He’d taken the Skytrain to Bang Chak, preferring the anonymity of Bangkok’s famous monorail to a cab, where he ran the risk of the driver remembering him. From there he made his way by foot through the market, holding tightly to his precious backpack as he weaved through stalls selling everything from textiles and electronics to cheap religious icons and revolting herbal charms made from chicken’s feet and the like.
In every corner, junkies sat slumped like the corpses they would soon become. Chao-tak’s customers. General McPhee felt no compassion for them. Their misery was self-inflicted.
The general had heard the horror stories about Chao-tak’s torture chambers, and the toe-curling punishments he apparently inflicted on perceived rivals, enemies or delinquent debtors. He wasn’t impressed. These drug lords and gang leaders thought of themselves as warriors. Pathetic! Put them in a real war zone and they wouldn’t last a day. Most of them were illiterate thugs who’d risen to the top like scum in a jar full of pond water. It pained the general in a way, to be handing over the beautiful Entemena statue to such a philistine. But business was business. Two million dollars would pay for the luxurious retirement that General Alan McPhee deserved.
A minion emerged from an alleyway and scuttled alongside the general like a rat.
“McPhee?”
The general nodded.
“This way.”
Chao-tak’s office was a sparsely furnished room in a nondescript apartment building. Not quite a tenement, it was nevertheless extremely run-down, with patchy air-conditioning, peeling paint and carpets that looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned since the day they were laid. In Mexico, the drug barons lived like emperors. Clearly Chao-tak had other uses for his money.
“You got the statue?”
General McPhee laid his backpack gently down on the desk.
“You got the money?”
A different minion handed him a briefcase.
“Do you mind if I count it?”
Chao-tak wasn’t listening. Like a greedy child on Christmas morning, he was attacking the general’s backpack, clawing at the Bubble Wrap protecting Entemena.
“Be careful with that!” The general couldn’t stop himself. “There’s over two thousand years of history in that bag.”
The squat little Thai turned the statue over in his hands, like a monkey examining a troublesome nut. Ignorant peasant.
Suddenly something happened. Chao-tak’s face darkened. He shook the statue hard, like a baby with a rattle, then started shouting something in Thai. Two of his men rushed forward. Each examined the base of the statue. Then all three glared at General McPhee.
“You try to cheat me!” Chao-tak spat.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? You ridiculous. Two-thousand-year-old statue, you think I’m stupid?” Snatching the Entemena back from his henchmen, Chao-tak threw it at the general, who only just caught it in time.
“For Christ’s sake! What are you doing?”
“Look at bottom. Look at base!” Chao-tak commanded.
The general’s face drained of color.
“They have serial number two thousand year ago? They have bar code?”
“I . . . I don’t understand,” the general stammered. “This is a mistake. Someone must have switched the statues somehow.” He thought about the robbery on the train, but that made no sense. It couldn’t be. I had the statue with me on the Kwai. It was never in the room.
“Look, I’ll straighten this out. You can keep your money.” He closed the briefcase and pushed it back across the desk. “I don’t know how this happened but—”
Four hands gripped his arms from behind. Before he could react, someone brought a metal crowbar slamming into the back of his knees. He screamed and slumped to the floor.
“You try to cheat me.”
The Harvard-educated American war hero looked into the eyes of the illiterate Thai drug dealer and saw his own black, compassionless heart staring back at him.
Tears welled up in his eyes.