Black Tiger (57 page)

‘On the other hand,’ the man dressed as a monk interposed, an undertone of chilling menace in his soft deep voice, ‘had he refused, he would never have needed to work again, either.’

‘This is a mad scheme!’ Chee Laan exclaimed. For a moment her iron control of her emotions faltered. Sunii Lee stopped and turned to face her. ‘Why risk killing yourself?’ Chee Laan demanded, fighting to conceal her anger. Her grandmother tipped her head.

‘The flight is bound for Switzerland. Passengers arriving off Bangkok flights in every international destination will be under close police scrutiny. Here, in Bangkok, I still have a little authority. Money speaks with a loud voice. Elsewhere, it would be too risky to travel conventionally. But today is safest for us. Nobody will expect us to leave from the major airport. Now, Granddaughter, it is time. I have left everything in order.’ She started walking again.

‘Shall I ever see you again?’ Chee Laan heard the desolation in her own voice.

‘The end of filial piety is establishing one’s character,’ Sunii said. She paused again and regarded Chee Laan long and coolly, as if memorising her features. Then she nodded, a curt gesture that expressed both satisfaction and dismissal. As if by mutual agreement, she and her companion turned away. Helplessly, Chee Laan stood and watched the unusual couple move to join a queue of passengers, the elderly Chinese lady in her black silk pyjamas, carrying her tightly rolled sleeping mat, and the powerfully built monk in his saffron robe, the roll under his arm dwarfed by his size. Chee Laan stared bleakly after them. They did not turn back.

As she turned to leave, her eye fell upon a tall coolie girl dragging a broom along the floor. For an instant, the light glinted on a sharp cheekbone, and the girl seemed familiar.

Chee Laan told herself severely that she had allowed sorrow to unhinge her mind. The momentary illusion might be because her eyes were full of unshed tears. She put up her chin, slid back behind the wheel of the Mercedes with a smile to the guard, and pulled out into traffic. She wanted to go back, to run after her grandmother, appealing, begging even. But such behaviour was unthinkable. She drove on.

Salikaa had been brought discreetly from prison to the Royal Palace in Bangkok and imprisoned in one of the guest suites. For two days she had seen only the mute, patient servants and the impassive major domo, and her nerves were strung taut as bowstrings.

‘How dare you keep me cooped up like this?’ Salikaa slung her silver tray against the wall. ‘I refuse to eat until I am granted an audience with King Vajah!’

With weary resignation, the major domo clapped his hands. Two maids scuttled in and began to clear up the spilled food.

‘By whose command am I imprisoned?’ Salikaa demanded, for the umpteenth time. As usual, the major domo made no reply, his habitual expression of pensive pessimism merely deepening.

At the sound of approaching footsteps, the major domo gestured hastily for the maids to disappear. They sidled out, carrying the debris. The major domo bowed to the rotund figure of Prince Premsakul, who bustled in with a portentous air. He flapped an impatient hand at the major domo and the man tactfully withdrew. Prince Premsakul observed Salikaa’s astonished face with a faint smile.

‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Salikaa demanded.

‘Much less than you deserve,’ the prince replied placidly. ‘You will be exiled. You will be escorted to the airport and put on a flight out of the country. You will never be permitted to return to Thailand. His Majesty and Her Royal Highness the Princess Regent have declared their intentions of graciously granting you an audience this afternoon. May I suggest…’ He cast his gaze insultingly over her dishevelled appearance. ‘…that you prepare yourself?’

He pressed his fingertips together in a perfunctory salutation and glided out, leaving Salikaa to her tumultuous thoughts.

The king gave Salikaa a look, a volatile compound of desire and disappoint-ment. The Princess Regent moved discreetly to the window and stood with her back to the room in apparent contemplation of the gardens. Prince Premsakul, escorting the royal couple, had placed a small suitcase ceremoniously upon the low table. He looked prepared to remain, until the king made an unmistakable gesture of dismissal.

Salikaa stared at the king. The spoiled boy had grown up; his personality and bearing had expanded. Now he filled the framework of power that had sat upon his slender shoulders since youth. This young man would not have succumbed so easily to her crude seduction. About him was the chill distance of those born to command—a king at last.

