The Secret Agent (26 page)

“Do not lie,” she replied brusquely. “You saved my
husband’s life—and saved me an eternity of loneliness. But I must ask one more favor.”

Her dark eyes burned fiercely in her wasted face. Nine years ago they had danced in Amphorn Gardens. Exile had cut away Chao’s grace as water will erode a streambed, leaving rock-hard strength exposed.

“Anything,” he replied, and meant it.

“When I am gone, take my son to my sister, Li-ang. He will forget this place, with time.”

“He will never forget you. Or Carlos.”

“Carlos wants for Sompong the life that has been denied him. But it is death for Carlos to take our son to Bangkok.”

“You have my word,” Roderick said; and saluted the General’s wife.

M
r. Halliwell,” Paolo Ferretti said into the phone Thursday evening, “I’m afraid we have a problem here at the Oriental. You remember Ms. Fogg? The American woman you met at the cocktail party Tuesday?”

Rush leaned against his secretary’s desk in the half-empty station. “I remember,” he answered.

“She’s just killed a man.”

Halliwell cursed silently.

“I have to call the police,” the assistant manager continued. “We would appreciate it if you could come over right away. To explain to Ms. Fogg her rights, before the police arrive.”

“Of course. Is she okay?”

“Unharmed.” Paolo hesitated. “But she is perhaps too much in command of herself. She was attacked, you see. A very curious incident. Quite beyond our usual experience. How the man ever got in—”

“Are you saying this guy was in her room?”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll be right over,” Rush said, and hung up the phone.

Paolo moved all
the guests from Stefani’s corridor to a different wing of the hotel, with complimentary champagne and no explanation. They left the corpse where it lay.

She sat in a chair to one side of his desk, cradling a glass of brandy in her hands. Someone had put a blanket around her shoulders, as though she had survived disaster, and offered her a cigarette. It burned unnoticed in Paolo’s ashtray.

“How did you … do it?” the assistant manager asked her once.

“You should be wondering how he got into my room.”

“He used the key.”

She glanced up swiftly from her brandy.

“Your butler was found dead in the service elevator.”

“I crushed the bastard’s windpipe,” she offered. “Instinct, I guess.”

“Instinct,” Paolo repeated, and looked away.

In Bangkok there
are two kinds of traffic: rush hour and worse. Tonight the streets were snarled in ways that even a native could not penetrate. Halfway to the hotel Rush abandoned his taxi and walked. The police employed sirens. He beat them by three minutes.

“What happened?” he demanded as he strode into Paolo’s office.

Stefani looked up. “Rush, he was going to cut my throat—”

“But you got to him first.”

“What does it cost to whack a stranger in this town? A hundred bucks?” “Try forty.”

The Bangkok police
spent five hours and forty-two minutes in the Oriental Hotel. They sealed the elevator where the murdered butler lay, they sealed Stefani’s suite, they sent in forensics teams to manage evidence collection and they muttered into walkie-talkies the length of the Garden Wing corridor. They found no identification on the dead man.

What they did find was a pack of clove cigarettes and a matchbook imprinted with the name of a tattoo parlor on Khao San Road. They took Polaroids of the corpse’s face and sent an eager young officer to sweep the backpacker district.

Rush followed Paolo Ferretti up a service elevator and into the deserted corridor. He took in the details: Stefani’s laptop on the coffee table, a bottle of Bombay Sapphire three-quarters full. She liked a Bulgari scent that smelled like green tea and she had very little in the way of luggage. The room had not been ransacked. But he had never thought burglary was the motive.

A police medic had slit open the stocking that shrouded the dead man’s features. He was Asian, neither young nor old, with a head of spiky hennaed hair. He stared at the ceiling, amazed. Rush bent to study the crushed throat.

“How is it possible?” Paolo whispered anxiously. “She’s such a small woman—”

Halliwell shook his head. “This is a Green Beret’s move. And it wasn’t done by accident. Have the cops mentioned it yet?”

“No.”

“They will. Stall.” He straightened and said in Thai to the medic, “We’ve never seen this man before.”

The most senior
of the floating pool of uniforms, a detective named Itchayanan, sat down to talk to Ms. Fogg. He was studying English and wanted to practice. The experience proved unhelpful.

