Bangkok Burn (22 page)

“The show is on. Now. Mother’s entertainment room.” There was a cheer and a mad scramble for the best seats in Mother’s mini-theater entertainment room. They left the center sofa for me. Pichit and Somboon brought the whiskey, ice, and soda with them. Chai worked the laptop, the screen flickered blue once, then filled with an image of a garden and a pool. Ken’s garden and pool. We’d set up a camera on the rear wall hidden by a tree. Chai had zoom control from the laptop. Tum jumped up and turned the lights down.

Headlights showed, visible through the glass walls of the entrance of the house. Ken had arrived home.

Chai zoomed in. The door opened and someone came into the house, male, wearing a suit. Lights turned on in the house, illuminating the area by the pool.

Crocodylus porosus
– salt water crocodile to you, Farang, are ambush predators. They are opportunistic feeders but prefer to hunt at night, near water. Of all the crocodile species, they are the most aggressive, prone to charge, especially the females, and especially during the egg laying season, October to May.

“Ten thousand even odds he gets killed in the pool.”

“I’ll take a piece of that.”

“Two-to-one, five thousand, he loses an arm but escapes.”

“Five to one, he gets out without a scratch.”

I turned in my seat. “Who offered the 5-1?”

Beckham ducked his head at Tum.

“I’ll take it. Ten thousand.”

“Shush, he’s coming out…”

We turned to watch. Ken, wearing a white bathrobe, had opened the sliding door to the patio. We still couldn’t see the croc, then Ken reached up, turned on the pool and the garden lights.

“There, there,” someone whispered. It was in darkness at the end of the garden, its eyes glowing red. The croc would be pissed off. This morning it was looking after a clutch on a sandy bank in Samut Prakarn. It had been lassoed, manhandled, blindfolded, and thrown in the back of a pickup, then dropped over a wall separated from its eggs. Maybe pissed off was an understatement.

Ken took out a pack of cigarettes, tapping one out. He tapped the cigarette against the pack tamping it down. Then he stuck in the corner of his mouth and lit it. He took a long hit, put the pack and lighter on the table. He exhaled. We could see the cloud of smoke drift lazily across the pool.

One of the boys behind me giggled. That set everyone off.

“Shush, shush…” from Chai, a rare smile on his face.

Ken was taking off the bath robe. His arms tanned, his body pale. Yak tats covered his body except his arms. White Speedos, I cringed. He took another drag of the cigarette and snubbed it out in the ashtray on the table.

“Oh fuck me. He’s going to use the diving board.” I don’t know who said it, thought it might be Pichit, but he was right. Ken walked around the pool to the side closest to the house. He climbed the diving board steps and stopped. The room went quiet, everyone held their breath.

Then Ken started swinging his arms around and the room breathed out. The croc hadn’t moved. Ken stopped swinging his arms and bounced a little on the board. The croc moved forward about a meter and stopped. A loud cheer erupted. A flurry of bets made. Crocodiles have excellent hearing and eyesight. A particular strength is the ability to judge distance exactly, aiding in the ambush attack. On land, for short bursts of speed, they can outrun a human. In water, it’s no contest.

Ken stopped bouncing and took two steps forward, diving into the pool. The sound of a splash in water is a sound hardwired into a croc’s reptilian brain. From the sound, they determine speed, weight, velocity, and make a decision whether or not the splash is prey. Ninety-nine percent of the time it is. Tonight was no exception. The croc moved forward to the edge of the light in the garden, about four meters from the edge of the pool. Ken swam freestyle, smooth, long, steady strokes. He touched the end and turned back to the house. If he kept to his usual routine, he’d do this another nineteen and a half times: twenty lengths of the pool.

Crocs are patient hunters. They’ll wait, often missing opportunities, until they’re sure of their kill. Our croc watched no less intently than us as Ken swam to the far end of the pool and turned. The audio wasn’t that good, just a small directional mike, but we could hear the splashes he made as he swum. Ken reached the turn, the room held its collective breath, and the croc didn’t move.

