Black Tiger (3 page)

June 24, 1969

It seems that Sya has studied obsessively, played certain Western sports with bravado, and dated intellectual sluts, my spies inform me. This year he returned, armed with an MBA and a racy vocabulary.

I am so happy with his return. Now educated and an expert in English, he is more useful than ever.

Sya quickly achieved yet another promotion. He was now a full colonel in the Border Patrol Police. He was too young, in reality, but I did not care about that. And because I did not care, nobody else dared raise objections. He now spends much time at court, yet pays no respect to anyone, except myself.

It is good to have my faithful Tiger back home. Sya is my talisman and my shield. I truly believe no ill will befall me on his watch.

‘Come!’ Colonel Sya Dam stood with his back to the room, staring out at the cheerless compound. He did not turn, even at the staccato thud of three pairs of military boots on the wooden floor behind him, scraping to an abrupt halt.

‘Prisoner, sir!’

He turned then, at the sergeant’s bark, listening for any hint of resentment in the sergeant’s voice, any rift in the unquestioning acceptance of his absolute authority. His hard gaze raked the face of the young soldier who stood between the two guards. On the youth’s head, thrown back defiantly, Sya noted the black spikes where the cropped hair was starting to grow back. The chin was firm, the eyes steady. Only the clenched fists and unnaturally taut jawline betrayed his terror.

The boy’s face expressed incredulity and indignation. His expression proclaimed that, had he dared, he would have yelled in protest that he had only been obeying orders, the incontestable commands of Colonel Sya himself, his fearsome, charismatic commanding officer, to whom the young man had demonstrated his doglike devotion over and above the call of duty. All this despite the fact that the commanding officer was not of his own people, not even a Black Thai or a Plains Thai, but an Akha.

One week ago, he’d been a trusted professional soldier at the start of a promising career. Or, rather, almost trusted. For it was well known that Colonel Sya Dam trusted nobody; his circumspection forestalled complications of just this unwelcome kind. Sya ensured that sensitive information, the kind that could too easily sow seeds of speculation and doubt, was withheld. He regarded the young prisoner with irritation tinged with regret.

‘Read the charge, Sergeant,’ Sya commanded tiredly.

‘Boonchua, Corporal. Border Patrol Police number 10035. Mechanical support unit 306, airborne support division, Isaan. Suspected of collusion with insurgent terrorists, to the displeasure and jeopardy of the serenity and comfort of His Majesty King Rama and the security of His realm. Charge: treason, sir!’

‘Defence?’ Sya turned his heavy face once more toward the prisoner. The prisoner shied away from that cold eye. He shouted at the ceiling, hoarsely, without hope.

‘Sir, just give me a few days to find witnesses to my innocence! I have important information for you, sir, concerning His Majesty. I have evidence His Majesty’s life is in danger, sir! I work on the helicopters…’

‘If His Majesty is in danger, it can only be from insurgent terrorists. With whom you, soldier, are accused of dealing.’ Sya lowered his voice, exchanged the haranguing tone for a warmer, more intimate one. ‘How did they trap you, boy? Was it drugs? Drink, women…little boys, perhaps?’ Sya moved close, gazing into the boy’s face.

‘Sir, I am loyal! I would lay down my life for the king!’ Sya nodded, wearily, as one who had heard the same thing many times. ‘Sir, there are those who would kill the king!’

‘You hope to be believed? What desperate plea is this?’ Sya murmured contemptuously.

‘I have witnesses to my loyalty, Colonel, sir. And witnesses who will swear they know of a plot against His Majesty. Please believe me! Just grant me a few days…’

‘Request denied.’ Sya shook his head. The condemned man shuddered. His eyes seemed to glaze, as though it were all over already, reminding Sya of the sudden resignation he had observed in animals at the point of slaughter.

‘You seek to excuse yourself by incriminating others. This is the last resort of a desperate man. We must investigate these matters more closely. At all costs, the Chakri dynasty and the king’s person must be protected. Take him away.’

The prisoner stared in disbelief. Sya lifted his hand as if in greeting, but it was a valediction, without compunction or regret. Sya looked hard at the sergeant.

‘Take good care of this prisoner, Sergeant. I hope he will be too wise to attempt to flee. No one would be answerable for the consequences of such a rash action.’

The prisoner gave a great despairing cry and fell at Sya’s feet. He clutched Sya’s ankles and tugged at his boot, attempting to lift it and place it upon his own head as he grovelled. Sya did not move a muscle.

