The Secret Agent (23 page)

Bangkok,
1952

T
he night of the first full moon of the dry season in 1952, Jack Roderick opened the doors of his home to all of Bangkok, and they came by car and by boat, up the gravel drive and down the waterways, through the lanterns that flickered amid the jungle palms like jeweled fireflies.

He placed torches along the drive and up the staircase of his soaring entrance hall, luminous with women in silk. There was a Western orchestra and champagne and caviar, and the men were dressed in white tie and they smoked Dunhill cigarettes and wore their hair clipped very short. Most of the Thais were people Roderick knew from the years of the war or his hunting expeditions among the old caves of the West; they were doctors and lawyers or men who had no love for Pibul and never talked politics in public at all. Some of them were agents that Roderick handled, but tonight was not a night for
business. Alec McQueen had sent reporters and photographers with enormous lamps, and they bathed the most spectacular of the new arrivals with phosphorescence.

Tonight
the farang
community was out in force: wives of French-legation members, who spoke of
l’Indochine
in guttural tones; British envoys, plotting the ruin of victorious Mao; American businessmen whose breezy laughs suggested that the world was a damn big oyster, and they had the tools to open it. Alec McQueen wore a white ascot and brandished a cigar, his black hair unkempt over his flushed brow. One very blond and languid beauty, a divorcée come to Bangkok for the fun of it, competed for Roderick’s attention with a black-eyed Chinese woman dressed in a skin-tight
cheongsam.
Several men grew drunk on Roderick’s Scotch and began tossing champagne corks from the terrace wall, in an effort to reach the waters of the khlong; and across the khlong itself, rocking gently on their floating doorsteps, sat the silk-weaving families of Ban Khrua.

The weavers stared at Roderick’s lights and listened to the foreign music that prevented their children from sleeping, and one boy dove suddenly into the water and surfaced with a handful of corks, laughing uproariously at the foolishness of
farangs.

The Minister of Culture, Vukrit Suwannathat, came without his wife, Li-ang, whom he had abandoned recently for an exotic mistress. Vukrit came in the shining glow of confident power, and his bodyguards hugged the walls with drinks untouched in their hands. He came, and where he passed, the party shifted like a rice paddy swept by a fitful breeze. Roderick laughed just as loudly as the rest of the Americans, but his eyes followed Vukrit as though the man might steal him blind. McQueen’s reporters gathered dutifully around the
minister and jotted his comments in their notebooks while the cameras seared his image in their brains.

At eleven o’clock, when the brilliant hum of the spinning party threatened to slow and jangle, Roderick ordered the lights doused and left the room dusky with coconut-oil torches. He gazed out over the wilted crowd of sweating men and women, assembled willy-nilly among his bright silk cushions and his priceless salvage of ancient empire, and he clapped his hands twice. The terrace doors swung open. The
lakhon
dancers filed in.

There were eight of them dressed in silk and jewels, their headdresses elaborately worked, their masks and painted faces like figures cut down from the walls of the Grand Palace. A hush fell over the crowd; most had seen Thai dancers before, but never like this, with the torchlit shadows and the khlong waters moving ceaselessly behind them. It was as though for an instant they were all returned to the days when dance was a court ritual, and the movements of sinuous women the privilege of kings alone.
Tonight,
Roderick seemed to declare,
I am royal too. Roderick in his palace. Roderick the king.

The music was made of wind instruments and strings, the movements were studied and controlled. There was impossible grace in the curve of a fingertip, the turn of a cheek; grace in the principal dancer, a woman dressed in the guise of Taksin, the warrior king of Ayutthaya. The dancer’s eyes were expressionless when they roved the crowd, but once—and only once—they widened slightly, as though in shock or fear. That was the moment they fell on Roderick, standing spare and elegant in his dinner jacket. His pale hair was swept back from the high forehead, a cigarette burned forgotten in his fingers. It seemed the dancer’s wrist trembled slightly as she extended her palm in a choreographed gesture of denial; then it steadied, and she moved on.

“What is her name?” Roderick muttered to Alec McQueen. Alec alone in all that room was certain to know.

“Thongchai Pithuvanuk,” he said slowly. “Trained in the Royal Palace. Her friends call her Fleur.”

“Fleur,” Roderick repeated. “It suits her.”

Later, when the
last of the guests had left, Roderick strolled through his garden in search of Alec and the woman named Fleur and instead, in the breezeway amid the stilts of his house, found His Excellency the Minister of Culture leaning against a massive limestone head of a reclining Buddha. The head was sunk in a square of gravel like a meteor fallen from the sky.

