Noble Lies (8 page)

“Uncle says that one of the fishermen will take us to Krabi,” Pim said. “One of the big towns on the mainland, but it is a long way and he will lose two days fishing.”

“We'll pay him for his time,” Mark said.

“Sure,” Robin said, shaking her down over her face, making the little girl squeal with laughter. “Unless of course he's got that nama gee thing going.”

“The fishermen are asleep now, but Uncle says in an hour he will wake his youngest son and we can go. But he wants you to know that we are also welcome to spend the night here, as his guests.”

“Naturally,” Robin said, letting the young girl squirm free, only to pull her back, laughing.

“Uncle says that it is a long ride, but that we should be there by sunset,” Pim said, translating as the man spoke. “There should be no problem with sà-lât.”

Mark had been looking out over her grandfather's shoulder to the fluid line where the turquoise shallows met the navy blue channel as Pim spoke. At the Thai word the man's eyes became alert and he saw the muscles in his scrawny neck tighten.

“Sà-lât are sea robbers,” Pim explained. “But I don't think they will be a problem.”

“Sea robbers? You mean like pirates?” Robin let go and the girl squirmed free again.

“Yes, but we will be there before it is dark. There should be no problem.”

Mark sipped his still warm, still sickeningly sweet tea. “We were on the water all night. You should have told us there might be a problem.”

“Where we were last night, on the west of Phuket, all that are there are fishermen. Here on this side, between Phuket and the mainland, there are many boats transporting goods and there are more ferang—more foreigners with their own sailboats.”

“But it's just going to be us,” Robin said, “so there should be no problem, right?”

“Yes, no problem,” Pim said, pausing too long, then adding, “I think.”

 

Chapter Fourteen

   

Jarin pushed in the clutch and downshifted around a sharp bend in the beach-hugging road, thirty kilometers over the posted speed limit. In the rearview mirror he saw the two bodyguards lean against the curve, while in the passenger seat, Laang—the man hired a year ago to be his driver—braced a knee against the dashboard, straining not to slide into his boss' space. In Bangkok he would have had a string of black Hummers or at least an Escalade, not driving himself around in a four door Honda. But that was Bangkok and this was Phuket, and here he didn't need a flashy car to stand out since everybody who mattered knew who he was. Besides, he liked to drive.

His earliest memory was of watching his mother pray in front of the shrine in the family's one-room home, not much bigger than the parking space it bordered. She would kneel in front of the painted wooden alcove that held the postcard picture of a seated Buddha—a wispy flame fluttering over his head—her face shrouded in a veil of smoke from the joss sticks held between her pressed palms. When he was old enough to imitate her movements, she had him kneel beside her, watching the candles burn on the altar as his mother whispered prayers. Once he asked her what she was saying, and she told him that her prayer was that one day he would grow up to become a taxi driver. From that day on he doubled his devotions, kneeling alongside his mother, praying that his mother's prayers would not be answered. But as the engine redlined and he popped the car up a gear, he was glad that some of her prayers had gotten through.

It was a twelve-kilometer drive from his home near Surin Beach down to Patong, but in many ways it was a much longer journey. At his home he was Jarin the successful businessman, dutiful husband and loving father to his six adoring children—the eldest just finishing her first year at the private international high school. He could relax at home, enjoy the panoramic view of the ocean on the rustic patio—the hidden AC vents blowing out chilled air—or soak in one of the Jacuzzis, listening to the water splash down the eight-step waterfall. Home was his sanctuary and no one was stupid enough to bother him there.

But in Patong or Kathu or Ra Wai or Phuket City—anyplace outside the walled compound of his estate—he was Sua noi, the Tiger, demanding head of an army of criminals, source of millions in bribes to government officials; the man to see if you wanted something that laws prevented you from getting. And every day the list of people who needed him grew.

That was in the book, too. Rule Number Seven: Offer the right bone and the meanest dog will sit up and beg.

