Part 10 (1/2)
Shortly they agreed on a price. It was steep but not ruinous-notwithstanding what Roux was going to say-but Annja figured that if she was going to hire somebody, she might as well get the best available. Patty seemed to be that, so Annja was willing to pony up.
”All right, then,” Patty said when they settled. ”You have yourself an official photographer. How about the rest of the team?”
”At the minimum,” Annja said, ”and I want to keep this minimal, for reasons I'm sure you understand-”
Patty nodded. Annja took the risks attendant to crossing a sealed border between two overmilitarized and adrenalized Southeast Asian states very seriously, even if Ruhle didn't believe she did. In this case it was the world-wise veteran who didn't know what she was dealing with, not the fresh-faced newbie.
”I want an area specialist, an anthropologist who knows the people and cultures of the ground we're going to cover. And we need a guide. Preferably somebody who's not a stranger to border crossing himself. Or herself,” Annja said.
Ruhle nodded. ”The guide I can't help you with-the best man I know for this region died two years ago of acute lead poisoning because he got a little fly around an ethnic army in Myanmar. The second best is doing hard time since the Thais caught him being a little too familiar with informal border crossing, if you get my drift. But as for an anthropologist with regional cred, I have just the man for you. He's got all the integrity in the world, he's on a first-name basis with half the tribes between here and the Himalayas and he's got an A-1 international rep. Plus he's available and in the area, as of a couple days ago.”
It was Annja's turn to narrow her eyes. ”Do I hear an unspoken 'but' here, Patty?”
”With two t ts,” Ruhle said. ”He is the best. But he can be, well, a total a.s.shole. Not to put too fine an edge on it.”
16.
”Are you sure this guy is the best?” Annja asked. She wore a cheap straw tourist hat. When she wore hats she generally wore cheap ones. They never seemed to last with her.
Patty nodded resolutely. She didn't have a hat. ”And anyway, if anyone's gonna be able to find us a halfway decent guide, he's it.”
Annja peered dubiously into the shade of the hut. It was hard to penetrate with eyes accustomed to the noonday sun's blaze.
”He looks,” she said, ”stoned.”
”Probably,” Ruhle said.
A bus had brought them most of the way to this village in the Chao Phraya swamps half a day's journey outside Bangkok. It was a yellow bus with twisty Thai characters painted all over it in maroon and blue. It was also perilously tall for the narrow wheelbase. The balance issues weren't addressed-or not in any favorable way-by the crates and hampers all lashed on top.
It was nothing too unusual for Annja. Local accents differentiated it from other buses she'd ridden in around the world, such as the distinctive, somewhat astringent Thai music tinkling from tinny speakers hung from the ceiling on brightly colored ribbons. But on the whole it was much like other Third World buses. Including the fact that the driver drove as fast as road conditions would allow, and usually a bit faster.
Since their destination lay well and truly out in the boonies, away from Thailand's more or less modern highway system, Annja wound up with a sore b.u.t.t and a feeling as if her spine had been pounded shorter by eight inches from the bad road and worse shocks.
They stood several hundred yards from a stream meandering to join the Chao Phraya a few miles away. The hut was raised up on stilts about three feet off the ground. That didn't suggest a great deal of confidence in the creek keeping to its banks if the rains came, though fortunately the monsoon proper was over, tailing off into occasional slamming rains.
The hut stood open to a thatch roof supported by joists lashed together with tight rope windings. Long rolled screens were hung just below it to keep the weather out in storms. Annja didn't have much confidence in them, either, but she had to reckon the locals knew best. Probably they were as fatalistic about their weather as she was about their rural public transport. Anyway it didn't look like rain anytime soon.
In the hut eight men sat cross-legged, naked to the waist. She thought one of them was paler and taller than the rest, but it wasn't easy to tell. As she was standing in the sun, her eyes weren't going to get any more adjusted to the shade inside. The men swayed side to side, crooning in low, nasally, melodic tones as they pa.s.sed a bowl from hand to hand.
”You're kidding, right?” Annja said optimistically.
Patty shook her head. ”Nope. That's one of the reasons Phil gets along so well with the tribal types-he joins in their rituals.”
”Which tend to involve consuming mind-altering substances,” Annja said.
”Don't they all?”
As with a lot of such rituals, Annja suspected this was really all just another dodge for the men to get away from the womenfolk for a while, in default of bars.
