The Windup Girl(55)

Jaidee returns his attention to Pracha. Whisper sheets lie scattered on the desk, rustling under the breeze of the crank fan: Thai Rath. Kom Chad Luek. Phuchatkan Rai Wan. Many of them with photos of Jaidee on the cover. "The newspapers don't think so."

Pracha scowls. He shoves the papers into a bin for composting. "The papers love a hero. It sells copies. Don't believe these people who call you a tiger for fighting the farang. The farang are the key to our future."

Jaidee nods at the portrait of his mentor Chaiyanuchit hanging below the Queen's image. "I am not certain that he would agree."

"Times change, old friend. People are hunting for your head."

"And you'll give it to them?"

Pracha sighs. "Jaidee, I've known you too long for this. I know you're a fighter. And I know you have a hot heart." He holds up a hand as Jaidee stirs to protest. "Yes, a good heart, also, just like your name, but still, jai rawn. Not a bit of jai yen in you. You relish the conflict." He purses his lips. "So I know that if I rein you in, you will fight. And if I punish you, you will fight."

"Then let me go about my business. The Ministry benefits from a loose cannon like me."

"People were offended by your action. And not just stupid farang. Not everyone who ships air cargo is farang, these days. Our interests reach far and wide. Thai interests."

Jaidee studies the general's desk. "I wasn't aware that the Environment Ministry only inspected cargo at others' convenience."

"I am trying to reason with you. My hands are full with tigers: blister rust, weevil, the coal war, Trade Ministry infiltrators, yellow cards, greenhouse quotas, fa' gan outbreaks… And yet you choose to add another."

Jaidee looks up. "Who is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Who is so angry that you're pissing your pants this way? Coming to ask me not to fight? It's Trade, yes? Someone in the Trade Ministry has you by the balls."

Pracha doesn't say anything for a moment. "I don't know who it is. Better that you don't know, either. What you do not know, you cannot fight." He slides a card across the desk. "This arrived today, under my door." His eyes lock on Jaidee so that Jaidee cannot look away. "Right here in the office. Inside the compound, you understand? We are completely infiltrated."

Jaidee turns over the card.

* * *

Niwat and Surat are good boys. Four and Six. Young men. Fighters already. Niwat once came home with a bloody nose and bright eyes and told Jaidee that he had fought honorably and been horribly beaten, but that he was going to train and he would take the heeya next time.

Chaya despairs over this. She accuses Jaidee of filling their heads with impossible ideas. Surat follows Niwat and encourages him, tells Niwat he can't be beat. Tells him he is a tiger. The best of the best. That he will reign in Krung Thep, and bring honor to them all. Surat calls himself trainer and tells Niwat to hit harder next time. Niwat is not afraid of beatings. He is not afraid of anything. He is four.

It is at times like these that Jaidee's heart breaks. Only once when he was in the muay thai ring was he afraid. But many times when he has worked, he has been terrified. Fear is part of him. Fear is part of the Ministry. What else but fear could close borders, burn towns, slaughter fifty thousand chickens and inter them wholesale under clean dirt and a thick powdering of lye? When the Thonburi virus hit, he and his men wore little rice paper masks that were no protection and they shoveled avian corpses into mass graves, while their fears swirled around them like phii. Could the virus really have come so far in such little time? Would it spread further? Would it continue to accelerate? Was this the virus that would finally finish them? He and his men were quarantined for thirty days while they waited to die, and fear was their only companion. Jaidee works for a ministry that cannot hold against all the threats it faces; he is afraid all the time.

It is not fighting that he fears; it is not death; it is the waiting and uncertainty, and it breaks Jaidee's heart that Niwat knows nothing of the waiting terrors, and that the waiting terrors are all around them now. So many things can only be fought by waiting. Jaidee is a man of action. He fought in the ring. He wore his Seub luck amulets blessed by Ajahn Nopadon himself in the White Temple, and went forth. He carried only his black baton and quelled the nam riots of Katchanaburi single-handed by striding into the crowd.

And yet the only battles that matter are the waiting battles: when his father and mother succumbed to cibiscosis and coughed the meat of their lungs out between their teeth; when his sister and Chaya's sister both saw their hands thicken and crack with the cauliflower growths of fa' gan before the ministry stole the genetic map from the Chinese and manufactured a partial cure. They prayed every day to Buddha and practiced non-attachment and hoped that their two sisters would find a better rebirth than this one that turned their fingers to clubs and chewed away at their joints. They prayed. And waited.

It breaks Jaidee's heart that Niwat knows no fear, and that Surat trains him so. It breaks his heart that he cannot make himself intervene, and he curses himself for it. Why must he destroy childhood illusions of invincibility? Why him? He resents this role.

Instead, he lets his children tackle him and roars, "Ahh, you are a tiger's sons! Too fierce! Too fierce by half!" And they are pleased and laugh and tackle him again, and he lets them win, and shows them tricks that he has learned since the ring, the tricks a fighter in the streets must know, where no combat is ritualized and where even a champion has things to learn. He teaches them how to fight, because it is all he knows. And the other thing-the waiting thing-is something he could never prepare them for, anyway.