The Secret Agent (24 page)

“Got it in one.”

For the space of heartbeats, he studied the dust motes trapped in a band of sunlight that divided the room between them. He said finally, “I only heard about the will a few months ago. The second will, I mean. I had often wondered where it was. I was asked to witness it, you see,
along with my father, five or six weeks before Jack disappeared. And then no mention of it was ever made again.”

“I saw your signature on the document. Roderick placed the will between the pages of some blueprints and sent them off to his sister. The will went undiscovered for over thirty years.”

“How terribly sad to think that no one bothered to study those blueprints. Jack was such a superb draftsman. These are some of his designs, you know. He had a flawless sense of color.”

Spencer handed her the sketches of fabric she had glimpsed on the drafting table. An intricate damask of blue and green, fluid as the sky where it meets spring grass; a plaid of cherry red and mango yellow that sprang off the page. A strong, light hand had penned one word in the lower corner:
Roderick.
She traced the name with her fingertip, and longed for Max.

“You realize the risks in what you ask of me, Ms. Fogg? Or are you just terribly naïve?”

“Both. But no one speaks of Sompong Suwannathat without adding that he’s dangerous—
a man to respect,
they say. That kind of man always has enemies, Mr. Spencer. I intend to befriend Sompong’s enemies.”

“How very Thai of you. I think you should call me Dickie.”

Surprised, Stefani laughed out loud. “Very well. Tell me, Dickie—why did Jack write a new will five weeks before he disappeared?”

“Because Jack was an old man. He was worried about his son and he wanted, at the end, to give him all the things he’d failed to offer during the boy’s life. You know about Rory?”

“—And the Hanoi Hilton? A little. My friend Max— from whom I inherit the house—was Rory’s only child.”

“Ah.” Spencer rubbed at his eyes as though they pained him. “The Vietnam War did terrible things to Jack Roderick. It seemed to place in question the value of his whole life in Asia.”

Stefani waited in silence for him to explain.

“Jack had this vision of what Thailand could be, when he arrived here after the Second World War. But the years Jack spent here—perhaps even the work he did?— resulted in a different sort of country than he’d hoped.” Spencer shrugged. “He hated the new roads and the filled khlongs and the sex workers and the ugly, slapdash concrete skyscrapers. By the time he disappeared, he no longer seemed to enjoy the things he’d always loved—the silk weavers’ homes in Ban Khrua, the dealers in the Thieves Market. Perhaps he was merely tired.”

“You blame the war. Did Jack?”

“I don’t know,” Spencer mused. “My father told me that Jack didn’t support the American engagement in Southeast Asia. For the first time in his life, Jack Roderick was at odds with the country he’d always served.”

“Meaning the United States? Or Thailand?”

“Hard to separate the two. They were hand-in-glove during the Vietnam War. It was one of the best periods in history for Thai-U.S. relations. Washington needed a friendly staging ground for troops; Thailand needed support in the region—everyone else in Southeast Asia was battling Communist insurgencies or revolution or both. It was a marriage of convenience between two strangers marooned on an island.”

“How old were you in 1967?” she asked impulsively.

“I had my sixteenth birthday three weeks after Jack disappeared.”

“And people knew that Jack was a spy?”

“We preferred, in our family, to call him an intelligence operative,” Spencer answered. “A spy might be anything—
a man without honor, telling tales to the highest bidder. Jack Roderick had integrity. Perhaps that’s why he said:
No more.”

“Max was convinced that his grandfather died because he opposed the Vietnam War.”

“Eliminated by right-thinkers on one side or the other?” Spencer shook his head. “I don’t believe anyone killed Jack. I suspect he set about quite purposefully to drop off the face of the earth—and from the look of things, he succeeded.”

Stefani stared at him wordlessly.

“No one believes me, Ms. Fogg.” His smile was disarming. “No one agrees. It’s far too simple a solution, you see. But consider the money. Consider Fleur.”

“Fleur?” she repeated, bewildered.

“Fleur Pithuvanuk. Jack’s once-and-forever mistress, an exquisite dancer of
lakhon.
She was decades younger than he and they’d drifted apart toward the end of his life, but she reappeared a few weeks before Jack left for Malaysia. I think Fleur’s the reason Jack went.”

“I’ve never heard her name before.”

“Fleur is the key to everything.” Spencer said it softly. “She was another man’s mistress before she was Jack’s. Jack lured her away from Vukrit Suwannathat, Sompong’s father. Blood was bad between Roderick and Vukrit, from that time forward.”