“And this is what comes of your fine words, Jack.” Vukrit spoke with distaste. “You wanted experts and priests, someone from the museum—you put us all off with talk of what is sacred—and then you returned alone and cut the thing from the wall.”

Roderick stopped short, his hands slouched in his trouser pockets. “You know the story better than that, Vukrit. You know all the stories, don’t you? You collect them, I think. You spin them out of thin air. You even sell them to the highest bidder. Like you sold your friends. Carlos. And Boonreung.”

“I could have you arrested,” the minister replied evenly, “for the theft of precious national artifacts. What else do you have hidden away? I could bring my troops here tomorrow. Examine your papers. Confiscate your house—”

“‘There is only one minister who matters.’ A dying man told me that. Was he talking about you?”

Vukrit threw back his head and laughed. “I certainly hope so. May I ask his name?”

“Chacrit Gyapay. It was almost the last thing he said.” From his pocket, Roderick drew something—a dull red stone. He fitted it tenderly into the hollow in the Buddha’s brow, then returned it to his pocket. “How much did you get for your brother-in-law, Vukrit? Tell me that.”

“Carlos was never found.” The laughter stopped abruptly, and Roderick saw that the minister perspired in the torchlight, his eyes shifting from Roderick’s pocket to the hole where the gem had rested. “Carlos’s life is forfeit if he returns. He killed our king.”

“No,” Roderick replied. “Not Carlos. That’s another story you’ve sold.”

“You dare to call me
liar?”

“I could call you
murderer
instead.”

Something pulsed between them like the strobe of a camera bulb: hatred, blood lust. Roderick stepped closer to this man he despised as he might a viper lying underfoot, and Vukrit moved instinctively backward, his spine against the ancient stone head.

“I know some stories of my own, minister. I know the trails you blazed through the jungle, I know the treasures you’ve sold in the Thieves Market and the man who paid your price. You cut Carlos out of his life, just as you cut this head from the wall of the cave we found together.” Roderick held up the stone as though it were a sacred bond. “I will see Carlos avenged. As I avenged the boy.”

“Boonreung was a traitor,” Vukrit spat contemptuously, “and you’re
a farang.
You backed the wrong horse. Pridi! My God, how it makes me laugh!”

“I back
all
the horses, Vukrit.” Roderick’s voice remained low and ruthless. “I back your boss, Field Marshal Pibul, and I back his chief rival, Sarit Thanarat. I’ve got money on the favorites, money on the long
shots, I’ve got the bookies in my pocket and I’m even setting the odds. You see, I’m the guy who’s staging the race. The only horse not entered is yours.”

“There you are, Jack,” McQueen drawled through the darkness. His hair was in his eyes, his white scarf dangling over one shoulder, and on his arm was a woman.
Fleur.
Roderick’s heartbeat quickened.

She had shed the martial uniform and the startling makeup and now wore a long, slim skirt made of silk he recognized immediately as having come from his own shop. She looked quite young—eighteen?—and the bones of her face were as delicate as porcelain. She raised her palms to him in reverence but he returned the gesture immediately, as though unworthy, his hands far higher.

“Yours is a beautiful home,” she murmured.

Her voice was plangent and dark, the voice of a goddess and not a child.

“And yours, a beautiful dance.”

Her eyes slid away in humility, but he saw that she was pleased. Vukrit seized her by the arm and muttered something swift and brutal in Thai. Roderick’s expression changed as he understood the slur. He took a step forward and came up hard against Alec’s restraining hand.

“What’s your hurry, Minister?” McQueen asked Vukrit. “We’re all old friends here. Or were you and Jack plotting coups together?”

“I plot nothing with this man.” Vukrit spat deliberately into the gravel at Roderick’s feet.

Alec’s right hand tightened implacably against his chest and the left came up around Roderick’s neck, as though he’d cheerfully strangle Jack rather than allow him to brawl in his own courtyard. “Steady,” McQueen muttered. “Steady. There are reporters here.”

Vukrit gripped the girl by the wrist and dragged her furiously toward the khlong gate. Fleur stumbled in the narrow skirt and high Western heels, and gasped a beseeching word of Thai. Vukrit did not turn his head.

“Poor kid’ll pay for her kindness to
you
tonight,” Alec told Jack quietly. “And she was a virgin when he bought her. Bastard brags about it.”

