"Tell the Dung Lord that Tan Hock Seng, head of the Three Prosperities Trading Company has a business proposal. Deliver my note to him and you will also profit greatly."

Dog Fucker smiles. "I think perhaps that I'll simply take this money, and my men will beat you until you tell me where you hide all your paranoid yellow card cash."

Hock Seng doesn't say anything. Keeps his face impassive.

Dog Fucker says, "I know all about Laughing Chan's people here. He owes me for his disrespect."

Hock Seng is surprised that he feels no fear. He lives in fear of all things, but thuggish pi lien like Dog Fucker are not what fill his nights with terror. In the end, Dog Fucker is a businessman. He is not a white shirt, puffed on national pride or hungry for a little more respect. Dog Fucker works for money. Acts for money. He and Hock Seng are different parts of the economic organism, but underneath everything, they are brothers. Hock Seng smiles slightly as confidence builds.

"This is just a gift, for your trouble. What I propose will provide much more. For all of us." He takes out the last two items. One, a letter. "Give it to your master, sealed." The other, he hands across: a small box with its familiar universal spindle and braces, a palm-oil polymer casing in a dull shade of yellow.

Dog Fucker takes the object, turns it over. "A kink-spring?" He makes a face. "What's the point of this?"

Hock Seng smiles. "He'll know when he reads the letter." He stands and turns away, without even waiting for Dog Fucker to respond, feeling stronger and more assured than any time since the Green Headbands came and his warehouses went up in smoke and his clipper ships went sliding down into the ocean depths. In this moment, Hock Seng feels like a man. He walks straighter, his limp forgotten.

It's impossible to know if Dog Fucker's people will follow him and so he walks slowly, knowing that both Dog Fucker's and Laughing Chan's men surround him, a floating ring of surveillance as he works his way down the alleys and cuts into deeper slums, until, at last, Laughing Chan is there, waiting for him, smiling.

"They let you go," he says.

Hock Seng pulls out more money. "You did well. He knows it was your men, though." He gives Laughing Chan an extra roll of baht. "Pay him off with this."

Laughing Chan smiles at the pile of money. "This is twice what I need for that. Even Dog Fucker likes to use us when he doesn't want to risk smuggling SoyPRO over from Koh Angrit."

"Take it anyway."

Laughing Chan shrugs and pockets it. "It's very kind of you. With the anchor pads shut down, we can use the extra baht."

Hock Seng is turning away, but at Laughing Chan's words he turns back.

"What did you say about the anchor pads?"

"They're shut down. The white shirts raided them last night. Everything's locked tight."

"What happened?"

Laughing Chan shrugs. "I heard they burned everything. Sent it all up in smoke."

Hock Seng doesn't pause to ask any more. He turns and runs, as fast as his old bones will carry him. Cursing himself all the way. Cursing that he was a fool and didn't put his nose to the wind, that he let himself be distracted from bare survival by the urgent wish to do something more, to reach ahead.

Every time he makes plans for his future, he seems to fail. Every time he reaches forward, the world leans against him, pressing him down.

On Thanon Sukhumvit, in the sweat of the sun, he finds a news vendor. He fumbles through newspapers and the hand-cranked whisper sheets of rumor, through luck pages advertising good numbers for gambling and the names of predicted muay thai champions.

He tears them open, one after another, more frantic with every copy.

All of them show the smiling face of Jaidee Rojjanasukchai, the incorruptible Tiger of Bangkok.

7

"Look! I'm famous!"

Jaidee holds the whisper sheet picture up beside his own face, grinning at Kanya. When she doesn't smile, he puts it back in its rack, along with all the rest of his pictures.

"Eh, you're right. It's not really a good likeness. They must have bribed it out of our records department." He sighs wistfully. "But I was young then."

Still, Kanya doesn't respond, just stares morosely at the water of the khlong. They've spent the day hunting for skiffs smuggling PurCal and AgriGen crops up the river, sailing back and forth across the river mouth, and Jaidee still thrums with a certain exhilaration.

The prize of the day was a clipper ship anchored just off the docks. Ostensibly an Indian trading vessel sailed north from Bali, it turned out to be brimming with cibiscosis-resistant pineapples. It was satisfying to see the harbormaster and the ship's captain both stammering excuses while Jaidee's white shirts poured lye over the entire shipment, crate after crate rendered sterile and inedible. All that smuggling profit gone.

He flips though the other papers attached to the display board, finds a different image of himself. This one from his time as a muay thai competitor, laughing after a fight in Lumphini Stadium. The Bangkok Morning Post.

"My boys will like this one."

He opens the paper and scans the story. Trade Minister Akkarat is spitting mad. The quotes from the Trade Ministry call Jaidee a vandal. Jaidee is surprised they don't just call him a traitor or a terrorist. That they restrain themselves tells him just how impotent they really are.

Jaidee can't help smiling over the pages at Kanya. "We really hurt them."

Again, Kanya doesn't respond.

There's a certain trick to ignoring her bad moods. The first time Jaidee met Kanya, he almost thought she was stupid, the way her face remained so impassive, so impervious to any hint of fun, as though she were missing an organ, a nose for smell, eyes for sight, and whatever curious organ makes a person sense sanuk when it is right in front of them.

"We should be getting back to the Ministry," she says, and turns to scan the boat traffic along the khlong, looking for a possible ride.

Jaidee pays the whisper sheet man for his paper as a canal taxi glides into view.

Kanya flags it and it slides up beside them, its flywheel whining with accumulated power, waves sloshing the khlong embankment as its wake catches up. Huge kink-springs crowd half its displacement. Wealthy Chaozhou Chinese business people cram the covered prow of the boat like ducks on their way to slaughter.

Kanya and Jaidee jump aboard and stand on the running board outside the seating compartment. The ticket child ignores their white uniforms, just as they ignore her. She sells a 30-baht ticket to another man who boards with them. Jaidee grabs a safety line as the boat accelerates away from the dock. Wind caresses his face as they make their way down the khlong, aiming for the heart of the city. The boat moves quickly, zipping around small paddled skiffs and long tail boats in the canal. Blocks of dilapidated houses and shopfronts slide past, pha sin and blouses and sarong hang colorful in the sun. Women bathe their long black hair in the brown waters of the canal. The boat slows abruptly.

Kanya looks forward. "What is it?"

Up ahead, a tree has fallen, blocking much of the canal. Boats jam around it, trying to squeeze past.

"A bo tree," Jaidee says. He looks around for landmarks. "We'll have to let the monks know."

No one else will move it. And despite the shortage of wood, no one will harvest it either. It would be unlucky. Their boat wallows as the khlong traffic tries to slip through the tiny gap left in the canal, where the sacred tree has not blocked movement.

Jaidee makes a noise of impatience and then calls ahead. "Clear out, friends! Ministry business. Clear the way!" He waves his badge.