Crackdown Read online

  Fah pulled her new iPhone 6 from her backpack. She clicked open a photo app and scrolled through an album.

  “Is this your work?”

  Munny looked at the photograph of one of his tattoos on the right shoulder of an Englishman. He remembered his name: Colin—Colin from London, who had reddish uncombed hair and freckles over his nose and his shoulders, too. He was twenty or twenty-one years old and had been traveling for six months. Smelling of beer and pad Thai, he had stumbled into the shop a few months earlier holding a magazine. Alcohol-fueled courage commonly propelled a customer into a tattoo parlor for the first time. He’d plopped into the old dentist chair, crossed his legs, belched and opened a book at a dog-eared page.

  “Can you do me this?”

  His finger had pointed at the page showing a girl of four or five, in a dress, hair wind-blown, releasing a heart-shaped balloon.

  “You know Colin?” Munny asked.

  “He’s a Facebook friend. He posted this really cool tattoo.”

  Munny nodded and looked up from the photo. He waited. There had to be more to the story.

  “You want this tattoo?” he finally asked her.

  “I like this one,” she said, scrolling to another tattoo.

  Colin had returned two days later for a second tattoo, one of Banksy’s rat holding a sign that said “You lie.”

  Munny pursed his lips and nodded.

  “So you want the girl and balloons or the rat and the sign?”

  Before Fah answered, the shop owner, a Thai-Chinese man about fifty years old, stormed through the door. Taut anger pulled the man’s face into a sneer of contempt. He grabbed Munny by the arm.

  “I told you yesterday. Get out. Don’t come back.”

  His gold incisor teeth showed as he began to shout.

  “You are illegal Cambodian. The army doesn’t like illegals in our country. The military warn us big problem if they catch us with illegals in our shop. I tell you. Why you come back? You want cause me a problem? I told you, go back to your home. No one want you in Thailand.”

  He spit on the floor just as he noticed Fah looking at him. He had ignored her up to then as some inconsequential girl. Now he flashed a fake smile.

  “You want a tattoo? I can do. This man’s not Thai. He’s no good. No one like.”

  Munny edged toward the door, opening it.

  “I’ll come back for my pay,” he said.

  “I owe you nothing.”

  “You owe me two thousand baht.”

  “Get out!”

  The Thais had a smile that vanished in the moment when all control over emotions shut down and pure anger and aggression was released. The Chinese owner was a ticking time bomb, hands made into fists, edging toward the door. “No impulse control” should have been tattooed on his forehead.

  If that was the way the boss wanted to play it, what could Munny do?

  “Okay, okay,” said Munny, holding up both hands, palms out.

  Thailand wasn’t his country, and the boss could do whatever he wanted, and no one would say a word. He walked out of the shop and turned right down the street. He had money for a bus, but a bus wouldn’t get him back in time to avoid violating curfew. Munny felt his world dissolving around him. He was screwed. There simply wasn’t enough time to return to the Aquarium by ten p.m., and if he was arrested anything might happen to him. Rumors of beatings, detentions, disappearances as the army cracked down on illegals had spread like fire through each floor of his building. He shuffled along the sub-soi like a straggler from a retreating army, hands in his empty pockets except for a few coins for his bus fare. He pulled them out, counted them under a streetlight and stuffed them back in his pocket. Munny leaned against the wall of a building, his weight on his right foot, hands in his pockets, wondering what he should do next. Fah, who had followed him out of the shop, stopped beside him, startling him.

  “You got fired,” she said.

  “That was yesterday.”

  “I have a job for you. If you need one.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Graphic art. You can do graphic art?”

  “Yeah, I can do,” he said.

  It was Munny’s nature to always leave the door ajar, especially when he wasn’t sure exactly what someone was offering in terms of a job. In his twenty-eight years he had acquired a lot of experience as a tattoo artist because he’d never turned down a challenge.

