Gift of the Golden Mountain (50 page)

     Outside in the courtyard he handed her a note, pressed his palms together, fingertips up, and left. It was from Sam, and it was dated three days ago. "Sorry I couldn't wait, but I'll be here when you get back. Take a bus to Chiang Mai, check in at the Railway Hotel, then go to the Night Bazaar to a shop called Srisupan Gems. Ask for Phorn. He will make all arrangements. I'll be waiting for you in Bangkok when you get back. Happy trails."

     She leaned against one of the mythological beasts that guarded the Chapel Royal and grimaced. Happy trails. Wrong, Sam. You've got it wrong.

She arrived in Chiang Mai in that gray period between sunset and dark. The evening air smelled of smoke and jasmine. She climbed into a pedicab, told the driver to take her to the night bazaar, and leaned back to try to get a sense of this northern town. It was the jumping-off spot for the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos and Burma came together, and where the opium poppy was the largest cash crop. For all its notoriety, she thought, the town seemed prosaic. Even in the gathering dark, she could
see shards of light glint off the golden stele of a monastery behind a high wall. She stopped at a food stall and pointed to the green coconuts piled in a bucket of ice. With a machete, the man sliced the top off one and, with great precision, placed a straw in it. Then he handed it to her with a flourish and a smile.

     "Thank you," she said, pressing her palms together in a wai, before paying him. It was the right thing to do. The man broke into giggles, as the Thai tended to do, and insisted she sit on his chair to enjoy her drink.

     She took two long, deep sips of the cold coconut water and then asked him to direct her to the Srisupan shop. He repeated the name twice before he began calling out wildly. Presently, a small boy appeared, and May understood that she was to follow him.

     She had a hard time keeping up, as the child ducked between the stalls—dozens of them, set up every night in the broad wasteland only a few minutes from the heart of town. "Wait," she called out, but the child scurried ahead, she had simply to plow her way through the night throngs, muttering, "sorry, sorry."

     Phorn was short and thick with a heavy smile perpetually in place. He wore an immaculate white knit golf shirt, shiny green trousers, and dress shoes. "Oh yes," he said when she told him who she was. "Everything is quite okay." It was a phrase she would hear over and over again in weeks to come. That night she had no idea that it was applied as soothing balm, that all it meant was, "Everything is out of your hands."

When she came out of the Railway Hotel the next morning a small girl, about eight, approached her carrying a huge rattan tray. On it were stacked a dozen small woven cages; inside each were two tiny sparrows fluttering madly.

     "Ten baht, madame," the girl said, holding out one of the little baskets in which the birds batted wildly.

     May laughed. "Whatever would I do with them?" she said out loud. The girl's eyes were opaque; she did not understand. A pedicab driver standing nearby answered for her: "You set them free, madam. Make a wish and if they fly off together, your wish is granted."

     "Ten baht," the girl repeated.

     How perverse, May thought, to capture some poor creature for the pleasure of releasing it. While she was trying to open the cage she made her wish:
Hayes, to see Hayes.

     She stood, watching the birds fly off together, until tears stung her eyes. Suddenly she whirled and went back into the hotel, to the desk. Screw secrecy, screw Sam. On a sheet of paper she wrote:
Going to find my mother. Meet me in Hong Kong, Peninsula Hotel, April 20. Please.
With painstaking care, she printed his name and Paris address and gave the man at the desk fifty baht to send the telegram at once. He looked at the money, dissolved into a delighted fit of giggling, and got right to it.

For three days they traveled, first by jeep, then across a lake on a boat that sat so low in the water her feet were perpetually wet, through a forest on elephant back and finally, by foot. Her companions were Phorn, still in his golf shirt and shiny green pants, but now wearing bright blue Adidas running shoes, a woman of the Meo tribe with black teeth and matching cotton costume heavily embroidered in bright reds and yellows and with loops of silver weighing on her chest, and a wiry young man who was a mahout, or elephant handler.

     Only Phorn spoke English, and not very well. She was never quite certain if he understood and didn't want to give her a straight answer, or if he simply did not understand. For this reason, most of the journey, for May, was spent in silence. She did not mind; the heat and the dust and the insects drained her of any but the
most immediate concerns. Tiny mites worked their way under the moneybelt she wore, biting her until she had what looked like a red ring separating the top of her from the bottom. Her stomach was giving her trouble, in spite of the medicine she had brought along. She was as physically miserable as she had ever been, and she had to concentrate simply to keep going, to keep her equilibrium. The worst of it was, she had a feeling that things were going to get harder before they got easier. Occasionally, when she watched the Meo woman squatting in the dirt preparing their food . . . stuffing sticky rice in hollowed-out sections of sugarcane, wrapping it in leaves and roasting it deep in the fire . . . she would wonder what the woman could be thinking, how she felt about a strange English-speaking woman in an Abercrombie safari suit who could only sit and watch.

