17

“Going to Burma, hah,” the plump man in the red-tasseled pillbox hat said. He might have been muttering to himself, but his use of heavily Chinese-accented English suggested he spoke for the benefit of his guests. “Bad business, go to Burma. Very bad.” He shook his head.

Chinese music played low in the background.

Philip Kennedy fixed the shopkeeper with a lofty look. “We’re not interested in business,” he said, inflecting the word as a curse. “What we’re doing may be bad enough. But at least we’re not grubbing after profits.”

A fly buzzed past Annja’s nose. One or more of the various forms of incense alight in the crowded, stuffy shop was threatening to bring on a major allergic reaction.

Annja cast her other companion a look. Patty Ruhle rolled her eyes toward the roof beams of the crowded little shop in a particularly decrepit and disreputable section of the long sprawl of the Bangkok waterfront district.

It was an interaction that had taken place many times in the day since they’d collected the Harvard-trained anthropologist.

Kennedy was laser straight today. It didn’t exactly make him easier to deal with.

Kennedy said something in an Asian language. It was singsong, tonal. It didn’t sound to Annja’s ears—and she had a definite ear for languages, even if she knew no useful amount of any East Asian tongue—like what she heard slung on the crowded streets and in the bright-bannered kiosks outside. She wondered if Kennedy had also picked up a usable amount of Mandarin along the way. Supercilious he may have been, but he was a keenly intelligent man, and ingesting all those entheogens didn’t seem to have dulled him appreciably.

Annja found herself grinning at Ruhle as the two men became engrossed in singing and gesticulating at one another. Having spent time in the ethnic enclaves of New Orleans the tourists never saw, in the back streets and on the docks, she had always known that the movie version of Third World haggling was not only truthful but somewhat understated.

Then again, the people who haggled seriously were people who were often seriously poor—usually on both sides of the transaction. It was a Darwinian proposition, and sometimes the party who got the better of the deal was the party that survived.

Of course Master Chen didn’t seem to have missed many meals. Skinny though he was, Kennedy wasn’t hanging on the raw edge of starvation, either.

“Boys enjoy this too much, don’t they?” said Patty sotto voce, putting her curly red head near Annja’s. Annja laughed. She thought the same thing.

She wandered among crowded shelves and counters. She moved with extreme caution to avoid brushing anything for fear high-piled goods would tumble down on her. She suspected Master Chen strictly enforced a “you break it, you buy it” policy. And in any dispute she had few doubts as to whose side the Bangkok cops would come down on. If anything, Bangkok was more adept even than most of the Third World at the fine art of shaking down wealthy Westerners.

“See anything you like?” Patty asked.

“I hardly know,” Annja said, shaking her head.

Chen’s shop appeared to be a combination of modern sporting-goods store, old-time general store and combination apothecary and magic shop. Nylon rope lay wound in gleaming coils between spoils of hairy natural-fiber line. Coleman lanterns vied for shelf space with pink Hello Kitty purses, above jars full of colorful herbs and bins of fleshy roots of doubtful virtue, Joss sticks, road maps, CDs and octagonal feng shui mirrors. “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she said.

Patty held up a piece of wood carved to look like a short sheathed sword with Chinese characters and unfamiliar symbols. “How about a seven-star sword for luck?”

Annja laughed. “If only it were that easy to get luck.”

“Lots of Asians think you can buy it,” the photographer said. “They look set to take over the world in a few years. Maybe they’re onto something.”

Kennedy walked up to them. He looked grave. Even on short acquaintance Annja had learned not to take that too seriously.

“Master Chen says he can supply us,” he said. “He ought to have everything we need. Of course, he’d have a better idea if he knew precisely where we were going. But then so would I.”

Patty laughed. “Just get used to being a mushroom, Phil,” she said. “Ms. Annja has her reasons for keeping us in the dark. She’s a girl who’s always got reasons for what she does.”

“What kind of price?” Annja asked.

Kennedy’s look of disapproval deepened to a frown. He named a figure in baht, the local currency, which he quickly translated to dollars. “I know it’s high,” he said. “But I think you’re looking at carrying along a great deal too much prepared food.” He said prepared as he might say tainted.

