The Windup Girl Read online

  Hock Seng tugs at a lucky mole, thoughtful. A good monopoly, that. The Dung Lord's influence touches so many parts of the city, it's a wonder that he hasn't been made Prime Minister. Certainly, if he wanted it, the godfather of godfathers, the greatest jao por to ever influence the Kingdom could have anything he wanted.

  But will he want what I have to offer? Hock Seng wonders. Will he appreciate a good business opportunity?

  Mai's voice finally filters up from underneath, interrupting his ruminations. "It's cracked!" she shouts. A moment later she claws her way out of the hole, dripping sweat and covered with dust. Nu and Pom and the rest release their hemp ropes. The spindle crashes back into its cradle and the floor shakes.

  Mai glances behind her at the noise. Hock Seng thinks he catches a glimpse of fear, the realization that the spindle could have truly crushed her. The look is gone as quickly as it came. A resilient child.

  "Yes?" Hock Seng asks. "Go on? Is it the core that has split?"

  "Yes, Khun, I can slide my hand into the crack this far." She shows him, touching her hand nearly at her wrist. "And another on the far side, just the same."

  "Tamade," Hock Seng curses. He's not surprised, but still. "And the chain drive?"

  She shakes her head. "The links I could see were bent."

  He nods. "Get Lin and Lek and Chuan—"

  "Chuan is dead." She waves toward the smears where the megodont trampled two workers.

  Hock Seng grimaces. "Yes of course." Along with Noi and Kapiphon and unfortunate Banyat the QA man who will never now hear Mr. Anderson's irritation that he allowed line contamination in the algae baths. Another expense. A thousand baht to the dead workers' families and two thousand for Banyat. He grimaces again. "Find someone else then, someone small from the cleaning gang like you. You will be going underground. Pom and Nu and Kukrit, get the spindle out. All the way out. We will need to inspect the main drive system, link by link. We cannot even consider starting again until it has been checked."

  "What's the rush?" Pom laughs. "It will be a long time before we run again. The farang will have to pay the union bags and bags of opium before they're willing to come back. Not after he gunned down Hapreet."

  "When they do return, we won't have Number Four Spindle," Hock Seng snaps. "It will take time to win an approval from the crown to cut another tree of this diameter, and then to float the log down from the North—assuming the monsoon comes at all this year—and all that time we will be running under constrained power. Think about that. Some of you will not be working at all." He nods at the spindle. "The ones who work hardest will be the ones who stay."

  Pom smiles apologetically, hiding his anger, and wais. "Khun, I was loose with my words. I meant no offense."

  "Good then." Hock Seng nods and turns away. He keeps his face sour, but privately, he agrees. It will take opium and bribes and a renegotiation of their power contract before the megodonts once again make their shuffling revolutions around the spindle cranks. Another red item for the balance sheets. And it doesn't even include the cost of the monks who will need to chant, or the Brahmin priests, or the feng shui experts, or the mediums who must consult with the phii so that workers will be placated and continue working in this bad luck factory—

  "Tan Xiansheng!"

  Hock Seng looks up from his calculations. Across the floor, the yang guizi Anderson Lake is sitting on a bench beside the workers' lockers, a doctor tending his wounds. At first, the foreign devil wanted to have her sew him upstairs, but Hock Seng convinced him to do it down on the factory floor, in public, where the workers could see him, with his white tropical suit covered with blood like a phii out of a graveyard, but still alive at least. And unafraid. A lot of face to be gained from that. The foreigner is fearless.

  The man drinks from a bottle of Mekong whiskey that he sent Hock Seng out to buy as if Hock Seng was nothing more than a servant. Hock Seng sent Mai, who came back with a bottle of fake Mekong with an adequate label and enough change to spare that he tipped her a few baht extra for her cleverness, while looking into her eyes and saying, "Remember that I did this for you."

  In a different life, he would have believed that he had bought a little loyalty when she nodded solemnly in response. In this life, he only hopes that she will not immediately try to kill him if the Thais suddenly turn on his kind and decide to send the yellow card Chinese all fleeing into the blister rusted jungle. Perhaps he has bought himself a little time. Or not.