  “You don’t understand. I don’t want a tattoo. I want an artist who can design graphic art stencil designs. Like the ones Banksy makes. If you can tattoo Banksy on skin, I am thinking you can make a stencil to use on a concrete wall. Like this one.”

  She touched the wall where he stood.

  “Can you do that?”

  “I’ll need materials.”

  How hard could it be? Writing on skin prepared an artist for any medium.

  She fished her wallet out of her bag.

  “Take this,” she said, as she pulled five one-thousand baht notes from the wallet and held them out. “You can start work tomorrow.”

  “Where do I work?”

  She handed him a business card. He squinted at it. A barber’s pole with red and white stripes was embossed on the front.

  “A barbershop?”

  “We have a room on the second floor. It’s above the barbershop. Go through the shop and up the stairs. Tomorrow. One in the afternoon.”

  “You didn’t say how much you’d pay me. This is enough for material.”

  He stared at the notes. That money would feed his family for a month and a half. But some instinct stopped him from immediately taking it. She saw how much control Munny exercised in not grabbing the notes. Osborne had taught her the control that comes from flashing money at someone who has none. The face of such a person would twist like that of a drug addict in withdrawal.

  She counted out another five thousand baht.

  “It’s a down payment. Take the money,” she said.

  These were words she had heard Osborne use. They made him appear generous. She stuffed the ten thousand baht into his shirt pocket. He made no effort to hand the money back. That was the moment of truth—the moment when one person controlled another. She had witnessed that moment every day since she had been with Osborne. He demanded to be in control. Looking at Munny, she understood what that moment meant for him.

  “You’ll have a place to work, and I’ll bring all the materials you’ll need. The ten thousand is for you. You okay with that? Tomorrow we’ll give you our ideas about design.”

  As she walked away, he was shaking. He didn’t know exactly why. Maybe it was the shock of getting so much money from a stranger. He thought to call after her and ask who “we” was, but in truth he didn’t care that much. She trusted him. He liked her for that. He looked at the name card before slipping it in his pocket. Then, stepping into the road, he flagged a taxi with the red vacancy light on. He was going home in time and in style. Munny felt his luck had taken a sharp turn for the better.

  For the last two years the Aquarium had been Munny’s family homestead. They lived on the third floor of an eleven-story building site, an abandoned, unfinished skeletal structure of gray concrete and rusting steel girders. Tucked away in back sois, the building had been largely forgotten by its rich owners. The Décor Hi-So, as it was officially known, had become an expensive folly, an orphan. For anyone in the family to admit they played a role in the catastrophic failure of its planning and design, including the lack of necessary approvals and the many license violations, would have resulted in a massive loss of face. For the guilty parties, to accept responsibility was clearly out of the question, given how toxic to their reputation and standing that would be. Munny had not been the first to spot the building’s indeterminate status. Other Cambodians were already squatting there when Munny joined the community with his family.

  Seven additional floors had been constructed beyond the four that had been allowed in the permit. This lapse wasn’t the result of a
little bit of cheating; it was hog-wild cheating at the buffet, the kind that could get the owner in trouble with the law. One or two floors over the quota, secured with a stuffed envelope, might have worked. All those extra floors triggered the predictable lengthy court battles and demolition orders, but in the end nothing much beyond administrative paperwork ever belched out of the great bureaucratic machine, and the uncompleted building remained standing. The authorities were perfectly content to process the necessary orders while taking their rewards for inaction, and the owners were perfectly happy to take delivery of the latest order or appeal and simply pay more money. Like a bad marriage that inched forward in ongoing instability, this uneasy state of affairs had lasted for fifteen years. Meanwhile the seven illegal joined the four legal stories of concrete and steel, nestled deep in a sub-soi off Phra Kanong—some floors with brickwork, others open on all sides—filled up with illegal immigrant squatters.

