The Thief

  No hospital. Abhik Lee knows now he’s in Bangkok, and will know too that he’s injured. He’ll be watching the hospitals.

  Water, he begs, and the woman brings him water from a pump.

  How do I look? he asks.

  Terrible, she replies. You need help.

  No help. You’re very kind. No help.

  Remy crawls on, towards the gathering night.

  Chapter 37

  Here we are.

  You and I, here we are again, standing before the doors of the Gameshouse.

  It is night over Bangkok. A bone-rattling, engine-snorting, ting-a-linging, come-all-ye-unto-the-roaring night. We knock on the silver doors of the Gameshouse and they let us in, shutting out the city. Here, the sound of the sueng, plucked by an old man with a red hat upon his head, ears grown long, gold around his throat. A pair of girls in blue and pearl duet on the many-stringed khim, while a singer pushes her voice as high as the eagle’s flight to tell the story of sad kings, broken hearts, lost empires, forgotten lives. Here the players of the lower league – so many players, so many mighty men and women looking to be something more! – challenge each other for gold and time, favours and secrets, as if they matter. As if this board is the one we have come to love. How many of these would-be great players will end up pieces? (Twenty-two of the fifty-eight here assembled. Twenty-two of the gathered players will bet a little too much, lose a little too heavily and when they are in the pit of their despair, a woman in white will come to them and say, “Can I interest you in something different?” A high number indeed; a significant percentage of those congregated here, as though, we muse, as though there are those called to the Gameshouse to play only so that they might be played upon, and in their falling increase the sum resources of the Gamesmaster, of she who sits on high. Yet these are thoughts for another time, another roll of the dice, and so we move on.)

  Through another pair of silver doors, lions roaring from the panelling, up a corridor too long for this building, to the place where the higher league plays. Oh now here, here we see the true players, the men and women who know that the world is a board, and only toss a coin when they are sure which way it will land.

  We are looking for one player in particular, and tonight we find him.

  Godert van Zuylen. He was sent, so the rumours say, to a tiny island in the middle of nowhere after he got his boss’s daughter pregnant and would not agree to the marriage. The population of that place was seventy-three, but no! Seventy-three, it transpired, was the number of those people that the Dutch authorities had actually managed to count, and being as they were uninterested in the interior, they had not found the two thousand that lived on the side of a volcano and worshipped the fire and the sea. Van Zuylen found them, and even here, even they, it seemed, had heard of the game, for one day a door was opened at the back of a cave, and within he found the sound of cards, dice and the beating of the ritual drum.

  Now he owns the father and the daughter both who had him sent away. He won them in a game of codebreaker’s scrabble in 1917, by use of a one-time pad dropped behind Austrian lines. Two thousand men died that day, and he was victorious by the rules of the game and he never looked back.

  We approach, but wait!

  Another approaches first. Remy Burke, fancy seeing you here!

  His appearance causes some commotion. Blood still clings to the collar of his shirt, laces the ends of his hair. His trousers are torn, knees scuffed, fingers dirty, knuckles swollen, jaw red, eyes black. He makes directly for van Zuylen, and others part before him, though many stare.

  He sits down opposite van Zuylen and says to the white-clad waiter who cautiously approaches, “Water please.”

  Water is bought in a cup chilled with ice, a slice of lemon in the side, a sprig of mint at the bottom. Where does the Gameshouse find all these things? A low priority on the list of questions we must ask.

  At last van Zuylen says in careful French, “You look terrible, Remy.”

  “You look well.”

  “I had good fortune in a game I played.”

  “Ah – that explains your youthful glow! How much did you win?”

  “Only five years. It was a brief skirmish, that was all. My planes had the better engines.”

  “Of course they did – you are a professional.”

  “Indeed. May I help you?”

  “You played a game against Abhik Lee here some seven months ago.”

  “Ah, the delightful Mr Lee. Yes, I played him, though I do not think it is good form to discuss the matter, do you?”

  “It’s not a discussion that interests me: it’s the wager.”

