A Time for Pirates Read online

  A TIME FOR PIRATES

  Gavin Black was the pseudonym used by Scottish author Oswald Wynd to publish his highly successful thrillers. Born in 1913 to missionary parents in Japan, he was educated at The American School in Tokyo until his family moved to the United States where he undertook a year of high school in Atlantic City. Upon graduation, he attended The University of Edinburgh until the outbreak of WWII. He then joined the Scots Guards and was sent to Malaya with British Intelligence, attached to the Indian Army. After the Japanese invasion, he was captured in the jungle and spent more than three years in a Japanese prison camp in Hokkaido where his fluency in the language aided both himself and other prisoners of war. It was when he returned to Scotland via the Philippines that he thought to try his hand at a ‘first novel’ contest run by Doubleday in America. His entry Black Fountains (about a young American-educated Japanese woman embroiled in the war) won him both first prize and the staggering sum of $20,000. He went on to make his fame and fortune writing critically acclaimed thrillers as Gavin Black, most of which were set in Asia and featured Paul Harris. He died in 1998.

  A TIME FOR

  PIRATES

  GAVIN BLACK

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2010 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  A Time for Pirates © 1971 Gavin Black

  ISBN 978-1-78002-026-6

  TO MY SISTER, RITA MACGINITIE

  CHAPTER I

  THE MINI ahead of me was tucked in close to the belching exhaust of a huge, vibrating furniture van, the driver of the little box apparently getting worried about the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. The Mini yapped away with its horn like a terrier trying to shift a stubborn cow. A long line of cars behind my Mercedes were expressing fury, too, but I kept my hands firmly away from the klaxon ring, remembering that traffic temper is a beaten path towards the coronary.

  Some kind of procession along the main shopping street at right angles to us was causing the hold up. The furniture van blocked most of my view but to the right of it I could just see a biggish crowd at the intersection. No one seemed to be carrying banners, which rather ruled out protest, and it could simply be an outsize Chinese funeral. I switched off the radio and wound down my window, listening for cymbals and possibly a brass band. There was no music or professional lamentations, just shouting.

  At two-fifteen pm on any day in the year Kuala Lumpur is a very hot city. I shut the window again to preserve the kind of air conditioning with which a Mercedes cossets its owner and sat there telling myself that it really didn’t matter if I wasn’t in the office until three.

  The Mercedes was close in to a line of empty parked cars with a pavement beyond on which there didn’t seem to be any shoppers. I looked across the street and couldn’t see people walking there either. Then I noticed that a considerable number of stores had wooden shutters up over their frontages and at others clerks were busy fitting these. The shuttered shop is a tropic storm signal.

  I tried the radio again, pushing the button for our local station, getting a cookery lesson in Malay that didn’t seem likely to be interrupted for a news flash. An empty down lane tempted me to try a U-turn and escape from a tension area but a check showed that I’d pushed too close to the Mini for this manoeuvre without some reversing and there was a Ford on my rear bumper.

  About ten yards up the pavement on my left was a store whose owner had shown faith in the stability of our social structure with the kind of display area that couldn’t be shuttered in civic disturbances. The shop faced the future in a glitter of glass and chromium. A massive sign over the new frontage said: FONG WANG FOH, ELECTRICAL REQUIREMENTS. I had to offer a quick tribute to good selling. There was nothing diffident about Mr Foh, he wasn’t displaying merchandise there was a chance you might fancy, but telling you that you had to have his stuff, illustrating your need under high-powered strip lighting. The lighting had been switched off but the sun had taken over and behind glass was a big area packed with the basics for contemporary living, hi-fi sets, television, and six foot by three deep-freezers.

  Mr Foh represented contemporary progressive capitalism sinking roots in the Oriental scene. That’s fine, but out here there is a snag. Malaysia has one of the highest per capita income rates in South East Asia but this still hasn’t pushed itself up to anything like the purchasing power of one thousand US dollars a year, which leaves a high percentage of the population unable to do anything more than window shop, and quite often with hate in their hearts.

