The Secret Agent (15 page)

The Western Coast of Thailand,
December 1945

I
t was Tao Oum, the refugee from Laos, who drove them south that day, south and west in Jack Roderick’s shining Packard. They were armed with the old military maps, much creased, that Roderick had been given in Ceylon; some dried fish and papaya; and the OSS service revolver hidden in the glove box. Five of them sharing a water canteen in the heat, a damp-fingered wind off the coast flooding through the open windows.

Boonreung sat in the middle because he was young and slight, a bundle of northeast bones. Roderick had hired the boy away from the Suan Kularb Palace where he had worked as a waiter, and kept him to run errands and valet his clothing and drive his car. He liked Boonreung’s quickness and his easy laughter; he was teaching him to speak English.

Beside the boy was Vukrit and on the other side the man everyone still called Carlos because it was the name
he’d earned during the war. Vukrit and Carlos were married to sisters and they should have been like brothers themselves—but the war and its hatreds divided them. Vukrit had backed the pro-Japanese dictator, Field Marshal Pibul Songgram, while Carlos had thrown his lot in with the hero of the Thai Resistance, Pridi Banomyong. The Japanese had surrendered four months ago, but neither man could forgive the other’s choices. Vukrit was an Army officer and he suffered when the collaborationists fell. The army was in disgrace and Vukrit’s friends were wary of him. Carlos worked for Pridi Banomyong in the new Prime Minister’s office and took his beautiful wife, Chao, to glittering victory parties in the
farang
quarter.

Boonreung sat between the brothers-in-law in the back of the car and was sometimes their buffer and sometimes their only link.

Roderick sat in front, next to Tao Oum, listening to the words the others tossed back and forth in Thai. He spoke French to Tao Oum, who despised the French, and English with the others, and all three assumed that the
farang
would never understand the taunts they traded like outgrown clothes. He was Roderick and they feared him and loved him in equal measure; but in the end he was
farang.

They had spent the night in Phetchaburi, one hundred and twenty-three kilometers south of Bangkok, where for a thousand years the royal palaces and temples were raised in the pleasant hills above the coast. Boonreung had never been so near the sea in his life and they abused him for his wonder and forced fried urchins into his mouth, staying up late over their beer to study the maps. Roderick loved to hear the old tales of conquest, told in halting English and French, and so they obliged him by inventing what they could not translate
and inadvertently managed a fractured poetry. They spoke of elephants and of armies and of cities enslaved; of hermits in the hills and the sacred shrines they hid there; of women more beautiful than gems in the secret passages of the king’s palace, where it was death for a common man to enter. They talked far into the night, slept on hard cots in a ramshackle rooming house and then woke to the scent of hot noodles. The cook had added seaweed to the broth and Boonreung would not eat it. The boy was ravenous now as he drank from the canteen, begging pieces of dried papaya like a favored dog. Roderick tossed him scraps over his shoulder and laughed whenever the boy caught them between his teeth.

The narrow road was pocked with old mortar shells; the train line that ran alongside it was still broken in places, with gangs of workmen slaving over rush baskets and picks. They traveled slowly and the talk surged and died depending upon the difficulty of the road. Boonreung exclaimed over the color of the water on their left hand—a translucent azure with the look of polished jade. Carlos, however, cut off the boy’s words in a voice as sharp as a knife. Carlos was an educated man and in his heart a kind one, but he had been born on the Western Seaboard and would never forget how the Japanese bayoneted the men and boys of the fishing villages four years before, during the bloody December invasion of 1941. The coast around Singora and Patani had been trapped between two colliding forces: the Japanese ground troops heading south toward the Malay Peninsula, and the British advance pushing north. Five days of butchery, before Field Marshal Pibul declared defeat.

Roderick was unmoved by blood feuds or war memories. He stared instead through the open window, at the
mountains rising in dense green. “There are tigers in that jungle, or were,” he said, “and leopards and gibbons and two types of Asiatic bear. Gray elephants. Lemurs and birds.” The four men heard the longing in his voice and when they did not understand
his farang
names for things, they thought of Burma, the land that fell just beyond those mountains, and the burning embers of rubies clutched at its heart.