I don’t know the man and I don’t know how he got into my room. He had a knife and he tried to use it.

I’m not sure how I killed him. He had his hands on my neck and I just shoved at him in the dark. Suddenly he was on the floor.

I have no idea why anyone would attack me.

I’m in Bangkok for pleasure. My permanent address is New York City. I have no place of employment.

“Stefani Fogg,” Itchayanan repeated, tasting the strange name on his tongue. “You’re the
farang—the
American lady—who wants to steal Jack Roderick’s House.”

Stefani did not reply.

“I saw you on TV. You’ve got a pretty big mouth, huh?” Itchayanan waved his pen under her nose. “This guy you killed probably wanted to teach you a lesson.”

They searched her
room for drugs and large sums of currency and black-market ivory or artifacts. They examined the purpled bruise where three fingers had gripped her slender neck and tagged the pocket switchblade they found under her coffee table. They considered the possibility of attempted rape. They asked where Miss Fogg had traveled last, where she intended to go next, and why. Then they told her to remain in Bangkok, pending further developments.

An hour and forty minutes later, Detective Itchayanan
informed the U.S. embassy’s Third Political Secretary that they would not charge Miss Fogg for the crime of murder. Still sitting in her chair beside Paolo’s desk, she rolled her eyes in disdain.

Americans, Itchayanan thought bitterly, took the most amazing things for granted.

Rush signaled one
of the ivory-colored Mercedes sedans that sat in front of the hotel, day and night. When the driver pulled over he put a question to the man in Thai. The answer must not have pleased him, because he slapped the car roof and motioned to the next in line. It, too, was rejected. So was a third. When the fourth pulled up, Stefani snapped, “If you send this one away, I’m walking.”

Rush slid in beside her and slammed the door. A fusillade of Thai.

“What’s going on?”

“I’d prefer a driver who doesn’t speak English,” Rush muttered.

“Then you want a city cab, not one of the hotel’s.”

“Please,” he told the man at the wheel, “play some music. Something loud. We’re trying to stay awake.”

The driver reached obediently for a knob and the Beatles—“Penny Lane”—filled the backseat. The car pulled away from the Oriental. Stefani thought it unlikely that she would ever return.

“Have you eaten lately?” Rush asked.

“Not since breakfast.”

“It’s nearly two
A.M.
Never kill a man on an empty stomach.”

He cast a glance toward the rearview mirror, but the driver seemed oblivious. Stefani curled herself into a corner of the seat, arms wrapped tightly under her chest.

She was suddenly overwhelmingly tired of death and her intimacy with it.

“I have a penchant for gallows humor,” Halliwell said unexpectedly. “Forgive me. The police located your attacker’s wife in a fortune-teller’s den on Khao San Road. They’re questioning her now. Why would a guy who reads tea leaves for a living want to kill you?”

“Because he works two jobs,” she retorted. “Why wasn’t that Jo-Jo lying on my floor?”

“Be glad it wasn’t. Jo-Jo’s too strong and too cunning to be flipped on his back by a girl.”

She kept her eyes on the flow of lights. There was little traffic on the streets now. “Where are you taking me?”

“My father’s house, in Nonthaburi. No one will look for you there.”

“Is your father Joe Halliwell—of the
Bangkok Post?”

“He is.”

Just what she needed: a hostile journalist over the breakfast table. She considered putting up a fight. But a hotel would be difficult at this hour of the morning. And a hotel would be watched. She shuddered at the thought of another empty room.

“I read his column,” Rush was saying awkwardly. “You should ignore it. He’s touchy on the subject of Jack Roderick.”

“And your mother?” Stefani asked. “She’s Thai, if I recall?”

“She died when I was ten. That’s when I came to live with Joe.” He said these words so carefully that she knew not to probe further.

Had his parents never married? She imagined Rush as a kid: half-Thai, illegitimate and cut loose with too much money in southern California. A Eurasian was often the butt of both his cultures. Had Rush grown up determined to join neither of them? Had he wandered
the world, watching and listening, behind his mask of easy charm? For the first time since she’d learned that Max was dead, Stefani felt pity for someone besides herself.