  We’d had window shopper trouble before and this pedestrian uprising at a cross roads could be more of the same. I was now conscious of sitting in the kind of car which has become … except to owners … an unloved Oriental status symbol, closely associated with Chinese towkays who tend to be showy about their wealth. At least fifty per cent of the well-heeled involved in kidnapping incidents have been pulled out of transport like mine.

  Suddenly the van moved, jumping forward as though prodded. The Mini didn’t follow at once, it could be that fumes had slowed down driver reaction. Horns clamoured from behind. The Mini jerked away but was too late for what had been available space ahead, this taken over at astounding speed by people pouring down from the intersection. The little car stopped and was surrounded.

  I had moved forward but braked while there was still twenty feet between me and the crowd. The Ford made use of the space given it to go into the dramatic U-turn I’d been contemplating and the other cars in the row took their cue and did the same, all accelerating away like the start of a rally. I was planning to escape also, not worrying about the Mini too much, when there was a clearing of people from behind the little car and a youth brought a heavy object smashing down on its rear window, which went opaque.

  There are some things you can run from, others you can’t. It’s a fine moral line and I’m often not too sure where it is drawn with me, but somehow I was now involved. I pulled out the ignition key, used it on a glove locker and got my fingers around the butt of a Luger. I then stepped out on to hot asphalt.

  The driver was also out of the Mini. It looked as though she had been pulled out. She was European, had almost white blonde hair, and seemed young. That was all I could see before the crowd closed in again. Through the shouting came a girl’s voice, clear and sharp and in English:

  ‘Leave me alone, you bastards!’

  I took a crisis risk, raised the gun in the air and pulled the trigger. The Luger made a noise like a heavy door slammed. The crowd seemed to experience a sharp deflation of its first impulse towards corporate violence. Yowling quietened. Everything held, with attention switched down the road to me.

  These were young men, youths mostly, and Malay. They were Moslems, which meant that there shouldn’t have been a place in their faith for a worship of Kali, the Destroyer, but they had made room for her. The many-armed Hindu Queen of Hell was hostess on a hot afternoon. She likes an orgasmic spurting of blood at her really big parties.

  The blonde was free of hands, standing alone, almost at the centre of a three-quarters circle of youths holding back more youths. None of the ones in front fancied martyrdom to a Luger bullet. It was too soon for the hysteria that could push a surge of boys towards a man with a gun.

  The girl was wearing orange slacks. A white shirt had been half-ripped from one arm. Her hair fell straight to her shoulders except for a strand across one eye. The other eye was a startling colour, the blue of African violets. She could be someone’s daughter out from Britain for a holiday.

  I walked perhaps a dozen paces up the road, then said to the girl:

  ‘Get in my car.’

  She didn’t seem troubled about just aband
oning the Mini, though she was very far from panic, coming towards me at just the right pace, not too fast. It looked as though she had some experience of tight situations and it would take more than a riot mob of youths to make her lose her cool.

  She put up a hand and pushed back hair. I got a look from two astonishing eyes. At once, without really seeing the rest of her face, my mind registered her as beautiful. A moment later a door of the Mercedes clonked shut, that sound loud in a silence still so intense that the noise of traffic continuing to move in other parts of the city reached us.

  I turned and walked back to the car watched by the girl through the windscreen. Shouting started, but it seemed to be coming from the rear of the crowd, the youths up front continuing to hold to discretion. I opened the driver’s door, got in, and tucked the Luger by my thigh. I had to take the ignition key from the compartment lock to start the car and saw a movement in the crowd as I did this, a mass impulse coming like a wave from the back.

  ‘Thanks,’ the girl said.

  ‘Wait till we’re out of here.’

