Year of the Dragon (29 page)

Still trying to decide on a course of action, Koy ordered his driver to take him to an outdoor marketplace, and they moved through traffic through the town. Traffic amounted to a few buses, some taxis, and many pedicabs and bicycles. Small, busy people in broad straw hats. The buildings were low and flat, with the roofs of Buddhist temples rising above them like blisters on paint.

His decision, whatever it turned out to be, was an important one. Not because he dreaded the brutal trek into the jungle to Khun Sa’s encampment, though he did, but because at stake was the most prized commodity of all in any negotiation between Chinese: face. To go all the way to Khun Sa’s doorstep was to grant him an immeasurable amount of face. It would make him impossible to deal with. His price would rise by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Worse, his attitude would change. He would become superior, contemptuous, and his own attitude toward Koy would be transmitted to his underlings in the form of bad jokes and carelessness, with a consequent risk to the security of Koy’s organization. Attitudes were transmitted from person to person more casually than disease, and faster, and often with more deadly results. Attitudes were far more critical than bullets, which killed one man at a time. Attitudes could wipe out whole armies.

The open market, Koy saw, sold principally food. There were pyramids of fruits on mats on the ground, durians, lichees, mangos, rose apples, mandarin oranges. There were wicker baskets of green vegetables, and chickens and pigeons that hung in squadrons from hooks. Tables held simmering caldrons of boiled rice, of soups, of various steaming curries whose odor cleared Koy’s nasal passages as he strolled by.

Face was as precious to Koy as to any Chinese, and his own, if he went in there, would diminish even as Khun Sa’s rose. It would practically vanish. He bought some lichees and broke them open and munched their sweet flesh, spitting out the seeds, and reviewed what he knew of Khun Sa.

There were in those hills, under that triple-canopy jungle, tigers, elephants, cobras and other wild creatures, and there were at the moment four or five private armies in opposition to Rangoon. All purported to represent noble or semi-noble causes, such as independence for various hill tribes, of which there were six or seven. The major tribe was the Shan, and Khun Sa called his group the Shan United Army even though he and his chief lieutenants were not Shans but Chinese. Formerly an enlisted man in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army, Khun Sa had evidently succeeded the one-eyed general and was now a general himself, self-appointed. He was about fifty, and commanded about ten battalions of about three hundred men each, with which he pretended to be making war on Rangoon so as to free the Shan tribe from the yoke of Burmese oppression. This rallied popular support. Khun Sa’s real business, however, was opium, though he also smuggled gemstones from Burma into Thailand as a sideline. The purpose of his private army was to protect his mule caravans from the other private armies, and also to war on them in order to hold his territory astride the main smuggling route. He was said to conscript his men in the hill villages, assigning them seven-to-twelve-year enlistments. He paid them in kerosene tins of rice, plus thirty bahts a month, and ruled through terror. He executed anyone who crossed him, and he moved a great deal of opium. He once organized a caravan 300 mules long to carry sixteen tons of raw opium down from the poppy-growing region further north to his own refineries near the Thai border - he had about fifteen mobile refineries. But another army attacked the caravan and there was a pitched battle which left more than 200 dead.

Koy in the marketplace had come to a stall selling rough clothing and heavy rubber boots, and abruptly he decided that he wanted to meet this man Khun Sa. There were ways to preserve face whatever the situation. He had never been humiliated in his life and did not intend to be now. He would teach this Khun Sa lout something about face. He bought the clothing and boots he needed, stowed them in the cardboard box in the floorwell of the jeep and got back into his seat.

A few minutes later they were out of town and rolling north along a rutted track, and Koy stopped the jeep, got out and changed to the work clothes he had just bought, repacking his suit in the cardboard box. Then they were in the jungle. The trees closed down on top of them. The bushes sometimes brushed the sides of the jeep. Driving was like punching a fist through a sleeve. The sky could not be seen. It was as if a storm were coming. There were many insects. Koy had just spent most of four bumpy hours in the propeller plane, flying low over mountains, landing four times, he had not slept in a bed in two nights, and as they bounded along he began to feel distinctly unwell.

