Death Trip (10 page)

‘Johnny Mann?’

Mann turned at the sound of a New York accent and saw a tall, curly-haired man entering the temple. He was wearing a faded sarong around his lower half and a bleached-out cotton shirt on the top. He greeted the monk with a low bow.

‘Louis?’ The man came over to shake Mann’s hand.

Louis had a strong handshake and the frame of a man once large and muscled, now devoid of all fat. But still the outline of the strength could be seen under his summer clothes. Mann looked at his arms. Where his sleeves were rolled up there were the faded scars of blue tattoos that had been removed.

‘I thought you might get here early so I’ve been looking out for you.’ His hair was a frizzy mass of curls that moved as if on springs as he talked. His blue-grey eyes, rimmed with dark blond lashes, held Mann’s gaze. His face was tanned and handsome, but weathered.

‘Please follow me.’

Louis seemed anxious to leave the temple. But Thailand was not a country that encouraged haste of
any kind. It was too hot to hurry, and Buddha’s teachings did not allow for impatience.

When Mann stopped to bow his head towards the altar and pay his respects to the old monk, the monk raised his eyes from his notebook and held up his palms towards Mann, as if to communicate a message via his hands.

‘When you lose your way, go back to the beginning. Go to where all men are equal and there is no one religion. The circle is not yet complete. You can break it. But you must hurry; you are very near to death. You will be faced with a mirror and you will not know yourself in it.’

Then he picked up his notebook and continued with his writing.

Mann followed Louis out of the temple. An orangerobed monk was sweeping up outside the temple as they left. In the shade of the golden obelisk a dog lay panting on its side. Louis walked purposefully as he strode in front of Mann and they crossed the open courtyard and passed the two smaller temples. A tan-coloured feral dog roamed hungrily. All the dogs had the same look about them here, Mann thought, like short-haired, short-legged dingos.

Louis gestured back towards the temple and the monk.

‘Crazy, huh? It’s a crazy world. Are you a Buddhist?’

‘I’ve had a taster of most religions. I tend to take the bits I like and leave the rest. I haven’t found one that offered me the whole package yet.’

‘I converted to Buddhism but I don’t go for the fortune-telling side of it. I try and live by the code of respect for others.’

They walked back towards the rear of the courtyard, past the sweeping monk and two young monks who were playing tag amongst a washing line full of sheets. They reached the Enlightenment Centre’s doorway at the far end of the courtyard. Just outside the doorway a small altar sat, at eye level, and a sumo-sized Buddha smiled out from a garland of pink plastic flowers.

‘Buddhism is the main religion here?’

‘Not amongst the hill tribes. They are mainly animists. They make noises about being Christians or Buddhists but they sprinkle it with a liberal dose of their animist beliefs.’

‘Animists believe in what—nature?’

‘Yes. Everything has a spirit: the river, the mountain, men, and animals. All spirits must be appeased. It is a religion based on fear. They make blood sacrifices, go in for taboos, charms, that kind of thing. The dead worry them more than the living.’

Louis stopped at the entrance and was about to step back to allow Mann to enter first when he held up his arm to stop him.

‘Like this mirror here…’ In the entrance to the centre was a circular mirror. ‘It has been left by an animist who is worried about the dead returning to this place. It is supposed to shock the spirit when it sees its own reflection and make him go away.’

‘Was it left here because someone thinks the five volunteers are dead?’

Louis snatched the mirror away from the door.

‘Maybe.’ They entered the cool shade and musty darkness.

‘Do you know why they were taken?’

‘Wrong place, wrong time. That’s the only explanation.’

‘The old monk seemed to think someone else caused the trouble.’ Mann followed Louis into a gloomy corridor with that unmistakable smell of the tropics and no aircon—a mildly fizzing, sweetly unpleasant smell of things rotting in the heat.

‘He would say that. It’s what all Buddhism is founded on—cause and effect.’ Louis stopped in his tracks and looked across at Mann. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘You met them here that first day?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘It was your job to look after them for their first week, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. It was my job to shepherd them to the various people and places needed. That was all. My role was to give them an understanding of what the situation is with the hill tribes and their refugee status. I briefed them on what their specific job here would be at the camps—they were going to be helping to build a school. On a practical level, they needed to learn how to use the materials and what skills were involved in the actual building.’

‘Where did you go to teach them that?’