  I couldn’t quite make the U-turn in the large car, and had to reverse back. We were rushed. What I saw in the driving mirror wasn’t pleasant, distorted faces and raised arms. A battering began on the boot. Voices caught a chant. Something hit a window. I got into drive again and we surged away.

  ‘What are they shouting?’

  ‘Kill the pig-eaters.’

  ‘Why pigs especially?’

  ‘It’s usually kept for Chinese. I hope you get your Mini later.’

  ‘To hell with that, it’s rented.’

  There was a minor side street ahead, not much more than a lane, but I knew I could get the car down it. I had the right-turn flashers on when a lorry came out from our escape passage pushing straight across the street to block both up and down traffic. There wasn’t room behind it, either, to squeeze the Mercedes into the turn. I braked.

  The lorry had a load in its open back, more youths, about thirty of them. These were equipped with sharpened bamboo poles held up like spears. They looked like reinforcements for a medieval war being rushed to the front in modern transport. The riot was about as spontaneous as deliberate arson.

  On an order I didn’t hear they began to jump down on to the roadway, holding those poles erect as they did it, trained in the manoeuvre. I looked in the mirror. The crowd had stopped almost on a line fifty yards up the road, turned audience for a new development. I put the Mercedes in reverse and steered over into the up lane, braking between two of the parked cars. What we were doing now didn’t seem to interest the mob at all, it had suddenly become an inert, almost purposeless mass waiting to be activated by a catalyst.

  The men from the lorry marched up the street in a shapeless crocodile following a leader distinguished by a white sweat band around his forehead.

  ‘We get out,’ I said.

  ‘You’re just leaving this car?’

  ‘Better chance on our feet. Come on, slide over to my side.’

  ‘Those pole vaulters can cut us off on the pavement.’

  ‘They heard my gun.’

  I kept the door open while the girl got out and slipped between the parked cars, then closed it, and lifted the Luger in my right hand, holding it out from my body to advertise that ours was an armed neutrality.

  I joined the blonde on the pavement. We walked down the street as the storm troopers came up it, drawing level with no acknowledgement from either party. Then a big van hid us.

  ‘They’re just kids,’ the girl said.

  ‘These days you stop being a kid at fifteen.’

  ‘Where are the police?’

  ‘I’m not really expecting to see them. They’re Malay controlled.’

  ‘This is anti-Chinese?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why we’re being allowed to walk out. I hope.’

  The next to the last shop before the lane was fitting its last shutter under an awning, a woman doing the job and pretty frantic about it. Then she popped under cover, but before that final panel slammed a customer was ejected through it, hands pushing. It was a Tamil girl. She stood under that awning staring first up the pavement, then out into the road. She had been urbanized out of her sari into a cotton tartan mini skirt and pink blouse. From one hand dangled a white bag; she held the other arm tight in to her body. Above a starched neck frill her chiselled, tightly boned face was very black. Her people weren’t the target for today but they could become this at any time, and if that happened youth wouldn’t shield her, nor her sex. She was rigid, centred in that fear with which she had grown up, of a pogrom, of the majority turning against her particular minority.

  From some impulse entirely beyond reason the girl jerked into movement, coming up the pavement towards us, and at a run, the white bag flapping. The idea could be to end isolation, to lose herself in the crowd up there. I didn’t think she’d lose herself, the Malays don’t love Tamils much either. She didn’t seem to see us at all. I turned aside to grab a thin, bangled wrist.

  The storm troopers reached the mob, fertilizing it. There was an immediate bellowing that covered the Tamil’s wails as she struggled. The white handbag dropped to the pavement, its contents spilling out. I put the Luger in a jacket pocket.

  ‘Get her into the lane,’ I said. ‘I’ll pick up this stuff,’ The blonde took over with a woman to woman approach to hysteria, giving the weeping girl a stinging slap on one cheek. The Tamil allowed herself to be led away. I bent down to shove things into the bag, picking up everything that seemed to matter though there had been a wide scattering of small objects.