“We can’t all live on grubs and roots,” Patty said. She smiled as she always did.

Kennedy sniffed. “The indigenous peoples do,” he said. “I don’t see why their diet, which has served them well for years, won’t serve Westerners as well. And you see far less obesity among the inland tribes than in the West.”

“You calling me fat, Phil?” Patty asked. “Because our esteemed employer sure isn’t carrying any excess baggage. Truth to tell, I wouldn’t mind seeing her fatten up a bit before we set out—she’s got no reserves.”

Kennedy flushed.

“Leaving aside the relative merits of the indigenous diet versus the Western one,” Annja said, putting on her best professional tone, which she used when her Chasing History’s Monsters producer Doug Morrell tried to steamroller her, “speed is vital on this expedition. We can’t afford the time to forage for food en route.”

“Well,” said Kennedy, with the air of a man who knows he’s lost but is trying to cover his retreat, “we can obtain food from villages we encounter.”

Annja nodded. “And if we do, the fresh food will be a welcome break,” she said. “I’m not looking forward to a steady diet of dried foods any more than you are. But I’m unwilling to totally rely on haggling to feed us.”

For one thing, she thought, we’re going to want to avoid attracting any more attention than absolutely necessary. She knew their chances of completely avoiding detection by the inhabitants of villages they passed near was slight, but the more exposure they got the greater the risk of attracting the attention of the Myanmar government. Obvious Westerners bargaining loudly in the village square were hardly low profile.

“One question,” Annja asked. “Why did you, as an anticapitalist, bargain Master Chen down so vigorously?”

“I wasn’t going to let the fat capitalist bastard exploit us,” Phil said with a set in his bearded jaw and a gleam in his eye, “any more than I had to.”

Annja smiled. She couldn’t shake the impression that despite their ferocious haggling the two men seemed to like each other enough to have a hard time hiding it.

“How about a guide, Phil?” Patty said. “Can old Chen set us up there?”

Kennedy turned back toward the counter. The proprietor perched behind it on a stool. He held something to his ear and spoke earnestly, if inaudibly over the music.

“He says that he can,” Kennedy said.

“Wait,” Annja said, “is he talking on an iPhone?”

“He is,” Patty said with a nod. “Isn’t that a hoot? He looks like he should be balancing his books with an abacus behind the counter. He might really use an abacus.”

Kennedy strode back toward the counter as if to join the conversation. Patty put her face close to Annja’s ear.

“Don’t sweat the MREs too much,” Patty said. “I don’t know Chen, but if he’s half as well connected as he looks to be, he gets ’em dog cheap by the carload from crooked quartermasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. My son tells me it’s pretty common.”

“You have children?” Annja asked.

“One,” she said. “Army Ranger. He’s in Afghanistan. He can’t tell me where. But the censors let him say it’s where the Soviets really lost it.”

She grinned. “I reckon that makes it the Panjsher Valley. The censors don’t know what his mama does for a living. I was in the Panjsher, when Jeremy was less than a year old.”

Quickly her mood shifted. She lowered her head. “I wish he wasn’t,” she said in a muted tone. “He does, too. Says whatever they’re fighting for, it’s not what they were told it would be. Not what they tell the folks back home. But as long as his buddies are there, he says he’ll keep going back. For them.”

Annja listened mutely, unsure of what to say. Ruhle shook her kinky hair, raised her head and mustered a brave smile. “Ah, well,” she said. “What’s a mother to do?”

Kennedy was walking back to them. “So,” Annja called to him, “any word on a guide?”

The back door opened. Annja hadn’t thought the shop was particularly dimly lit. Nor cool for that matter. But the sunshine that poured in on a blast of loud Thai music and diesel fumes was blinding and so hot she flinched away.

What she took for a young boy walked in, bandy-legged, a shadow featureless against the glare from outside. She could tell he wore a baseball-type cap and shorts, but no more. The door swung shut behind him.

When the eye-frying glare shut off she could make out a young Chinese man with a round, open face and a big grin.

“Ah,” Master Chen said. “Your guide.”

“Our guide?” Annja and Patty echoed.

The newcomer nodded cheerily to the foreigners, then looked past them. “Hi, Dad,” he called.