Black Tiger (11 page)

And so, without telling her, I’d driven over to Normandy, met up with Fleischer and his half-dozen students, passed on a few key skills—bushcraft, self-defence, and so on—and come away both fitter and wealthier than I had expected. It was unlikely our paths would cross again, or that I would ever see the Thai girls again, either. If by any chance we did meet, I thought they would have difficulty recognising me. Out of a perverse need to register my detachment from Fleischer’s monstrous theatre of the absurd, I’d insisted on wearing a balaclava at all times except in private. The students never knew my face. I had also disguised my voice, addressing them in barks and growls, like the caricature of a drill sergeant.

I told myself sternly that that was just as well. The effect of those Thai women on me had been stupefying; I’d never met women like them in a long and misspent life. I’d fancied myself inured against the lure of the exotic, but their beauty, their tenacity and courage in spite of all Fleischer’s sadistic invention could throw at them, fascinated me. They were so different, yet the strength of their friendship meant that thoughts of one inevitably brought the others to mind. Salikaa, tempestuous, dazzling, dangerous; Pim, the Royal Princess, fiercely committed, fragrant, strangely vulnerable; and Chee Laan, the Chinese girl, the biggest threat of all to my efforts to gather up the shreds of my disreputable rackety existence and forge a grounded life for myself.

‘Yes, well,’ Iolo was saying, ‘to Thais, we’re not worth spit. Bloody
farangs
, we are.
Farang
. Derived from
français
. The first European the Thais were aware of was the king’s French favourite. They even adopted a French legal system—imagine the trouble
that
caused! So you remember, boy’—here he bent his sombre dark gaze on me—’two facts: in Thailand, you’re guilty until proven innocent. The burden of proof is on the accused. And,’ he admonished the Buddhist convert, slumped stolidly on his chair, clutching on his lap a yellow plastic bag containing his books with the portentous dignity of an ill-favoured matron of honour holding a bouquet, ‘you can shave your head, don the saffron robe, spout Thai as well as the Patriarch himself. But don’t delude yourself. Kipling was right, the old fascist: never the twain shall meet. Once a
farang
, always a
farang
!’

‘Where did you learn your Thai?’ I asked.

‘Ah!’ Iolo tapped the side of his beak, miming peasant cunning. ‘That’d be telling, now. Compromise my mystique, see?’ He rubbed his hands, beaming sadistically. ‘Now, let’s see what you made of the homework. You go first!’ He pointed at me.

In spite of myself, and much to my surprise, I enjoyed Iolo’s classes. It was odd to find myself on the other side of the fence for once, regressing to irresponsibility and inventing excuses for inadequate preparation. I was childishly pleased when Iolo, in an unguarded moment, uttered a word of commendation for my efforts. There was an eccentricity, a colourful, off-beat quality about the entire chaotic proceeding that was very much in tune with the late sixties Zeitgeist. The atmosphere was paradoxically both laid back and charged with passion, a euphoric combination that few of us will ever experience again. I was impatient to encounter firsthand the society he described, eager for my intriguing mission to begin.

I’m pretty sure, looking back, that Iolo was high half the time. He was certainly suspiciously devoted to the plants growing on the windowsill of his tiny flat, to which I half-carried him on that last evening many months later, when I’d got my marching orders and Iolo and I got royally drunk to celebrate the end of our association.

I had happily drifted along, feeling the new language and the distant alien society gradually taking shape in my imagination. I was conscious that, from the moment I plunged into that society head first, the contours I had drawn up would shift, perhaps violently, before they settled into a recognizable pattern.

There’s nothing like a shrilling telephone startling you out of sleep for creating resentment and disorientation. Cursing, I fumbled for the instrument and growled into it like a disturbed hibernating bear. Nor was my humour improved when I recognised the smooth tones of Mr James Smith.

‘Dr Raven? Hope I didn’t wake you.’

‘What?’ Irritated, I forgot to keep my voice down. Beside me, Nancy groaned and flounced, dragging the pillow over her ears in a way that boded trouble.

Smith tut-tutted in mild rebuke at my intemperance. ‘Meet you at eleven. Redfern Art Gallery—you know it?’

‘Oddly enough, I do.’ I smouldered, as though accused of philistinism, and added childishly, ‘Though I mainly just use its website, of course. That’s where I buy stuff to cover the damp patches on my walls.’

