The Feiquon Heist Read online

  “My brother and I stopped talking to each other after that. He was jealous. He could see that Vilay preferred me to him. I often question how much of his anger was because I was his younger brother and was getting the attention that he wanted. Maybe he felt it was his right to choose her because he was the oldest. I’d wonder if his reaction would have been so extreme if it was one of the older boys in the village that caught her interest. But it was crazy, me and my brother were silently fighting over a girl that neither of us had the slightest claim over. Our parents didn’t help. They thought that Vilay’s family were lower class and not as well-off as ours. Vilay’s family had four girls and her parents had never had any boys. This was considered back luck, and my parents didn’t want either of their boys involved with their family. The benefits would be less than they could get elsewhere because Vilay’s family would have to provide for four daughters who would eventually live with their husband’s families, so they would have less labour to work the land. The eventual inheritance would be a much smaller scrap of land than our own family had, and it would be on the same steep-sided hillside which was so much more difficult to farm rice. At the start of that harvest season, we went to sleep in the fields, as we did every year, to protect the crop and harvest the rice as it became ready. My father told us to build a small temporary hut out of bamboo on high stilts, so we could sleep there and use the vantage point to keep watch over the fields. Imagine, two brothers trying to coordinate building a thing like that without speaking a word to each other. It was terrible. I loved Vilay, but I loved my brother too. We’d grown up so close together, playing, working on the farm, making mischief. As we put the final piece of thatched roof on the top of our bamboo sentry post, my brother finally spoke to me. ‘I will get her, you know I will,’ he said. ‘She may like you more but I’m the older brother. I will marry first, our father will expect this, and I will make sure I get both ours and Vilay’s parents’ consent. You’ll have to watch her marry me and live with it.’ I was furious. I was a kid with mixed-up emotions. I’d not shared two words with my brother for months, and now this. ‘I hate you,’ I cried, and charged at him with all my strength and anger. Grappling, we fell through the makeshift side of the look-out hut and tumbled all the way to the ground. I staggered to my feet, ready to fight my brother and take whatever punishment he could give. He was bigger than me, and no one at school had ever been brave enough to take him on, but I didn’t care. In that moment I was ready to take a beating if that was what it took to sort this out. And as I stood there, fists clenched, trembling with adrenalin, I looked down at my brother. He just lay there, motionless. I kicked his legs and yelled at him to get up and fight me. But there was nothing. I bent over him to see what was wrong. Blood was coming from his head where he had landed on a large rock. I tried to sit him up and his head fell back; his neck was broken.

  “I wept. The last thing I’d said to my brother was that I’d hated him. Now he was dead. I’d killed him. I sat there for a while, holding him. Maybe he was just unconscious. I couldn’t believe he was really dead. He’d come round again and everything would be all right. But he didn’t. The sun was getting lower in the sky, and we would be expected home soon, so I climbed back up the ladder to the look-out hut and quickly replaced the broken bamboo. Then I carried my brother’s body down in the forest by the stream. I returned to the hut, took the bamboo ladder that was against the side and laid it up against a tree near the stream. Somehow, I found the strength to pull my brother’s body up the ladder. I heaved with all the energy I could find, and eventually got high enough to where there was a fork in the trunk of the tree. I made sure the body wouldn’t fall and then I left him there. I didn’t want to bury him. I was too scared. Somehow I still believed that he was going to wake up and everything would be all right. It was dark by now. I washed my brother’s blood from my hands and my shirt in the stream. Then I put the ladder back against the hut and started to walk up through the tracks and back to the village. I told my mother that I’d not seen my brother Somveat all afternoon, and so decided that I should stay and eat in the house rather than be alone in the fields. She was so annoyed that Somveat hadn’t stayed with me. She was annoyed with both of us. She knew we weren’t talking to each other, so she assumed that we’d not been together on account of our feud.

  “The next morning, as there was still no sign of my brother, before breakfast my father and my two uncles went to the farm to look for him. They reached the fields where the hut was and saw the blood on the rock where my brother’s head had cracked open. They asked me about it but I said nothing. More villagers joined in the search. It wasn’t long before my uncle’s hunting dogs started barking at the tree in the forest near the stream, and then they found the body.

  “My father was devastated. He couldn’t look at me. My uncle asked me what happened and I told him the truth. But I’d lied the day before about what had happened and I don’t think they knew what to believe. I was brought before the village leader, and on hearing the story he said that he had to inform the police. I was arrested and taken from the village. That wasn’t the worst of it though. My family and my family’s land had become taboo. We had angered the spirits in the forest and brought bad luck on the village. Sometimes when that happened the whole village had to move to a new site in the forest and start again. The village leader and the elders held a meeting. They decided that my family would have to be banished from the village. The few buffalo that my parents owned would have to be sacrificed to order to try to calm the forest spirits and seek their absolution for the wicked act I had performed in their lands. Our family’s land was believed to have become very unlucky and no other villager was allowed to use it. The next day my parents left the village with only the possessions that they could carry. They had lost their home, their lands and their eldest son. In their minds they had also lost their second son. They never spoke to me again.”