Not that these village men had gone to any great lengths to escape their women. The hut stood on the outskirts of the tiny village. But a number of women sat on the steps up to other huts and on mats on the ground nearby, smoking pipes and chopping vegetables or weaving more mats from long river gra.s.ses. They showed no more interest in the men than they did the lines of ants flowing everywhere like rivers of tiny gleaming bodies.
The day wore on. The heat pressed down on Annja like an anvil. Lizards rustled in the roof thatch, hunting bugs. Birds chirped and fussed in the forest nearby. Chickens strutted about importantly, pecking at the ants. Little children, naked or half-naked, peered wide eyed at the funny-looking foreign women from behind the struts holding up huts nearby, and fled giggling when either glanced their way.
The gathering broke up. The men ceased their ritualistic moaning. They began talking in normal tones, punctuated with bursts of high-pitched, t.i.ttery laughter. Annja didn't know if that was an effect of whatever herbal decoction they had been pa.s.sing around or just the way people laughed hereabouts.
Several stood unsteadily. One unfolded himself to a greater height than the rest. Annja could now see his narrow torso was noticeably paler than the other men's. He took a s.h.i.+rt from a peg where it hung, pulled it on as he turned and came unsteadily down the wooden stairs to the ground.
He had dark brown receding hair, sharply handsome features behind a neat beard, blue eyes that under other circ.u.mstances might have pierced but were now notably muddy. He swayed on reaching the level earth, packed hard by many bare feet since the last rain. He noticed the Western women and walked toward them with immense dignity.
”Ladies,” he said. Then he turned aside, doubled over and vomited into the black dirt.
”SO,” ANNJA SAID, WALKING along the gra.s.sy bank beside a stream black with tannin from decomposing plants, ”fill me in a bit on your background, if you will.”
She kept a part of her consciousness c.o.c.ked for some of Southeast Asia's many noted species of venomous serpents. She'd heard they could get pretty aggressive.
For a man who'd been barfing not fifteen minutes before, and still wore his white s.h.i.+rt with tan vertical stripes open over a washboard chest, Dr. Philip Kennedy walked beside her with great dignity. It spoke well for his presence of mind, anyway, Annja thought.
”I was born in a whitebread suburb north of Boston,” he said. ”My father was a dentist. My mother was a terribly socially conscious housewife.”
For a man who wore his leftist political views on his sleeves, and not infrequently let them fall off onto his academic publications, he didn't seem respectful of his mother's liberal activism, or so it seemed to Annja. She had researched him online in her hotel room before heading out before dawn on the hair-raising bus ride. She wanted to hear his account in his own words, and make sure it squared with his published bio. Also she had some questions.
Maybe his famed disdain for all things Western was coming out. Or maybe he was working through some other issues, she thought.
”I got an academic scholars.h.i.+p to Harvard-a terrible waste of resources, given my upper-middle-cla.s.s background. Typical. My undergrad was in Southeast Asian social anthropology through the East Asia center. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii.”
”I understand you spent some time here in Southeast Asia as an undergrad,” she said. He must have known Patty Ruhle would have told Annja something about him. They had left the red-haired woman snapping photos of the village. To keep her hand in, she said-and also because there was no telling what a professional with her contacts could sell somewhere along the line. Annja was not going to lie to him and pretend she hadn't looked him up. But she wasn't going to volunteer it, either.
Philip nodded. His beard was streaked gray down both sides. His temples were also silvered. The gray and even the way his hair was getting a little thin to the sides of his forehead only made him look distinguished. Annja couldn't see Kennedy coloring his hair or using any of those baldness cures they advertised on television. She suspected the very fierceness of his disdain for such vanities was part of an att.i.tudinal package that helped him pull the whole thing off.
He was actually a fairly handsome man in a weather-beaten way.
”I did,” he said. ”In fact I worked with tribes in the very area of Burma you say you're interested in. I became fascinated with the region because of an early interest in Hinduism and Buddhism.”
What Annja had read indicated he had established a reputation as an utterly intrepid field researcher with a gift for the difficult Thai family of languages spoken throughout Thailand and Burma. He had also made a name for himself for the ease with which he won the confidence of tribesfolk. Centuries of threats and oppression by heavy-handed neighbors, European colonialists and the j.a.panese, followed in many places by virtually continuous guerrilla warfare at varying levels of intensity, had given little reason to trust outsiders of any flavor.
”That's good,” she said. ”So, uh, what was going on back there with the chanting and the puking?”
”Oh, we were simply sharing a local entheogen.”
”A what?” Annja asked.
”It's a psychoactive compound used in shamanic rituals. This one's an alkaloid derived from plants. Probably fly agaric.”