‘Splendid,’ returned Smith impassively, and rang off. I sat glaring at the telephone, one of Nancy’s impulse purchases. Right now, it struck me as self-conscious rather than an ironic fashion statement. Squatting on the desk like a pale plastic toad, its pallid lustre reminded me of Smith’s smug imperiousness. I wondered what the hell the bloody man wanted. He couldn’t just state his business on the phone, there and then—all the cloak-and-dagger rigmarole. Art galleries indeed! Just playacting again.

On my way to the meeting, slumped in the Tube, idly scanning the back of a fellow passenger’s tabloid and still speculating resentfully, I found my answer.

A banner headline proclaimed: KING OF SI
A
M DIES IN CR
A
SH.

There were two pictures: one long-lens shot of tangled wreckage, helicopter blades and palm trees. Another other, smaller shot of a slim, elaborately coiffed woman, whom I recognized as the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. The smaller headline read: NOW SHE’S QUEEN FOR RE
A
L. I knew this was the Princess Asra, ex-Miss Universe, whose husband would now be Prince Regent.

The possessor of the newspaper, discovering my interest, shook his paper angrily, folded it small, and shifted in his seat so as to study it in a position inaccessible to my eyes. I had seen enough. I folded my arms and whistled silently, staring with unseeing eyes at the underwear adverts on the carriage walls.

I burst through the doors of the Redfern Gallery. Smith appeared to be engrossed in the appraisal of a Bryan Kneale sculpture, his head cocked like an inquisitive robin. The majestic bronze structure was stark and forbidding, like the skeleton of some prehistoric predator. As he straightened up to meet my eye, Smith was nothing if not matter-of-fact.

‘Ah, Raven. Whole new ball game, my dear fellow! New developments. Seen the papers? Now the king’s out of the game, we need you there yesterday. This could be just the chance they’re waiting for. That’s if they didn’t engineer it in the first place…’

‘They? Who are they?’ I snarled. Hunching my shoulders crossly, I began a restless circumambulation of the sculpture.

Smith merely continued, as if I had not spoken. ‘The king was too popular. That could be perceived as a threat. And now, of course, the whole region could flare up at any moment.’

I stopped prowling, turned and faced him. ‘If you tell me you’re concerned for the Americans’ military bases…’

Smith met my eyes coldly. ‘I shall not tell you that.’

‘It’s something to do with the Yanks, though, isn’t it?’ I persisted. ‘But why don’t they send their own spook? The place is rotten with them as it is. Why me?’

Smith sighed. He bent to study the brass plate at the base of the sculpture. As he straightened up, nostrils curving with mild reproof, as though I had farted, he answered casually, ‘Unthinkable. That would not do at all.’

‘A third national, then. A Frenchman or a German, or even a naturalised American, someone like…’

‘Like our mutual acquaintance, the valiant Lieutenant Fleischer,’ Smith intercepted smoothly. Refusing to show how taken aback I was, I scowled, feigning puzzlement. Even when you both knew a fellow Legionnaire’s real name, the code dictated that you did not bandy it about art galleries, or betray recognition in the presence of mysterious and infuriating characters calling themselves Smith.

Smith smiled as though he understood all this. ‘I rather fancy your friend and mine, Lieutenant Fleischer, will soon tire of his current occupation. Yuppies learning assertiveness by stabbing cushions and abseiling down cliffs.’ He sniffed fastidiously. ‘Poodle-fakery and parlour tricks. Fleischer’s stock-in-trade involves torture, terror, and death by stealth. But you know that, of course.’

Smith sighed and turned to walk out, forcing me to follow him.

‘Apparently there is a market for such skills as Lieutenant Fleischer’s in this naughty world of ours, Dr Raven. Your flight has been booked for Thursday. Ten p.m. check-in. Trust your shots are up to date? Everything else has been taken care of.’ He extended his hand. In it there was a small, black lizard-skin wallet. ‘Local currency and U.S. dollars. Also the number of your new bank account. You will find it, I trust, in an agreeably healthy condition. I do hope my telephone call last night did not disturb Ms Raven. Take her to dinner, but resist the temptation to confide. The less she knows, the better. For her own protection.’ Before I could explode, Smith patted my arm cheerily. ‘Siam’s chock-full of pretty things. Oh, dear, yes!’ The mask dropped for a second. His rain-grey eyes misted with yearning. ‘While you’re there, get her a nice pair of star sapphire earrings. Remember to keep in touch, there’s a good chap. Little and often, that’s the ticket. Like feeding fledglings. We’re relying on you, you know.’