Stefani remembered something Rush Halliwell had said. “Sompong’s father was Minister of Culture once, too.”

“It’s a family sinecure.”

“Dickie—do you think Vukrit hated Roderick enough, because of Fleur, to kill him in the Cameron Highlands?”

“I think Vukrit hated Jack so much he could have killed him with his bare hands. But Vukrit was investigated thoroughly—if not by his pals in the Thai government,
then by the U.S. team that tracked the Roderick case. Jack’s family was persistent. Vukrit was never accused.”

“But why should Jack just … vanish? Without explaining where he went?”

“Perhaps he didn’t want to be found,” Spencer suggested. “Look—two days before Jack left for Malaysia, he took me aside in this very room. He put a sealed envelope and a briefcase in my hand.
Dickie,
he said,
I need you to run an errand. Go to the bank and give that letter to the manager Then do as he tells you. Come straight back here and don’t talk to anyone along the way.
”

“What was in the briefcase?” she asked.

“Nothing at all. I could tell by the weight that it was empty. I didn’t question the fact, or read the sealed letter. I ran errands for Jack quite often—it was one way to learn the business. I went to the bank in a hired
tuk-tuk
and I remember every meter of the journey. It was beastly hot and the fumes from the traffic were stifling. I thought I should never arrive.”

He paused, and peered at her soberly. “I can recall almost nothing of the trip back. I was in shock. I had never held so much money in a black bag in my life. That letter I gave the manager must have cleaned out the entire Roderick account.”

“Jack used the funds to start a new life?”

“He’d written his will, leaving everything else to his heirs. He couldn’t help his son Rory, trapped in the Hanoi Hilton. And he’d grown mortally tired of Bangkok. Jack cut his losses and got out.”

“Did this Fleur woman disappear, too?”

“On Good Friday, Jack took Fleur and that briefcase full of cash to the Cameron Highlands. On Sunday night, he disappeared. But for some reason, Fleur stayed behind. She never explained why.”

“You spoke to her?”

“The entire world spoke to her.” Spencer sounded amused. “She’d been privy to one of the most spectacular vanishing acts in history.
The New York Times
sent their Bangkok stringer, the Agence France-Press, UPI, even the
Bangkok Post.”

“What did she say?”

“She insisted that Jack had got lost in the jungle. And in a sense, of course, he had—with over a million dollars in U.S. currency. We should all be so lucky.”

There was a knock at the office door. “Sorry, Dickie,” Spencer’s assistant said, “but the woman from the museum has finally arrived. She’s brought a rather large portfolio, so I’ve put her in the conference room.”

“Very well,” Spencer replied. “I’ve enjoyed our discussion, Ms. Fogg. But I’m afraid—”

Stefani’s farewell was drowned in a gushing British voice.

“Dickie,
darling,
it’s so
fabulous
to see you again! I couldn’t
wait
to get out of London—you know how dreary it always is in October. How is your delicious place in the suburbs? Is the houseboy still pining for me? Shall I come to dinner tonight?”

There could be only one woman with that peculiar combination of familiarity and affront.

“Ankana.” Stefani turned toward the door. “Ankana Lee-Harris. What are you doing in Bangkok?”

“I might ask the same of you—if I hadn’t seen the morning papers!” The woman held her arms wide.
“Dearest
Stefani. So tragic about Max. I cried
buckets
when I heard. Of course, his life was over—no skiing, no sex, no fun in a wheelchair, one could hardly expect him to put up with it. We must accept that he died as he lived—mustn’t we? And move on?”

Spencer looked from Stefani to Ankana. “You two know each other.”

Ankana slid her manicured fingers along Spencer’s sleeve. “Ummm. That cashmere’s perfectly yummy, Dickie, but then so’s the arm beneath it. Ready to talk? Or should we relax a bit, first?”

“Talk,” he said firmly. “In the conference room. You were expected an hour ago.”

Roguishly, she laughed. “I’m worth the wait! You’ll love the things I’ve brought—I had to sell my very soul to get them.”

“Ankana and I are coordinating on the big Met show that opens in a month,” Spencer explained to Stefani. “Two Thousand Years of Southeast Asian Art. A fortune in sculpture and ceramics will soon be winging its way to New York.”

“From Roderick’s House?” Stefani turned to Ankana. “And the Hughes Museum?”