“He’ll strike now, for his legs. I’ve seen them do it that way.” It was Beckham, his gravelly voice an echo of Ken’s. At that moment, Ken’s bodyguard, the guy from his club, with him at the warehouse, came out of the door near the diving board. He was holding a phone, saying something in Japanese. Ken stopped at the end of the diving board, taking the phone from the guy kneeling down handing it to him. The croc covered the four meters to the pool in the blink of an eye and slipped in with hardly a ripple.

And there was a knock on the door. We froze. The door opened and Pim stuck her head around.

I jumped up from the sofa seat to block her from coming in. Chai had the presence of mind to freeze the screen.

“Hey, what’s up?” she asked, smiling.

“Oh, just watching a show with the boys.”

“What are you watching?”

“Ah, Animal Planet, Bad Animal Attacks. The guys love it. They’re sick, always rooting for the animal.”

“Ah, okay, look I’m going up.” She leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Mother said we could share the guest room.” Kissed me on the lips, gave me a naughty look filled with promise, and a little wave. I closed the door and locked it.

Chai unfroze the screen just as the croc struck. The croc uses its all-muscle tail to propel itself, up to its full body length, out of water when it strikes. Ken’s bodyguard reeled back in shock as the croc took Ken at chest height. The pressure of the crocodile's bite is more than five thousand pounds per square inch. If this bite, the strongest on the planet, doesn’t kill, the prey usually drowns as the croc takes its victim into a death roll. The death roll serves two purposes; the first is to drown the victim; the second, to tear off whatever they’ve bitten.

Ken’s bodyguard made a big mistake. He pulled out his gun and leaned over the edge of the diving board to take a look. Brave but stupid. The croc launched itself and got his arm. He tried to hold onto the diving board. The twenty-year-old croc weighed three hundred kilos. The pool changed color. The thrashing stopped. The waves in the pool smoothed.

How Much For Your Daughter

22 May 2010 Pak Nam 3:30 pm

There were still eight days left
before the escrow account would be triggered. They’d check the account for a deposit from Samuel Harper and when there wasn’t one, they’d move to transfer the assets. There was only one problem, well a hundred million of them actually. The documents that Ken had carefully inspected were copies of the real documents. Mother’s signature was false, and Sam Harper, the witness to her signature, was dead, complete with Death Certificate, issued three days before he’d signed the documents.

This alone wouldn’t prevent a war with the Yakuza. We were hoping that could be avoided by the email we’d sent them with the tapes of Ken stealing their money attached. Along with the link to YouTube where Chai posted an edited version of the video, ‘Crocodile Pool Attack’, complete with Animal Planet logo.

Our gamble was that they had no idea Ken was operating his ‘lend and steal’ scam in Thailand. It was a risk but a calculated one. And the reason Ken had to go in such a way.

It was Por who first came up with the idea of using crocs to scare the bejesus out of enemies, and occasionally allies, who needed firming up. He got the idea after watching the first Godfather movie, the famous scene with the horse head. Uncle Mike could act Por very well. Had him down pat, the time when Por told him of the idea, being a favorite scene.

Uncle Mike would adopt Por’s calm, emotionless face. Crossing his arms and stroking his chin, like Por did when he was thinking about buying a piece of land or a car, he’d drop his voice, mimicking Por’s English.

“Mike, you know, I’ve been thinking. You know, Mike, a horse’s head is nothing. Send it down to the cook, prepare it for lunch. But imagine waking up to a live crocodile. We’d have to sedate it, just enough to knock it out while we get it in the bed. We could experiment on weights and measures...” He’d go on for hours, everyone, including Por, in stitches. Thinking about it made me think of Por. I missed him. Missed his weight around the place. Our anchor.

