Thai Horse (23 page)

COHEN: 1973

Cohen, too, remembered that night.

And he, too, had thought to himself as he cruised through the heavy fog
in the long, slender snakeboat:
What the hell is a nice Jewish boy from Westchester with a DBA from Harvard Business School doing here?

The barge had appeared so suddenly it startled Cohen. It was a floating department store, stacked high with crates of cameras, television sets, china dishes and forbidden icons, bolts of Thai silk and Indian. madras. Heavy tarps were strapped over the stacks to keep them dry.

Han, Cohen’s bodyguard and helmsman, throttled back and eased the snakeboat toward the barge. Cohen could feel his heart thundering in his throat and wrists. His mouth was dry.

Standing on the foredeck of the
b
arge was the ugliest, meanest-looking human being he had ever seen. He was shorter than Cohen, perhaps five six, an Oriental built like a crate, his bulging arms covered with tattoos. He had no hair on the right side of his head. In its place was a mottled burn scar, which extended from a disfigured lump of ear halfway to the crown of his head. He combed the rest of his long black hair away from the scar so it swept over the top of his head and showered down the left side almost to his shoulder. He wore a gun belt and an ornate hand-made holster, designed to hold an Uzi machine gun, which was tied to his thigh Western style. His three front teeth were gold. One of them, according to rumor, had belonged to an unfortunate English businessman who thought he could bypass the unwritten and unsaid laws of the river and deal directly with the Ts’e K’a
m
Men Ti.

This was Sam-Sam Sam, the
Do Wong,
the Prince of the Knife, a one-man Teamsters Union. Nothing happened on the river unless Sam-Sam Sam said okay. The booty stacked behind him was all tribute, collected from others who wanted to do business with the taipans.

Cohen’s mouth got drier.

Behind Sam-Sam Sam there were at least twenty other men, all wearing the black shirts, shin-length hauki pants, and red headbands of the Khmer Rouge, all armed with Uzis, AK-47s, M-16s and .357 Pythons. They looked as if they expected an invasion. Behind them were the women, all young, all probably cold-blooded, dressed the same, with knives and pistols stuck in their red sashes.

All of the weapons seemed to be pointed at Cohen’s stomach.

Leaning against a stack of crates was a white man, his uncut black hair covering his ears and sweeping almost to his shoulders. He was tall, handsome in a scruffy, unshaven way, and was wearing khaki cotton pants and shirt. A blue windbreaker was tied around his waist by the sleeves; a 9 mm. H&K automatic dangled under his arm in a shoulder holster; his wide-brimmed safari hat was faded and limp from sun and rain. He had his hands in his pockets and was grinning. No, thought Cohen, not grinning, the son of a bitch is leering.

‘They look like Khmer Rouge,’ Cohen whispered to Han.

‘Disguise,’ whispered his boatman, who was supposed to act as a bodyguard. ‘Nobody bother them this way.’

Cohen quickly appraised the situation. He became temporarily paranoid, afraid they would hear his heart pounding. The odds were about thirty to two and there was no future in any kind of confrontation. Cohen immediately made his move.

‘I’ll go over alone,’ Cohen said.

‘Not good. They don’t know you,’ answered Han.

‘I have this,’ said Cohen, opening his hand. In his palm lay a Queen Victoria twenty-dollar gold piece. ‘Stand up in full view so they don’t get nervous. If there is trouble, the two of us aren’t going to last long anyhow.’

He stood on the point of the bow as the motorboat idled up to the barge and opened
his
cheongsam
wide
to show he was unarmed, then stepped cautiously onto the barge.

‘I didn’t come here to fight,’ he said in Chinese to the ugly one. ‘I came here to make us
all rich.’

The ugly man glared at him.

‘I’m Cohen,’ Cohen said.

The ugly man still glared at him.

Cohen made his way to the stacks of contraband goods, threading his way through the
m
en and women, and flipped a corner of a bolt of Thai sil
k
, felt it, and nodded.

‘Good stuff,’ he said, then turned to the ugly man. ‘This is what I want.’ He held up his
f
ingers and counted. ‘I want cameras from Japan, good brands. I want stereos, Sony and Panasonic. I want Thai silk
—
not cheap
—
good stuff, like this, and madras from India.’ He flipped the corner back on the bolt. ‘I’ll buy green jade, no white
—
and don’t try to dye it on me, I can see right through that. Statues, idols, stuff like that from China, I’ll give you good price on all that, as much as you can bring down from Chin Chin land or over from Thailand.’

The ugly man stood with his ha
n
ds on his hips, a cigar clenched in his teeth. Its tip glowed in the dark. Okay, thought Cohen, he’s got to show his balls here, push me around a little.