  “I do not think it’s good form to discuss that either – unless, that is, you propose to offer something in return?”

  Remy is silent for a moment, staring down at the table. At last he says, “I am in the middle of a game. I cannot access my resources until the game is done.”

  “Then I fear we cannot…”

  “How about cards?”

  Van Zuylen hesitates. “You are already occupied, are you not?”

  “A lower league game, a skirmish, nothing more.”

  “And what could you wager for this game?”

  “What would you like?”

  The Dutchman purses his lips, turns his head thoughtfully to the ceiling of the room. “How about…the affections of the last person who loved you?”

  “That’s a big wager for a small game.”

  “You seem…desperate.”

  “I’m not sure the umpires would appreciate you taking advantage of my condition.”

  “It is a lower league game, that is all. Backgammon, perhaps, or chess? I’ll let you decide.”

  “I had always thought you were more sporting than that, Godert.”

  He shrugs. “The word is you agreed to a game with Abhik Lee while drunk. Most likely you will lose. What is the good for me in playing a man who is already beaten, unless I get to pick at some of the bones?”

  Remy smiles thinly. “Chess then,” he says, and his voice is dry. “You can be white, if you like.”

  Chapter 38

  A game of chess.

  We watch.

  So does half the Gameshouse.

  These people have seen a lot, but a blood-soaked player, in the middle of a match of hide-and-seek, staggering into their halls? Why, that – that is still a sight to see. We are drawn, we are drawn, by the smell of blood in the water.

  Who was the last person who loved Remy?

  He is not sure he can say for certain, but we can, and so can you too, Remy, if you try. She waits for you in a broken hut in the forest, the moon above and the waters of the lake below, your widow in the woods. We do not think you shall return to her, and neither does she, but such a predicament does not diminish the force of her affection. Van Zuylen will have her, if he wins, like a trophy on the wall.

  You should not gamble a thing that is not yours, Remy.

  You should not bet a thing you cannot afford to lose.

  It is not in keeping with your code.

  We watch, waiting for Remy to lose.

  He plays black; van Zuylen is white.

  He opens aggressively, swaps a bishop for a knight, a knight for a bishop, opens up the centre of the board, pawn takes pawn takes pawn takes pawn. The pieces fall, the centre is exposed. King’s castle, racing to opposite sides of the board, taking cover. The queens square off, Remy eyes an exchange, van Zuylen…

  …flinches.

  It is not yet time, the Dutchman seems to say, to take the most powerful piece from the board.

  Remy studies his face now, as the queen moves away.

  It is not an error per se to retreat from the exchange, but it is…indicative.

  Does van Zuylen see something in the bloodied features of his opponent?

  (He does. He sees the chief of the tribe on the unnamed island where, as a philanderer who’d philandered too far, he has been sent. He sees the ancient man dancing with the bones
of slaughtered sharks around his neck, hears the beating of the drum, feels blood in his face, his neck, his fingertips, rises up spontaneously to dance himself, spins round and round with the chief and the chieftain’s daughter and the chieftain’s wife until he realises that the flesh he was eating is raw, and the drums are now silent, the whole village watching him gorge, and him alone. There is a darkness in their silence, a violence waiting to spill, but they do not move, do not speak as he crawls away back to the trading post in the bay, and the drums do not beat, and he does not dance again. Now van Zuylen looks again into the sun-soaked, blood-soaked face of Remy Burke and sees violence in it, and power, and tastes raw flesh in his mouth, and hears the beating of the drum, and is mightily afraid.)

  A piece falls; only a pawn, and at some tactical risk.

  Van Zuylen reclaims the next pawn four moves later, then another, his pulse rising as he sniffs victory.

  He is wrong – not a victory, a trap. He was lured in by the taste of easy pickings and now his rook is trapped, pinned by a combination of king and knight. He tries to run, has nowhere to go and with a sigh throws away his rook for one last pawn, and knows that the game is nearly over, though he is not sure where death will come.