     She did not know when they crossed the border into Burma; it must have happened on the third day. All that afternoon they had traveled by foot along a stony dry riverbed, a canopy of teak and bamboo shading them, the tangled jungle rising on either side. As the light began to lower, Phorn motioned for them to stop. At first she thought they were going to make camp, but logic told her it was too early. Instead, they waited.

     After a while. May asked, "Do you suppose you could tell me why we are waiting—is someone going to meet us, and where we will be going now?"

     "Oh yes, someone," Phorn answered with his usual set smile. "Everything is quite okay."

     There were three of them, small and wiry men in oddly matched clothes—jeans, sneakers, army fatigues, and floppy hats. They carried rifles and shotguns and led a string of sturdy little ponies, each carrying a heavy pack. One of the men, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, set to work. He took the pack off one of the ponies, and repositioned it. Meanwhile, the others had engaged Phorn in a furious conversation in a dialect she had never heard.

     It was about her, she knew that. The men would look at her
and glance away. They sat on their haunches under a giant teak tree, smoking and chattering. She lit a cigarette too, and filled her lungs with the harsh dry smoke.
This feels wrong
, she thought, and bit the inside of her cheek.
But I've gone too far to turn back.

     Phorn approached her. She made no move to meet him, instead, she took another long drag on the cigarette.

     "Madam May," he said, "I am very sorry to say, these men say need more money."

     
"More
money? Sam already paid them."

     "Not so much enough. Very hard, getting men to take to China. Very hard time."

     "Sam made all of the arrangements, they were paid in advance."

     "Oh no, Madam, they say he pay not enough."

     She sighed. "How much?"

     "Two thousand U.S. dollars."

     "Christ!" she blurted angrily, not knowing if she should be angry at Sam or if they were extorting more money from her. "Tell them two thousand dollars is all I have, and if they take that now I will be left with nothing," she lied. "Tell them they can have a thousand dollars now, and the rest when I return to Bangkok."

     Phorn walked the few steps to the other camp, spoke rapidly for a few moments, and then came back to say, "Give them fifteen hundred dollars, everything will be quite okay."

     "Sure," she said, wanting to slap the stupid grin off his face, "sure it will. But tell them they are leaving me with nothing."

     Phorn looked at her, for the first time not bothering to mask his disapproval. "Five hundred U.S. dollars is not nothing."

     She leaned against the tree and closed her eyes. He was right. In this part of the world $500 U.S. was a fortune. And they could have demanded all of it, they could easily have taken it from her.

She continued the journey north with the Meo woman and one of the Burmese, an old man with a shock of white hair and enough English to explain that she was now in Kachin territory, and what she had just encountered was a caravan of jade smugglers on their way to the Thai border, that he was to deliver her to the Chinese who would then take her where she wanted to go in Yunnan Province.

     "Who are these Chinese?" she said, then rephrased her question. "Why do the Chinese come to Burma?"

     "To Kachin," he corrected her, "Here, is Kachin land. They come for jadeite."

     "Ah," May said, beginning to understand. The Kachin tribes had always ruled the north of Burma, where the best jade mines were. The civil war continued, with the Kachin holding their own ground. But now even the Chinese were coming to them for the fine green jadeite mined in these mountains.

     They walked for another day, at times picking through jungle so thick the old man had to cut a way with a machete. She could feel the sweat caking on her body; her shoulders ached and sharp pains shot up the back of her neck. Her mouth and throat were parched, even her eyes felt hot. She tried to loosen her shirt; her underpants began to bind her and she wished she could take them off altogether. She swung her backpack off and dragged it for a time, but then she put it back on when the woman—in her heavy black dress, carrying a load of pots and pans on her head—moved around her, to take the second position behind the old man.

     "If I ever get out of this . . ." May was beginning to say to herself when they came into the clearing. Two small thatched huts, a rusted frame of what may once have been a jeep and several haystacks. She hoped she could make it as far as the water jar. At first she did not notice the small knot of men huddled in the shade cast by one of the huts.