  Seven years before the coup, the basement had flooded. Some said it was a sign of what was to come. A monsoon left behind ten meters of water covering a vast interior area. The unfinished structure lacked doors, windows, walls, electricity, water, toilets or lifts. The floors that were completely open to the elements gradually grew makeshift walls of brick, plywood or fiberboard, materials nicked from nearby construction sites. The basement remained underwater. No one had any reason to drain it. Besides, there was nowhere for the water to go. Mosquitos became a problem, and a few people came down with dengue fever. The neighbors found a solution—stock the water with fish, which ate the mosquito eggs. Word got out, and other squatters arrived and released fish to make merit. Soon there were thousands of fish. By then, weeds and trees had grown around the building, cutting it off from street-level view.

  Five years on, the first illegals from Cambodia had joined the squatters in the building. Their illegal community of nearly a hundred people was difficult to keep a secret. Because of this new influx, the early settlers in the more finished floors worried about the owner, neighbors or the authorities throwing them all out. A meeting by eighth and ninth floor members resulted in a decision to close off the top two floors from occupation. The six men at the meeting also voted to install themselves as lookouts and enforcers, the ones who dealt with the owner and the police. Politics had arrived at the community, and no one thought much about it at the time.

  Munny hadn’t gone to the meetings. But that was understandable, as he hadn’t been invited. The meeting-calling men referred to themselves as the Eight-Nine Safety Council and made it clear to everyone squatting in the building that from now on they were the ones who ran things, and no matter what floor someone lived on, they had to obey their orders. A couple of men from other floors who challenged them were beaten up. After that no one, including Munny, risked offending the council. One day, out of the blue, the council decided the building needed a name. They decided after a long drinking session to call it the Aquarium. Most of the squatters welcomed the sense of stability that came with firm authority and rules. The squatters, before the Eight-Nine Safety Council appointed themselves, had been worn out by the temporary factions and unstable alliances and quarreling. As the time before the council ran things faded from memory, so did the beatings.

  Munny dreamed of moving his family out of the Aquarium, away from the men the squatters had begun to call the Eight-Niners and into an apartment. He lived, alongside his wife Chamey and their son, Sovann, in a corner of the third floor. Their son’s name translated, like most Thai and Khmer names, into a thing—in this case “like gold.” Chamey told Munny he lived in a fantasy world with his tattoos. They had no chance of leaving the Aquarium, not now. Not since the coup. No one felt safe, and the Eight-Niners gave new orders about using fire and light at night so as not to draw attention. They also set a quota on the number of fish each family could take from the basement pool for personal use. Beyond the quota, residents now had to pay for the fish. Munny found out that the leader of the Eight-Niners supplied the fish market from the pool. They also collected a “tax” to pay off the police and the owner. But as the new rules and demands increased, Munny said nothing.

  Chamey wasn’t quiet. No one owned the fish in the basement. Anyone could see the massive numbers were sufficient for all to take as many as they wished. She complained, and her discontent reached the eighth and ninth floors. The Eight-Niners didn’t frighten her. They watched her taking fish from the basement, and when they told her to stop, she flashed a knife. She threw her last hundred-baht note at one of them.

  “Here’s your tax,” she said. “Now leave me to feed my family.” She earned money frying and selling fish harvested from the basement.

  “You owe us one thousand more. We want our money.”

  She glared at the two men, her jaw tight, moving up and down, as she thought of what she could do or what she should say. The last thing she wanted was to back down or even worse, cry. “Tomorrow,” slipped out, and she immediately hated herself for giving in to their threats.

  Chamey had memorized the details of the structure room by room—hiding places, empty and occupied places—memorized as if the Aquarium were a universe with eleven discrete but interconnected worlds. They lived on the south side of the third floor, overlooking the back of a row of shophouses with lights in the barred and curtained windows, trash barrels leaning against the common walls and motorbikes parked in the alley. Chamey’s family laid claim to an area of about thirty square meters. One day Munny brought home a piece of chalk from Khao San Road and used it to draw the boundary in straight lines along the unfinished concrete floor. He mapped their territory, and soon others did the same. Then some of the chalk marks were replaced with concrete blocks.