“Of course,” she replied. “Nothing
we’ve
got can touch Jack Roderick’s treasures. You’re so right to want the collection for your greedy little self—God knows
I
would. Have you any idea what it’s
worth?”
Malice gleamed in the woman’s sloe eyes. “I couldn’t
believe
Max left you a fortune like that. ‘Must be a pretty fabulous lay,’ I told Jeff, ‘if he turned over the kit and caboodle for a mere week of her life! He might have left
me
his wine cellar, at least.’”

“I’ll send you a bottle,” Stefani said smoothly. “So you’ve talked to Knetsch recently?”

“Yesterday. Jeff’s in Bangkok, too.”

And Oliver Krane had dropped out of sight. What had she called her precarious position? A highwire act, with no safety net? “I thought Knetsch was in France.”

“That was
last
week. As a trustee of the Met, Jeff’s got to meet with the Ministry of Culture. It’s a busy time for them, between our show and your grab for Jack Roderick’s House—but they seem to manage. They’ve
got a crackerjack chief, you know. Sompong’s hand is in every pie.”

Ankana smiled broadly, and in that moment a series of pennies dropped somewhere in Stefani’s mind.

Jeff Knetsch was acquainted with Sompong. Jeff Knetsch, Max’s personal attorney and closest friend. According to Oliver, Knetsch had serious financial problems—and Suwannathat could help.

“Jeff informed on Max,” she said aloud. “He kept tabs on Max’s private life, his movements, his legal problems, his dreams—and sold what he knew to Max’s worst enemy.”

Ankana shrugged. “Darling, we’ve all got to survive. We prostitute ourselves in various ways. I wouldn’t throw stones, if I were you.”

Bangkok,
1954

N
o one in Bangkok—not even Alec McQueen—understood how much of a slave Roderick was to dance.

He guarded the secret as one might a sexual perversion; but this man of cunning and solitude could trace the growth of his obsession through the high-water marks of his past life, knew the wrack it had left in heaps on his personal shore. It had begun when he was a boy, on a trip to Paris with his wealthy and cultured family-Jack at eight, all knees and knickerbockers, as his indulgent papa might have said.
L’Après-midi d’un Faune,
perhaps, or
Rite of Spring—something
pulsing and savage by Diaghilev. He’d sat on the edge of his Louis XVI chair, chin perched on his hands as he peered over the edge of the theater box, and after three hours of tumult and color, he was never the same.

It was the sets, mostly—blocks of vivid paint, abandoned in feeling and beyond the bounds of classic
restraint—that moved him as a boy. Later he understood that the shifting screens and monumental objects were mere expressions of something deeper: the violence of a dancer’s heart. He begged his mother to take him to the ballet during his vacations from St. Paul’s. He never spoke of these visits once he returned to school.

At Princeton he scanned the papers for notices of traveling troupes, and bought furtive tickets as another man might visit a bordello. And at last, a thirty-year-old Manhattan bachelor, he took what funds he had and threw them into the Monte Carlo Ballet, George Balanchine’s experiment in the grand tradition of Diaghilev.

It was there that Roderick met Joan—on her hands and knees with a paintbrush between her teeth.

She was thirteen years younger than he, a
debutante manqué with
a piquant face and prominent collarbones. Her father had lost his fortune in the Crash of ’29; her mother was delicately described as “indisposed,” and resided in an institution somewhere in Poughkeepsie. Joan was an only child, headstrong and outrageously indulged; a product of serial governesses and despairing finishing schools and protracted transatlantic tours. She possessed one talent—the ability to cover large surfaces with brilliant color—an eye for form, and the desire to provoke.

Her outfits were pastiches of old treasures and designer castoffs. Her body was careless and perfect and could bring a man to his knees. She laughed a great deal, at her own jokes and sometimes at others’. She could talk earnestly and drunkenly in smoky rooms until three in the morning, on behalf of social justice; and when Roderick met her he thought that they were driven by the same things: a repugnance for frivolity, a respect for
art and truth. For Joan he abandoned Republicanism and took up with Democrats. As Roosevelt was then in power, a Brahmin like himself, this was no very great leap; but the conversion made him feel dangerously independent. He brought Joan home to meet his family in Delaware, and though he reveled in her cheeky looks and untamed views, he was vaguely reassured that she understood the use of fish knives and iced teaspoons.

They were married four months later.

He wanted to give her everything: clothes as bright as plumage, a studio that faced north. He sold his interest in the Monte Carlo Ballet and dedicated himself to architecture. Joan abandoned her set-painting job and dabbled in oils. The two of them sailed firmly out into the sea of Society in which they had both been launched, years before, and found the water not nearly so cold as they remembered.

