I have to tell you about the Yunan trip, DFR; it goes like this.
Colonel Vikorn was away on business with Sergeant Ruamsantiah. Only the inner circle, which is to say me, knew where they had gone: Yunnan, in southwestern China. He had never been there before, and my present guess is that he will never go there again. On the face of it, though, the intention had been a relatively normal meeting between high-end narcotics traffickers. It seems a Burmese general closely associated with, but not a member of, the ruling elite had perfected the black art of producing morphine from poppy and, when required, heroin from morphine. Vikorn was interested for two reasons, the first being that he could never obtain enough smack to match demand, the second that he had been trying for years to break into the Burmese wholesale market as a strategy for doing in his main business rival in Thailand, General Zinna, who had been pals with the psychopathic rulers of Myanmar for decades and derived most of his crystal meth supplies from there. Due diligence had revealed that General U-Tat was something of a rebel within the Burmese military but was too well entrenched in the Shan Mountains for them to do much about it. Clearly, this was a man to cultivate with a long-term view of using him to squeeze Zinna. Vikorn and Ruamsantiah set off together for Lijiang, leaving Manny and me at headquarters.
General U-Tat was not at the airport to meet them; instead they found one General Xie, of the People’s Liberation Army. General Xie gave them to understand that his dear friend General U-Tat was dealing with a minor insurrection among the Shan tribes, which he was putting down with such speed and brutality, he would be able to join the party in not less than two days. In the meantime General Xie let it be known that he knew why Vikorn and Ruamsantiah had come to Yunnan, that he was himself a major shareholder in General U-Tat’s enterprise and might even be the senior partner. As the days passed, the dinners grew longer, and the entertainment more lavish; opportunities to indulge in all the major vices were offered and, in the case of Ruamsantiah, accepted.
Then Xie announced that General U-Tat had successfully put down the rebellion but had sustained a minor yet debilitating injury to his left knee that made it difficult for him to travel. He would certainly not trouble Vikorn and Ruamsantiah to come into Burma, but would they mind meeting him halfway-at the village of Ruili, near the Yunnan-Burmese border? This would not be a sinister-looking jungle trek-there were modern roads and full communications all the way to Ruili, and for full security General Xie himself would escort them. The general had held a full inspection of the local garrison the day before and invited Vikorn and Ruamsantiah as guests of honor; they duly admired the general in full-dress uniform. Not that they trusted Xie any further than they could throw him, and not that General Xie thought he could induce them to trust him. It was more a case of the general showing how wealthy and powerful he was, and how well known, so he would hardly pull a fast one on them. For what? They were merely two Thai cops and had no money on them to speak of. What good could come from molesting them?
So when their car and escort were stopped just outside Ruili by masked men who held themselves very much like soldiers and seemed armed with standard-issue military weapons all of the same Chinese type and make, Vikorn and Ruamsantiah couldn’t believe that they’d violated the first rule of sophisticated professionals: never underestimate the other guy’s possible amateurism. They were kicking themselves.
“Suppose the general has been recording our conversations for entrapment purposes?” Ruamsantiah whispered to Vikorn while they were being professionally frisked by one of the masked gunmen.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that our conversations together over the past several days have been recorded. After taking legal advice, I have reached the conclusion that I have no choice but to report you to the authorities for conspiring to transport prohibited narcotics across Chinese territory, a criminal offense with a mandatory death penalty,” General Xie explained twenty minutes later, when they were in a military-style cabin in an army camp less than a mile from the Burmese border.
“How much?” Vikorn said.
“Two million dollars,” Xie said.
“Okay,” Vikorn said, concealing a smirk of contempt. In the general’s position, he would have started at twenty million and stood firm at ten. Two million? It wasn’t worth bargaining about.
“In cash,” Xie said.
“Ah!” Vikorn said.
“Used notes,” Xie said.
Now Vikorn reassessed Xie. He had thought he was dealing with a brain-dead thug, of a model not dissimilar to Zinna. Now he switched models. This was classic Chinese small-and-medium-enterprises thinking: modest returns with quick turnarounds and near-zero risk; used banknotes were the caviar of money laundering. Smart operators would give as much as a 60 percent discount for used notes.
“How often have you done this?” Vikorn asked.
“Not telling you,” Xie said.
“More or less than ten?”
“More.”
“More or less than a hundred?”
Xie could not resist a smirk.
“More or less than-”
“Can you get the money by tomorrow? The price goes up ten percent per day thereafter.”
Vikorn thought about it. “You really need it for tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Xie said, “I really need it for tomorrow.”
Xie didn’t know it, but Vikorn was giving him a chance to be reasonable. “Really really?”
“Yes, really really really. What’s wrong with you?”
“And if we don’t get it, you’re going to have us executed for narcotics trafficking?”
“Sure.”
“So we don’t have any choice?”
“Right.”
“Just tell me one thing. Are you really connected to a Burmese general named U-Tat?”
“He would corroborate if I needed him to,” Xie said. “Or I’d send some men to talk to him. He does what I want.”
“Okay,” Vikorn said, “I can get it for you by tomorrow night. Before midnight, anyway. But I have to make phone calls.”
“Only one,” Xie said.
“Okay,” Vikorn said with a sigh.
Which was when he called me.