‘Who the hell you think you are?’ Ugly said.

‘I told you, I’m Cohen.’

The ugly man looked around at his men and they all laughed. There was some jabber between them and then the ugly man turned back to Cohen
a
nd said, ‘They think I ought to skin you alive and hang you to the side of my boat.’

Cohen threw his wallet on the table. ‘Kill me, all you get is ten Hong Kong dollars. I don’t think you got to be the
do wong
by being stupid.’

The white man whistled low through his teeth and shook his head very slowly.

The ugly man’s eyes flamed. He bit down hard on his cigar and his hand dropped over the stock of the Uzi.

‘You say I am stupid,
gwai-lo,
that what you say?’

‘No no, I say I
don’t
think you
are
stupid. If you were stupid you’d skin me for ten dollars. Instead, I’ll make you
fat.’

‘I am fat already,’ the ugly man said proudly.

‘One is never too fat.’

‘You have a fast tongue.’

‘A man wouldn’t last long up here with a slow one.’ The ugly man liked that. He threw back his head, laughed heartily, and his men relaxed.

‘So how do you pay?’ the ugly man asked.

‘Hong Kong paper. You want American dollars or gold, you won’t do as well.’

‘And why should I do business with you?’ the pirate asked.

Cohen held up the gold coin between a thumb and forefinger. He twisted it in the beam of one of the lights. The coin twinkled in his hand. Sa
m
-Sam walked very close and inspected the coin.

‘You come from the Tsu Fi?’ the ugly one asked. Cohen nodded. ‘I talk for the Tsu Fi. I got lots of dollars and there’s plenty more. None of that tea-and-crumpets shit like dealing with the British. You deal with me, it’s down and dirty, everybody makes a pound, no bullshit, no waste of time. And the big reason is I’ll take delivery upriver. I’ll make the Macao run myself and worry about customs. All you got to do is get the goods to me.’

The white man shifted slightly and said in English, ‘You got the balls of a Brahma bull.’

‘How did you know I speak t
h
e language?’ Cohen asked.

‘Boston accent.’

‘You got a good ear. Cohen’s the name.’

‘Hatcher,’ the man in khaki said in a flat, no-nonsense voice. It was not unfriendly, it
w
as a voice that said, simply, Don’t mess with me. They shook hands. Hatcher had cold eyes that gave away nothing, and his smile came with an effort. Not a man to stand on the wrong side of, thought Cohen. Hatcher
—
Remember that name.

‘You’re not part of this bunch, surely,’ Cohen said.

‘Naw, just trying to make a buck like yourself.’

‘How do you think I’m doing?’

‘Sam-Sam hasn’t cut your throat yet, that’s a good sign. What’s that you showed him?’

‘Little down payment,’ Cohen
said
and winked.

‘Where’s the rest of your swag?’
H
atcher asked.

‘Downriver a ways,’ Cohen whispered. ‘Ten men and a chest of paper. I don’t like to show
my
hole card until the bets are all in.’

The ugly man had a short
conference
with several of his men, then came over to Cohen.

‘I’m Sam-Sam
Sam,
do wong
of
the
Ts’e K’am Men Ti. You tell me what you want, you tell we how we make deal, okay, you and me do business, nob
o
d
y
else.’

Cohen smiled and winked at Hatcher.

‘Let’s do some dealing,’ he said t
o
the ugly one.

That had been two years befor
e
their meeting in the dismal office on Cat Street. Cohen lad come a long way by then, had become the Tsu Fi, the
m
aster conniver of the island. And in the next few years he and Hatcher became allies, each feeding information
a
nd assistance to the other, ultimately learning to trust eac
h
other as friends.

Hatcher stared across the bay at the sprawling houses almost hidden by trees near t
h
e peak of Victoria Mountain.

Cohen’s lair.

My God,
Hatcher wondered, is
th
e
little guy still alive?

ch’uang tzu-chi

As he sat staring across the bay,
hi
s eyes occasionally drooping with exhaustion, Hatcher
suddenly
began to feel a
vague
sense of malaise. The old
clicks
were at work. Perhaps it was coming back to the E
a
st, the sudden flood of memories invoked by the past. T
h
e Far Easterners had a strong premonitory sense; they
b
elieved not only in reincarnation but in visions. Hatcher bad never bought the concepts, and yet at times in th
e
past his clicks, or instincts or memories or whatever t
h
ey might be called, had warned him of danger.

Now his clicks suddenly began racing overtime.

Sloan was on his way to Hong Ko
n
g. There was more to that than just a friendly visit to chec
k
in with Hatcher.

He had been too tired for it to register before, but now, relaxing half asleep on the balcony
ov
er1ooking the harbor, he had an overwhelming sense that something had gone wrong. What other reason would Sl
o
an have for coming to Hong Kong?