‘Get up!’ the sergeant snapped. The guards hauled the prisoner to his feet and dragged him outside.

Sya turned back to the window. He listened for the sharp, single bark of the service pistol. It came sooner than he had expected, and he drummed his finger on the window ledge, squashing, with efficient deliberation, a small blowfly crawling there. Small fry like Boonchua did not merit a full firing squad—a single shot to the back of the neck was all they deserved, just like a dog. Sometimes Sya fired the shot himself, in order to set a good example. A full firing squad would have entailed instigating a full-scale enquiry. Better by far, incomparably neater, for the fellow to be shot while resisting arrest. A full-scale inquiry must be avoided at all costs; whether the boy knew anything about a plot against the king or not, such a forum where he could blab his suspicions must be avoided.

Sya flexed his shoulders, feeling the damp uniform shirt lift from his skin and then reclaim it like a hot, clammy touch.

He felt confident that his own position was unassailable. His devotion to the dynasty and to King Rama’s person was notoriously obsessive. He enjoyed a reputation as the scourge of insurgents, the hunter of terrorists. Diligently he scanned every shadow for possible royal assassins. When the moment came, the king would be removed from the scene, and none would mourn the popular monarch more vociferously. No one would pursue the investigations into possible treachery and sabotage more relentlessly than Sya Dam. Nobody would ever suspect that Colonel Sya, of the Border Patrol Police, the king’s own creature, was not brokenhearted.

The members of the press, who privately called Sya the King’s Blind Spot, publicly lauded him as the Incorruptible Black Tiger, the emblem of the tamed tribes. Sya knew they would have been less patronisingly complacent had they known that to the tribesmen he was much more than a contemptible emblem, a token tribesman among the Thai elite. Sya had carefully calculated the support he enjoyed among the tribes. Ostensibly wooing them in the national interest, he had instead established a useful power base among them. If the tribes had their way, Sya would rule the land as the reincarnation of their vengeful animistic gods—a savage, implacable deity after the Akhas’ own hearts. Sya could now mobilise tribal resistance at will, following his successful campaign to bring wireless communication to them. ‘Only through radio can we hope to centralise and educate the hill tribes, to channel their loyalties,’ he had declared, addressing the tribes through that mass medium in the myriad variety of their own tongues. He spoke to the Meo, the Yao, the Tibetan, Burmese, South-Chinese hill people, and to his own people, the Akha, the last of the wild men, whose dread of civilisation had driven them deep into the northern jungles. Here, several days’ march through bandit country, he knew they lived in primeval splendour and profound squalor, steeped in superstition, befuddled with the first fruits of their great cash crop, raw opium. Their annual yield of nubile village girls was still ritually deflowered by a handpicked village stud, with attendant brutality.

Since living in Bangkok and America, Sya had deliberately repudiated his fearsome inheritance. Once only had Sya revisited his tribe. It had been a semi-official visit, intended to win hearts and minds. They offered him the maiden crop. He recalled the dark gleam of frightened young faces, the crazy jangling of the silver coins in the black-and-scarlet pyramid headdresses that concealed their hair, the rustling of the heavy black-and-scarlet embroidered skirts. He remembered the muscular warm slithering of oiled skin smelling of blood and pork fat, the rank animal scent of pubic hair wiry as heather. He remembered his own readiness, and smiled. He had spoken true when he boasted to the shocked courtiers that, after the fierce taste of tribal fare, the refinements of civilisation seemed bland, anodyne, even tedious.

He sometimes wondered what he had become, away from his tribe. A white raven, a freak, walking among the Thai like a poodle tottering along on its hind legs. A savage pet, a pet savage. The Lady Asra, sometime Miss Universe, was known as Thailand’s Smile, just as he, Sya, was the Black Tiger, or sometimes even Thailand’s Conscience. She, too, must know what it was to be Thailand’s pet.

The Thais seemed to him a soft people seduced by intricate fantasies. He wondered idly, as he waited for the sergeant’s return, whether it was the influence of the Thai language that encouraged people into overdetermined symbolism. The language was richly metaphoric: a carburettor was ‘nipples of mouse’, an indicator was ‘elephant’s ear’, to be naked was to be dressed in a ‘garment of air’.
Overdetermined symbolism!
Sya rolled the syllables on his tongue. He had studied in America; he was a man of education. He could conjure with such terms. To understand these people was to destroy them.