‘I took them up into the hills north of here. There is a centre for the tribes up there. We stayed there for three nights and they learned how to thatch, learned how to build. We had some fun. We trekked through the jungle and stayed with a remote tribe. They saw the problems, met the people, that kind of thing. The rest of the time they were here, they met monks and social
workers and other non-government organisations—NGOs. I’ll show you their classroom.’

He led Mann down a corridor. On the right were official portraits of the King of Thailand when he was a young prince. His hair stood straight up on his head in a boxy style that made him look more like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air rather than the future king of Thailand. There was a second photo of him in his orange robes.

‘Was the prince a monk?’ asked Mann.

‘Briefly. It is customary for most boys to enter the monastery for a few months, to learn about Buddhism. But here in Chiang Mai, where people are poor and education difficult to afford, there are many young boys studying to be monks—it means a free education for them and the added bonus that their parents are guaranteed a place in heaven.’

‘Good selling point,’ commented Mann, wryly.

The classroom was on the left, the whiteboard still up. The room had a couple of basic foldaway tables and a dozen plastic chairs—that was it. It echoed with their footsteps as they stepped onto the linoleum floor. The walls were decorated with acupuncture charts and drawings of human anatomy interspersed with posters of people on mats in various yoga positions. There was an appeal poster for the tsunami relief fund, with ‘NAP’ printed prominently across the top.

‘Do you work exclusively for NAP?’ Mann said, looking closely at a poster of smashed houses and fishing boats on roofs.

‘Not exclusively. I do whatever I can. You acquire skills along life’s road, don’t you?’

‘Like what?’

‘I help out in a hospital in Mae Sot as a medic and I go into the Burmese hills as a backpack medic, to help the hill tribes.’

‘Very worthy job. You’re a trained doctor?’

‘Somewhere between a doctor and a nurse. I am qualified to do certain emergency procedures.’

‘More of a field doctor?’

Louis was busy tidying the chairs.

‘I suppose so.’

‘One of those skills you acquired along the way?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘What are you doing here now?’

‘You emailed me, remember? I have things to do here, personal stuff.’ He turned to stare at Mann. ‘I have gone out of my way to be helpful. I feel like I’m being cross-examined. What is it you need—my name, rank and serial number?’ He spoke half-jokingly, but Mann could see he was beginning to get pissed off.

‘Look…’ Mann turned around to face him. ‘I’ll be honest—I don’t give a fuck about you or your life. I care about why five kids have gone missing. You can opt out of everything as far as I am concerned. You can spend your life saluting the sun and sticking incense cones up your arse, I couldn’t give a damn. But, yes, when it comes to my job, even where you had those tattoos on your forearms done and why you had them removed—even these details matter to me right now.’

Louis looked uneasy but apologetic.

‘Okay, okay.’ He smiled. ‘I’m not used to getting the third degree. Lots of people live here because they would rather not live somewhere else. This is a paradise where you can start again. I had the tattoos removed because I no longer believed in what they stood for.’

‘Which was?’

He had lost the smile now. ‘When I was young I belonged to the White Terror group. It’s a racist group in New York—’

‘I know what it is. The name kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? You were in the forces though, weren’t you? Which was it, the army, the navy, special?’

‘No, you’re wrong. Look, I have told you enough. I don’t see why I have to tell you jack shit. Who the fuck are you anyway?’

‘I am a rare thing around here: someone who gives a damn what happens to those five kids. I intend to find out why they were taken and who has them. If there’s any dirty dark secret in your past that’s put these kids in danger in the present, I want to know.’

Louis sat down on one of the plastic chairs and rested his elbows on his knees. He shook his head and, as his hair parted, Mann caught the glimpse of blue on his scalp. He had racist slogans tattooed on his scalp as well as everywhere else. The White Terror group wore them on their heads as a badge of honour.

‘I came out here for some headspace. I never expected to stay but the people, the way of life here, made me rethink mine. My dirty secrets don’t go beyond 1986. The kids going missing has nothing to do with me.’ He stood and stacked the chairs and made ready to leave.
‘When someone offered me the NAP work I jumped at it. It means I can hang about up here for a few days, relax. Things can get tense down in Mae Sot.’

‘Did the kids say what they thought about NAP?’

‘They thought they were lucky. They
were
lucky—small group, individual attention.’

They walked back along the corridor towards the rectangle of bright sunshine waiting for them at the end.

‘How did they leave here?’

‘By airconditioned minibus.’

‘How did they seem?’

‘Seem?’

‘Happy, sad, worried? What?’

Louis thought about his answer. They stopped by the poster of the prince.

