone Munny would then push the graphics through five hundred phones, pointed at walls in a hundred locations.

  “That’s how to project people power,” Fah had said.

  He thought of Oak leaning over the table, looking at the walls covered with spray-painted images Munny had made. Oak had turned, looked him in the eye and performed a wai, bowing slightly. The image of Oak ran like a film clip inside Munny’s head. He couldn’t turn it off, and Palm waiing him, too. Both of them waiing him like he was a monk. Fah had started something unexpected. She’d broken a taboo, and it made him feel free in a way that he was still coming to terms with. What was Munny going to do with all that respect coming at him from all directions?

  Munny pushed the sequence on the iPhone, waited a moment, and then put the phone back in his pocket.

  “What are you doing, father?”

  “Figuring out how it works.”

  His son lowered his head, looking at the screen.

  “Does it have games?”

  “Plenty. When we’re back home, I’ll teach you how to use it.”

  “You can teach me now.”

  “I have to keep the battery from running low,” he said.

  Besides, there wasn’t a signal. They were either out of range or the system was down. It didn’t much matter as the phone wasn’t co-operating, so he slipped it into his pants pocket.

  “Get some sleep. We have a long way before we reach home.”

  By the time they
arrived in the border area, they found thousands of other Khmer already there. As far as the eye could see, people on foot, on motorcycles or in vans or buses or trucks edged along. Their van pulled over to the side of the road. It was hopeless to continue a meter or two every ten minutes. Munny and his family unloaded their possessions, and Munny went around and told the driver to wait a few minutes. The driver shrugged, looked at his watch.

  “Fifteen minutes, I go.”

  It wasn’t much time. Munny and his family joined the stream of Cambodians heading to the immigration booth at the border crossing. He squeezed a thousand dollars in Thai baht into his wife’s hands.

  “Hide this money somewhere.”

  “Munny, why you doing this now?”

  His arm around Sovann’s shoulder, he replied, “For our son. I’ve got to go back to Bangkok.”

  “You can’t! They say the soldiers are killing Cambodians who stay. Don’t talk crazy! You can’t go back.”

  “I made a promise to Fah and the others.”

  She shook her head.

  “That don’t matter, Munny. What about us?”

  “Don’t you think I’ve been thinking about that? What I’m doing is for Sovann. What kind of man is his father, if he teaches him to break his promise to help someone? If a father has only one lesson to teach his son, it’s don’t make a promise unless you intend to keep it. Once you learn that lesson, the only thing of value in the world is being true to those who trust you.”

  He took a deep breath as his wife hugged him.

  “It doesn’t matter, Munny. We’re going home.”

  “And you wait for me at the border. I promise I’ll be back. And I just told you how important it is to keep your word.”

  When Munny reached the van, he looked back, but his wife, son and other members of his family had already been swallowed up in the blur of the crowd. All the people he saw looked as if their lives depended on getting over the border as soon as possible.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “The word in your mouth is anarchy.”

  —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  IN THE DARKNESS she watched the blades of the ceiling fan rotating slowly. They made a soft whirling sound. No cool air blew from the air-conditioning unit on the opposite wall. No light, no sound came from the unit, and there was no remote control. Fah lay on her side, looking at the light slipping from under the door a few feet away. Sweat had run down her back and neck, soaking through the mattress of her narrow bed. The room, still and humid, was like a tropical hothouse at midday. She slapped at a mosquito and missed. She started to cry.

  One of the women guards had taken away her clothing. She’d been given just a towel to cover her body. The room lights had been shut off an hour ago. The voices of men came from the corridor. Now they were talking outside her door. She rolled to one side on the bed, folding her arms over her stomach, Osborne’s baby inside her. It was too soon to feel anything. An image of Christina Tangier’s Elite John exhibition flashed through her mind. What would Christina, her role model, have done if the military had put her in detention? Christina had made achieving fame, wealth and recognition look easy. How many idealistic students wanted to be her? Thousands? Millions?

  Fah had one “elite john” in her life, and her request to phone him had been rejected.

  “No calls. It’s the rule,” she was told.

  “It’s cruel not to tell my husband that you’ve arrested me.”

  “We haven’t arrested you. You’ve been invited to come here.”

  “I don’t want your invitation.”

  Belligerence was easy at the beginning of detention, before the awareness sank in that nothing she said or did would allow her to hold on to any minimal amount of power over what happened to her. She had none. She remembered the reply she’d been given.

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  No truer words had ever been spoken. It took her a few hours to realize that there was no point in arguing. Osborne’s temper would flare as he waited for her call. She’d promised to phone him if she was going to be late. She’d sworn an oath, but in the sin business, there were always extenuating circumstances, such as being arrested. She told herself it would work out. Her captors had nothing but suspicions. They’d have to let her and her friends go in the morning with a warning. And once Osborne found out the army had detained her, kept her overnight, sweating under a towel, he would turn his rage on them. It would be the same violent emotion but directed at a different target. Or would he? She wondered.

