The Windup Girl(36)

"We couldn't save even one thing." Jaidee lets his fingers slide along the grooves where the ivory beetle did its work. "The farang have so much to answer for, and yet still Akkarat seeks to treat with them."

"Not with AgriGen."

Jaidee smiles bitterly and pulls his hand away from the fallen tree. "No, not with them. But their ilk, nonetheless. Generippers. Calorie men. Even PurCal when the famines are worst. Why else to do we let them squat out on Koh Angrit? In case we need them. In case we fail, and must go begging for their rice and wheat and soy."

"We have our own generippers, now."

"Thanks to His Royal Majesty King Rama XII's foresight."

"And Chaopraya Gi Bu Sen."

"Chaopraya." Jaidee makes a face. "No one that evil should be graced with such a respectful title."

Kanya shrugs, but doesn't bait him. Soon the bo tree is behind them. At Srinakharin Bridge they disembark. The smell of food stalls calls to Jaidee. He motions Kanya to follow as he makes his way into a tiny soi. "Somchai says there's a good som tam cart down here. Good clean papayas, he tells me."

"I'm not hungry," Kanya says.

"That's why you're always in such a terrible mood."

"Jaidee…" Kanya starts, then stops.

Jaidee glances back at her, catches the worried expression on her face. "What is it? Come on then."

"I'm worried about the anchor pads."

Jaidee shrugs. "Don't be."

Up ahead, food carts and tables cluster along the walls of the alley, all jammed together. Small bowls of nam plaa prik sit tidily in the centers of the scavenged table planks. "You see? Somchai was right." He finds the salad cart he wants and examines the spices and fruit, starts ordering for both of them. Kanya comes up beside, a compact cloud of dark mood.

"Two hundred thousand baht is a lot of money for Akkarat to lose," she mutters as Jaidee tells the som tam vendor to add more chiles.

Jaidee nods thoughtfully as the woman stirs the threads of green papaya into the mix of spices. "It's true. I had no idea there was so much money being made out there."

It's enough to finance a new lab for generip research, or put five hundred white shirts on inspection in the tilapia farms of Thonburi… He shakes his head. And this was just one raid. It's amazing to him.

There are times when he thinks he understands how the world works, and then, every so often, he lifts the lid of some new part of the divine city and finds roaches scuttling where he never expected. Something new, indeed.

He goes to the next food cart, stacked with trays of chile-laden pork and RedStar bamboo tips. Fried snakehead plaa, battered and crisp, pulled from the Chao Phraya River that day. He orders more food. Enough for both of them, and Sato for drinking. He settles at an open table as the food is brought out.

Teetering on a bamboo stool at the end of his day, with rice beer warming his belly, Jaidee can't help smiling at his dour subordinate.

As usual, even with good food before her, Kanya remains herself. "Khun Bhirombhakdi was complaining about you at headquarters," she says. "He said he would go to General Pracha, and have your smiling lips ripped off."

Jaidee scoops chiles into his mouth. "I'm not afraid of him."

"The anchor pads were supposed to be his territory. His protection racket, his bribe money."

"First you worry about Trade, now you worry about Bhirombhakdi. That old man is afraid of his own shadow. He makes his wife taste every dish for him to make sure he won't get blister rust." He shakes his head. "Stop being so sour. You should smile more. Laugh a little. Here, drink this." Jaidee pours more Sato for his lieutenant. "We used to call our country the Land of Smiles." Jaidee demonstrates. "And there you sit, sad-faced, as though you are eating limes all day."

"Perhaps we had more to smile about, then."

"Well, that might be true." Jaidee sets his Sato back on the splintered tabletop and stares at it thoughtfully. "We must have done something terrible in our previous lives to have earned these ones. It's the only thing I can think of that explains it all."

Kanya sighs. "I sometimes see my grandmother's spirit, wandering around the chedi near my house. She told me one time that she couldn't reincarnate until we made a better place for her to arrive."

"Another of the Contraction phii? How did she find you? Wasn't she Isaan people, too?"

"She found me anyway." Kanya shrugs. "She is very unhappy with me."

"Yes, well, I suppose we'll be unhappy, too."

Jaidee has seen these ghosts as well, walking the boulevards sometimes, sitting in the trees. Phii are everywhere, now. Too many to count. He has seen them in the graveyards and leaning against the bones of riddled bo trees, all of them looking at him with some irritation.

Mediums all speak of how crazy with frustration the phii are, how they cannot reincarnate and thus linger, like a great mass of people at Hualamphong Station hoping for a train ride down to the beaches. All of them waiting for a reincarnation that they cannot have because none of them deserve the suffering of this particular world.

Monks like Ajahn Suthep say this is nonsense. He sells amulets to ward off these phii and says that they are nothing but hungry ghosts, created by the unnatural death of eating from blister rust-tainted vegetables. Anyone can go to his shrine and make a donation, or else go to the Erawan shrine and make an offering to Brahma-perhaps have the temple dancers perform for a little while-and buy a hope that the spirits may be put to rest to travel on to their next incarnation. It is possible to hope for such things.