  42. Vilay

  Salt looked up from the corner of the room and leaned back against a pile of money sacks to steady himself. Tears were streaming from his eyes.

  “I had no idea, Salt,” said Meebor.

  Meebor sat attentively, looking penitent for his previously low opinion of Mr Salt.

  “Maybe we should get you some of your coffee before we continue,” offered Kheng.

  Kheng could see the effort of telling his story had drained Mr Salt’s energy. Meebor got up, stood on the table and eased his way up into the ceiling. A few moments later he had returned with the coffee and the cups.

  Kheng took the flask from him and placed the cups on the floor, carefully pouring to make sure nothing dripped and left evidence of their entry into the bank. He passed one of the hot brews to Meebor and then another to Salt.

  “So, how did you find out about your parents and the land? Surely by then you had been taken by the authorities?” asked Kheng.

  “Vilay came to visit me in prison, later. Much later, after things had calmed down a little. She told me everything. How she had watched from under her house as my parents slowly walked out of the village, pushing an old wooden cart with their clothes and few possessions piled on, trying to get to the district town.

  “I was taken straight to the provincial town police headquarters. It was treated as murder you see. The village leader knew about the conflict between Somveat and myself. There are no secrets in a small village. So the story that was told was one of two brothers feuding over a girl, and one of the brothers, in his rage, kills the other one. Even the truth that I’d told my uncle wasn’t so far from that. In my anger I’d attacked him and he was dead. Who could prove that his death was an accident? There were no witnesses and I’d tried to cover up the deed. I was taken before the provincial magistrate, and the village leader and my uncle both had to give evidence. Even though I’d admitted to the accident, I was found guilty of murdering my brother and given a prison sentence. A few days later I was transferred from the cells in the police station and taken to a prison in t
he next province. We were used for hard labour. I was a young boy doing a man’s work on child’s rations. It was two years later that Vilay found me and persuaded the prison officers to let her see me. It was the most wonderful thing. For the first time since the accident I had hope. She believed my story and said she would wait for me, however long it took.

  “It was another nineteen years before I got out of prison. It was a long time for me. It was forever. Time stops in a place like that. It was a long time for Vilay as well. She had spent all of her young life struggling to get by without a husband to support her. She moved to the same provincial town to get unskilled work in the factory. Eventually she got some training in operating the machines and moved up the ladder a little bit. Her family didn’t want to know her any more as she was following me and I was bad luck. If she was waiting for me then she was bad luck too, and they didn’t want her back in the village for fear of angering the spirits again. Vilay and I married shortly after I was released. We had our boy a year after that and the girl a year later. We were a bit old by then to have too many kids, so two was enough.

  “So that’s the whole story. Vilay gave up everything for me, and so now I have to do everything I can to get her through this illness. The problem is, Mr Meebor, if we take all the money and I get caught, then we’ll lose each other all over again. I’m not a young man any more. I don’t have the strength any more to keep waiting for a life that’s being denied. If we take it all and then I have to go on the run, it’s like Mr Kheng says, I still won’t be with her at the hospital each day. It’ll be almost as bad.”

  Meebor nodded.

  “Fine. Don’t think I don’t know something about life in prison. I’m not in a big hurry to get back there either.”

  Kheng took a slurp of his coffee, which had now cooled sufficiently to be gulped rather than sipped.

  “So let’s agree on a compromise. How about Salt tells us how much we need to take to pay for his wife’s hospital bills. We double that number and you get to keep the other half. I don’t need anything for myself, I just need to follow this through and get Papa Han’s tree spirit out of my head.”

  Meebor looked to the ground for a moment before looking up and nodding.

  Kheng breathed a sigh of relief.

  “So then, we are agreed. Now maybe we should finally get on with this bank robbery before the sun comes up.”

  The three of them slowly got to their feet, put the plastic bags they were using as gloves back on their hands, and in a slightly more subdued manner than earlier, they made their way over to the sacks filled with money.

  43. Keys

  The front gates made their usual apologetic shudder forwards, exhaling a rusty creak from the ancient hinges as they did so. The overnight rain had done nothing to lubricate the aging joints. The mild grinding noise had become a long established phrase in the morning chorus and did not disturb the chirps of the sparrows or the heartfelt efforts of neighbouring cockerels. Mr Tann shuffled listlessly through the opening until he gradually arrived at the front door of the bank. Meebor watched him perform this apathetic routine as he held the gate back for him and placed a stone in front of it to stop it from creaking closed again.

  “Morning, Mr Tann. A bit fresh, eh? All that rain last night. All rather unexpected, but I’m glad I wasn’t out here sitting in it. I was safe at home, sleeping in my bed.”

  Mr Tann glanced back at Meebor. He wasn’t sure about this new guard. He was a bit too cocky, always sounded like he was trying to sell you something.

  Mr Tann rooted around in his battered old leather satchel and searched for the over-size bunch of keys that formed the hub of all bank security, before replying in the absent way that had developed from Kheng’s long held routine.

  “Good morning, Mr Meebor. Everything okay?”

  “Yes, Mr Tann. No problems at all. All nice and quiet here. Nothing going on.”