  Early the next morning, before setting off for his new job above the barbershop, Munny sat along the edge, taking a moment to admire his handiwork. The old chalk lines had become smudged, and he’d recently redrawn them. He thought about how working in ink on a person’s skin had given him purpose and power. Chalk had a different texture and feel, but the purpose was similar. He looked at the outline of their space and felt the power it conferred on them. The chalk, like ink, had transformed a surface into a new creation. As the light streaked across the chalk lines, he also felt a bitter taste. Inside their marked-off space, they lived deep inside enemy territory. No amount of chalk would change that fact.

  Munny walked over to the electric generator and squatted down beside it. It had conked out again at about three in the morning. The fan had stopped and the sweating had started, along with the buzz of mosquitoes in their ears.

  “Can you fix it?” his wife had whispered to him as she turned on the bamboo mat in the dark.

  Though he’d tried through the rest of the night, Munny had failed to repair the generator without some new parts. By morning his wife found him curled up next to it, clutching a wrench. She woke him up.

  “You did all you could do,” she said.

  It hadn’t been enough. Once the curfew time had ended, he’d dressed and gone out to buy parts at a junk shop. Then he’d had to return there again to buy a gasket. The generator, like his wife, kept up a steady stream of demands. Without the fan to move the dead air, they were both languid and irritable as they swatted at the bloated mosquitoes.

  “Half an hour,” he said, showing her the gasket. “Unless something else is broken.”

  Chamey’s long night of frustration, discontent and anger had turned into a collective experience for the members of her work group, now assembled around her. Ten meters from Munny, Chamey stood at the table with a long knife, glancing back at him as she gutted a large red snapper. Her hands glistened with silvery fish scales. Some stuck to her skin and her black hair, and when the morning sun caught the scales, they sparkled like rotating lamps from a thousand tiny lighthouses. Her medium wasn’t ink or chalk; it was blood. The smell of blood and piles of guts hung thick in the air. Two plastic buckets on the floor beside the table vibrated with flopping fish. Three other women and a man
, in sandals and jeans, sweat rolling down their cheeks and necks, helped her fillet the fish, wrapped the strips of meat and stacked the packages in neat rows inside small wooden crates.

  A silver streak of blood ran across the cheek of a boy no more than ten or eleven. Munny watched his son, sweat rolling down his face and neck, as he lifted a crate with gutted fish onto a trolley. He should have been in school. It wasn’t possible. Like other families who lived at the Aquarium, the illegals had trouble getting their children into Thai schools. They had to live like criminals. Munny thought how the Thai woman who’d come to the tattoo parlor and given him ten thousand baht had looked so young. She was only a couple of years younger than his wife, but they didn’t look like they belonged to the same generation. That made Munny sad.

  Though she was only twenty-five years old, Chamey showed no signs of youth. It had been dragged out of her by a hard life in the open, on the run, without money. The Aquarium had provided some degree of shelter, food and community but hadn’t restored her youth.

  She called out to the boy: “Wait until the crate is full before you move it! You are just like your father, impatient.”

  A trickle of fish blood ran down the side of his cheek like a red tear. The boy nodded, his head dropping in a sulk as he lifted the crate back to the table to wait for more fish.

  Was it true that Sovann was impatient, Munny wondered. He hadn’t told Chamey about the money the young Thai woman had given him the night before. He hadn’t figured out how to explain that such a person had given him so much money. When she’d asked him if his boss had paid him, he told her that the boss had been angry, threatened to call the police and ordered him out of the shop. Any other woman would have cried. Not Chamey. She lay next to him quietly, eyes open, unblinking like one of the dead fish, her mind drifting off to some other place where the chalk lines of their world didn’t smear and run in the rainwater. Munny had also reasoned that if news of the ten thousand baht leaked out, he would face a rush of people wanting loans. The Eight-Niners would sniff out the money then too and demand a new tax. There was no way Chamey could keep the money a secret. She was too open and honest for secrets.