  The soldiers inside the camp were young, tough and pumped up with a high-octane rage of their own. Osborne was an old man. He’d be no match for them. Yet she knew him well enough to know that he never showed fear. That’s why people avoided getting into a fight with him. It would be a battle to the death, and nothing would stop him from charging ahead. She saw the young matador, buried in his old man’s flesh, roaring to go back into the ring, shaking his orange hair. He was both matador and fighting bull, waging war against old age. Lying in the darkness, she found it comforting to think about his fierceness, not when it was used against her but when it became a sword and cape wielded to protect her honor. She missed him.

  He’d taught her a great deal about life, but nothing had prepared her for the long, hot night locked in a room along a hallway patrolled by soldiers. She heard their heavy boots pacing outside her door. They preyed on her like wolves on a lamb, and she imagined that other, higher-ranking men preyed on them. She’d learnt how to read men from Osborne, who had the instincts of a predator, one who had survived countless battles. He knew better than most the masculine landscape of the Bangkok night filled with its bands of distracted men, made stupid with booze, drugs and lust, licking old, self-inflicted wounds, searching for a tunnel out of the command structure of their lives and seeking release in pleasure.

  What had made the soldiers outside her door submit to the chain of command? It was the dirty little secret of life. Osborne whispered it to her one night when they were in bed together. It was their fear, their naked fear. There was a fortune to be made in making people fearful. Night after night, men returned to the bars not for the sex but to purge their fear and to find power over someone they paid money to fuck. The lure of a new excitement promised a moment when they wouldn’t have to be afraid.

  She rolled on her other side, facing away from the door. What had happened to Oak and Palm? Oak’s face had flushed red when a soldier slapped him. He looked deeply wounded by the act of violence. Its quickness and power made further force unnecessary. He already looked fearful.

  A military unit had set up an ambush point on the street that led out of the bridge community and back to Sukhumvit Road. The unit commander had planned it well. They had only moments after their taxi was stopped to activate the sequences that would wipe their iPhones. Ten soldiers blocked the street, and the driver of the taxi pulled over and rolled down his window. Oak looked over his shoulder as another army truck came from behind them.

  “Some serious shit,” said Palm. “It’s time to say goodbye.”

  He pressed the sequence on his phone keyboard. Fah followed next, and Oak a few split seconds later as the soldiers ran toward the taxi, flung the doors open and pulled them out.

  They were frog-marched back in the direction they’d come from. Two soldiers flanked them as they entered the barbershop and walked up the stairs, through the door and into the room where they’d worked.

  They’d cleaned the room before leaving. When the door opened, the soldiers found a long table, chairs and a single bed with a thin sheet and two pillows. The white walls smelled of fresh paint. The officer in charge walked around, looking under the table and bed. Two of the soldiers took photographs of the room. It looked like a room some old farang might stumble into to sit at the table and slowly drink himself to death. It was the kind of room where, if someone died, no one would know until one of barber’s customers complained about the bad smell. The kind of room a landlord
might quickly repaint to make it a bit easier to find a new tenant. The soldiers walked around the empty space, looking for something. No incriminating evidence was visible.

  “Who paid you?” asked the officer.

  “No one paid me,” said Fah.

  It was inconceivable to the officer that anyone would voluntarily challenge authority without a financial payment from someone. Why would a student write a hateful paper unless someone had slipped her a fistful of cash? The presumption remained that she was under the protection of someone powerful. His mission was to get her to confess to the amount she’d received and finger the person who’d paid her. At the same time, he was hitting resistance, so his psych op training told him the best strategy was to change tack, hoping to catch her off guard.

  “What were you doing here?”

  “Studying for our lectures,” said Fah.

  “Why don’t you study at university or at home? Why come here?”

  “We were praying for the junta as instructed, sir,” said Oak.

  That earned him an open-hand slap across the face.

  “Why does the barber say he smelled paint from this room?”

  No one said anything.

  “What were you painting in this room?”

  “We wanted to return it to the landlord in perfect condition so we could get our deposit back,” said Palm.

  That made Fah smile.

  “Why are you laughing? This is serious,” said the officer.

  Two other officers showed up, and one of them had their phones in clear plastic bags.

  He asked, “What did you do to your cell phones? They work but there’s no record of calls. No contact list, no apps. Nothing. Clean. What are you hiding?”

  “Is that why you were laughing? You think you can make fools of us?” asked the original officer who’d taken them upstairs.

  “Are we in trouble?” asked Fah.

  “You are going to learn the meaning of that word before the night is over.”

  They were taken back to an army vehicle, pushed inside and blindfolded.