“Hey, Sonchai, we’ve been kidnapped. It’s okay, they only want two million dollars, but it has to be in used notes. I want you to get the money from the bank and bring it. You have to come alone, unarmed.
Got it?”
I knew what to do. Once, a long time before, he had called me into his office and said, “If you ever get a call from me to say I’ve been kidnapped and held for ransom and I use the words You have to come alone, unarmed. Got it? you go to my bank-you know the one I mean? — and you tell them you want to speak to Mr. To on behalf of Colonel Vikorn.”
The bank in question was a mid-ranking Chinese merchant bank based in Hong Kong with an outlet in Chinatown, not far from the Chao Phraya River. I took a motorbike taxi and arrived within thirty minutes of putting the phone down on Vikorn. At the same time I used my cell phone to book a flight to Lijiang City. The travel agent doubted that I would be able to arrive before midnight the next day, but she would do her best.
The banking hall was of the Chinese-gaudy school, clearly intended to outmarble any rival in the area. When I asked for Mr. To at the information desk, the Chinese receptionist checked her computer and told me there was nobody there of that name.
“So, what are your instructions for when someone like me arrives and says I’m from Colonel Vikorn and need to speak urgently to Mr. To?”
She nodded and plugged the question into the software. “Just a minute please. I will try to get you Mr. Ng.”
Within minutes a uniformed security guard led me to a private lift, which took us up to the top floor. When the lift doors opened, two more uniformed guards took me down a corridor, where a third man in a suit waited. He looked a lot more dangerous than the guards.
“Are you Mr. To?”
“No,” he said with a smile.
“Ng?”
“No,” he said, and knocked on a door. A male voice said something in Chinese. The man in the suit said something back that included the name Vikorn. The voice in the room said something that must have meant “come in.” We entered. The man in the suit left, closing the door behind him.
It was a small room with a small desk crowded with old-fashioned file covers bulging with documents. Behind the desk sat a very thin Chinese man in his forties with thick straight black hair and a black moustache and a bright smile full of optimism. On either side of him sat two women who seemed to be secretaries. One was very thin and boyish, the other about thirty and voluptuous with black-rimmed glasses.
“Are you Mr. To?” I asked.
“No,” he said with a sparkling smile, “I am not.”
“Ng?”
He shook his head. “Not Ng either, but what can I do for you?”
I told him all I knew, which was almost nothing. He thought for perhaps two seconds, said, “Won’t you please sit down,” in perfect English, and stuck a finger in the air to shut me up when I tried to say something more. Then he spoke rapidly to the boyish secretary, who grabbed a pad and pencil and scribbled in Chinese script while he spoke. “Please tell me where you have been told to make contact in Yunnan.”
“At Lijiang City airport.”
The man who was not Mr. To nodded and seemed to repeat this to the secretary, who wrote it down. Then he spoke to the other woman, who took out a cell phone and used it to take a photograph of me. Then she asked me to stand up. She took a ruler from the desk and made a rough calculation as to my height. Then she seemed to describe me and my clothes to her colleague, who wrote down the details. The man stood up.
“Thank you, that will be all.”
“D’you have the money now? I’ve got about an hour to get to the airport,” I said.
He looked surprised. “Oh, no. You do not go anywhere. You stay in Bangkok.”
“But Colonel Vikorn said-”
“No, no, no, no, no. You forget Colonel Vikorn. You stay here. Your job is over.”
In addition to being a very skinny man, he was also quite short, but I wouldn’t have disobeyed him for the world. He walked around his desk to escort me to the door and gave me a name card with no name on it, only a number. I looked at the number and said, “Thanks. Who should I ask for if I need to use it?”
“Ask for Mr. To,” he said. Just before he closed the door on me, he added, “There will be no need to use it immediately. It’s simply in case of unforeseen contingencies in the future. We like to be thorough.”
The next day Vikorn and Ruamsantiah arrived back from Yunnan looking sheepish but somehow pleased with themselves. Neither would speak about their escapade save to say that they appreciated my help. They behaved as if nothing had happened, except that, according to Manny, Vikorn spent the whole of the next day at his bank, talking, I presume, to the man who was not named To.
It was a good six months later that the media ran a story about a Red Army general based in Yunnan who had confessed, under interrogation, to smuggling morphine into and out of China. The hook for the story was his execution by single bullet in the back of the head the day before. His name was Xie. It seems he had been held in solitary confinement for half a year, after a commando raid on his Lijiang City HQ by the army’s internal security unit. The rumor that he had been holding two Thai fat cat narcotics traffickers hostage at the time was vigorously denied both by the army and General Xie (according to the army after Xie’s death).
So, here I am halfway down our soi with my cell phone in my right hand and that nameless name card in the left trapped between the pinkie and the finger of the sun so I can use my left index to plug the number into the keyboard (because my model is too broad for my delicate little Eurasian hand to hold and thumb simultaneously with the right-I knew you were wondering, DFR). “Hello,” a woman’s voice answers on the third ring.
“May I speak to Mr. To, please?”
Silence, then the ringing tone. When I try again, I get the engaged tone. On my way back to the hovel, I realize I left out the most important part of the formula: I should have said I was calling on behalf of Colonel Vikorn. Now there’s only one man left to call, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.