‘You deceived me, Salikaa.’ King Vajah spoke softly, without reproach, in a measured tone. His voice seemed deeper. Petty imperiousness had been replaced with quiet authority. ‘Yet I do not blame you. You cannot help what you are. But our brief encounter has had its uses. My desire for you struck me like a thunderbolt. It was the first intense emotion I had ever experienced in my life, and appeared to me to be irresistible. It forced me to confront my own weakness. It was a salutary lesson.’

He paused. He studied Salikaa’s face as though to observe the effects of his words. Salikaa saw he was coolly assessing her appearance. Beneath his objectivity, there was a tremour of self-congratulation as he repudiated that earlier, susceptible self, a humble petitioner to her beauty.

‘Our encounter advanced my self-knowledge. I am now fit to undertake the tasks that lie before me. For this, Salikaa, I am in your debt.’ He gestured to the suitcase lying on the table. ‘For you.’

She bowed her thanks, wondering what he had brought her—gems, gold, perhaps a fortune in banknotes. Once more he studied her face regretfully.

‘We are each prisoners of our own fate.’

The Princess Regent turned from the window and moved toward the door. The young king, after a pause, followed. Salikaa was about to fall prostrate at his feet, but he extended a hand.

‘Oh, and
Khun
Salikaa…’

‘Majesty?’

‘Those judges who selected you as Miss Thailand had the right idea, you know. You are the most beautiful of all. My golden lotus, my graceful swallow.’

The door closed quietly behind the royal pair, but not before Salikaa had glimpsed the eyes of Prince Premsakul, hovering by the door, and recognised their gleam of triumph. She listened to the receding footsteps of the royal party. Then, shrugging off a momentary weakness with a stab of regret for what might have been, she turned her attention to the small case still lying on the table.

She snapped up the locks and threw open the lid, and stood staring. Inside, neatly folded, lay the clothes of a servant, and beside them the flame-coloured dress she had worn when she’d fallen on her knees before the king, afire with determination and adrenaline to win back the life she’d imagined.

On top of the clothes there was a large envelope. She tore it open with trembling hands, and sat back, shaking with rage and disappointment. It contained a one-way ticket to Switzerland, and a sum of money so despicably small that Salikaa’s first furious impulse was to smash the sealed window, rip up the ticket and the banknotes, and scatter them into the blood-red roses below.

Good sense prevailed. Grimacing, she pushed the notes into her padded lace bra.

Salikaa

As the palace limousine churned along, I stared at the chauffeur’s stolid shoulders and the bull neck of the guard who sat in the front seat beside him. I was savouring Vajah’s last words. It is quite a compliment to be desired, even briefly, by a king. I looked most unlike either a swallow or a golden lotus at that moment, wearing the black
pasin
and white blouse of a servant. I had been given plastic flip-flops for my feet. Ashamed of my appearance, I had wound a cloth about my head, covering half my face, like a woman from one of the stone-breaking gangs who work on the roads.

When we reached the airport, the guard picked up a suitcase identical to the one I had been given and set off purposefully into the building. I leapt out, seeing my opportunity. Ignoring the shouts of the chauffeur, I hurried into the building through the glass door, still carrying my little suitcase, and mingled with the mob. I could hear the calls of my pursuer growing closer; he had clearly abandoned the car to chase me.

Frantically, I glanced around, and quickly saw, to my good fortune, just what I needed—a sweeping broom, abandoned by a coolie. I slipped off my shoes and seized the broom, dragging it along. I worked my way across the entrance hall, trying my best to look the part of a downtrodden, self-effacing servant and curbing my impatience—lazy coolies never moved at more than a snail’s pace. I was still thinking out my next move when I saw something that caused me to crouch down over my bucket and hide my face behind the tail of my turban.

It was the sharp-eyed Mrs van Hooten: the red-haired foreign woman, tutor to Vajah, and the only foreigner at court. Hauteur is infectious, and she’d been at court so long she fancied herself a royal, too. She was arguing with the Thai International representative, clutching a small suitcase identical to the one I had been given. I realized that the guard who had been in the limousine with me must have given it to her. My curiosity was aroused. I wondered what it contained, and why an official had been ordered to hand it over to her.

Throughout her heated dispute with the woman behind the counter, her hands never left the case. She was a woman given to large gestures with her bony freckled hands, yet now she gripped that bag like a life belt.

