The Windup Girl

26

Hock Seng crouches in an alley just outside the farang manufacturing district. It’s night, but still there are white shirts everywhere. Everywhere he goes, he finds cordons of uniforms. On the quays, clipper ships sit isolated, waiting for permission to unload cargo. In the factory district, Ministry officers stand on every corner, preventing access for workers and owners and shopkeepers alike. Only a few people are allowed in and out, ones who show residence cards. Locals.

With only a yellow card for identification, it took Hock Seng half the evening to traverse the city, avoiding checkpoints. He misses Mai. Those young eyes and ears made him feel safe. Now he crouches with cheshires and the stink of urine, watching white shirts check another man’s identification and cursing that he is cut off from the SpringLife factory. He should have been brave. Should have simply robbed the safe when he had the chance. Should have risked everything. And now it’s too late. Now the white shirts own every inch of the city, and their favorite target is yellow cards. They like to test their batons on yellow card skulls, like to teach them lessons. If the Dung Lord didn’t have so much influence, Hock Seng is sure that the ones in the towers would already be slaughtered. The Environment Ministry sees yellow cards the same way it sees the other invasive species and plagues it manages. Given a choice, the white shirts would slaughter every yellow card Chinese and then make a khrab of apology for their over-enthusiasm to the Child Queen. But only after the fact.

A young woman shows her pass and clears the cordon. She disappears down the street, deeper into the manufacturing district. Everything is so tantalizingly close, and yet so impossibly out of reach.

Looked at objectively, it is probably best that the factory is closed. Safer for everyone. If he weren’t so dependent on the contents of the safe, he would just report the line’s infections and be done with the tamade thing entirely. And yet, in the midst of all that illness, ensconced above the miasma of the algae baths, the blueprints and specifications still beckon.

Hock Seng wants to tear out the last of his hair with frustration.

He glares at the checkpoint, willing the white shirts to go away, to look somewhere else. Wishing, praying to the goddess Kuan Yin, begging to fat gold Budai for a little luck. With those manufacturing plans and the support of the Dung Lord, so much would be possible. So much future. So much life. Offerings for his ancestors again. Perhaps a wife. Perhaps a son to carry on his name. Perhaps…

A patrol stalks past. Hock Seng eases deeper into shadow. The enforcers remind him of when the Green Headbands began patrolling at night. They started out looking for couples holding hands in the evening, displaying immorality.

At the time, he told his children to watch themselves, to understand that the tides of conservatism came and went and if they could not live as freely and openly as their parents had, well then, what of it? Didn’t they have food in their bellies and family and friends whose company they enjoyed? And within their high-walled compounds, it was irrelevant what the Green Headbands thought.

Another patrol. Hock Seng turns and slips back down the alley. There is no way to sneak into the manufacturing district. The white shirts are determined to shut down Trade and hurt the farang. He grimaces and begins the long circuitous route back through the sois toward his hovel.

Others in the Ministry were corrupt, but not Jaidee. Not if anyone is honest about the man. Even Sawatdee Krung Thep!, the whisper sheet which loved him most, and then denigrated him so completely during his disgrace, has printed pages and pages in praise of the hero of the country. Captain Jaidee was too well-loved to be cut into pieces, to be treated like offal that is dumped in methane composters. Someone must be punished.

And if Trade is to blame, then trade must be punished. So the factories are closed along with anchor pads and roads and docks, and Hock Seng cannot squeeze out. He cannot book passage on a clipper, cannot ride upriver to the ruined Ayutthaya, cannot flee on a dirigible to Kolkata or Japan.

He makes his way past the docks and, sure enough, the white shirts are still there, along with small knots of workers, squatting on the ground, idled by the blockade. A beautiful clipper ship lies anchored a hundred meters offshore, rocking gently in the water. As beautiful a clipper as he ever owned. Latest generation, switch hulls and hydrofoils, palm oil polymer, wind wings. Fast. Capable of hauling plenty of cargo. It sits out there, gleaming. And he stands on the dock, staring at it. It might as well be docked in India.