  As he approaches, Doctor Chan calls out in Mandarin, "Your foreign devil is a stubborn one. Always moving around."

  She's a yellow card, like him. Another refugee forbidden from feeding herself except by wits and clever machinations. If the white shirts discovered she was taking rice from a Thai doctor's bowl. . . . He stifles the thought. It's worth it to help someone from the homeland, even if it is only for a day. An atonement of sorts for all that has gone before.

  "Please try to keep him alive." Hock Seng smiles slightly. "We still need him to sign our pay stubs."

  She laughs. "Ting mafan. I'm rusty with a needle and thread, but for you, I'd bring this ugly creature back from the dead."

  "If you're that good, I'll call for you when I catch cibiscosis."

  The yang guizi interjects in English, "What's she complaining about?"

  Hock Seng eyes him. "You move about too much."

  "She's damn clumsy. Tell her to hurry up."

  "She also says you are very very lucky. Another centimeter difference and the splinter cuts your artery. Then your blood is on the floor with all the rest."

  Surprisingly, Mr. Lake smiles at this news. His eyes go to the mountain of meat being rendered down. "A splinter. And I thought it was the megodont that was going to get me."

  "Yes. You nearly died," Hock Seng says. And that would have been disastrous. If Mr. Lake's investors were to lose heart and give up the factory. . . Hock Seng grimaces. It is so much harder to influence this yang guizi than Mr. Yates, and yet this stubborn foreign devil must be kept alive, if only so that the factory will not close.

  It's an irritating realization, that he was once so close to Mr. Yates, and now so far from Mr. Lake. Bad luck and a stubborn yang guizi, and now he must come up with a new plan to cement his long-term survival and the revival of his clan.

  "You should celebrate your survival, I think," Hock Seng suggests. "Make offerings to Kuan Yin and Budai for your very good luck."

  Mr. Lake grins, his pale blue eyes on Hock Seng. Twin watery devil pools. "You're damn right I will." He holds up the bottle of fake Mekong, already half gone. "I'll be celebrating all night long."

  "Perhaps you would like me to arrange a companion?"

  The foreign devil's face turns to stone. He looks at Hock Seng with something akin to disgust. "That's not your business."

  Hock Seng curses himself, even as he keeps his face immobile. He has apparently pushed too far, and now the creature is angry again. He makes a quick wai of apology. "Of course. I do not mean to insult you."

  The yang guizi looks out across the factory floor. The pleasure of the moment seems drained from him "How bad is the damage?"

  Hock Seng shrugs. "You are right about the spindle core. It is cracked."

  "And the main chain?"

  "We will inspect every link. If we are lucky, it will only be the sub-train that is affected."

  "Not likely." The foreign devil offers him the whiskey bottle. Hock Seng tries to hide his revulsion as he shakes his head. Mr. Lake grins knowingly and takes another pull. Wipes his lips on the back of his arm.

  A new shout rises from the union's butchers as more blood gushes from the megodont. Its head lies at an angle now, half-severed from the rest of the body. More and more, the carcass is taking on the appearance of separated parts. Not an animal at all, more a child's play set for building a megodont from the ground up.

  Hock Seng wonders if there is a way to force the union to cut him in on the profits they get from selling the untainted meat. It seems u
nlikely, given how quickly they staked out their space, but perhaps when their power contract is renegotiated, or when they demand their reparations.

  "Will you take the head?" Hock Seng asks. "You can make a trophy of it."

  "No." The yang guizi looks offended.

  Hock Seng forces himself not to grimace. It's maddening to work with the creature. The devil's moods are mercurial, and always aggressive. Like a child. One moment joyful, the next petulant. Hock Seng forces down his irritation; Mr. Lake is what he is. His karma has made him a foreign devil, and Hock Seng's karma has brought them together. It's no use complaining about the quality of U-Tex when you are starving.

  Mr. Lake seems to catch Hock Seng's expression and explains himself. "This wasn't a hunt. It was just an extermination. As soon as I hit it with the darts, it was dead. There's no sport in that."