  There was the heavy crash of plate glass. I didn’t have to turn my head to know whose window that was. Action had started at Mr Foh’s.

  I tucked the bag under my arm and followed the girls. They rounded the corner just as I reached the awning. I went under its shadow and stopped. A couple of hundred yards back the looting had started, portable radios already travelling from hand to hand. A passage was made for a man staggering under the weight of a twenty-four-inch television. The crowd’s mood had undergone swift change, to a kind of frenzied merriment. A boy was dancing up and down on the pavement, a private celebration.

  I could just see the roof of my car. Two heads bobbed about it, a couple of the troopers. They seemed to be opening all four doors and suddenly they dashed away up the road. A third man followed them from the rear of the Mercedes, running even faster.

  There was an explosion that could have been a five-hundred pound bomb hitting cement. Flames shot thirty feet in the air, straight up. A great gout of jet smoke followed them. I had put fourteen gallons in the Mercedes’s tank in the morning and it wouldn’t be long before my car was nothing more than twisted metal. Heat could set off other tanks, too.

  I ran for the corner. There were still quite a few people about in the lane but shutters were going up fast. A Chinese youth glared at me, then snapped to a metal grille, disappearing behind a door with a steel shield mounted over it. The place was a jeweller’s. The girls were waiting for me against a wall. The Tamil snatched her bag, groped through it, then cried out in English:

  ‘My purse! You didn’t get my purse!’

  ‘It must have rolled into the gutter.’

  ‘Then I go … !’

  ‘You’re not going back for it. Neither am I.’

  We had to hold her. She was making a noise again.

  Across the lane shutters were being pushed into steel runners over the front of a cavern that until a few moments ago had been offering cotton fabrics printed in Japan. A fat man was doing the job, repelling refugees at the same time. People were suddenly wanting out of that lane fast, and I saw why. Another lorry with a load of pole-bearers was coming down it, slowly. It didn’t seem a good idea to try to work our way past that one, even with a Luger to wave. We’d be in spear range doing it.

  The fat man saw us coming.

  ‘No selling, no selling! I shut!’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

&nbs
p; I held him against a shutter to let the girls into the shop. He kicked me on the shins, then went limp. I moved into gloom and the fat man deepened this almost at once with the last board, slamming it into place and ramming home a bolt.

  ‘What was that explosion?’ the blonde asked.

  ‘My car.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  ‘They’re only kids,’ I said.

  Faint light came from an inner room. Where we were, long strips of cloth hanging from the ceiling gave the feel of behind scenes in a theatre from which everyone has gone home, leaving the place to its ghost. Then another boom set small objects tinkling and there was shouting from the back premises.

  We went through a half-curtained arch into a place lit by one naked bulb. It was occupied by four plump Chinese matrons, two youths obviously assistants, and a round-faced girl in a tropic trouser suit with magenta paeonies splashed all over it. The ladies were clearly customers who had chosen the wrong day to go shopping and the girl could be the owner’s daughter. She was certainly calm enough, sitting on a stool smoking, with one leg laid over the knee of the other, ignoring us and apparently untroubled by riots. But the matrons had a lot to lose in civic disorders and were easing the worry of that with ear-splitting Cantonese noise. This died down as we came in.

  It was pretty clear that we weren’t welcome. Europeans get blamed by all parties in times like these and the Chinese ladies had been carefully brought up to hate Tamils. They concentrated their stares on the Indian girl, who now stood perfectly still in front of a huge, dragon-lurid calendar, looking like an age-darkened statue of Our Lady of Sorrows.

  It is the fragility of most Tamils which appeals to whatever protective instinct I have. Those small, molded heads, fine bones, delicate hands, give them the air of having been brought into a world against which their only real protection is skin pigment. Hard sun doesn’t harm them but almost anything else can, and they move as though with a deer’s constant readiness to run, and fast, from the strong and the terrible.