  Mr Tann looked up at Meebor in a particularly vacant and tired sort of way.

  “Always good to know.”

  Meebor noticed that Mr Tann was looking worn out, somehow more vulnerable than usual. It was the sort of tiredness that builds up over time and is difficult to recover from.

  Mr Tann looked back down at his weather-beaten satchel and returned to his rummaging. It was made particularly cumbersome by the large roll of papers that were sticking out of the top corner of his satchel, and seemed determined to fall to the floor should he make any attempt to put his hand inside the bag. Having at last located the mammoth clump of keys, he then rifled through the largely redundant collection of openers for the one that would persuade the front door to swing forward and let him in. Mr Tann had been performing this duty with tireless regularity for years, and in all that time he’d never managed to hit upon the right key with any level of precision or efficiency. However, today the frustration at failing to adequately perform his first task of the morning was even more evident from his tired and wan expression. Meebor concluded that the events over recent weeks had taken their toll on the old man.

  He looked on with a degree of sympathy as the head clerk began a second review of the impossibly full key ring, holding on to one of the bigger keys and trying to work his way from there, without losing track of which ones had already been studied and rejected. Meebor’s passive concern for the disillusioned man and his challenge with this basic task was probably slightly more genuine than usual. It was rare that his well-practised level of apathy would waiver. However, the irony was not lost on him. The previous night he’d robbed the bank by using the key to walk in through the back door, the very same bank which was currently so stubbornly reluctant to provide any access to its head clerk. Meebor wondered whether the frail and dilapidated man that was rattling a collage of scrap metal at a seemingly unmoveable door was likely to notice the depletion of the vast wads of notes they had stored inside. Only time would tell. Of all the resources available to a guard for a bank in a sleepy provincial town, ‘time’ was the one that they had in abundance.

  44. Cooking

  Mr Hua Lin sat at his desk, facing Ms Win-Kham. Despite the blurriness of his sleep-deprived eyes, he could see that she was looking particularly attractive. Was it something new she’d done with her hair? It might be something she was wearing. Somehow she still remained appropriately prim for her office duties. Was it a new air of confidence about her, or was it just that she was also looking at him with genuine expression of concern.

  “There is no mistake, Mr Hua Lin. I’ve counted all the money three times just to be sure. We are down over fifteen million nham.”

  It was true that Ms Win-Kham had counted the money three times. This was primarily because she had expected the difference between the ledger and the money in the safe room to amount to just under three million nham. However, this assumption was based entirely on the fact that she had cooked the books the day before so that this would be the case. Three million nham was not a small amount. Fifteen million was more than all their annual salaries combined. In her original plan, when she expected to have to steal some of the money she had been thinking around a sum of 200,000 nham. This was not an insignificant amount, but probably small enough to avoid prison time if caught. When she’d cooked the books she’d felt three million might be overdoing it a bit. However, if something was worth doing it was worth doing properly. If Hua Lin was indebted to her for a three million rescue then he would be more eager to rush them into matrimony to make sure he didn’t let her out of his sight. Fifteen million, on the other hand, was a crazy amount to have got lost. The extra twelve million that she’d had to add to her own manipulation of the ledger was really helping her to maintain a genuine look of shock.

  The three million of course was relatively easy to make disappear. She just had to put the books back how they should have been before she messed with them. Now she was almost regretting cooking the books at all. It seemed that she had wasted her time over the previous days as the books were already askew without any help fro
m her. She could have implemented her plan to entwine her web around Hua Lin without having to do anything wrong at all. Trying to hide the extra twelve million would be a big challenge. It would be incredibly difficult to make the problem go away. However, originally she was expecting to do some creative bookwork when she was focusing on plan A, which had involved some minor stealing. She would just have to apply those principles on a much bigger scale. There was also the risk that a fifteen million nham cover up was so big that Hua Lin would lose his bottle and go straight to his supervisors, who would then call in the police. Of course, that didn’t directly affect her, but it would spell the end of Hua Lin’s career and, therefore, her chances of stepping up to a privileged lifestyle in the capital.

  Hua Lin’s reaction to the loss of fifteen million nham had also been one of genuine surprise and shock. His reation would no doubt be to his advantage, should it be recalled by Ms Win-Kham if called to the witness stand at a later date. Hua Lin had only taken about 100,000 nham from the safe room. It may even have been less than that. He’d not really counted at the time. Now it was irrelevant. It was not as if he had the chance to put it back. What on earth had happened to the rest? And when? He made regular checks of all the bank’s systems and ledgers and had failed to notice anything like this.

  The two sat in silence, staring at the documents for the cash count and the ledgers that Ms Win-Kham had put on the desk. Ms Win-Kham’s expression was vacant, but her mind was working fast. Sure enough, she had the ability to doctor a few transactions and gradually make the balances change, but this would never be enough. It would take her months, based on her level of access to documentation, to cover up this kind of money. She looked up at Hua Lin and realised her solution. True enough, she didn’t have the authority over things to cook on that scale, but Hua Lin did. They would have to work together. Once Hua Lin agreed to go down that path then he belonged to her, there would be no going back for him.