Joe Halliwell lived
in a small house with a dense garden on the outskirts of Nonthaburi. A single light blazed through the dark. “That’s the guest-room window,” Rush whispered as they stood on the doorstep. The hired Mercedes was idling; the Beatles had given way to jazz. “Dad’s probably in bed. You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Do you carry a gun?”

She smiled faintly. “Of course not. I’m a tourist.”

“You’re not a tourist,” he retorted, and she heard his irritation. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

Bangkok,
1957

I
n February of 1957, Field Marshal Pibul was an old man of sixty who had ruled Thailand, with the exception of a two-year hiatus in prison, for nearly twenty years. Washington was worried about Thailand—about the increasing fractiousness of the governing elites, the unrest of student groups, the cries for democratic process and the growing attraction of Communist insurgency. Indochina was in armed revolt against the colonial power of France: men with guns were stalking the hills of Laos, the rice paddies of Vietnam and even the wide and leafy boulevards of Phnom Penh. In the domino game of Southeast Asia, Thailand could not be next.

Washington worried about the guns; and Washington believed that Field Marshal Pibul was too indolent, now, in his advancing years, to stem the flood of cheap Soviet and Chinese rifles into his country. It was time to effect a change.

Please advise fault lines of current government clique,
Langley cabled the Bangkok embassy.
Also likely candidates for covert support in upcoming elections.

Elections in Thailand had never meant much. They were lip service to the public, allowing it to believe it chose the members of its national assembly, who were actually in thrall to the cabinet members who’d bought their seats.

“Shouldn’t we be supporting free and fair elections?” asked the young case officer who sat over roasted pork and mangosteen, in Jack Roderick’s house one evening in late January. “Isn’t that the reason we’re all here? To promote democracy?”

He was maybe twenty-four years old, Roderick thought; a former quarterback from Yale. His name was Chip. The current station chief at the U.S. embassy had sent him over to meet Jack Roderick in a ritual, repeated every year, that was known within the ranks as “sitting at the feet of the Great White Case Officer.” Roderick was supposed to slap some sense into the kid.

He was growing increasingly tired of the role. The new recruits reminded him of the man he had once been: idealistic, engaged, unquestioning. Less tired, purer. Certain of his goals and the motives behind them. Now he collected his thoughts and focused on the bewildered young face opposite.

“Free and fair elections are a farce. Every son of a bitch in Thailand will be scalping votes in front of the polling places like tickets to the Army-Navy Game. Next month’s election will be no different. In fact, it’ll be worse. The Coup Group smells blood. They’re ready to cut Pibul off at the knees. They’ll be at each other’s throats for every last seat in the House.”

The Coup Group was Pibul’s cabinet, so-named in recognition of their ascent to power on the back of Pibul’s 1947 coup. The cabinet ministers were military officers, drawn from the Army, the Navy and even the
new body of Marines set up with Washington’s help and ruled by Pibul’s son, Rear Admiral Prasong. None of them was loyal to Pibul.

Chip looked mulish.

Roderick tried again. “You can’t stop the flood of cash. And so you might as well put some bills in the kitty. In support of the right people. Understand?”

The most likely man to grab power was Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, a horse Jack Roderick backed. Roderick had taken Sarit’s measure years before, when the Field Marshal was a mere Colonel, and considered him intelligent, ruthless and no friend to Mao. Sarit had threatened the Pibul government in 1951, and been placated with rapid promotions: from lieutenant general to commander in chief of the Army and, by this time, Minister of Defense. Sarit controlled the Finance Section of the State Lottery Bureau, and skimmed huge sums of cash to buy political support. But the real reason Jack Roderick watched Sarit’s progress was because he hated and undermined the power base of another cabinet minister: Vukrit Suwannathat. Any enemy of Vukrit’s was worth keeping on Roderick’s payroll.

But his immediate problem was Chip. “Look,” he attempted, “think of it in terms of football. You can run yourself ragged trying to score against a dirty defense. Or you can size up the opposing team—in this case, the Soviet Union—and undermine each one of their rotten plays. You may not reach the end zone every quarter, but you’re bound to spike the other side’s chances of getting a touchdown. Make sense?”

Chip nodded tentatively. “It just seems so … un-American. I can’t believe that Ike would admit to these kind of tactics.”

“You’re here,” Roderick concluded bluntly, “so that he never has to.”