  Death comes three moves after the inevitable queen exchange.

  He resigns when it becomes definite, and the watchers, save for us, drift away.

  Remy says, “You owe me some information.”

  “What would you like to know?” the Dutchman asks, and finds that he is exhausted.

  “Seven months ago you played Abhik Lee at a game, and Abhik lost. Here’s my question – what was his forfeit?”

  Van Zuylen smiles, though his hands are shaking.

  “Oh,” he says. “Now I understand.”

  Chapter 39

  It is the small hours of the morning, the glow before dawn, when Remy leaves the Gameshouse.

  The streets of Bangkok are at last silent, save for the distant ringing of a ship’s bell, the thump of a door slamming in an alley, the shriek of a stray cat.

  The men are waiting outside: three soldiers and a colonel. We know who tipped them off, and we understand – Abhik Lee is a good player to have on your side.

  This time they leave nothing to chance. Two men have grabbed Remy by the arms, a third snapping the handcuffs on, and before he can tut and say, “So it goes,” they bundle him into a car and rush him through the empty, grubby streets. They take him to a house above a canal, bundle him up three flights of stairs, push the door open to reveal a room where the slowly rising light of dawn now creeps across the floor in perfectly defined squares, showing a desk, a chair, a bed, an oil lamp burning down. They sit him in the chair, and from the room next door the sound of water in a bowl rises, sloshes, ceases.

  They wait.

  Abhik Lee dries his face, his hands, the side and back of his neck with a towel, and steps at last into the room. He wears a waistcoat and long shirt sleeves, a watch hooked in his pocket, the chain slung across his tight belly. Perhaps he slept like that? How, Remy wonders, did he avoid crinkles?

  “You did well, Remy,” he says, reaching forward to touch the side of Remy’s bruised face. “Better than I thought you would.”

  “Thank you.”

  Abhik hesitates, his fingers hovering above Remy’s skin. Then he lets his hand drop, brushing his enemy’s sleeve, his arm, squeezing tight a moment against the bruises along the bone, hard enough to make Remy flinch, before gently letting go. He turns away from his prisoner, straightening his tie, and as he examines himself in the mirror breathes softly, “Tag. You’re it.”

  Chapter 40

  They gave Remy three days’ grace.

  Time to heal, they said.

  On the third day, he was given his deck of hands.

  Majors, the wives of ministers, a handful of priests, some nuns, a couple of traders, a medley of spies, a hunter from South Africa, a tracker from Nepal, a good hand, no doubt, a decent collection of pieces to play, but not nearly good enough.

  He wondered then what Silver would say.

  (He would smile and say nothing at all. Remy has not seen Abhik’s hand but he has sensed its power, and senses now perhaps that the cards he holds, the randomly shuffled, randomly dealt cards, are bad. If they were random at all.)

  He smiled at the umpire who delivered them to him and said, “Thank you very much.”

  The umpire’s face was invisible, hidden behind her veil as she walked away.

  On the fourth day, he summoned two of his pieces – a Bengali soldier, famed for having first killed then fallen in love with the great mountain tigers – and a Bangkok gangster, who boasted that his cousin owned all of Hong Kong and had dealt opium to Queen Victoria herself! The thief had a car; the soldier had a gun. Together, they went to the Gameshouse.

  The umpire stood outside to wait with them until the allotted time. They lounged on the bonnet of the car, chewing tendrils of squid until twelve p.m. struck, at which point Remy put his watch away, slipped into the passenger seat and said, “I’m thinking about a show.”

  They went to the cinema. When the national anthem played, the entire audience rose in solemnity and stood again when newsreel footage showed the king inspecting some general’s latest triumph.

  We, servants of his great majesty,

  Prostrate our hearts and heads,

  To pay respect to the ruler, whose merits are boundless,

  Outstanding in the great Chakri dynasty,

  The greatest of Siam.

  …May it be that whatever you will be done,

  According to the hopes of your great heart,

  As we wish you victory, hurrah!