A spurt of anguish tore through Roderick’s gut. “How long?”

“—Has she been his mistress? Three months. Maybe less.”

Shoulders nearly touching, they stood together in the fragrant shadows. McQueen offered him a cigar but Roderick refused it. The smell of khlongs in the dry season and burning tobacco mingled in a way that might almost be confused with incense.
Roderick the king

He had threatened a man and made him look foolish, then presumed to flirt with his toy. He’d given Vukrit an excuse for rape.

Cotton-mouthed and ashamed, he doused the torches.

H
ave you seen the papers?” Matthew French demanded over the phone on Thursday morning. “The press has been calling my office all morning. It has been
most
disruptive.”

“Anything interesting?” Stefani retorted. “Exclusive interviews? Talk-show appearances?”

“I’m afraid the media spin is highly negative, Ms. Fogg.” The lawyer sounded disapproving. “Your public display at the museum yesterday is regarded as a deliberate attempt to humiliate both the Minister of Culture and the Thai Heritage Board.”

“Poor them,” Stefani cooed.

There was the rustle of newsprint over the line.

“Sompong Suwannathat states unequivocally, in one of the Thai-language papers I wouldn’t expect you to have seen, that your claim is ‘a
farang
woman’s brazen effort to exploit a national legend, and strip the Thai people of their priceless heritage.’”

“So Sompong owns more people in the press than he’s sold out. Bravo for the minister. How do we save the situation? Publicly request a meeting with the museum’s Board?”

“I would urge you to abandon the public assault and employ back channels.”

“Such as?”

“Any that are available to you,” French concluded. “For my part, I must refuse to act further on your behalf. Several clients informed me this morning that they are taking their business elsewhere. I can no longer afford to link my name to yours.”

“I see why you’re in Trusts and Estates, Mattie—a nice, comfortable branch of the law that’ll never get your hands dirty.” Acid words, but she felt an undeniable thrust of panic in the pit of her stomach.

“Trusts and Estates is what you said you needed,” he shot back. “I have never claimed to be a celebrity publicist.”

“Does Oliver know you’re dumping me?”

“Mr. Krane was kind enough to support me wholeheartedly.”

“When?” Stefani demanded. Oliver had dropped off the face of the earth. His private number—the discreet voice at Carlton Gardens—was disconnected. And he’d sent no reply to her e-mail inquiries.

“I received a severance wire from his account this morning.”

Stefani swore under her breath. “Matthew—I need to reach Oliver. Can you put me in touch with him?”

“Unfortunately, no.” French was smug. “He requested that I say nothing of his whereabouts—a simple request, as I never know where Oliver is.”

* * *

The woman seated
alone at the rickety table outside Jimmy Kwai’s Guest Café was drinking a Michelob and toying with a tired plate of
pad thai.
They were always toying with
pad thai,
Jeff Knetsch thought; it was a backpacker staple on Khao San Road, like the cheese steaks and the soba noodles and the Oreo cookies imported and sold in the thousands to homesick Americans. But usually the women moved in twos or threes, if they weren’t hooked up with a guy; women preferred the protection of numbers. It was a defense against muggings and pick-up lines and the sudden surrender of loneliness; and so Jeff decided the sole female next to him had left someone sleeping off a hangover in one of the seven-dollar-a-night guesthouses nearby.

She wore the woman backpacker’s garb of choice: a featherweight sarong that limned her tanned legs, and a spaghetti-strapped camisole she could wash out in a basin. She was very blond, in the sun-damaged way that comes with excessive exposure; her cheekbones were raw and hungry and she’d spread glitter provocatively along her brow. A Californian on self-imposed exile? Or an Aussie touring the Pacific-rim world? As Jeff watched, she shoved the plate of noodles and the plastic fork to one side and leaned protectively over the paperback in her lap. He realized, with a faint buzz of anticipation, that she was conscious of him watching her.

“Food’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” he asked.

She glanced up. “Least it’s cheap.”

New Zealand, probably. Or south Australian. He wondered if the person she’d left behind was male or female, and whether she practiced massage or aromatherapy. Everyone who drifted through Khao San Road did one or the other. They also did Ecstasy and pot and psychedelic drugs, when they weren’t toying with heroin; they traveled overland in the back of pickup trucks to Tibet
and Bhutan; they danced to techno-rave for three days straight on the beaches of Ko Pha Ngan; and they all believed in a Universal Experience of Love and Peace, at least until their parents’ money ran out.