  "Ah. Of course. Very honorable." Hock Seng stifles his disappointment. With the foreign devil demanding the head, he could have replaced the stumpy tusk remainders with coconut oil composites and sold the ivory to the doctors near Wat Boworniwet. Now, even that money will be gone. A waste. Hock Seng considers explaining the situation to Mr. Lake, explaining the value of meat and calories and ivory lying before them, then decides against it. The foreign devil would not understand, and the man is too easy to anger as it is.

  "The cheshires are here," Mr. Lake comments.

  Hock Seng looks to where the yang guizi indicates. At the periphery of the bloodletting, shimmering feline shapes have appeared; twists of shadow and light summoned by the carrion scent. The yang guizi makes a face of distaste, but Hock Seng has a measure of respect for the devil cats. They are clever, thriving in places where they are despised. Almost supernatural in their tenacity. Sometimes it seems that they smell blood before it is even spilled. As if they can peer a little way into the future and know precisely where their next meal will appear. The feline shimmers stealth toward the sticky pools of blood. A butcher kicks one away, but there are too many to really fight, and his attack is desultory.

  Mr. Lake takes another pull of whiskey. "We'll never get them out."

  "There are children who will hunt them," Hock Seng says. "A bounty is not expensive."

  The yang guizi makes a face of dismissal. "We have bounties back in the Midwest, too."

  Our children are more motivated than yours.

  But Hock Seng doesn't contest the foreigner's words. He'll put out the bounty, regardless. If the cats are allowed to stay, the workers will start rumors that Phii Oun the cheshire trickster spirit has caused the calamity. The devil cats flicker closer. Calico and ginger, black as night—all of them fading in and out of view as their bodies take on the colors of their surroundings. They shade red as they dip into the blood pool.

  Hock Seng has heard that cheshires were supposedly created by a calorie executive—some PurCal or AgriGen man, most likely—for a daughter's birthday. A party favor for when the little princess turned as old as Lewis Carroll's Alice.

  The child guests took their new pets home where they mated with natural felines, and within twenty years, the devil cats were on every continent and Felis domesticus was gone from the face of the world, replaced by a genetic string that bred true ninety-eight percent of the time. The Green Headbands in Malaya hated Chinese people and cheshires equally, but as far as Hock Seng knows, the devil cats still thrive there.

  The yang guizi flinches as Doctor Chan sticks him again and he gives her a dirty look. "Finish up," he says to her. "Now."

  She wais carefully, hiding her fear. "He moved again," she whispers to Hock Seng. "The anesthetic is not good. Not as good as what I am used to."

  "Don't worry." Hock Seng replies. "That's why I gave him the whiskey. Finish your work. I will deal with him." To Lake Xiansheng he says, "She is almost finished."

  The foreigner makes a face but doesn't threaten her anymore, and at last the doctor completes her sewing. Hock Seng takes her aside and hands her an envelope with her payment. She wais her thanks but Hock Seng shakes his head. "There is a bonus in it. I wish you to deliver a letter as well." He hands her another envelope. "I would like to speak with the boss of your tower."

  "Dog Fucker?" She makes a face of distaste.

  "If he heard you call him that, he'd destroy whatever is left of your family."

  "He's a hard one."

  "Just deliver the note. That will be enough."

  Doubtfully, she takes the envelope. "You've been good to our family. All the neighbors also speak of your kindness. Make offerings to your. . . loss."

  "What I do is too little." Hock Seng forces a smile. "Anyway, we Chinese must stick together. Perhaps in Malaya we were still Hokkien, or Hakka or Fifth Wave, but here we are all yellow cards. I am embarrassed I cannot do more."

  "It is more than anyone else." She wais to him, emulating the manners of their new culture, and departs.

  Mr. Lake watches her go. "She's a yellow card, isn't she?"

  Hock Seng nods. "Yes. A doctor in Malacca. Before the Incident."

  The man is quiet, seeming to digest this information. "Was she cheaper than a Thai doctor?"