  When the film was done, Remy looked at his watch again and, tutting, said, “How about temple?”

  They went to Pathum Wanaram, assured by the thief that it was out of the way enough to be quiet, but royal enough to be majestic. The soldier stayed outside, refusing to enter the grounds of a place so ornate and contrary to his faith. The thief galloped in, bounded up the steps two at a time, bought a great handful of incense and prostrated himself before every monk and icon he saw. Remy watched a crowd saluting the ashes of a long-dead king, sat a while by the roaring mouth of a kylin, a half-dragon, half-lion which guarded this royal place, heard the beating of the gong and watched the shadows stretch and said at last, “Wasn’t that nice? Let’s have some supper.”

  They ate prawns and fried fish, octopus legs and crinkled green cabbage purchased from a vendor by the river, who swore that his father was the greatest fisherman of the bay, and had once caught a shark bigger than his boat which took three days to die even after it was hooked and harpooned and dragged to land.

  “It didn’t die even on land?” asked Remy politely.

  “No! It only died when my mother cut its heart out, still beating, and threw it back into the sea! True story!”

  All the truest stories, we knew, ended with these sacred words.

  When the sun was down, and they’d washed the oil and grease of their fishy meal from their hands, the thief said, enthused by the adventure that the day had begun:

  “Where next, sir?”

  The soldier sighed, and at Remy’s expression shrugged and said, “I was brought here to hunt.”

  “How many hours has it been since the hunt began?”

  “Nine, ten?”

  “That should be long enough,” he replied, and turning to the thief, “Take me to the Gameshouse.”

  Chapter 41

  Again, the silver doors; again, the sound of music.

  Again, the rolling of the dice; again, the laughter of strangers who will never really be friends, not truly, not while they play the game.

  Heads turn as Remy enters, his soldier in tow, the thief left with the car.

  “He can’t come in here,” says the umpire guarding the gateway to the halls of the higher league.

  “He is a piece, and I am a player,” replies Remy firmly. “We are playing a game.”
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  The umpire hesitates, then nods, and the two of them go in.

  Through the halls, heads turn, people stare; we move past the lives that are being made, the dreams that are being broken, the wonders won, the lives lost, the battle of mind against mind, brute intelligence and skill; governments fall, empires turn; this is the Gameshouse, where humanity is a symbol, the world an object – come and play if you dare; come into the Gameshouse.

  A smaller wooden door at the back, a darkened stair heading up. Usually it is guarded but as Remy approaches, the umpire stands back because the umpires – why, they enforce the rules of the game, and Remy is a player, the game goes on, on, yay even up this dark flight of stairs where usually only the umpires go, up and up too many floors, we think, for this house, too many doors leading to either side but Remy keeps going, knows in his belly where to go, up towards the place where the Gamesmaster, so beautiful though she is lost in white, so beautiful, until she became what she is, up even there to where the Gamesmaster resides, ruler of the house, lady of the game.

  The umpire pushes back the door without Remy needing to knock, and he enters a room hung with silks, all whites and silvers, obscuring furniture, obscuring shape or size, but not obscuring him.

  Abhik Lee, sitting by a writing desk of red lacquer. He turns as the door opens, mouth opening, perhaps to give some command, ask some favour, but as he turns, he sees, and his mouth widens, pen and paper fall from his fingers to the floor.

  Abhik Lee.

  “Tag,” says Remy, catching him by the arm. “You’re it.”

  Chapter 42

  The soldier stood outside.

  Remy stood within.

  Abhik sat, frozen by the moment, still in his chair, papers at his feet, a crystal beaker of water half consumed by his elbow.

  Neither man spoke.

  Then Remy said, “Your side of the wager was twenty years. When you pay the forfeit, you will be an old man. Your mind will wither as well as your body. It will be a difficult loss for you to come back from. I once lost fifteen years in a match in Poland, and I nearly died while trying to claw them back. I will release you from this forfeit, spare you this death – and, I think, given how this game has gone, it will be death – if you answer some simple questions.”