‘Young. They just seemed young. They made me feel so old. Fuck! It seems like yesterday I came here but I’ve lived here for fifteen years. Time means nothing to me now. There’s a slight change in the seasons but it always looks the same. It’s all crazy shit, huh? You were young and then one day you wake up old.’ He shrugged. ‘How did that happen?’

‘I’ve often wondered the same thing myself,’ Mann replied as he walked away and left Louis standing in the entrance to the yoga centre.

Mann went to look for his tuk-tuk driver. The young monks had vanished between the drying sheets. The other monk had finished sweeping and was sat watching the dog feeding her young. But there was also someone new in the courtyard. From beneath the obelisk at the
entrance to the park an old woman stepped into Mann’s path as he made his way across the dusty square. She was carrying a small wicker basket in the shape of a ball. It contained a bird, barely more than a fledgling, startlingly ugly in the surrounds of so much gold and red and finery. This bird was grey, big eyed, and it beat its wings to try and maintain its balance as the woman turned the basket in her hands. Its dusty feathers flew from the ball. She grinned up into Mann’s face.

‘Free bird—free soul. One thousand baht.’ Mann tried to sidestep her but she was small and nimble and determined. ‘Free bird—free your soul,’ she repeated, undeterred.

Mann looked into her eyes. She was ancient. How on earth had she caught this bird? He looked over to where she was pointing. There were four other cages, each with the same type of bird, a generic and ugly type of sparrow that could be found anywhere in the world.

She wagged her finger back and forth from her basket to the other remaining cages on the floor at the side of the temple.

‘Family.’ She grinned, brown stumps for teeth, still blocking Mann’s path as he tried to go around her.

The old monk from the temple appeared behind Mann.

‘Buddhists believe to set something free is to free yourself.’

Mann looked from the monk to the woman.

‘But you have to trap it first?’

The monk and the old woman nodded in unison.

Alfie left Magda resting. He had cleared the mess up and had made her take a break. She was so exhausted but he was so proud of her. She had her fighting spirit back. Whilst she was sleeping he cycled over to Katrien’s. He tucked his bike around the back of her building and sauntered casually to the entrance, carrying a box; it was his usual trick of pretending to be a delivery man. With the information that Magda had got from Dorothy he could now have a crack at getting Katrien’s codes. He also needed to get back into her apartment to access her email accounts. Using his mobile, he rang NAP and asked to speak to her, making sure she was safely out of the flat, then hung up before she came to the phone.

Within minutes he was back in her flat. Nothing had changed. Everything was in the same immaculate state. Bed made, silk knickers left on the top. Maybe she was expecting company, thought Alfie. It would take more than silk knickers to make her attractive to him. He touched the mouse and the screen sprang into life. He clicked on the other accounts on the screen
and saw that she was offline. He followed the ‘forgotten password’ link and prepared to answer the questions.

Place of birth?
He typed in ‘Burma’.

Favourite colour?
He typed in ‘black’.

A new message came up for katcream69. It was her password reminder:
bitch.

Now Alfie knew her password and he had access to all her accounts.

Mann spent the rest of the day chasing up anyone who had had contact with the five but found out very little he didn’t already know. He was ready to head south to Mae Sot the following morning, making this his one and only night in Chiang Mai. Now he was sitting at a portable bar in the centre of town. It reminded him of the burger vans outside a football match in the UK. It was parked up on a broad piece of pavement, just a few feet away from the busy main road and the River Ping. It was almost like Europe, with pavement cafés on cobbled streets, except it was as hot as a furnace: at forty degrees, the evening was no cooler than the day had been. He cradled his ice-cold glass and waited for cooler air from the circulating fan to reach him as it came by every thirty seconds on its rotation. It was plugged into a series of extension leads that disappeared out of sight around the corner of a building.

In the middle of the mobile bar was a pretty woman in her fifties. She looked like Imelda Marcos. She had dyed black hair and a puffy, pretty, made-up face. Her chubby hands moved at a measured pace across the
bottles as she made the drinks slowly, deliberately. She did not have the luxury of space and one wild swing of her arm would have taken out most of her stock. Outside the kiosk, there were the other three members of staff—two men and Imelda’s beautiful, quirky-looking daughter.

Mann looked up to see Louis walking towards him. He was dressed in jeans this time but he had on the same cotton shirt.