I knew, like everyone else, that the royal lady tutor enjoyed the Princess Regent’s confidence, and that she made frequent trips to Switzerland on royal missions. The official line was that she brought back health and beauty products for the Princess that were too fragile to be sent by post. Pim’s theory had been that the Princess Regent dispatched Mrs van Hooten with consignments of valuables from the royal treasure, to be stored in a Swiss bank in the event of a coup. The Chakri dynasty was ancient; their wealth was inestimable.

I hadn’t paid much attention to Pim at the time. But now I needed a decent bankroll to get myself launched again, especially when I considered the insultingly paltry farewell gift from the king. I decided to investigate Mrs van Hooten at the earliest opportunity, and, if need be, eliminate her. She was a very irritating woman, and Thailand was finished for me anyway. Vichai always told me killing wasn’t such a dirty business as high finance.

Any fool who lifted a hand against Vichai was dead before that hand could find its mark—unless he was tricked. I had long suspected the involvement of that big American, the husband of the ugly red-haired woman who stood before me, gripping her case with white-gloved hands. How the threads tied together.

My arm shook as I recalled this memory, and water from the pail slopped onto the floor and my begrimed bare feet. I moved close enough to hear her flight number.

As I watched a neat little air hostess walk by, humming, tittuping on her high heels and patting her little hat, inspiration struck me. The air hostess wiggled her fingers coquettishly at an airline official, called, ‘Switzerland, then three days leave!’ and vanished into the ladies’ toilet. Poor girl—her death warrant was signed. I took up my pail and shuffled along in her wake.

The adjacent men’s toilet bore a large sign: ‘Closed for cleaning. Please use toilet in restaurant.’ I took it off the men’s and hung it on the handle of the ladies’ before entering and closing the door behind me. I saw with satisfaction that only one cubicle was engaged. Under its door I could see the stewardess’s shoes. I heard a clatter as the girl kicked them off and stepped barefoot onto the toilet bowl to urinate in the Thai fashion. I waited beside the cubicle door. I held the mop handle horizontally in two hands, like a Siamese fighting-stick.

The toilet flushed. I gauged the moment exactly. As she came out I raised the mop handle and struck a blow across her windpipe. She gasped and tumbled backward. Her hands clutched at the air. I dropped the mop and grabbed her hair with one hand. At the same time I flung my free arm round her waist, pressing into her solar plexus. I braced her body against my own and folded it like a jackknife, pressing her face downward toward the toilet bowl. She fought energetically, but my position allowed me to use all my strength without losing my balance. Angel Fleischer had been an excellent tutor.

People think you have to be as strong as a bear to kill another human being, but that’s nonsense. You just have to calculate angles and stress points correctly. I performed the twist-and-press movement with textbook precision, exactly as I had been taught. The girl’s vertebrae crunched and parted obediently. She slumped in my arms.

In truth, she was more trouble dead than alive, for she was surprisingly heavy. I had to half drag, half push her lifeless body into the cubicle to close the door. Stripping off her uniform, I was gratified to discover that she had been a girl with respect for herself, who kept herself tidy. There was the inevitable slight odour of fear, of course, compounded of perspiration and incipient micturition, the result of our struggle. But there was also expensive scent—these international stewardesses shopped in the rue de Rivoli—and her underwear was matching white lace and spotless. Perhaps she had a rendezvous with some sexy captain, or she was just a nicely brought-up girl.

I locked the cubicle door from the inside—a delaying tactic, nothing more. The body had to remain undiscovered until the flight for Switzerland had left. I kicked the black patent shoes and shoulder bag under the partition into the next cubicle, dropped the lilac two-piece after them, and shinned over the narrow wall.

Still wearing my coolie clothes, the stewardess’s clothes safely inside my case, I sold my ticket to a loitering tout. I could see police and guards routinely checking the queues. I knew they would not detain me even if they recognised me; nobody was interested in dragging me back, for they wanted to get rid of me. When the tout insisted, I sold him my passport too. It was made out in the name they had given me, as the wife of that filthy creature Vasit. The first name on this passport was Boonmee. The picture could have been any Asian girl between fifteen and thirty. The tout grunted his satisfaction and paid me handsomely. I insisted on American dollars.