The Windup Girl(97)

The fish vendor shakes his head. "No one's going either way. They've caught two different groups of passengers trying to make their way ashore from the ships, too. The white shirts won't even allow a resupply boat to go out. We're betting on whether the captain will weigh anchor or the white shirts will open up first."

"What are the odds?" Hock Seng asks.

"I'll give you eleven to one that the clipper leaves first."

Hock Seng makes a face. "I don't think I'll risk it."

"Twenty to one, then."

A few others seem to have been listening to the exchange. They laugh quietly. "Don't bet unless he gives you fifty to one," one of them says. "The white shirts aren't going to bend. Not this time. Not with the Tiger dead."

Hock Seng makes himself laugh with them. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it, offers more to the people around him. A small gift of good will for these Thais, for this moment of shared brotherhood. If he were not a yellow card with a yellow card accent, he might even try a gift of goodwill for the white shirts, but on a night like tonight it will earn him nothing but a baton on the skull. He has no interest in seeing his head splintered against paving stones. He smokes and studies the blockade.

Time is passing.

The idea of a sealed city makes his hands shake. This isn't about yellow cards, he tells himself. We are not the reason for this. But he has a hard time believing a noose isn't tightening. It might be about Trade right now, but there are too many yellow cards in the city and if trade is cut off for long, even these friendly people will begin to notice the lack of work, and then they will drink, and then they will think of the yellow cards in the towers.

The Tiger is dead. His face is on every gaslight pole. Pasted to every building. Three images of Jaidee in a fighting pose stare out from a warehouse wall even now. Hock Seng smokes his cigarette and scowls at that face. The hero of the people. The man who could not be bought, who faced down ministers and farang companies and petty businessmen. The man who was willing to fight even his own ministry. Sent to a desk job when he became too troublesome, and then put back on the street when he became even more so. The man who laughed at death threats, and survived three assassinations before the fourth felled him.

Hock Seng grimaces. The number four is everywhere in his mind these days. The Tiger of Bangkok only got four chances. How many has he himself used up? Hock Seng studies the docks and the clustered people, all unable to make their ships. With the sharpened senses of a refugee, he smells hazard in the wind, sharper than the sea air that sweeps across a clipper and presages typhoon.

The Tiger is dead. Captain Jaidee's painted eyes stare out at Hock Seng, and Hock Seng has the sudden, horrified feeling that the Tiger is not dead. That in fact, he is hunting.

Hock Seng shies away from the poster as if it is a blister-rusted durian. He knows in his bones, knows as surely as his clan is all dead and buried in Malaya, that it's time to run. Time to hide from tigers that hunt though the night. Time to plunge into leech-infested jungles and eat cockroaches and slither through the mud of the rainy season as it gushes in torrents. It doesn't matter where he goes. All that matters is that it's time to flee. Hock Seng stares out at the anchored clipper ship. Time to make hard decisions. Time, in truth, to give up on the SpringLife factory and its blueprints. Delays will only make it worse. Money must be spent. Survival secured.

This raft is sinking.

27

Carlyle is already waiting anxiously in the rickshaw when Anderson comes out of his building. The man's eyes flick from right to left, cataloguing the darkness around him in a nervous rotation. The man has the trembling cautiousness of a rabbit.

"You look jumpy," Anderson notes as he climbs in.

Carlyle grimaces. "The white shirts just took the Victory. Confiscated everything."

Anderson glances up at his own apartment, glad that poor old Yates chose to locate far from the rest of the farang. "You lose much?"

"Cash in the safe. Some customer lists that I was keeping away from our offices." Carlyle calls forward to the rickshaw driver, giving directions in Thai. "You'd better have something to offer these people."

"Akkarat knows what I'm offering."

They begin rolling through the humid night. Cheshires scatter. Carlyle glances behind them, scanning for followers. "No one's officially going after farang, but you know we're next on the list. I'm not sure how much longer we'll be able to keep a toehold in the country."

"Look on the bright side. If they go after farang, Akkarat won't be far behind."

They spin across the darkened city. Ahead of them, a checkpoint materializes. Carlyle mops his forehead. He's sweating like a pig. The white shirts hail their rickshaw and they slow.

Anderson feels a prickle of tension. "You're sure this will work?"

Carlyle wipes his brow again. "We'll know soon enough." The rickshaw coasts to a stop and the white shirts surround them. Carlyle speaks rapidly. Hands across a piece of paper. The white shirts confer for a moment, and then they're giving obsequious wais and motioning the farang forward.

"I'll be damned."

Carlyle laughs, relief obvious in his voice. "The right stamps on a piece of paper do wonders."

"I'm amazed that Akkarat still has any influence."