  Hock Seng glances at the yang guizi, trying to decide what he wants to hear. Finally he says, "Yes. Much cheaper. Just as good. Maybe better. But much cheaper. They do not allow us to take Thai niches here. So she has very little work except for yellow cards—who of course have too little to pay. She is happy for the work."

  Mr. Lake nods thoughtfully and Hock Seng wonders what he is thinking. The man is an enigma. Sometimes, Hock Seng thinks yang guizi are too stupid to have possibly taken over the world once, let alone twice. That they succeeded in the Expansion and then—even after the energy collapse beat them back to their own shores—that they returned again, with their calorie companies and their plagues and their patented grains. . . They seem protected by the supernatural. By rights, Mr. Lake should be dead, a bit of human offal mingled with the bodies of Banyat and Noi and the nameless stupid Number Four Spindle megodont handler who caused the beast to panic in the first place. And yet here the foreign devil sits, complaining about the tiny prick of a needle, but completely unconcerned that he has destroyed a ten-ton animal in the blink of an eye. The yang guizi are strange creatures indeed. More alien than he suspected, even when he traded with them regularly.

  "The mahout will have to be paid off again. Bribed to come back to work," Hock Seng observes.

  "Yes."

  "And we will have to hire monks to chant for the factory. To make the workers happy again. Phii must be placated." Hock Seng pauses. "It will be expensive. People will say that your factory has bad spirits in it. That it is sited wrong, or that the spirit house is not large enough. Or that you cut down a phii's tree when it was built. We will have to bring a fortune teller, perhaps a feng shui master to get them to believe the place is good. And then the mahout will demand hazard pay—"

  Mr. Lake interrupts. "I want to replace the mahout," he says. "All of them."

  Hock Seng sucks air through his teeth. "It is impossible. The Megodont Union controls all of the city's power contracts. It is a government mandate. The white shirts award the power monopoly. There is nothing we can do about the unions."

  "They're incompetent. I don't want them here. Not anymore."

  Hock Seng tries to tell if the farang is joking. He smiles hesitantly. "It is Royal Mandate. One might as well wish to replace the Environment Ministry."

  "There's a thought." Mr. Lake laughs. "I could team up with Carlyle & Sons and start complaining every day about taxes and carbon credit laws. Get Trade Minister Akkarat to take up our cause." His gaze rests on Hock Seng. "But that's not the way you like to operate, is it?" His eyes become abruptly cold. "You like the shadows and the bargaining. The quiet deal."

  Hock Seng swallows. The foreign devil's pale skin and blue eyes are truly horrific. As alien as a devil cat, and just as comfortable in a hostile land. "It would be unwise to enrage the white shirts." Hock Seng murmurs. "The nail that stands
up will be pounded down."

  "That's yellow card talk."

  "As you say. But I am alive when others are dead, and the Environment Ministry is very powerful. General Pracha and his white shirts have survived every challenge. Even the December 12 attempt. If you wish to poke at a cobra, be ready for its bite."

  Mr. Lake looks as if he will argue, but instead shrugs. "I'm sure you know best."

  "It is why you pay me."

  The yang guizi stares at the dead megodont. "That animal shouldn't have been able to break out of its harness." He takes another drink from his bottle. "The safety chains were rusted; I checked. We aren't going to pay a cent of reparations. That's final. That's my bottom line. If they had secured their animal, I wouldn't have had to kill it."

  Hock Seng inclines his head in tacit agreement, though he will not speak it out loud. "Khun, there is no other option."

  Mr. Lake smiles coldly. "Yes, of course. They're a monopoly." He makes a face. "Yates was a fool to locate here."

  Hock Seng experiences a chill of anxiety. The yang guizi suddenly looks like a petulant child. Children are rash. Children do things to anger the white shirts or the unions. And sometimes they pick up their toys and run away home. A disturbing thought indeed. Anderson Lake and his investors must not run away. Not yet.

  "What are our losses, to date?" Mr. Lake asks.

  Hock Seng hesitates, then steels himself to deliver bad news. "With the loss of the megodont, and now the cost of placating the unions? Ninety million baht, perhaps?"