It was only in the midst of his son Rory’s third birthday, in 1939—a chance expression intercepted, a hand lingering too long—that Roderick understood. Joan required a full house for each of her performances, and she was cultivating a new leading man. Roderick was surrounded by props and scrims and bit players he hadn’t hired, a character always on the point of exiting. He found it a relief when the Japanese finally bombed Pearl Harbor.

Another high-water mark
in Roderick’s life, etched in torchlight on the back terrace: the night he first saw Fleur Pithuvanuk dance.

There was nothing in the movements of
lakhon
to suggest Diaghilev; no echo of drums that conjured Debussy. A feral pulse, all the same. Roderick watched with his back to the wall and his cigarette burning between his fingers. Fleur turned, her arms outstretched in an attitude
of war. The branching flames flickered. Fleur shuddered, her eyes lost and swooning; and his heart rose wildly in his chest.

He employed all
the tradecraft he had ever learned, by art or instinct, in stalking her.

There were the casual comments to friends and acquaintances, when they chanced to thank him for the evening’s entertainment:
Yes, those Thai girls are really quite good. They should get more support from the foreign community than they do. I’m thinking of speaking to the ambassador about it.
There were the subtle hints to one of Alec’s reporters that he might consider donating silk to the
lakhon
production company. And when he chanced to learn that the latest American ambassador had a daughter who loved ballet, there was the utterly spontaneous proposal of a cross-cultural festival of dance, under the auspices of the embassy and Jack Roderick Silk.

Philanthropy gave him cover. Philanthropy allowed him to observe Fleur’s
lakhon
troupe, in its severe rehearsals, for six weeks; and to shower the dancers with attention and flowers. Philanthropy gave him access to Fleur herself, and hours in which to memorize the line of her back, the tilt of her chin, the precise length of her smallest finger as it curled upward toward her wrist. She was lovely, ethereal and heartbreakingly sad, like a bird dying for lack of flight. With his palm clutched in the hand of the ambassador’s little girl, Roderick watched Fleur sway. And contemplated the ruin of Vukrit Suwannathat.

She came to
him on a night of torrential rain, two days before the cross-cultural festival was scheduled to close,
and stood under the shelter of his house with her feet in the floodwaters of the khlong.

“Fleur,” he said, from the pool of light at the top of the stairs. “What is it?”

Her black hair streamed and her eyes were blank with terror; her lip torn where Vukrit had struck her. She had taken a bus and then walked through the flooded streets.

“His wife. A terrible scene. I could not bear to stay, but when I tried to go he struck me in the face. I hate him, Jack.”

It was the first time she had ever said his name. He went slowly down the steps, careful not to touch her. But she reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder, as if they might waltz together beneath the soaring house; and though the monsoon air was heavy and warm, she trembled uncontrollably. He should have been warned.

“Your lip,” he said. “It’s bleeding.”

“I do not feel it.”

He fetched her towels and a robe and as she changed her clothes he warmed sake over an open flame. The rain beat upon his red-tiled roof as though it were a boat battened down at harbor; the floor beneath his feet rocked and swam. He set down the sake and drew a steadying breath. He was forty-nine years old. He assumed she was not yet twenty.

When he looked up, Fleur sat with her face toward the old brick terrace, watching the palm fronds whip in the storm. He crossed the room and proffered the sake.

“Is there somewhere I could take you? A friend’s house, perhaps?”

Her head turned in alarm.

“Urana—what about Urana?” he asked.

Urana was the mistress of
lakhon,
a tight-lipped and exacting woman.

“She will call Vukrit,” Fleur whispered, “and make me go back. Our troupe depends upon the Ministry of Culture.”

He understood, then—the practiced abuse of power. Vukrit held one string of his government’s purse. The minister chose where to place the funds at his disposal. And in return, Urana was willing to act as pimp. There were other
lakhon
troupes for Vukrit to support; but as long as Fleur was available to the minister, Vukrit would support Urana’s. It was a classic business exchange in a land where everyone—
everyone,
Roderick thought—had something to sell.

“He would never come here. It is the one house he fears to enter. He told me so himself. He hates you, Jack, as much as I hate him.”

He should have been warned.

But instead he touched her lip where the blood had dried. She closed her eyes and curled her cheek into his palm.

“You’ll have to go back.”

“Not for hours and hours,” she said dreamily. “Perhaps never.”

It was a lie, of course. At the time, he believed lies would be enough.