“What are you thinking about?” Pim asked, putting her hand on mine. We were in the backseat of Mother’s Benz, on the way to Pim’s parents’ house in Phuttamonton, west of Bangkok.

“I was just thinking about Por. How I miss him. Wish he was here.”

Mother turned around in the front seat, Beckham driving, trying to keep up with Chai in the vanguard.

“I’ve arranged for Por to come home on Sunday. Thomas says he is stable enough to travel and it will be better for him to be here with us. His vital signs are strong and he moved his fingers last night. Thomas said it was exactly at the time that you announced you were getting married.” And of course Thomas would never make such a thing up.

“That’s great news. He’ll stay with us at the house?”

“Yes. Tomorrow morning Thomas is coming with all the equipment and staff for twenty-four hour shift work. I’ve turned the guest house over to him. They’re doing some work today, backup electrics that sort of thing.”

“I’ll go with you to pick him up.”

“No, I think you should stay out of Cambodia for a little while. I’ve arranged military transport either side. It’ll be fine and Moo will be with me.” Moo was her name for Beck-ham. Ham is moo as pig is moo in Thai. When Beckham told her he was changing his name from Opart to Beckham, Mother was talking on the phone. All she heard was ‘Ham’ and Opart became, Moo.

It occurred to me that these little jaunts down memory lane might be my life slowly flashing before my eyes as I proceeded to an untimely death. I doubted Colonel Sankit would kill me, not with Mother there, but when Mother told him I was going to be marrying his only daughter, who knew.

We pulled up outside their gate. The house set well back from the road surrounded by a high wall. Chai pressed the buzzer by the gate and the gate immediately opened. We drove in and parked on the white gravel.

Pim’s mother and father came out of the house. They’d been told we were on the way. Though no one had said why, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. Neither of them looked happy. Pim squeezed my hand and got out. Beckham raced around and got Mother’s door.

Pim introduced Joom, formally, to her mother and father. Of course they had previously met, and knew exactly who she was, but we have a way of doing things, form, and function.

Pim’s mother, Khun Suchada, led the way. Col Sankit stepping aside. As I reached the steps he held his hand out towards the house indicating I should go in before him. I smiled politely.

“No, Khun Por. Please, after you.” My wai kept in place as I said this. As son-in-laws we call our wife’s father, father. Khun Por was more formal as befitting a prospective son-in-law. It caught at the back of my throat. I followed him into the house, clearing my head. It’s just plain wrong to be thinking about shooting your father-in-law in the back on your engagement day.

We filed into their living room. De rigueur standard issue hiso Louis IVX chair and sofa set was parked in front of an enormous oil painting portrait of the happy couple; he in full police uniform; she in traditional Thai costume. I thought the artist had captured the naked ambition on her face very well. Small talk ensued while the maid brought water and everyone agreed tea would be lovely.

One of Mother’s special talents, and she has many, is her ability to charm people. Whatever the social station, be it construction worker or Khunying, Mother’s ability to push the right buttons never ceases to amaze me. Of course her spy network, from which the CIA, Mossad, and MI6, could all take lessons, is second to none, feeding her with all the facts, but outlining and coloring in with juicy gossip and tidbits of information gleaned here and there. Mostly out of the mouths of maids and hairdressers. Ask Mother a question and you’ll have an answer within twenty-four hours, at the latest.

Khun Suchada was the driving force behind Colonel Sankit’s career, one foot always lifted for the next rung up the social ladder. She’d driven Sankit from Police Inspector to Police Colonel, and then to Member of Parliament. Her next ambition was a Ministry, preferably something to do with highways and roads. Having a son-in-law known to be associated with a mafia gang was a definite obstacle on the path to the dizzy heights she dreamed of. She also knew that Mother was a not a person to be treated lightly. Khun Suchada no doubt would also have her spy network. I doubted it was as sophisticated as Mother’s but it wouldn’t be trivial. No self-respecting hiso Thai women’s spy network is trivial.