The sergeant’s polite cough recalled him to the present. He turned as the man re-entered the room and clicked his heels, saluting smartly.

‘Beg to report, Colonel, sir. Prisoner shot while attempting escape, sir.’

‘In order, Sergeant. Carry on.’

‘Sir!’

‘Boonchua. That was the name?’

‘Sir!’ the sergeant confirmed.

Sya snorted. ‘Boonchua, formerly Boon, no doubt. Chinese. Bloody Jek!’ He turned back to the window. ‘There must be no hint of trouble in Isaan. His Majesty makes another official visit there tomorrow. His Majesty’s safety is of paramount importance. We must all be ready to give our lives for the king, our father.’

‘Sir!’ agreed the sergeant heartily.

‘Boon,’ mused Sya. ‘He would never have been able to afford proper witnesses on a corporal’s salary,’ he remarked casually, ‘even supposing he managed to find any!’

‘No, sir. Thank you, sir!’

As the sergeant turned on his heel he almost bumped into a soldier who immediately stood sideways, courteously, saluted at this awkward angle, and announced nervously, ‘Please, sir, beg to report, foreign officer to see you, sir.’

Sya frowned. Expert as he was at the effective exploitation of the value of surprise, he himself was singularly averse to receiving surprises himself.

‘Who?’ he scowled.

‘Please, sir, a Major Fleischer, sir. American person, sir!’

Sya gritted his teeth and forced his features into an expression of cordiality. Not a surprise visitor after all, but the long-awaited, recently promoted Major Angel Fleischer.

Sya had no wish to get off on the wrong foot with Major Fleischer, at least until they had explored one another’s potential usefulness, so he hoped the sergeant had used what little initiative he had and tidied away the remains of the unhappy Boonchua.

Even battle-hardened Americans tended to find unexpected corpses off-putting so early in the morning.

Young Tamnoon, his colleagues agreed, was never likely to become a successful police officer despite his enthusiasm for the job. His career would languish because he simply did not know how to make the best of a situation. He was too stubborn to ingratiate himself with his superiors, and too upright to take bribes and enrich himself in the usual way. And he was too pig-headed to refrain from open criticism of colleagues who did so.

Tamnoon, a poor but honest man, possessed only one treasure: his young wife, Sompong. She was a true Northern beauty, with skin pale and delicate as magnolia petals. She had the grace of the mythical hong bird, whose elegance is unsurpassed by any living creature. Tamnoon had bought her out of a house of entertainment within a week of her arrival, age fifteen, from the rice fields of Chiengrai, and never regretted it for a moment, even when his hell-raking old reprobate of a father, ‘Python’ Prasert, knocked his teeth out for marrying a Bad Girl. Tamnoon was accustomed to his father’s intemperate reactions: upon learning of his son’s intention to enter the police force, he had broken three of his ribs, yelling, ‘Disgrace to the family! You will die a dog’s death! You’re too stupid even to be a policeman!’ The Python had then gone on a bender that lasted three weeks, fully exercising the Thai capacity for drunkenness.

Tamnoon appeared to justify his father’s misgivings. When his colonel cast lewd eyes upon the lovely Sompong as she strolled to market with her undulating stride, instead of turning a blind eye and accepting the inevitable promotion and favour, the young husband expressed his moral indignation. His reward was an immediate posting to the outback, the poverty-stricken far eastern district of Isaan on the Cambodian border.

In the meantime, his father, Python Prasert, had killed a man in a village brawl. This was not the first occasion, but this time, being too drunk to flee the scene, he was captured, fettered with leg-irons, and sentenced to life in Bang Saen prison. Here, Python lost little time in establishing his own social network. His fellow convicts considered him a straightforward sort of fellow, almost an aristocrat. It was widely felt that his crime, a brawl-killing, was a manly, clean-cut affair. There was nothing distasteful or premeditated about it, like the slow poisoning of an erring daughter or molesting temple boys. Besides, Nature had bestowed upon the Python disconcertingly crossed eyes, which to the superstitious convicts implied dealings with the black arts. Notwithstanding this blemish, the Python was a merry wag when sober, and had a great sense of humour and a kind word for everyone, even the blackest villains drug addicts. He even befriended Bang Saen’s most notorious inmate, Crazy Archin, an acquaintance doomed to have disastrous consequences.