* * *

Months later, in
the rainy season of August, he took Fleur by boat upriver to Ayutthaya with a picnic hamper at her feet. Fleur’s feet were a subject he was supposed to ignore—it is bad manners in Thailand even to glance at the feet, which are the lowliest of objects—but he loved them for their strength and suppleness and for the extraordinary flexibility of the toes. It was his habit to spend an absurd amount of time caressing those feet, which had stamped out the tragedies of Thailand on a hundred stages. They were born to be carried aloft on a silken cushion, to command from an elephant’s back; but the feet and Roderick’s obsession with them caused Fleur acute embarrassment. He restrained himself now, content to admire her poise in the boat’s prow, the gay flags that rippled from stem to stern all about her.

They had often gone to the old capital, bumping along the dusty roads in the Buick he had imported as successor to the Packard, a monstrous shining thing the dark green of a crocodile. He had bought her a very fine Bencharong tea set at a dusty shop in the modern city, and had walked with her through the islands at the confluence of three rivers, marveling at the sounds her lips could form as they parsed out the words engraved in ancient stone. Roderick had never quite mastered the subtleties of tone—mid, high, low, rising, falling, like the stages of earthly love—and he had completely despaired of the elegant script with its eighty sinuous characters. On these trips he and Fleur retold the kingdom’s oldest stories, of betrayal and passion and mortal loss. That was why he had chosen Ayutthaya today.

“You are very serious, Jack,” she commented, scooping up a handful of river water and sprinkling him with the drops. “I think we grow fat and dull in our old age.”

“‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety,’” he said, with all the longing of a man who will not see fifty again. She was unfamiliar with Shakespeare; and yet there was something very like Cleopatra about her, as she perched in the bow with her head lifted and bare ankles crossed. She was not yet twenty-five. Time had worn away the lost look of her youth; but her eyes were as dark and deep and changeable in their expression as they’d been when he’d first glimpsed her.

“Serious,” she repeated, “and gloomy. What’s troubling you, Jack? The silk trade? Politics?”

It was a judicious question. February’s general election had been the dirtiest contest in memory. Students had marched in the streets, and Pibul sent out his riot police. When scores were injured, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat sided with the students and protestors, and resigned his cabinet post. He was maneuvering, most Thais thought, for the right moment to seize power. Pibul had just cut off Sarit’s main source of income: he’d been stripped of the State Lottery post.

“I’m worried about my house,” Roderick said abruptly. “Your friend the minister—Vukrit Suwannathat—sent two men yesterday. They came while I was out and took four of my small bronze Buddhas away with them, despite the protests of my cook and houseboy. I shall never see those figures again; and I shall be very lucky if worse is not to follow.”

“Petty. Vukrit’s like a bad child shooting peas across the dinner table, don’t you think?”

“I loved my Buddhas—loved them enough, Fleur, that I haven’t displayed them for nearly two years. They were packed away in a storage cupboard. Vukrit’s men knew exactly where to find them.”

She was staring into the water, her profile etched
against the gilded roof of a distant wat. “I remember,” she said vaguely. “You showed them to me once, I think. There is a royal barge!”

He glanced in the direction she pointed and saw the prow of a great boat, some forty oarsmen chanting time as their blades slid through the water. A single figure swung high in the stern, plying the massive oar that served as tiller. The passenger amidships—royal or no-was indistinct at such a distance, dwarfed by pageantry.

“That’s where you belong,” he told her. “Cleopatra.”

“The motion of the river is making me sick,” she retorted, “and I don’t want to be treated like a princess.”

“Good. I’m fond of the present queen—particularly when she wears my silk—but I don’t care much for royals in general.”

“Because of King Ananda,” she said quietly. “Because the palace insists his death was an accident. But you know the truth, don’t you? Alec McQueen says so.”

He glanced at her piercingly. “Surely that was before your time, child.”

“I know all the best stories.”

Cruelty prompted him to ask, “Did you learn them at your minister’s knee?”

“Don’t talk about him. That’s
twice
today. You’re jealous and you’re determined to spoil everything.”

“I know that you still see him.”
I know you tell him everything. You are his ears in my house.

“We’ve been over and over that,” she returned wearily. “Sometimes I wish—”

“That you’d never met me?”