I was too furious to reply.

Iolo had read the newspapers, too. When I arrived in the classroom I was surprised to find him perched on the windowsill staring glumly out at the rain. Despite his oft-trumpeted socialism, he appeared quite upset by the news of King Rama’s death. ‘Not a bad old sod, really,’ he grunted. I regarded his beaky Welsh profile silhouetted against the grimy pane.

‘Fancy a pint?’ I suggested. He snorted.

‘A pint or bloody three,’ he said, reaching for his crutches.

It was an undistinguished watering hole, the Mitre, but conveniently adjacent.

‘So you’re finally off, then?’ Iolo asked, leaning back on his barstool. He eyed me with speculation and envy. ‘Jammy bugger! Well, you can get the beers in.’

Meekly, I complied. After several libations, Iolo waxed conversational. ‘You watch your back, Raven, my man. There are bad people where you’re headed. They play hardball.’ I cocked an enquiring eyebrow but forbore to verbalise the query. Questions made Iolo clam up.

‘You were asking where I learned my Thai. VSO. Four years ago. Building schools, teaching. That sort of thing. Northeast. Isaan. Then further north. Akha country.’

‘Akha?’

‘Hill tribe. Savage, gorgeous, doped out of their skulls. Poppy growers. Outsiders. Only one of them ever made it big in Thai society. His Excellency Colonel Sya Dam. The Black Tiger. Chief of Royal Security.’ Iolo pronounced the title with an emotion impossible to fathom, with an expression both portentous and deadpan.

I laughed. ‘Chief of Security! He seems to have screwed up big-time, letting the Royal Family board dodgy helicopters.’

Iolo now snorted with laughter, causing beer foam to appear on his lip. ‘He probably arranged it,’ he said. ‘Never, ever try to second-guess them—him especially.’ He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and rolled up his trouser leg, revealing the back of his calf. I gazed in horrified fascination. ‘Sya gave me this.’ Iolo’s left calf gleamed purple and grey, like a plate of diseased liver, painful-looking, although the injury was old. The skin graft shone with a bronze lustre.

‘God! Why would he do something like that?’ I knew better than to ask whether Iolo had sued for compensation or accused the general of assault.

Iolo shrugged. He let his trouser leg drop again. ‘I insulted the Akha. Or Sya thought I did. I was high. We were both high. Stupid, it was. Plain stupid!’ Iolo contemplated his ruined leg reflectively, but without rancour or even regret.

‘What did he do it with?’

‘A meat hook. For slinging dead dogs on the village gates. The Akha hang carcasses there to discourage evil spirits.’

‘You must really hate the guy.’

Iolo eyed me strangely. ‘No. Why should I hate him? He was my friend.’

‘A fine friend!’

Iolo sipped his ale. ‘Raven, somehow I don’t think you and the East are going to get along. You’re too logical.’

‘You’re subtly telling me I lack subtlety?’

‘No. Not subtlety. Obliqueness. You must forget your obsession with the obvious.’

He refused to be drawn after that, and we devoted ourselves to the serious business of drinking and the serious topic of rugby football.

Yet beneath the surface, several different streams of thought flowed through my consciousness, combining into a broad, fast-running river. There was Nancy; in our trendy arrogance, we had not played it right, Nancy and I. I think we both realised this. We were neither courageously committed, nor free; too close for comfort, yet no longer close in any way that mattered. Possessiveness had outlived passion. She dismissed my female students as ‘your worshipful prepubescents.’ I pettishly referred to her head of chambers, a perfectly amiable, inoffensive man who had long idolised Nancy with a hopeless adoration, as ‘that reactionary dinosaur.’ She disapproved of my association with Fleischer—’that Fascist thug,’ she called him. I had told her I’d gone to France to write a book but I was only too aware that she suspected that was a front. If she knew about the Thai girls…

Then, there was my barely suppressed fury with Smith and all his ilk, the grey-faced, pen-pushing widowmakers of the world.

These two names kept cropping up, the one familiar, the other alien; both slightly exotic, both, it seemed to my drink-fuddled mind, faintly absurd. Lieutenant Angel Fleischer, of North Africa, Panama, and now, of all places, Normandy; and that other name, Colonel Sya Dam, the Black Tiger of Bangkok. I wondered how the hell I was going to play the strange hand life had dealt me. I felt very sorry for myself.