Louis sat down opposite Mann and waited for Imelda’s daughter to acknowledge his existence. She didn’t. She picked up the dirty glasses, refreshed the bowls of peanuts and kept up a constant conversation on her mobile, making sure that she made as little contact with the customers as possible. One of the others took his order. Imelda inclined her head in a slow Geisha bow and Louis returned it. She giggled; her teeth were tiny pins. ‘How did you get on today? Did you talk to everyone you needed to?’

‘I think so. I leave for Mae Sot tomorrow.’

‘How are you getting there?’

‘Don’t know yet. Are you headed that way?’

‘No, but I know a man—Gee. He goes back and forth. I’ll ring him and tell him to pick you up outside your hotel. Don’t give him more than five thousand baht and don’t pay him till you get there. He’s a likeable rogue but you can’t trust him.’

‘Thought you might consider helping; I could use a handy guy with a gun.’

Louis rested his keys on the table and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. He slouched over the table and tapped a cigarette out of the pack. Imelda’s daughter
appeared from nowhere, lit it for him, and disappeared again. He turned his head and grinned at Mann.

‘You had me checked out?’ He sat back in his chair and studied Mann.

‘I had you checked before I came. Although there wasn’t a lot to uncover in the last fifteen years. Except…you are an ex-marine and you never mentioned you were once a mercenary and that you fought on the side of the Karen National Liberation Army.’

Louis took a drag of his cigarette and nodded.

‘Well done, big respect, man. That took some digging.’

‘Actually, I didn’t know that last bit. I presumed you were out here for that long you probably got paid when the Opium King was handing out big money to foreign mercenaries, right?’

Louis realised he had walked straight into Mann’s trap. He smiled and then shook his head sadly. ‘That was when the KNLA had a chance of winning. Now they are screwed.’ Imelda’s daughter brought their drinks over. ‘Now there are twenty thousand KNLA with little or no equipment against five hundred thousand fully armed Burmese. The villagers don’t stand a chance. No one does in Burma. The kids are as good as dead. The Burmese do whatever the fuck they like and no one stops them—it’s the teak, the resources. The world might be appalled but it’s also a consumer. It still does business with Burma. The villagers won’t be able to help the kids, they won’t just face the Burmese army, they will face organised paid gangs of murderers. They’re called Shwit. It’s the sound of a throat being
cut. They kill anyone with links to the KNLA, past or present.’ Louis looked up from his beer and gave a faint smile. ‘Now, I’m a man who likes a cause but I also like to feel I can win.’

‘So, will you help me?’

Louis laughed gently. ‘You don’t give up do you? Mercenaries are ten a penny in this part of the world. Some of them don’t even want any money—they do it to get target practice. The hills have at least more than one crazy white mercenary in them at any one time. Seems Rambo is alive and well and living in the Shan State.’ He shrugged and shook his head. ‘They always go mad in the end, or they get killed. Sometimes they find God. Mercenaries and missionaries seem to go together. Mae Sot is everything a good border town on the edge of hell should be; it exists for darkness and misery and blood and fear, where the wealthy and the poor meet across the poker tables of life and bet on one another’s souls.’

‘Is that what you did?’

‘Yes. But not any more. I am hoping the Buddhism will save my soul, but, if not, it’s been a calming influence—one I needed. Us crazy whites can have a lust for blood once we kill; we cannot forgive ourselves and we cannot stop.’

Mann smiled ruefully. ‘Yes, it warps the brain.’

‘That’s because we don’t have a cause like they do. The Karen kill only to defend. They don’t take a life unnecessarily because they are all on the same side really. They are all fighting the Burmese military junta, whether they are Karen or poor Burmese farmers. They
should fight together, but they don’t, of course. Buddhist Karen kill Christian Karen and so on. They are splintered. What’s that old saying—“divided we fall”?’

‘Yes. Something like that. So you’re not interested in the reward money?’

‘How much?’

‘Two million US.’

‘Jesus! Who put that up?’

‘Anonymous. You interested now?’

Louis shook his head. ‘I turned over a new leaf, remember?’

Mann smiled. ‘I have to meet up with a man named Riley, he’s the NAP contact at Mae Klaw. You know him?’

‘I know him well. He’s a good guy. He runs the whole NGO side of things at Mae Sot. Go to King’s bar. He’s there every evening. You can trust Riley,’ said Louis before drinking the dregs of his beer.

‘Trust means something different to everyone,’ Mann said. ‘It depends on what’s important to you. Some people you could trust with your life but not with your wallet or your wife. Everyone has their Achilles’ heel. I trust no one, it’s easier that way.’