The Godfather of Kathmandu - By John Burdett Page 0,130
got closer, he stopped intending to do it. He was in quite a state. You see, he had no reliable addiction; even his fondness for chemicals was promiscuous.” She pauses to give me a long, appraising stare, perhaps to check if I’m ready for what comes next. “There’s only one thing harder to handle than a would-be suicide, and that’s a failed suicide.” She gives a brief smile. “I’m afraid Ah Ting caught him in a vulnerable moment when I was out, and strictly against my instructions told him about—ah—one of the little things Kongrao gets up to overseas.”
“She recruited him because she needed another scapegoat? Kongrao was moving into Japan?”
At the word Japan she gives a couple of blinks of acknowledgment. “But, you see, it wasn’t a case of ‘moving into’ Japan.” Here her face turns quite merry and she blows a long stream of smoke over the balcony. “We’d been supplying Japan for over a century. But a terrible thing happened to Japan after they lost the war. Half their psyche turned farang. That’s why they’re so confused. They rely on science instead of Asian intuition. It’s made them terribly vulnerable.” Now she is spluttering, trying not to collapse in laughter. “They have laboratories, d’you see? And in farangland, a fully accredited, properly staffed scientific laboratory is like the word of God. And just like God, it can be amazingly unreliable.” Now she cannot stop laughing. When the maid comes onto the terrace, perhaps to check on her, she, too, permits herself the ghost of a smile. Once she has seen that her mistress is okay, she retreats again into the dark teak interior. Moi shakes her head.
“Recruit him? Ah Ting recruit Frank Charles? A lawyer might frame it that way. A more accurate way of putting it would be to say she waved a carrot in front of him and he turned into a voracious donkey overnight. After she’d explained the scam to him, pretending to keep it secret so I wouldn’t be implicated—she protects me from all forms of reality, especially male—you couldn’t have stopped him.” She has become quite vigorous, even to the point of raising her body from the chaise. “And this is the point, d’you see? If he’d just heated up a couple of cheap Burmese sapphires now and then and taken a modest profit, the Japs would have accepted the scam as part of the game. But he had to do his American think-big thing and go to that godforsaken village in Tanzania and buy up all their sapphire junk by the kilo. Literally.”
I wait and wait, but she doesn’t continue. She has fallen into some kind of reverie. I say, “I don’t understand.”
The words take about two minutes to penetrate, then she says, languidly, “Why not? To understand all you need are two things: sixteen hundred degrees Centigrade, and beryllium.”
“You paid off the Japanese labs that check gems for the local industry?”
She waves a hand. “Nothing so sophisticated. Thais don’t know how to bribe Japanese laboratories, assuming such a thing is possible. No, you see, the labs themselves weren’t up to speed. They simply didn’t know, or didn’t believe, Thais could be so smart, so devious, and so humble looking at the same time. And apparently their tests for beryllium were very crude and unreliable. And what’s more, we never used the word padparadscha on any of the invoices—they were simply described as sapphires. The Japs thought they were being clever because they knew these gems were really the hyper-valuable padparadscha and we did not. They thought they were fooling us—just as we intended. They’re terrible racists, you see; they haven’t changed since Nanking. No way they were going to think our decadent brown people would outsmart them. We never sold the product at the market price—thirty thousand dollars a carat—but about twenty-five percent cheaper. We let them think they were getting a bargain from a genuine Thai padparadscha mine, and Thai pads, when you can get them, are among the best in the world. It was only when the Japanese tried selling their Thai padparadschas—which were actually enhanced low-quality African sapphires—to America, where the labs were more up to speed, that they realized what Kongrao had done. And since there was no evidence of misrepresentation, there was nothing they could do. But it destroyed more than fifty percent of their gem merchants. You had bankruptcies from Nagasaki to Sapporo.” She rubs her jaw. “I suppose one shouldn’t laugh.”