After his chilling discussion with Sompong Suwannathat at the Peninsula Hotel the previous night, Knetsch had immediately checked out of his room and hopped a
tuk-tuk
to the warren of bars and cafés and Internet outlets on Khao San Road. He had been a gambler long enough to know when his luck had turned. His blood money was out of reach. He couldn’t go home; he couldn’t pay off the debts that were about to bury him alive. Sompong owned the city: Sompong would track him down.

Knetsch had landed on Khao San in the suit and tie he’d worn for the past two days, and booked a bed for ten bucks in a guesthouse whose name and location he promptly forgot. Somewhere around midnight he traded the suit for tie-dyed drawstring pants and a T-shirt with the words
Hard Rock Café, Reykjavik
emblazoned across the chest. He’d lost his loafers after a three
A.M.
rerun of
MI:2
and gave up his briefcase for a pair of Taiwanese Tevas. Khao San Road was lined with the refuse of lost backpackers’ lives, all of it for barter or sale. Travel agencies offered cheap tickets on unknown airlines to obscure destinations. Tiny shops sandwiched between street vendors and tattoo parlors sold bedrolls and iodine tablets and pocketknives and Sony Walkmans. One of the shops bought his cell phone for a song. After that, he felt absurdly free, as though his last bond to life had been cut in two.

Amid the noise and neon it was harder to see the shadowy silhouette of the boy-specter who’d been following him through Bangkok. Knetsch still heard Max’s voice, babbling inconsequentially about snowpack, time
trials and the new race wax he could lend Jeff—but once Knetsch started singing Gilbert & Sullivan tunes, desperate and badly off-key, he hardly heard Max anymore.

The knowledge that he was hunted—by Sompong’s people, by the boy-ghost—drove him relentlessly through the shops and arcades, as though he would not be found if he did not stop moving.

In the hours between five
A.M.
and noon, he ordered eggs and bacon, eggs and sausage, eggs and noodles. He talked to Israeli soldiers taking a break between compulsory service before hitting college in Tel Aviv; to Germans and Danes who thought they’d found paradise; to American Peace Corps volunteers returning to the United States from posts in Africa and New Guinea and Bucharest. And he drank a raft of beer. Beer was plentiful and cheap, like everything sold on Khao San Road. What started as a necessary sedative became, with time, a pleasant background buzz of befuddlement, but he could not screen out the thoughts of what he’d done and what might happen, the thoughts of what he meant to do.

The aromatherapist from New Zealand slapped her guide book closed and stood abruptly. She wore some kind of hill tribe fanny pack instead of a purse, and her bare arms were lean and muscled. Jeff stared at the woman—all rangy legs and sharp angles, the damaged ends of her hair—and felt a desperate impulse to save her.

“Come with me,” he said urgently. “I’ll get us a room at a nice hotel. We’ll have dinner. Somewhere great. The Peninsula, maybe. Down by the waterfront. Have you even seen the river?”

The girl glanced at his tie-dyed pants and hopelessly dated T-shirt, his pale white toes in the knock-off Tevas. “Bother me again and I’ll call the cops,” she said.

* * *

By three in
the afternoon he had drunk his final beer, paid his tab at Jimmy Kwai’s and woven his way through the foreign tourists to the address he’d learned by heart.

It was a closet of a place, with a beaded curtain across the door and a sign written in five languages, offering Tarot card readings. Jeff slid through the swinging strings of beads and paused on the threshold as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. A joss stick smoldered on a Buddhist altar in the far corner. The air was thick and warm as though someone, somewhere, was showering.

In such quiet, Max was sure to surface. Knetsch squeezed his eyes shut and began to sing.
Three little maids from school are we/Pert as a schoolgirl well can be …

“May I help you?”

The Thai woman emerged from the gloom, thin and cramped in a long-sleeved shirt and cargo pants.

“I’m looking for Chanin.”

Her expression of hostility deepened.

“Sompong sent me.”

“You’re drunk. I can smell the beer on you from here.”

“I just ate lunch.”

“Drank it, probably. I do not deal
with farang
drunkards. Neither does Chanin.”

Jeff reached a hand to his brow; it was cold and clammy. What
was
the name of his guesthouse? He’d left his luggage there. His ticket home. Panic surged in his throat.
Filled to the brim with girlish glee …

“I’ve got to see him. It’s important. Sompong—”

“You use that name too freely.” The woman’s lips had tightened with anger. Behind her, a man’s voice barked out a word of Thai. She glanced over her shoulder, then looked grudgingly back at Jeff.

