World of Trouble (9786167611136) (13 page)

“Could I ask that you shred these for me?”
Shepherd said. “They are only copies of the original documents and
I would prefer that they be destroyed now that they are no longer
needed.”

Tanit nodded and accepted the envelope. He
smiled. Shepherd smiled. They were getting along just famously.
Shepherd figured the grand climax of their little duet was drawing
near, and just then it arrived.

“Have you completed the other formalities
necessary for me to execute the remittance?” Tanit asked, his eyes
sliding away from Shepherd.

“What other formalities are you referring
to?”

“Because of the amount involved, you must
obtain a certificate of approval from the Bank of Thailand to send
the funds out of the country.”

“I assumed you would obtain that for us.”

“I cannot.”

Tanit still wasn’t making eye contact and
Shepherd just sat and waited for what he knew was coming.

“I can suggest someone at the Bank of
Thailand who might assist you,” Tanit said after a moment.

“I would appreciate that.”

“Her name is Khun Sumalee Suchinda. She is
one of the deputy governors.”

“Can you suggest how I could best approach
her?”

“Khun Sumalee has two daughters in school in
England,” Tanit said.

To most people, Tanit’s response would have
seemed like a non sequitur, but after living in Thailand for two
years Shepherd had no doubt at all what it meant.

“Do you know the amount of their school
fees?” he asked.

Tanit tilted his head back and studied a spot
on the ceiling.

“I would say about thirty million Thai baht
would cover them,” he mumbled after a few moments of suitable
contemplation.

Shepherd did the math in his head. Thirty
million Thai baht was about one million United States dollars. He
briefly considered reminding Woody Allen that it wasn’t necessary
to buy the school in England in order for the deputy governor’s
daughters to attend it, but decided not to bother. Besides, what
did he care? It was Charlie’s money and he was just following his
instructions. Anyway, Charlie thought it might cost him as much as
two million dollars to get his money out of Thailand and here he
was getting it done for the bargain price of one million. He was a
heck of a negotiator, wasn’t he? Just imagine how much money he
might have saved Charlie if he had actually said something.

Tanit slid a piece of paper across his desk.
“Here are the names of Khun Sumalee’s daughters, their London
banks, and their account numbers.”

Shepherd picked up the paper and glanced at
it. There was nothing on it but two names that naturally meant
nothing to him, each accompanied by an account number at the
National Westminster Bank. He wondered how much of the million
dollars would eventually be kicked back to Tanit for negotiating
the deal. Thailand was indeed an amazing place. You paid bribes to
facilitate the payment of bribes.

“There is one other thing I would like to ask
then, Khun Tanit,” Shepherd said.

“Yes?”

“Could you arrange two more wire transfers
for me?” Shepherd slid the same piece of paper he had just been
given back across his desk. “Five hundred thousand US dollars to
each of these two accounts at NatWest, please.”

Tanit nodded gravely. He carefully
transcribed the bank account information he had just given Shepherd
onto two forms that had conveniently appeared on his desktop. When
he was done, Shepherd signed them as well.

Only one step of the process remained. The
final movement in a Thai art form that was as precise as a Bach
cantata.

“In order to complete the transfer of my
client’s funds, I understand that a certificate of approval from
the Bank of Thailand will be required,” Shepherd said, playing his
part to the hilt.

“That is true.”

“Would it be possible for you to obtain it
for us, Khun Tanit?”

“Of course,” Tanit said. “It would be my
pleasure entirely.”

Shepherd thought it probably would be.

WHEN SHEPHERD LEFT the Bangkok Bank building, he
walked out onto Silom Road and straight into the biggest crowd he
had ever seen on the streets of Bangkok.

Shepherd knew the sidewalks in that part of
town were always a mess. Gangs of street vendors selling everything
from pirated DVDs to fried grasshoppers took up most of the
available space. Since they paid off the police to let them do
business there, the vendors acted as if they owned the sidewalks,
which in a way he supposed they did. The locals who had their
offices around there and the mobs of tourists drawn to the
neighborhood by the cheap goods were left to compete for whatever
tiny bit of public space the cops hadn’t rented out.

Still, it seemed to Shepherd that things were
even more of a shambles than usual and he wondered what was going
on. He slipped behind a metal cart from which an elderly woman was
hawking Chinese-made Rolexes and Cambodian-made Patek Phillipes and
took a couple of steps out into Silom Road.

About two hundred yards away on his left, a
band of marchers was trooping slowly toward the spot where he was
standing. There were a lot of them. They completely blocked the
roadway from one side to the other and Shepherd couldn’t even begin
to guess how far back they stretched. The marchers were led by a
pickup truck with a huge loudspeaker on top through which somebody
was shouting unintelligible slogans. The demonstration didn’t seem
very threatening. It was more or less like the one he had stood and
watched with Liz Corbin earlier in the day. The only differences he
could see was that this march was going in the opposite direction,
and the people in it were wearing yellow shirts instead of red
ones.

Then Shepherd looked the other way and all at
once he saw the real problem.

A couple of hundred yards to his right, an
even larger band of red shirts had taken up a position completely
blocking the roadway on which the yellow shirts were marching.
Perhaps it was the same group of red shirts he had seen earlier.
Perhaps it was a different group altogether. But either way, the
yellow shirts were heading directly for them.