With the road climbing all the time, they passed through a village belonging to one or another of the hill tribes - Shan or Lisu or Karen or Akkha, Koy did not know which, or care. The village was poor. Thatched huts surrounded by fields slashed out of the jungle. Small lean people in baggy black pants and broad straw hats, sometimes with straw baskets containing produce strapped to their backs. Then more jungle. The track came out at a high lake, and wound around it. Fishermen stood one-legged like storks on long flat barques, spare leg wrapped around an oar or pole, poling themselves along while manipulating their nets with their hands. On the bamboo posts that anchored the nets birds perched, some of them one-legged also. They swooped toward the water, roiled its surface, then rose again, gullets working, swallowing triumphantly.

And still more jungle. It was as if the earth had put on too many clothes - sweaters, vests, overcoats. In crushing heat the jeep pitched and yawed like a boat. To Koy the ride seemed unending. He was holding himself down, gripping the tubular chair frame in both fists. It was impossible to talk to the driver, whose dialect was a corrupt form of Yunnanese; Koy could not even understand how much farther they had to go.

At length the guide stopped the jeep and jumped out. He grabbed the rifle and Koy’s suitcase, and signaled him to follow. The forest lay on a slant. They started up on foot, Koy carrying the cardboard box containing his suit.

This was a teak forest here - the trees were as tall as towers, 150 feet or more above the forest floor, and from them dropped great dangling leaves up to two feet long, leaves big as awnings. Then the teaks ended, the trees became shorter, the undergrowth thick and knotted, and they were forced into a dry streambed, the only trail through it. Koy had long since soaked through his work clothes. He was dripping with sweat. This stream would be a torrent once the monsoons came, and as he stumbled upwards, he realized that the rains were due any day. The stream would be impassable. Khun Sa’s headquarters would be unreachable, unless there was another way in.

There probably was, thought the sweating Koy. The one-eyed general he had dealt with last time had been a reasonably cultured man and a graduate of the same military college as Chiang Kai-shek. But this Khun Sa would be a lout, you could count on it, and he began brooding about him. What else but lout could he be, holed up in these hills now for over thirty years? A king with a mini-kingdom, but a lout in all other respects. Face would be everything to him, as it was to Koy, the Chinese curse. To a Chinese, face was everything. His face was his fortune. It was face that made business success possible. It was only face that made the rest of life possible. In a New York office Khun Sa would keep his visitor waiting two hours for no other reason than to gain face at his expense. He was doing the equivalent to Koy now. The worst of it was that Koy would stumble out of the jungle bedraggled, exhausted; and Khun Sa, being fed, rested, and freshly bathed would stroll forward to meet him, smiling warmly no doubt, and to his assembled subjects the man would gain face until he assumed godlike proportions, and the visitor, Koy, would seem no more important than one of the hill peasants who grew the opium. If this face carried over into the negotiations that followed, and of course it would, this would be a disaster for Koy.

The streambed was full of boulders that had to be skirted, and loose round stones that skittered away under foot. It was like walking on billiard balls. Koy, climbing grimly, was as resolved as ever that this loss of face must not happen, though he could not imagine at the moment how to prevent it.

About thirty minutes later the guide pointed ahead. A building was visible through the trees. They were almost to the encampment, and the stupefied Koy, now that he listened, became aware of voices.

Employing parts of various Chinese dialects, he ordered the guide to go forward alone and to announce the imminent arrival of the Cho Kun, Mr. Koy.

Sitting down upon a rock, he waited until he had caught his breath and had stopped sweating, then changed back into his tan silk suit, into his reasonably clean shirt and Dior tie. He combed his hair. Leaving his hiking clothes and boots behind, he stepped forward into the encampment.

A clearing under teak trees. Some sunlight came through but not much - the clearing would not be visible to the American-supplied, Thai government helicopters that patrolled these hills, usually with American drug agents aboard. Eight or ten buildings. Bamboo walls, thatched roofs. A corral full of mules, and another of elephants. A shed under which stood two jeeps and a truck - as to whether an alternative route led in here, the answer, obviously, was yes. The most imposing of the buildings had a veranda all the way around, on which waited five men. The driver stood in his thong sandals in the dirt talking up at them, at one of them in particular, who must be Khun Sa.

