The Secret Agent (30 page)

As Rush stood before the kiosk on the pavement opposite his condo building, he thought of all that Stefani Fogg had told him that day. One fragment of information—so casually dropped she probably thought he’d overlooked it—was the key to everything.

There’s a show going up in a few weeks that both Ankana and Jeff are involved in.
Rush knew all about the art exhibition intended for the Met. For months, the embassy had worked closely with the Ministry of Culture on the project, approving the duty-free shipment of artifacts and oiling the delicate wheels of international exchange.

What Rush hadn’t understood was the significance of Jeff Knetsch—whom Halliwell had glimpsed studying ceramics with Sompong Suwannathat in the Nakorn Kasem Tuesday night. Knetsch, the distinguished member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board, who’d been arrested Thursday for heroin possession.

Rush returned the magazine he’d been scanning and pulled out his cell phone a second time.

“Marty, we need a favor from Liaison. Find a Bangkok police detective named Itchayanan. Tell him you’ve got a lead in a murder case he’s tracking. He should visit a warehouse in the Nakorn Kasem—”

Rush would have told Marty about the ceramics Sompong was using to ship drugs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he broke off in midsentence, his eyes fixed on the entry of his building.

Stefani Fogg had just walked out the door.

Bangkok,
1963

T
he three of them sat in a corner of the Bamboo Bar until nearly two
A.M.
, not drinking much but enjoying the protective cover of other
farang
conversation. Amid the English and French and occasional spurt of Italian it was possible to converse without drawing attention. Joe Halliwell was in his shirtsleeves and his tie was loosened. Roderick wore a pair of light cotton pants and an open-collared shirt; three hours earlier he’d worn an elegant suit fashioned of his own Thai silk, but had handed it to the host of their dinner party merely because the man admired it.

Self-promotion,
Roderick explained airily as he ducked into a taxi in a borrowed dressing gown.
Grand gestures. Market sense.
Halliwell refrained from snapping a photo or quoting him for the morning edition. It required all his strength.

Alec McQueen was his usual disheveled self. In the course of nearly two decades in Thailand he had acquired
a bit of weight to his frame, a rounding of his garish edges. He blew smoke rings to torment Jack, who had been advised for his health to forgo tobacco. Roderick followed the rings’ flight through the huddle of heads in the shadowy room, his eyes narrowed and his thoughts quite far away.

“They’re saying a few more months,” McQueen murmured around the stem of his pipe. “Months!—When Kennedy’s facing a stiff reelection campaign, and needs to look like a winner? Call it a few more weeks.”

“You think JFK escalates,” Halliwell countered, “and wipes up the mess in an afternoon? Or does he keep the boys at home and save lives? Which strategy wins the most votes?”

“They’ll never kick Jackie out of the White House,” Roderick said absently, “so Kennedy should stop worrying about the election and get the hell out of Southeast Asia. Every local boy between the ages of nine and eighty-three, from Vientiane to Rangoon to Phnom Penh, has an AK-47 under his pillow courtesy of Chairman Mao. We’re outgunned and in this terrain we’re bound to be outmaneuvered. I told the President so, myself.”

“Kennedy? You talked to the President?”

“I sent some fabric to the First Lady. Kennedy phoned in his thanks.”

The newspapermen stared at Roderick, who shrugged. “She’d seen
The King and I
on Broadway. All the costumes were made of Jack Roderick Silk. She liked them.”

Halliwell fidgeted with his lighter, snapping the flame on and off. Then McQueen said, with a barking laugh, “You never urged retreat in the jungles of Ceylon, Jack.”

“We were fighting the Japanese then. They had ships and planes and an organized attack. There was predictability,
Alec—something we could target, an enemy we could find. This bunch in Vietnam is nothing but a lot of armed zealots firing knockoffs of Soviet missiles.”

“Exactly. We’ll roll over ’em. Give us a real army! The hell with military advisors!”

“Roll over them—just like the French did?”

“The French are a bunch of pussies. We bailed them out in ’44, and we’re about to do it again. Besides,” McQueen added, changing tack, “it’s not a real war in Vietnam. It’s all about Uncle Ho. A cult of personality.”

