The Windup Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

tomorrow." Hock Seng makes a face that resembles a grin. "They are not like we Chinese. They are lazy."

    "Did you actually pay the bribes? The Trade Ministry was supposed to get a cut, to pass on to their pet white shirt inspector."

    "I paid them."

    "Enough?"

    Hock Seng looks up, eyes narrowed. "I paid."

    "You didn't pay half and keep half for yourself?"

    Hock Seng laughs nervously. "Of course I paid everything."

    Anderson studies the yellow card a moment longer, trying to determine his honesty, then gives up and tosses down the papers. He isn't even sure why he cares, but it galls him that the old man thinks he can be fooled so easily. He glances again at the sack of ngaw . Perhaps Hock Seng senses just how secondary the factory is. . . He forces the thought away and presses the old man again. "Tomorrow then?"

    Hock Seng inclines his head. "I think this is most likely."

    "I'll look forward to it."

    Hock Seng doesn't respond to the sarcasm. Anderson wonders if it even translates. The man speaks English with an extraordinary facility, but every so often they reach an impasse of language that seems more rooted in culture than vocabulary.

    Anderson returns to the paperwork. Tax forms here. Paychecks there. The workers cost twice as much as they should. Another problem of dealing with the Kingdom. Thai workers for Thai jobs. Yellow card refugees from Malaya are starving in the street, and he can't hire them. By rights, Hock Seng should be out in the job lines starving with all the other survivors of the Incident. Without his specialized skills in language and accountancy and Yates' indulgence, he would be starving.

    Anderson pauses on a new envelope. It's posted to him, personally, but true to form the seal is broken. Hock Seng has a hard time respecting the sanctity of other people's mail. They've discussed the problem repeatedly, but still the old man makes "mistakes."

    Inside the envelope, Anderson finds a small invitation card. Raleigh, proposing a meeting.

    Anderson taps the invitation card against his desk, thoughtful. Raleigh. Flotsam of the old Expansion. An ancient piece of driftwood left at high tide, from the time when petroleum was cheap and men and women crossed the globe in hours instead of weeks.

    When the last of the jumbo jets rumbled off the flooded runways of Suvarnabhumi, Raleigh stood knee-deep in rising seawater and watched them flee. He squatted with his girlfriends and then outlived them and then claimed new ones, forging a life of lemongrass and baht and fine opium. If his stories are to be believed, he has survived coups and counter-coups, calorie plagues and starvation. These days, the old man squats like a liver-spotted toad in his Ploenchit "club," smiling in self-satisfaction as he instructs newly arrived foreigners in the lost arts of pre-Contraction debauch.

    Anderson tosses the card on the desk. Whatever the old man's intentions, the invitation is innocuous enough. Raleigh hasn't lived this long in the Kingdom without developing a certain paranoia of his own. Anderson smiles slightly, glancing up at Hock Seng. The two would make a fine pair: two uprooted souls, two men far from their homelands, each of them surviving by their wits and paranoia. . .

    "If you are doing nothing other than watching me work," Hock Seng says, "the Megodont Union is requesting a renegotiation of their rates."

    Anderson regards the expenses piled on his desk. "I doubt they're so polite."

    Hock Seng's pen pauses. "The Thai are always polite. Even when they threaten."

    The megodont on the floor below screams again.

    Anderson gives Hock Seng a significant look. "I guess that gives you a bargaining chip when it comes to getting rid of the Number Four mahout . Hell, maybe I just won't pay them anything at all until they get rid of that bastard."

    "The union is powerful."

    Another scream shakes the factory, making Anderson flinch. "And stupid!" He glances toward the observation windows. "What the hell