And when at last they reached the marshes of Khao Sam Roi Yot where thousands of migratory birds sheltered in the grasses, and abandoned the Packard in the shade of a banana tree, the long journey had left them aching as old men. Boonreung ran joyously toward the shallows, startling a heron into the air, while the others stretched and yawned and eyed the women mending shrimp nets among the rocks. Roderick was already shifting canvas packs from the car’s trunk and muttering orders in fluent French to Tao Oum, who mopped his forehead with a damp handkerchief. Carlos offered bars of chocolate to the boys who lingered near the fishwives. The boys would have preferred real
farang
cigarettes they could have sold for money, but took the chocolate and answered Carlos’s questions. Vukrit leaned against the car’s hood and followed Roderick with inscrutable eyes.

They had come nearly two hundred kilometers south from Bangkok with the hope of finding riches in the hills: not leopards or rubies but the hidden mouths of caves. In the old stories it was said that the great limestone outcroppings that rose sheer from the lapping sands were sacred to Buddha, and that men had long ago set up secret altars that were beautiful to gaze upon. It was for this that Roderick had dragged them here, despite their hatreds and their jealousies and their private wars; he wanted to take a walk in the jungle, and he
wanted company. They had come, all four of them, because they did without question as Roderick asked. For Tao Oum it was a matter of loyalty; for Carlos, a debt between friends. For Vukrit the trip was a test. He came out of need and a thwarted desire to be loved. Only Boonreung came freely.

They walked into the jungle a few minutes after one o’clock in the afternoon, with the knowledge that they would not come down from the mountain again before nightfall. They took two local boys as guides, because the boys had told Carlos that they knew of sacred caves hidden high in the mountains and had often played near them. The boys sang strains of a nonsense song as they surged barefoot along the paths. They seemed unafraid of the rumor of tigers.

The men walked silently at first, Roderick in front. He remembered the faces of his OSS brothers as they pressed shoulder to shoulder under the cover of green leaves, while carpenter ants ran through their fingers. He remembered the tortured maze of paths that had confused and trapped them, the constant moisture, the snakes that looked like branches and the sudden surprise of a flower. In Ceylon there had been no loneliness, only the fine sandstone grind of tension and fatigue.

The day wore on and the paths rose ever higher. The canteens were emptied and then refilled from the streams that rushed among the rocks. The two boys stopped singing and talked instead in a dialect no one understood—the words of their village or perhaps their childhood. And then at last, when Vukrit had begun to complain of blisters from his hard city shoes and Roderick’s pale skin was red from exertion, the children hooted and called as though in prearranged signal, and the chasm opened at their feet.

It was an astonishing plunge downward one hundred
meters or more, unexpected in that hilly place. A curtain of mist boiled at its mouth, sent skyward by a waterfall that spurted from the rock, and orchids blossomed in limestone clefts. Roderick stopped short and gazed toward the heart of the earth with a look of naked wonder; behind him, the others fell silent. A white bird, disturbed, took wing. Somewhere a gibbon shrieked.

The sound broke the net that snared them all. Roderick finally spoke. “The cave is here? In the chasm?”

The two boys began to chatter excitedly. Carlos listened and nodded once. “The opening is difficult to find. It is there, a dark space behind the falling water.”

They craned to see, and felt the cool mist staining their faces. Tao Oum could pick nothing out of the curtained rocks but Roderick narrowed his pale blue eyes and thought he glimpsed the cavern’s mouth. Boonreung laughed out loud as though he had been given a present, and began to unload the ropes and picks from all their packs. He was an agile climber, that string of northeast bones, and would be sent first down the chasm’s face.

Vukrit took off his shoes. He would not risk losing them in the torrent and he would not remain alone, in shame, at the cliff edge. Roderick set the order in which they descended, placing Tao Oum between Vukrit and Carlos, so that neither brother-in-law would owe the other his life. Roderick himself went last, as anchor for them all.

Nearly forty minutes later, Boonreung’s spider foot touched down on the chasm’s floor. He glanced upward, at the others so much older than he, puffing and groaning as their shaking fingers sought the rock, and grinned at heaven. Then he danced across the streambed, sunlight firing on his black hair, and placed his toes in the farther wall.

