cunt.” He pronounces the word with a contempt you can taste. “Are you the one who busted her?” When I don’t say anything he yells to his secretary on the other side of the door and a private soldier in his thirties comes in. That he is more than six feet tall and built like something made of iron is not as disturbing as the mind behind the body. This is not a mischievous young recruit; this is a killer who enjoys his work.
I cough. “Look, I think I can cut this sh-, sh-, short,” I say. “You think Colonel Vikorn busted your mule to get an edge because your ten-year agreement with him is coming to an end and you’re both maneuvering for position. Well, you’re wrong. Vikorn would never be that crude, and anyway it’s not the kind of strategy that could succeed against a man like you. Everyone knows that. There’s a third party involved here.”
I have raised a flicker of interest. “Oh, really? Who?”
“A Tibetan.” The word produces a strange effect. The General exchanges a glance with his enforcer, then draws up a chair to sit down and watch me. More than five minutes pass without anyone saying anything. Finally, Zinna says, “Name?”
“Dr. Norbu Tietsin.”
I have the most curious impression that both Zinna and his enforcer twitch at the same time. Now Zinna stands up and paces up and down for a while, hammering home his authority with every ring. Finally, he tells his enforcer to go. “Talk,” he orders, as the door closes.
“No. I’m not talking until I see my assistant in good health standing on the other side of your window.”
“Are you giving orders here?”
“You can get the answer by torturing me, but it will take a while and Vikorn will feel obliged to retaliate. It would be a much more efficient use of your precious time if you just put Lek outside the window. It would also make negotiations for the next ten-year treaty that much smoother, don’t you think?”
Zinna shrugs and picks up his phone. “Looks like true love,” he says to me with a leer before talking into the receiver. “The katoey the boys just brought in, take him into the compound where I can see him/her from my window. If there are any visible signs, someone’s going to get their ass kicked.”
During the interval, Zinna and I find ourselves incongruously reminiscing, for want of small talk. He asks me if I remember the last summit meeting between him and Vikorn, more than a decade ago, when I was only a few years out of cadet school. I surprise him with my total recall of the event; it wasn’t something anyone could easily forget.
Both men were in their fifties at the time, at the height of their power and eager to demonstrate prowess in the most extravagant pissing contest I have ever seen. The negotiations took place over the border in Burma, where Zinna had set up a yaa baa factory capable of producing a million pills per day, manned by Karen tribeswomen whom the Burmese military had enslaved and made available to Zinna for his operation—in return for a big slice of the profits, of course.
I replay the fragments I have retained while Zinna and I are talking about it. In my mind’s eye I was no more than a kid: impressionable, fascinated, excited, and totally under Vikorn’s thumb. He sent me up into the tribal area, traditionally owned not by the Karen but by the Hmong, to reconnoiter prior to his arrival by helicopter. He astonished everyone by arriving not in one black chopper but in a squadron of thirteen which he hired for the day from an arms dealer based in Cambodia. Zinna was infuriated and intimidated, but tried not to show it while the two men negotiated at a military-type table in a valley mostly given over to poppy cultivation by the Hmong. Then something went wrong, and some very angry-looking soldiers with shoulder-fired rocket launchers appeared over the brow, running toward us in what bore a close resemblance to a charge. Now we were legging it like loonies to the last chopper to remain on the ground—and there we were, swinging away while making obscene signs at them indicating their genetic proximity to buffalo, while at the same time keeping our fingers crossed that they wouldn’t be able to get their rocket launchers on their shoulders and fire while we were still in range.
“Close one,” Vikorn