There was a post - an execution stake from the look of it - driven into the forest floor in the center of the clearing exactly where, in a cultured place, a flagpole might stand. Koy crossed in front of it and approached the veranda, approached Khun Sa, eyes never leaving him, as if approaching something beautiful, or something dangerous. A short stocky man. Close-cropped, graying hair. Worn army fatigues and a red beret with a military crest. Broad, flat, Mongol face. Broad, flat, mirthless smile. Began an immediate speech of welcome in Yunnanese. Strong peasant accent. Koy would have understood an educated man, for the Yunnan dialect was close to Mandarin, but Khun Sa’s accent was so thick as to be unintelligible. Could he speak no better? Was he doing it on purpose? If so, for what reason? Face again? He had looked astonished to see the New York fashion plate, Koy, step out of the jungle. His jaw had dropped. Surprise, both men knew, automatically conferred face on the man who caused it. Meaning Koy had regained a certain amount of lost ground, which almost made him smile. Almost. It was too early to say how much ground, and matters of face were too serious for smiles of any kind.

He was invited onto the veranda and there introduced to the other men, all Chinese, Khun Sa’s lieutenants. One was chief of staff; he went by the Shan name of Phalang, which meant thunder. Koy had heard of him. He was reported to be Khun Sa’s enforcer and executioner, a man hated and feared by the troops. A second man controlled the roving refineries, a third had charge of the business side of the operation - Koy understood him to be Khun Sa’s nephew, and he was said to have excellent connections with corrupt Thai officials. The fourth man was Khun Sa’s link to the peasant farmers in the inhospitable hills further north - his source of supply. Up there thirty or forty villages grew nothing but opium. It had been a traditional cash crop for hundreds of years, though never before on a scale as large as now. Not that the farmers ever earned much from it. Khun Sa’s men drove hard bargains. In fact, they would not bargain at all. They bought raw opium for the equivalent of 2,000 bahts a kilo, take it or leave it. If a farmer said no, they burned his fields.

Khun Sa clapped his hands and servant women appeared with tea and rice cakes. The six men sat at a table on the veranda, and the other five, excluding Koy from their conversation, talked and joked in their peasant Yunnanese. It was as if Koy were not there. They were like teenagers reminding an outsider of his status. They were like adults spelling out words so that any child or mental defective who also happened to be present would not understand.

To allow this conversation to continue without him was to lose still more face, Koy saw. Speaking a mixture of pidgin Mandarin and pidgin Cantonese, he interrupted. He began to brag about his relationship with the late one-eyed general years ago, when these five men were younger and of less exalted rank. It was a way of suggesting that Koy had dealt with generals at a time when these others were still assigned to load the mules, and it was, he saw, so perceived. The late general had been a great man and a close friend, Koy said, and his memory was no doubt greatly revered here. Khun Sa jumped up and gestured impatiently with his chin. Koy followed him down the dirt street to a shack made out of wattles and straw. The others had trailed along. All six entered the shack. Inside in the dark sat the one-eyed old man. All his teeth were gone and he was grinning at nothing.

Khun Sa said, “We feed him heroin in his soup. It keeps him happy. He feels no pain.” Khun Sa’s accent, Koy noted, had suddenly improved.

So much for Koy’s privileged relationship with the “greatly revered” general. He had again lost much face.

As they stepped out into the daylight, Koy said with pretended piety, “Being so old, he is of course very close to the gods.”

Khun Sa said nothing.

“The Chinese revere the old for that reason,” said Koy.

“This way,” said Khun Sa.

They entered a warehouse made of stout logs, with armed guards out front. Cases of transistor radios, steam irons and other appliances - all destined for the Rangoon black market - were stacked to the roof tree. Khun Sa lifted two five-liter kerosene tins onto a table. They were filled to the brim with raw gemstones, rubies in one, emeralds in the other. Khun Sa, as gleeful as a child, lifted handfuls above the cans and let them sift through his fingers like loose rice. The gemstones, Koy knew, having been mined in Burma, were bound the other way, to the black market in Thailand.