Supply and demand, that's all it was. His gift was knowing how to bring them together. And no one did it better than he did. Until Mr. Shawn and his men interfered. Wasn't it enough that he had to deal with reformist politicians and muckraking journalists, trying to pull him down so they could build themselves up? They should be going after the terrorists down in the south, the ones looking to overthrow the government and start some Islamic state. If the press knew how much of his own money he had spent killing off those terrorists they would treat him like a hero instead of a crooked businessman with shadowy connections. The terrorists were the real threat to Thailand, not him. They wanted to disrupt tourism and trade; he promoted it. He needed everything to stay just as it was—a corrupt and inefficient government enabling a tourist trade based on sex and alcohol. Business was better that way.

Jarin sped around an overloaded mini-bus—a snub-nosed pickup truck with a pair of benches in the back—and continued in the passing lane until he got around a Toyota sedan and a knot of motor scooters. He heard the non-driving driver suck in his breath, and in the rearview mirror, the two guards' eyes widened at the blind curve pass. That's why he liked to drive—there was never any doubt about who was in control.

He took the car down the last sloping hill, slowing down enough to make the turn in front of the police station, downshifting hard as he went past Par Pom Sri Na, its gold leaf statue gleaming in the sun. Built to bring good luck and prosperity to Patong, it was one of the first things destroyed by the wave. At the base of the white stone podium, between a pair of waist-high stone elephants, an altar was covered in fresh garlands of yellow flowers, unlit candles, and green coconuts; tops lopped off, offering up their bittersweet milk. When the community leaders were rebuilding the shrine they had asked local businessmen for donations, and although Jarin had already given almost a million bhat toward the recovery, he sent a check for twenty thousand more. He had lost four bar-beers that day and a year on he was still running well behind in revenues. Par Pom Sri Na reminded him how easily he could lose the rest.

He drove up the slight incline of Phrabarami Road, past the government bank, past the mosque, up to Nanai Road, a half a kilometer from the beach. The wave had reached this far before sliding back out to sea, leaving a barricade of debris and bodies at the fork in the road to mark the high water point. He had been home that morning, smoking his first cigarette of the day, enjoying a few hours of solitude before his family awoke, when the wave arrived, lapping up against the lower patio like the wake from a passing power boat; not so much as knocking the folding chair off the dock. The scientists said that it had to do with the sharp slope of the sea floor around Surin Beach, the energy of the wave absorbed by the undersea geography before it even reached land. The same drop off, that created an undertow so strong his children were forbidden to swim past the dock, had saved his home and spared his family.

At Kamala Beach, a mile away, it was a different story.

When the tide pulled out—impossibly far out, farther out than he would let his oldest son drive the jet ski, three, four hundred meters at least—the locals rushed with their plastic buckets and their palm-leaf baskets, collecting fish that were flopping about on the sand. They filled their baskets and brought them up to the beach road, rushing back out onto the wide sand and mud plain with anything they could find, laughing and waving and shouting to their children to hurry and help with the unexpected harvest, too busy to notice the wall of water on the horizon coming in as fast as a fighter jet. And there were tourists out there as well, heads down, looking for shells. Backs to the ocean, they never saw it coming, and if they did it wouldn't have made a difference. More people died on that one stretch of beach than the rest of Phuket combined; but at his house, just around the rocky outcrop of Laem Mai Phai, the wave that killed a hundred thousand rinsed the sand off his children's flip-flops.

Jarin turned the car down Nanai Road, slowing down on the busy commercial street. There were no souvenir shops here, just wholesalers and restaurants only the locals ate at; car repair shops and two-story warehouses that supplied the hundreds of hotels and guesthouses that were the heart of the island economy. He turned down a narrow road that took him farther from the beach, pulling up behind a row of warehouses he had bought a week after the tsunami, giving the grieving widow and her family more than he would have paid her husband, but still far below its actual value. Business, after all, was business.

Laang and the bodyguards jumped out of the car before he even had it parked, falling over themselves to open his door, pounding on the steel door of the warehouse like impatient children, the door swinging open, the men inside and the men outside arguing over who was more irresponsible, neither group watching as Jarin stepped out of the car and climbed up the wooden staircase to the second floor offices. It was cool, even cold in the office, the AC units humming louder than the police scanner on the desk. The men sat up as he came in, trying to look busier and more important than they really were. He passed through the room without giving them a glance, heading down the central hallway and through the door marked Private.