It seemed inconceivable to Shepherd that a
street battle would take place right there in the middle of the
financial district. Thais famously avoided face-to-face
confrontations and nothing like that had happened yet in spite of
the political turmoil that had gripped Bangkok for months. It
wasn’t that Thais were shy about attacking their enemies, it was
just the face-to-face part they didn’t get. The locals had never
been able to understand the Western obsession for duking it out
toe-to-toe with your adversaries. To Thais, it seemed silly to
square off against anyone. That was why Thais generally nursed
their anger, waited patiently until their enemy’s back was turned,
and then brought everything they had.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Shepherd glanced at the two women standing
next to him. They were what in less politically correct times
people might have called hippie chicks. Long greasy hair, shapeless
grey clothing, open-toed leather sandals, and huge, top-heavy
backpacks. Shepherd wondered what the proper term was these days
for people like that.

“Do you speak English?” the taller of the two
girls asked him.

“If I have to,” Shepherd said.

The woman looked puzzled. “So… then you
do
speak English?”

This time Shepherd just nodded.

“Can you tell us what’s going on here?” the
other girl asked, pointing toward the yellow shirts matching toward
them.

Shepherd thought of telling the two women the
real truth, which was that nobody ever really understood what was
going on in Thailand, but in his experience irony seldom played in
conversations with strangers. Instead he settled for giving the
girl the simplest answer he could think of.

“A political demonstration,” he said.

“You mean like against global warming?” the
tall girl asked.

“No,” Shepherd said, “like against each
other.”

The yellow shirts were now within fifty yards
of them. The old green pickup truck leading them was dusty and
dented and, as it rolled slowly down Silom Road, the Thai national
anthem began to blare out of the metal bullhorn mounted on top of
the cab. Behind the bullhorn there were at least a dozen men
standing in the bed of the pickup, one of whom had his arms
uplifted and was exhorting the yellow-shirted ranks behind the
truck.

Some of the marchers carried large Thai flags
on tall poles and others waved homemade posters written in Thai.
Most of the rest of the marchers Shepherd could see had the palms
of their hands pressed together in front of them in a graceful
gesture of humility and respect that Thais called a
wai
. The
flags flapped in unison and the posters bobbed in time with the
music. The whole effect was anything but threatening. It was more
like the cheering squad from a poorly funded local college taking
the field for halftime at a football game.

The two women just stood patiently and waited
for Shepherd to go on. He doubted any good would come of it, but he
continued anyway.

“The yellow shirts support the present
government,” he told the two women. “They include a lot of people
of Thai-Chinese background who see the government’s embrace of
China as the best course for Thailand.”

Then he pointed in the opposite direction
toward where the red shirts had now begun moving as well.

“The red shirts support General Kitnarok, who
has always had the support of the United States and Europe,”
Shepherd continued. “He was defeated in the last election and left
the country when the new government charged him with corruption and
tried send him to prison. The red shirts say the election was
stolen by pro-China Thais and that General Kitnarok is the victim
of a political persecution. They’re demanding that the government
resign so the general can return and form a new government.”

“Was this general really corrupt?” one of the
girls asked.

“Almost everyone in government is corrupt to
some degree. Government in Thailand is a just another business you
go into to make some money.”

“But then what happens to the people?”

A good question, Shepherd thought to himself.
A
damned
good question actually. He didn’t even try to
answer the girl. He just shrugged.

The reds shirts had their pickup trucks, too.
Two of them were now cruising slowly side-by-side, leading their
marchers. Not surprisingly, both of the trucks were red, but other
than that they were pretty much like the truck leading the yellows:
old and dented and with loud speakers mounted on top of their cabs.
Men stood in the beds of both trucks and waved their followers
forward while martial music blared out of the loudspeakers at an
ear-splitting volume.

Many of the red shirts, at least the ones
Shepherd could see in the front ranks just behind the pickup
trucks, were wearing long strips of white cloth tied around their
heads like the headbands worn by Indian extras in old
cowboy-and-Indian movies. There was something written in red on the
headbands, but it was in Thai characters and Shepherd couldn’t read
Thai characters. Still, he very much doubted the headbands said
Have a Nice Day
.

Some of the marchers carried flags and
Thai-language signs like the yellow shirts did, but the reds also
had huge posters with smiling images of General Kitnarok and even a
giant banner that stretched from one side of the road to the other.
It said, in English no less,
The People Will Bring Back
Democracy!
Apparently the red shirts were more concerned about
their appeal to the international media than the yellows were, or
at least they had the money to hire Western political
consultants.

“Is there going to be a riot?” one of the
women asked.

“No,” Shepherd said. “Thais don’t riot.”

“Cool,” she nodded.

The yellows were now no more than thirty
yards to their left and the reds were a little less than thirty
yards to their right. The racket from the competing loudspeakers
had melded into a single formless din and the sound of the
contending groups of marchers became nothing more than an
incoherent, angry-sounding rumbling. The two groups were moving
slowly but steadily toward each other.

Shepherd saw that he and the two girls were
standing very near to the point at which the reds and the yellows
would most likely converge. He glanced around for the police and
was anything but surprised not to see the slightest sign of them.
All the local cops would no doubt be at the station, probably
knocking back a few cold drinks and pretending that nothing at all
was going on. There was simply no money to be made out of getting
between two angry mobs.

In another two or three minutes the pickup
trucks would be bumper to bumper. Shepherd could not imagine what
would happen when that occurred, but he was still certain it could
not possibly be what one might expect to happen under similar
circumstances in almost any other country anywhere in the
world.

He was wrong.

Later, when Shepherd thought of the moment in
which the reds and the yellows came together, it would be the sound
of the screams he remembered most clearly.

EVERYWHERE SHEPHERD LOOKED, reds and yellows were
flailing at each other with crude weapons. And, as more and more
people joined in, the carnage grew.

Along the roadside, vendors carts had been
pushed onto their sides and shoved together into makeshift
barricades. What a few moments before had been merchandise for
tourists—T-shirts, copy watches, pirated CDs, and fake Louie
Vuitton bags—was now just debris under the feet of the
battlers.