It was another hour, the men strung out like ants on
the rock face, before Boonreung hauled himself lightly into the cave’s mouth. Beyond the falling curtain of water he caught the image of the two children, their guides, crouched in play on the opposite side of the cliff. The image wavered and dissolved. Roderick had reached the cave before the rest, his sleek blond head, dark with water, rising like a cobra’s. Boonreung reached for his hand, slick and cold with the mountain stream, and felt the shock of the
farang’s
touch. It was always thus, the boy thought: a thrill of fear and exultation, as though he had touched the sun …

They rested until the heat of the climb deserted them and the damp weight of their clothes raised gooseflesh on Boonreung’s arm. First Carlos and then Tao Oum and finally Vukrit appeared on the rock ledge, silent and shuddering. By that time Roderick had coiled the ropes and lit the torches he carried in his pack. He raised the flaring light and turned circles in the fine dust of the cave floor: a narrow space, more like a tunnel than a cavern, with sides that sloped inward and unplumbed shadows. Boonreung found the second torch and Carlos helped him light it.

“I will not go last this time,” Vukrit said sulkily. “You favor the boy, Roderick, when others are more deserving.”

“Honor is won, Vukrit, not bribed,” Carlos chided.

The man scuttled furiously to his feet and gripped the torch but Carlos did not release it; and so they stood, enraged, straining over the sputtering light. Roderick ignored them. He raised his torch and stepped farther into the tunnel. Vukrit clawed at Carlos’s face with his free hand, his breath coming fast and shallow. After an instant, Tao Oum and Boonreung followed Roderick.

The floor sloped gently downward. At first they walked upright but after some minutes were forced to stoop, and for the space of several heartbeats it seemed
that the cave was merely a pocket in the hills, a cul-de-sac rather than a sacred pathway. They could have grazed the walls with their fingertips merely by extending their hands; but they hugged themselves inward and kept their eyes trained on Roderick’s back. In the distance behind they heard the noise of shuffling feet and grunting; Vukrit and Carlos had dropped the torch and were wrestling on the cave floor.

“Leave it,” Roderick said when Boonreung would have turned back. “Perhaps they’ll settle the goddamn future of Siam between them.”

There were stairs
cut into the rock, sloping downward. Roderick raised his torch high, and found no limit to its light—the cavern’s height and depth a soaring vertigo. Tao Oum began to mutter words of Lao, an imprecation to the gods; Boonreung placed his hand upon the older man’s shoulder.

The cavern floor. The three of them, looking upward, straining to probe the darkness. And then the light falling upon a face—a face set high into the rock wall, three stories above their heads: the sublime and lovely image of a Reclining Buddha, slumbering forgotten, perhaps for centuries. His limestone body carved in relief, his head perfect and noble. A cabochon ruby glittered in his brow.

Boonreung gasped.

“Go back and get the others,” Roderick said tersely.

The boy stared an instant, motionless; then he wheeled and scrambled up the stone steps.

Rivalry and hatred
were set aside in the flicker of torchlight. Roderick swore them to secrecy and then they
debated what must be done: the child guides paid off, the cavern mouth closed until help was brought.

“What we need is a scholar,” Roderick said. “Someone from the museum or the university.”

“What we need is a monk,” Carlos objected, “and offerings to the spirits that guard the sacred image. This place should be known and venerated.”

“What we need,” Vukrit muttered, “is a hammer and chisel. There are those who would pay much for so old a thing—”

In the end they left the dreaming Buddha where it had been found, and made their way back to the surface. They descended the mountain in the tropic dark, with stars pricking overhead, and because Vukrit alone still carried a knife it was he who marked the trail for Roderick, slashing at the trunks of the rainforest trees. They ate fish roasted black over a charcoal fire and slept on the marshy beach, and in the morning they headed north and east in the sweltering car.

Roderick seemed transfixed. He spoke of preservation, of salvage, of the heritage of Siam; he vowed to return in a few weeks’ time, with his scholar from the university or the museum. Carlos pledged Prime Minister Pridi’s help and fingered an amulet he wore at his neck. Vukrit touched the blade of his knife and stared out at the sea.