Westerners might call it
memory
introspection, instinct. The Chinese always seemed to have a more poetic way of expressing such things. The Chinese called it
ch’uang tzu-chi,
the window to oneself.

Sloan had always said that to
indulge
in
ch’uang tzu-chi
was suicidal, that memories were
w
eapons that attacked the mind, dulled the senses.
W
ere distractions, misdirections, a deadly indulgence. Sloan was right, but only within the context of his own
r
eality, for without the window there was nothing to draw
on
.

In Los Boxes, all Hatcher had
was
ch’uang
t
zu-chi.
At first Hatcher had found the indulge
nc
e almost impossible, like drinking from an empty cup.
But
with the help of 126 he had reconstructed that part of
th
e past that gave him pleasure. Moments of discovery; taste of new wine, a brush of warm lips, the touch another body, the urgency of orgasm; brief moments when love was a word away and pleasure seemed infinite and he had momentarily escaped the passion of death; moments he could reach out and touch again in the misery of his cell. Eventually they gave him life.

Hatcher now tried to shrug them away, however. He decided to take a quick nap. It would be four hours before Sloan arrived, and in four hours Hatcher could take the edge off his jet lag. He went back into the room, stripped and lay flat on his back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling fan and the whirling shadows above it.

Lying on the floor, waiting for sleep to come rather than trying to induce it, Hatcher was rushed back in time by the slatted shutters that threw striped shadows on the wall, back to Los Boxes, to a time when he had embraced
ch’uang tzu-chi
and, with it, a facsimile of sanity. He had become addicted, and after Los Boxes had fought to free himself of the habit, a kind of cold-turkey repudiation of past and pleasure.

Now as he lay on the floor that window opened again, and there, beyond its ghostly sill, was the image of the first moment he saw Ginia: a soft red dawn spreading over the flat marsh, setting the shimmering water afire for an instant.

His first reaction was physical. She was standing on the marina dock near a sailboat, wearing a pair of brief shorts and a bikini top, and he was stunned by the perfection of her body, so stunned that he stopped loading his boat and stared without realizing it. Then he looked up and saw she was staring back at him with eyes so brown they were almost black.

‘If you take everything off me, I’ll get arrested for indecent exposure,’ she said with a hint of a smile.

Her companion, a flaccid rich boy recovering from a hangover, his character as shaky as his hands, was unfurling the main sheet. He looked up and said, ‘What’d you say?’

‘Not a thing, my dear,’ she purred, and when he turned back to his chore, she stared back at Hatcher. Hatcher walked directly to her side, looked down at her, and shook his head very slowly. ‘Life is j
u
st too damn short,’ Hatcher’s ruined voice whispered.

She was mesmerized by the shattered sound of his voice, and she smiled, then laughed, then nodded. ‘Oh, how true.’

Hatcher pointed to the wobbly youth struggling with his mainsail.

‘Roger,’ she said softly.

Hatcher turned toward him and said as loudly as he could, ‘Roger?’

Roger looked up, steadying himself by grasping the mast.

‘Roger, you’ll be happy to know that you can go home,’ Hatcher said. ‘Go back to bed. The lady’s coming with me.’

‘Who says?’ the shocked Roger demanded weakly. Hatcher looked back at her and she said, ‘I says, Roger.’ What a day that had been. What a dazzling moment when she had loosened the straps and dropped the bra, touched his face with her fingertips, leaned over and kissed his throat, when her breasts had brushed against his bare chest for the first time and he had reached up, running his fingers under her hair at the back of her neck, felt her skin grow erect under his touch and felt the goose flesh rise on his own arms and shoulders, and caressed her as she caressed him until they were both shaking with anticipation. They had postponed it for an eternity, touching, exploring, their lips flirting as they whispered to each other, until his fingers stroked her soul and their trembling became an earthquake and they could no longer push back the moment and she pressed him against her and stroked him into her and their whimpers became cries and time was suspended.

He reached out in the darkness, touched the unsettled air, tried to relive that moment, and he knew he could never, would never, overcome the addiction of
ch’uang tzu-chi.

And now, on the edge of sleep, he realized that it was that window, slightly ajar, that had also created his uneasiness. He
knew
—
knew
—
that
something had gone sour, just as he knew that he could not ignore the friends and enemies of the past. The journey would be harder than he had imagined, he sensed that now. And for whatever dangers lay ahead, in Macao, Bangkok or upriver, the best he could hope for was to close that window for the moment.

He set the alarm clock in his head for 11
A.M.,
folded his hands over his chest, and started counting backward from ten. He was in a deep sleep before he got to four.