WHEN SHEPHERD LEFT the Bangkok Bank building, he walked out onto Silom Road and straight into the biggest crowd he had ever seen on the streets of Bangkok.
Shepherd knew the sidewalks in that part of town were always a mess. Gangs of street vendors selling everything from pirated DVDs to fried grasshoppers took up most of the available space. Since they paid off the police to let them do business there, the vendors acted as if they owned the sidewalks, which in a way he supposed they did. The locals who had their offices around there and the mobs of tourists drawn to the neighborhood by the cheap goods were left to compete for whatever tiny bit of public space the cops hadn’t rented out.
Still, it seemed to Shepherd that things were even more of a shambles than usual and he wondered what was going on. He slipped behind a metal cart from which an elderly woman was hawking Chinese-made Rolexes and Cambodian-made Patek Phillipes and took a couple of steps out into Silom Road.
About two hundred yards away on his left, a band of marchers was trooping slowly toward the spot where he was standing. There were a lot of them. They completely blocked the roadway from one side to the other and Shepherd couldn’t even begin to guess how far back they stretched. The marchers were led by a pickup truck with a huge loudspeaker on top through which somebody was shouting unintelligible slogans. The demonstration didn’t seem very threatening. It was more or less like the one he had stood and watched with Liz Corbin earlier in the day. The only differences he could see was that this march was going in the opposite direction, and the people in it were wearing yellow shirts instead of red ones.
Then Shepherd looked the other way and all at once he saw the real problem.
A couple of hundred yards to his right, an even larger band of red shirts had taken up a position completely blocking the roadway on which the yellow shirts were marching. Perhaps it was the same group of red shirts he had seen earlier. Perhaps it was a different group altogether. But either way, the yellow shirts were heading directly for them.
It seemed inconceivable to Shepherd that a street battle would take place right there in the middle of the financial district. Thais famously avoided face-to-face confrontations and nothing like that had happened yet in spite of the political turmoil that had gripped Bangkok for months. It wasn’t that Thais were shy about attacking their enemies, it was just the face-to-face part they didn’t get. The locals had never been able to understand the Western obsession for duking it out toe-to-toe with your adversaries. To Thais, it seemed silly to square off against anyone. That was why Thais generally nursed their anger, waited patiently until their enemy’s back was turned, and then brought everything they had.
“Excuse me, sir?”
Shepherd glanced at the two women standing next to him. They were what in less politically correct times people might have called hippie chicks. Long greasy hair, shapeless grey clothing, open-toed leather sandals, and huge, top-heavy backpacks. Shepherd wondered what the proper term was these days for people like that.
“Do you speak English?” the taller of the two girls asked him.
“If I have to,” Shepherd said.
The woman looked puzzled. “So… then you do speak English?”
This time Shepherd just nodded.
“Can you tell us what’s going on here?” the other girl asked, pointing toward the yellow shirts matching toward them.
Shepherd thought of telling the two women the real truth, which was that nobody ever really understood what was going on in Thailand, but in his experience irony seldom played in conversations with strangers. Instead he settled for giving the girl the simplest answer he could think of.
“A political demonstration,” he said.
“You mean like against global warming?” the tall girl asked.
“No,” Shepherd said, “like against each other.”
The yellow shirts were now within fifty yards of them. The old green pickup truck leading them was dusty and dented and, as it rolled slowly down Silom Road, the Thai national anthem began to blare out of the metal bullhorn mounted on top of the cab. Behind the bullhorn there were at least a dozen men standing in the bed of the pickup, one of whom had his arms uplifted and was exhorting the yellow-shirted ranks behind the truck.
Some of the marchers carried large Thai flags on tall poles and others waved homemade posters written in Thai. Most of the rest of the marchers Shepherd could see had the palms of their hands pressed together in front of them in a graceful gesture of humility and respect that Thais called a wai. The flags flapped in unison and the posters bobbed in time with the music. The whole effect was anything but threatening. It was more like the cheering squad from a poorly funded local college taking the field for halftime at a football game.
The two women just stood patiently and waited for Shepherd to go on. He doubted any good would come of it, but he continued anyway.
“The yellow shirts support the present government,” he told the two women. “They include a lot of people of Thai-Chinese background who see the government’s embrace of China as the best course for Thailand.”
Then he pointed in the opposite direction toward where the red shirts had now begun moving as well.
“The red shirts support General Kitnarok, who has always had the support of the United States and Europe,” Shepherd continued. “He was defeated in the last election and left the country when the new government charged him with corruption and tried send him to prison. The red shirts say the election was stolen by pro-China Thais and that General Kitnarok is the victim of a political persecution. They’re demanding that the government resign so the general can return and form a new government.”
“Was this general really corrupt?” one of the girls asked.
“Almost everyone in government is corrupt to some degree. Government in Thailand is a just another business you go into to make some money.”
“But then what happens to the people?”
A good question, Shepherd thought to himself. A damned good question actually. He didn’t even try to answer the girl. He just shrugged.
The reds shirts had their pickup trucks, too. Two of them were now cruising slowly side-by-side, leading their marchers. Not surprisingly, both of the trucks were red, but other than that they were pretty much like the truck leading the yellows: old and dented and with loud speakers mounted on top of their cabs. Men stood in the beds of both trucks and waved their followers forward while martial music blared out of the loudspeakers at an ear-splitting volume.
Many of the red shirts, at least the ones Shepherd could see in the front ranks just behind the pickup trucks, were wearing long strips of white cloth tied around their heads like the headbands worn by Indian extras in old cowboy-and-Indian movies. There was something written in red on the headbands, but it was in Thai characters and Shepherd couldn’t read Thai characters. Still, he very much doubted the headbands said Have a Nice Day.
Some of the marchers carried flags and Thai-language signs like the yellow shirts did, but the reds also had huge posters with smiling images of General Kitnarok and even a giant banner that stretched from one side of the road to the other. It said, in English no less, The People Will Bring Back Democracy! Apparently the red shirts were more concerned about their appeal to the international media than the yellows were, or at least they had the money to hire Western political consultants.
“Is there going to be a riot?” one of the women asked.
“No,” Shepherd said. “Thais don’t riot.”
“Cool,” she nodded.
The yellows were now no more than thirty yards to their left and the reds were a little less than thirty yards to their right. The racket from the competing loudspeakers had melded into a single formless din and the sound of the contending groups of marchers became nothing more than an incoherent, angry-sounding rumbling. The two groups were moving slowly but steadily toward each other.
Shepherd saw that he and the two girls were standing very near to the point at which the reds and the yellows would most likely converge. He glanced around for the police and was anything but surprised not to see the slightest sign of them. All the local cops would no doubt be at the station, probably knocking back a few cold drinks and pretending that nothing at all was going on. There was simply no money to be made out of getting between two angry mobs.
In another two or three minutes the pickup trucks would be bumper to bumper. Shepherd could not imagine what would happen when that occurred, but he was still certain it could not possibly be what one might expect to happen under similar circumstances in almost any other country anywhere in the world.
He was wrong.
Later, when Shepherd thought of the moment in which the reds and the yellows came together, it would be the sound of the screams he remembered most clearly.