“Chanin will see you now,” she told him.

* * *

Dickie Spencer usually
spent his days in the executive office of Jack Roderick Silk, which occupied the rear of the main store on Surawong Road. The building was only as old as Roderick’s disappearance; Jack had opened the shop weeks before his fateful Easter holiday in March 1967, when the jungle highlands of Malaysia had swallowed him whole. But Spencer’s realm was calculated to suggest the elegance of antiquity: paneled in carved teak, it was furnished with planters’ chairs and vivid silks and clay urns tucked into niches in the walls.

When Stefani was shown into the room that afternoon, Spencer was bent over a drafting table—a tall, spare man with sandy hair and the mottled skin of an Englishman displaced to the tropics. He wore ivory flannel trousers, a silk shirt of the same shade and a cashmere jacket the hue of sandalwood. She expected his hand, when he offered it, to feel papery and dry, like the leaves of an old book; surprisingly, it was supple as doeskin. On the drafting table, under a light, were colored drawings of textile designs.

Spencer offered her one of the planters’ chairs, which were backed with enormous silk cushions in carmine and chartreuse. She sank into it, feeling instantly disarmed by its slope and comfort and thus at a tactical disadvantage. This was a chair for drinking rum, not for negotiation. Spencer leaned against the drafting table and stared down at her, completely at ease.

“You’re very kind to see me on such short notice,” she said.

“I am,” he agreed judiciously. “I’m usually far too busy to make room for heiresses, particularly pushy American ones. I understand you’d like to snatch the entire business out from under me—the factory, the silks,
the old khlong house—lock, stock and priceless barrel. But you arrive without a black limo or a phalanx of lawyers. I am encouraged. More to the point, my next meeting is unaccountably delayed and my schedule, at loose ends. So here we are.”

She smiled. “I haven’t come for the keys to your empire. Nor to slap down an ultimatum. I want some information.”

“About Jack Roderick? I never say a word. A legend deserves to be left … legendary.”

“To be frank, I’m more interested in Sompong Suwannathat.”

Wariness flickered across Spencer’s features, and was immediately replaced by the blandest inquiry. “You mean the Minister of Culture?”

“The man who controls the Thai Heritage Board that governs the disposition of my house. I imagine he puts more than a finger into your business as well.”

“My dear, I run a company that employs over one hundred thousand silk weavers and thirty textile designers. I export my goods worldwide. Sompong may like to offer advice from time to time, but he represents the public sector and I the private.”

“Nothing’s that clear-cut in Thailand. You grew up in Bangkok. Your father worked for Jack Roderick, when Sompong Suwannathat was just a boy. You’re embedded in this culture and your company couldn’t survive without favors won, and favors bestowed. You must have a thousand reasons to respect—or hate—the minister.”

Spencer quirked an eyebrow. “You’re never subtle, are you, Ms. Fogg? I admit that personal and professional histories can become a bit tangled in Bangkok. But I’m too old
a farang
to be caught in my own snare.”

“Mr. Spencer,” she retorted bluntly, “I intend to win title to Jack Roderick’s House. The process may require
months. Or it may take decades. I may spend a fortune in legal costs. None of that matters. A man I loved died violently because he wanted that house. His grandfather had left it to him in his will. I intend to see that legacy placed in the proper hands.”

Spencer’s lips twitched. “You don’t know Thailand at all, do you? Proper hands don’t exist. They’re all too busy grabbing what they can.”

“I came here today to make a deal,” she rejoined implacably.
“When
I am awarded the rights to Jack Roderick’s House, I may do any number of things. I could auction the art collection at Sotheby’s. I could use the place as a weekend retreat. Or I could turn it into a luxury inn and charge a fortune for a single night’s stay.”

“All of which would be a tragic waste,” Spencer replied softly, “of a very great national treasure.”

“I agree.” She sat back and gazed up at him. “I might be prepared to consider, however, turning over the house, and the management of its collections, to a hand-picked team of curators and trustees. I’d prefer to see them handled by the same people who’ve safeguarded the Jack Roderick Silk Company all these years. People like you— and those you employ—have kept Roderick’s legend alive. Not politicians or bureaucrats. Not Sompong Suwannathat.”

“I see.” Spencer met her eyes steadily. “May I thank you, Ms. Fogg, for that testimonial of faith. What you want is help in toppling Sompong’s personal empire?”