“That I was free of you both,” she said.

Roderick’s face hardened. “You can always go back to the south, Fleur. No one’s keeping you. In the strictest sense.”

She rose up in the boat’s stern as though she had been
struck. “You know that I would sooner die than leave you. It is just that my stomach is sick and I have a headache and I was a fool to say
it. Jack—”

“You would sooner die than return to the south, yes,” he cut in with reckless brutality, “but not for love of me. It’s the dancing that matters. Your art. I understand that, Fleur—I understand it so well that I’m able to forgive you almost everything.
Almost.
For your art I put up with the Ministry of Culture rifling my home, and the petty boy shooting peas. I put up with having only a fingerhold on your heart. Because without your art, Fleur, you would be half the woman you seem.”

He reached out his hand.

“You said
almost,
” she whispered. “What is it you cannot forgive, Jack?”

My bronze Buddhas,
he was tempted to say; but it was too much like an accusation, and he could not bear to utter it while the bright flags fluttered around her.

Fleur did not
eat much and Roderick questioned her about her sudden illness; but she gave him half-answers or silence and eventually he dropped the subject. She seemed to improve once they left the boat and he promised to hire a car for the return to Bangkok.

They drowsed on the grass amid the remains of their lunch, and the afternoon was so pleasant that he almost forgot to plant his betrayal in her ear.

“I have to go away in three days’ time,” he told her. “For a week, maybe longer. You could stay at the house while I’m gone.”

She propped herself up on one elbow and stared down at him. “Where are you going?”

“Khorat. Then into Vientiane. I may come back by way of Chiang Rai.”

“There is no silk in Chiang Rai. Only hill people and men with guns. I wonder what you find to take you there.”

He smiled faintly. “Old debts.”

“The kind that money can’t repay,” she said acutely. “Spy business.”

“I haven’t been a spy since 1947, Fleur.”

“I don’t believe you. You were born with a hunger to know everything, and a heart that shares nothing.”

He plucked at the grass before replying. “I have a meeting in Chiang Rai. An old friend from the resistance. Your minister’s brother-in-law. They hate each other.”

“I am sick of my minister. Who is this old friend, that you prefer to spend a week with him instead of me? A lady friend, perhaps?”

“He is a brave and tired man who has lost everything he loves, including his wife. And now I must take his son from him as well.”

She spread her hands on his chest; even at rest, her fingertips curved upward like the petals of an opening flower. “What kind of man would give up his own son?”

He thought of Rory and answered: “A man who had no choice. Promise me you’ll stay at the house.”

“To keep your bed warm?”

“I like to think of you there.”

A sidelong glance. “And where must I think of you?”

“On the outskirts of Sop Ruak, where the river path meets the jungle,” he said deliberately. “I shall be there in a week’s time, to see my old friend.”

She sighed and fell back in the grass. “You must bring me a present from Vientiane.”

“Promise me you’ll stay at the house. There may be violence in Bangkok while I am gone. You’ll be safe in Ban Khrua.”

“Violence! What kind of violence?”

“A man with a gun and an army at his back. Your minister knows all about it. But even knowledge will not save him, this time. Will you stay at the house?”

“I’m so tired of armies,” she said plaintively. “They disrupt the electrical service. Bring me back a Lisu headdress, Jack—something colorful from the hills. Then perhaps I shall forgive you.”

He set out
the next morning, two days early, and did not go to Khorat at all.

Instead, he drove due north from the city, past Ayutthaya where he had lain for the last time in the grass with his beloved; past Lop Buri where he bought a small statue of a snarling
singha
to give to Fleur; past the jungle of Thung Yai Naresuan where tigers lurked in the shifting green; and after many hours, through the ancient ruins of Sukkothai, the most distant outpost of the old Khmer empire. There he paused to eat some mango-steens in the cool of the evening and to watch three small boys wrestling in the riverbank mud. He was sad and yet hopeful, as one who has survived a death.

Two days later he reached Sop Ruak and found his way through the paths that meandered and led to the General’s stronghold in the hills. He was conscious of the watchers in the trees above, and of the whistles and calls that preceded his passage. He moved with the prickling knowledge of being tracked by a gun’s sights, and resisted the impulse to run.