Taped to a folding chair—a golf ball-sized welt growing under his left eye, his lower lip swollen and split—JJ looked up as Jarin entered the room.

 

***

 

“That was a smart idea, putting them up in that other hotel,” Robin said as they crossed the street and climbed the steps of the City Hotel, the glass doors sliding open, the chilled air blowing out to greet them. “All three of them in one room for eight bucks. That's a hell of a lot less expensive than having them all stay here. Besides, for them that hotel's probably like staying at the Hilton.”

A step ahead, Mark looked back at Robin as she pulled her long hair through a fat rubber band. She didn't notice him shake his head. “I wasn't thinking about the cost. It's safer if we split up. There can't be too many American couples traveling around with a Thai woman, her nephew, and her grandfather.”

“Safe? You're not worried about that gangster guy, are you? So you snuck out with one of his hookers, big deal. I'm sure there are plenty more where that came from.”

Mark grunted. It had been a good day, no sense on ruining it with information that would tie her to a homicide; Thai laws about accessory after the fact probably just as picky as the ones in the States.

They had set out from the fishing village an hour after lunch, the old man coming down to the beach to see them off, helping push his son's long-tail out into the surf, handing Pim a basket of fruits and a bottle of water for the trip. Without a compass or a map on board, the fisherman pointed the bow of the boat toward the southeast and gunned the four-cylinder engine. There were enough clouds in the sky to break up the all-blue monotony, and in every direction Mark could see green islands shooting straight up out of the water. The fisherman's course brought them close to one island, the sheer limestone cliffs undercut by the current, creating massive overhangs and hidden grottos, everything topped with arm-thick vines and jungle vegetation. He had seen some spectacular natural landscapes in his travels—Kashmir valleys with waterfalls as cold and clear as glacier ice, African lakes turned pink from all the flamingos—and he had seen some dull landscapes turned spectacular with horizon-wide oil fires and crisscrossing tracers. Maybe it was the warm sun or the sound of the water sluicing along the wooden hull, but somehow he knew that he'd try to hold on to this view longer than the rest.

Without thinking, they had taken the same seats on this long-tail that they had during their late night trip, with Mark at the bow, Pim and her nephew in front of the engine at the rear, and Robin and the grandfather in the middle. From the moment they set out, the boy could not stop grinning, and the fisherman, through words and gestures, asked him if he wanted to steer. The boy jumped up and grabbed hold of the steering bar, eyes front, watching the sea for sudden squalls or pirates on the starboard bow, never noticing how his great-grandfather beamed or how the fisherman kept the boat on course, readjusting the propeller shaft with his foot.

An hour out they passed between two large islands.

“That is Ko Yao Yai, home of my ancestors,” Pim said, pointing to the larger island to the south, breaking the restful silence. “And that is Ko Yao Noi.” She pointed to the north. “Perhaps that is where Shawn and I will live one day.”

“I wouldn't bet on it,” Robin said, shorts again rolled up high on her thighs, the strings of her bikini top dangling to the side as she lay on her back. She dropped her arm over the low hull and let her fingers cut a sharp wake in the flat water alongside the boat.

“Miss, you have very lovely rings. Very sparkly.”

Robin sighed but said nothing.

“I would hate to see you lose your lovely rings.”

Robin sighed again, louder. “Don't worry, they're not going to fall off.”

“Of course not, Miss,” Pim said, smiling at Mark as she spoke. “The barracudas will take the whole finger.”

Robin sat up, her hand flying out of the water, the other trying to catch her falling top. Mark hadn't laughed that hard in months.

The sun was setting when they motored up the swift-moving river toward the Chao Fa Pier; but once ashore, the fisherman paid and tipped, it hadn't taken Pim long to find a cheap hotel and for Robin to find a better one. Thirsty, sun-baked, and sticky with sea-salt and sweat, they waited as the hotel clerk apologized to the guest in 311 who was not pleased with the poor selection of pay-per-view movies.

“Just one room,” Robin said as she handed the clerk her credit card. “But two beds.”