Thai Horse

‘Jesus,’ Cohen said with a grin,, ‘ain’t it great to talk American. It’s the only thing I miss. These guys out here? They don’t know shit about the vernacular.’

Their meeting two years earlier had been a brief one. At the time, Hatcher had written off the brazen man as just another quick-buck river rat not long for this world, an easy mistake to make because on that night Cohen was making his first trip into what he called Chin Chin land — China.

For three years Hatcher had worked the back rivers from Thailand east through the deltas and terraced plains of Cambodia and north through Laos, Vietnam and China to the Macao Runs of Hong Kong. He knew the Irrawaddy, the Mekong, and the Yalu Jiang rivers and their backwaters, knew the towns and was accepted — or ignored — by the villagers, who considered him a soldier of fortune without flag or loyalty. He dodged the Red patrols in Vietnam by hiding in the daytime and traveling at night, and by speaking Russian when he was stopped. He got by on audacity and because his role was mostly benign. He was there to get information, not to cause trouble, and he gathered his information by observing rather than asking questions.

It was to learn their secret ways, their routes, their sources, their pick-up points and, mostly, their tie-in to the Saigon black market that had brought Hatcher to their meeting place in 1973. They called themselves the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the Secret Gatekeepers. There he occasionally did business with them to bolster his credibility. On the pretense of selling guns, he continued to build his file of informants and river operators and their connection to the Hong Kong underworld. He was known as gli Occhi di Sassi, the Man With Stone Eyes, a nickname given him by one of the most trusted men on his team, a onetime Mafioso enforcer named Tony Bagglio.

Standing in the dusty office, Hatcher remembered quite clearly his first sight of Cohen materializing out of the fog, a strange-looking creature in a silk cheongsam and with a long, straggly beard standing in the bow of a snakeboat — with only one other man, a hard-looking Chinese at the tiller — gliding quietly up one of the jungle-cramped offshoots of the Beijiang River, forty or so miles north of Macao.

I’ll be damned, Hatcher had thought to himself, what the hell’s this Chinese rabbi doing up here?

He soon found out.

COHEN: 1973

Cohen, too, remembered that night.

And he, too, had thought to himself as he cruised through the heavy fog in the long, slender snakeboat: What the hell is a nice Jewish boy from Westchester with a DBA from Harvard Business School doing here?

The barge had appeared so suddenly it startled Cohen. It was a floating department store, stacked high with crates of cameras, television sets, china dishes and forbidden icons, bolts of Thai silk and Indian. madras. Heavy tarps were strapped over the stacks to keep them dry.

Han, Cohen’s bodyguard and helmsman, throttled back and eased the snakeboat toward the barge. Cohen could feel his heart thundering in his throat and wrists. His mouth was dry.

Standing on the foredeck of the barge was the ugliest, meanest-looking human being he had ever seen. He was shorter than Cohen, perhaps five six, an Oriental built like a crate, his bulging arms covered with tattoos. He had no hair on the right side of his head. In its place was a mottled burn scar, which extended from a disfigured lump of ear halfway to the crown of his head. He combed the rest of his long black hair away from the scar so it swept over the top of his head and showered down the left side almost to his shoulder. He wore a gun belt and an ornate hand- made holster, designed to hold an Uzi machine gun, which was tied to his thigh Western style. His three front teeth were gold. One of them, according to rumor, had belonged to an unfortunate English businessman who thought he could bypass the unwritten and unsaid laws of the river and deal directly with the Ts’e K’am Men Ti.

This was Sam-Sam Sam, the Do Wong, the Prince of the Knife, a one-man Teamsters Union. Nothing happened on the river unless Sam-Sam Sam said okay. The booty stacked behind him was all tribute, collected from others who wanted to do business with the taipans.

Cohen’s mouth got drier.

Behind Sam-Sam Sam there were at least twenty other men, all wearing the black shirts, shin-length hauki pants, and red headbands of the Khmer Rouge, all armed with Uzis, AK-47s, M-16s and .357 Pythons. They looked as if they expected an invasion. Behind them were the women, all young, all probably cold-blooded, dressed the same, with knives and pistols stuck in their red sashes.

All of the weapons seemed to be pointed at Cohen’s stomach.

Leaning against a stack of crates was a white man, his uncut black hair covering his ears and sweeping almost to his shoulders. He was tall, handsome in a scruffy, unshaven way, and was wearing khaki cotton pants and shirt. A blue windbreaker was tied around his waist by the sleeves; a 9 mm. H&K automatic dangled under his arm in a shoulder holster; his wide-brimmed safari hat was faded and limp from sun and rain. He had his hands in his pockets and was grinning. No, thought Cohen, not grinning, the son of a bitch is leering.

‘They look like Khmer Rouge,’ Cohen whispered to Han.

‘Disguise,’ whispered his boatman, who was supposed to act as a bodyguard. ‘Nobody bother them this way.’

Cohen quickly appraised the situation. He became temporarily paranoid, afraid they would hear his heart pounding. The odds were about thirty to two and there was no future in any kind of confrontation. Cohen immediately made his move.

‘I’ll go over alone,’ Cohen said.

‘Not good. They don’t know you,’ answered Han.

‘I have this,’ said Cohen, opening his hand. In his palm lay a Queen Victoria twenty-dollar gold piece. ‘Stand up in full view so they don’t get nervous. If there is trouble, the two of us aren’t going to last long anyhow.’

He stood on the point of the bow as the motorboat idled up to the barge and opened his cheongsam wide to show he was unarmed, then stepped cautiously onto the barge.