Читать книгу Jade Monkey - James Holding - Страница 4

I’ve always loved jade. Green jade refreshes me like the cool crisp taste of mint in my mouth. Pink jade reminds me of sunset cloud that’s been carved from the sky with a soft knife. And white jade makes delicious icicles of pleasure parade down my back like tiger tracks in snow.

Indeed, I’m hardly normal when it comes to jade; unfortunately, I’ve never had the means to indulge my feeling for it. If I’d been a millionaire, I’d have assembled a private collection. If I’d had an adequate education, I might have become an expert on the subject, serving on the staff of a distinguished museum. But as it is, forced since childhood to scratch desperately for a living, I’m a thief.

Not a common thief, however; I specialize in jade. And by “jade” I mean not only jadeite, nephrite and chloromelanite, the true jade minerals, but all their beautiful blood brothers, too, from saussurite to quartz.

That’s what I was doing in Bangkok.

Bangkok is the home of the Green Monkey, an image of Hanuman, the ancient Monkey King, lovingly carved five hundred years ago from a single block of flawless green Chanthaburi jasper. The head is thirty-five centimeters tall, the body gowned in rich vestments, seated on a golden pyramid-shaped throne twelve feet high, and proudly displayed in an exquisite temple-museum building of its own, just off the Royal Plaza. It’s one of the loveliest jades in Asia.

I intended to steal it.

The round-the-world cruise ship, on which I’d been a minimum-rate passenger since San Francisco, anchored at dawn off the mouth of the Chao Phraya River in the Gulf of Siam. A huge flat-bottom barge met it there to carry three hundred of us, American tourists all, across the sandbar blocking the river’s mouth and upstream to Bangkok for two days of sightseeing, then back downstream to our cruise ship again the next evening.

Incredibly, there was no customs inspection for two-day cruise-tourists of our kind, either coming or going from Bangkok. That’s why I chose to enter the city, and leave it, as such a tourist. For the excursion, I carried with me from the ship only my large hold-all camera bag, toothbrush and razor, and my umbrella.

Arriving in Bangkok, I left my fellow tourists to their own devices and took a taxi to the Ratanokosin Hotel where I registered. It’s only two blocks from the Royal Plaza and the Abode of the Green Monkey. When the boy showed me to my room, I took off my jacket and tie, switched on the air-conditioner to full, and ordered a gin sling sent up.

Sipping it in a positive glow of anticipation and pleasure, I went over my plans once more, carefully and professionally. They were simple in the extreme. I’d reconnoitered the job several months before, you understand. I knew what I was up against. No one would question my camera case, I was sure. In a city whose temples, canals and towers are so infinitely photogenic, photographers are as common as cockroaches in China. And certainly no one would suspect my umbrella, a common sight on the streets of Bangkok at the beginning of the rainy season.

This was Saturday afternoon. My real work didn’t start until Sunday, since the Abode of the Green Monkey is open to the public only on Sundays.

On Sunday, I arose late to a muggy, overcast day threatening rain. I felt fresh, confident and strong. After a hearty breakfast at my hotel, I listened contentedly for an hour or so to the Sunday concert of music played on the ranad ek