He spies a food cart, a vendor frying generipped tilapia in a deep wok. Hock Seng steels himself. He has to ask, even if he reveals himself as a yellow card. He is blind without information. With the white shirts at the other end of the dock, if the man calls out, he should still have time to flee.

Hock Seng eases close. “Is there any way of passengers crossing?” he murmurs. He tilts his head toward the clipper. “Over there?”

“No transit for anyone,” the vendor mutters.

“Not even a single man?”

The man scowls, nods at the others in the shadows, squatting and smoking cigarettes, playing at cards. Huddled around the hand-crank radio of a shop keeper. “Those ones have been there for the last week. You’ll have to wait, yellow card. Just like everyone else.”

Hock Seng fights the urge to flinch at being identified. Forces himself to pretend as if they are all equals in this, to create a hopeful fiction that the man will see him as a person, and not as some unwelcome cheshire. “You haven’t heard of small boats, further down the coast? Away from the city? For money?”

The fish vendor shakes his head. “No one’s going either way. They’ve caught two different groups of passengers trying to make their way ashore from the ships, too. The white shirts won’t even allow a resupply boat to go out. We’re betting on whether the captain will weigh anchor or the white shirts will open up first.”

“What are the odds?” Hock Seng asks.

“I’ll give you eleven to one that the clipper leaves first.”

Hock Seng makes a face. “I don’t think I’ll risk it.”

“Twenty to one, then.”

A few others seem to have been listening to the exchange. They laugh quietly. “Don’t bet unless he gives you fifty to one,” one of them says. “The white shirts aren’t going to bend. Not this time. Not with the Tiger dead.”

Hock Seng makes himself laugh with them. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it, offers more to the people around him. A small gift of good will for these Thais, for this moment of shared brotherhood. If he were not a yellow card with a yellow card accent, he might even try a gift of goodwill for the white shirts, but on a night like tonight it will earn him nothing but a baton on the skull. He has no interest in seeing his head splintered against paving stones. He smokes and studies the blockade.

Time is passing.

The idea of a sealed city makes his hands shake. This isn’t about yellow cards, he tells himself. We are not the reason for this. But he has a hard time believing a noose isn’t tightening. It might be about Trade right now, but there are too many yellow cards in the city and if trade is cut off for long, even these friendly people will begin to notice the lack of work, and then they will drink, and then they will think of the yellow cards in the towers.

The Tiger is dead. His face is on every gaslight pole. Pasted to every building. Three images of Jaidee in a fighting pose stare out from a warehouse wall even now. Hock Seng smokes his cigarette and scowls at that face. The hero of the people. The man who could not be bought, who faced down ministers and farang companies and petty businessmen. The man who was willing to fight even his own ministry. Sent to a desk job when he became too troublesome, and then put back on the street when he became even more so. The man who laughed at death threats, and survived three assassinations before the fourth felled him.

Hock Seng grimaces. The number four is everywhere in his mind these days. The Tiger of Bangkok only got four chances. How many has he himself used up? Hock Seng studies the docks and the clustered people, all unable to make their ships. With the sharpened senses of a refugee, he smells hazard in the wind, sharper than the sea air that sweeps across a clipper and presages typhoon.

The Tiger is dead. Captain Jaidee’s painted eyes stare out at Hock Seng, and Hock Seng has the sudden, horrified feeling that the Tiger is not dead. That in fact, he is hunting.

Hock Seng shies away from the poster as if it is a blister-rusted durian. He knows in his bones, knows as surely as his clan is all dead and buried in Malaya, that it’s time to run. Time to hide from tigers that hunt though the night. Time to plunge into leech-infested jungles and eat cockroaches and slither through the mud of the rainy season as it gushes in torrents. It doesn’t matter where he goes. All that matters is that it’s time to flee. Hock Seng stares out at the anchored clipper ship. Time to make hard decisions. Time, in truth, to give up on the SpringLife factory and its blueprints. Delays will only make it worse. Money must be spent. Survival secured.

This raft is sinking.