“Look what that did for the Chinese.”

Roderick had silenced them again. Across the room, a girl with platinum hair and a beauty mark like Monroe’s laughed in a timbre husky with smoke. The three men allowed their eyes to graze her form but none of them was moved to comment.

“Your old friend Ruth still alive, Jack?” McQueen asked idly.

“As far as I know.”

“Spouting propaganda in China? Or has he moved on to Laos?”

“We aren’t exactly in touch, Alec.”

“Who’s Ruth?” Joe Halliwell asked.

“I’ve been thinking about a profile for the paper,” McQueen persisted. “Pridi Banomyong, fifteen years after the failed ’48 countercoup. Thailand’s wartime hero, disgraced and living in exile. Where is Ruth now? Was all the blood and loss worth it? That sort of crap.”

“Who’s Ruth?” Halliwell repeated.

Roderick glanced at the reporter’s innocent face, a good twenty years younger than his own, and reflected that experience of war made a profound difference in a man. He and Halliwell had both sprung from privileged families, on opposite sides of the United States, and
they’d both had an Ivy League education; but there the commonalities ceased. Too much history filled the chasm between them.

“Ruth is an old war hero, Joe. Heroes, you’ll find, never age well.”

“Speaking of which,” McQueen broke in, “I saw that little shit Vukrit yesterday. He didn’t see me, however, so I crossed to the opposite sidewalk and ducked into a doorway. Word has it he’s bought his way back into power.”

“Impossible,” Roderick said easily.

“This is Thailand, Jack. Nothing’s impossible.”

Roderick drained his glass. “Vukrit’s been wandering in the wasteland of Pattaya for at least six years.” Ever since Field Marshal Sarit had ousted the dictator Pibul. September 1957—the same month Roderick had delivered Carlos’s son to Vukrit’s wife at her villa on the coast. Six years ago. The last time Roderick had seen Fleur.

My God, she’d be thirty-one. What does she look like now? And where has she gone?

“Word has it Vukrit’s got the Ministry of Culture back in his pocket,” Joe Halliwell put in unexpectedly. “Paper’s running a piece on the appointment tomorrow.”

“We expect him to come out swinging on behalf of tradition and heritage,” McQueen added. “Siam for the Siamese, that sort of thing.”

“When a man is afraid of the people he leads,” Roderick said, “he makes them hate the outsider instead of himself.”

The two journalists were both watching Roderick now, McQueen’s eyes glinting through his tobacco smoke. Roderick knew that he was pontificating in a way that was embarrassing—ideals had gone out of fashion
lately—but he could not stop himself. The lateness of the hour, the effect of gin, the mention of Vukrit’s name. The memory of Fleur—

“Vukrit will circle the wagons around his sacred ruins while the rest of Southeast Asia goes up in flames,” he said, more loudly. “And you know what, gentlemen? He’ll get funding from the United States to do it. Vukrit’s our boy, now. We’ve put the palace thief in charge of the armory. That’s where two decades of fostering democracy have got us.”

“He’ll start by attacking the
farang
community,” Halliwell observed.

“By seizing my house, in fact. Isn’t that what you’re trying to tell me? Vukrit will come calling, and carry out everything I own in a wheelbarrow? At least it’ll save me having to invite him to dinner.”

Roderick rose from the table. He was fifty-eight years old and the weight of age was suddenly stifling. “Gentlemen, I believe I should call it a day.”

“Come on, Jack,” McQueen said brusquely. “Let me buy you another drink! The evening’s young.”

“I wasn’t talking about the evening, Alec.” Roderick nodded courteously to Halliwell, then turned away.

He decided to
walk for a bit, although Ban Khrua was miles off and the streets at this hour were empty. Another man might have felt vulnerable, the
sole farang
in the night of an Asian city, but Roderick waved off the Oriental’s taxi and set out at a brisk pace along New Road. He walked with one hand in his trouser pocket and the other swinging at his side, his shoulders hunched slightly forward.
Six years.
Fleur might even have died in so much time.

He wondered, as he walked, when it would happen to
him—that instant of oblivion called death. His doctor was worried about his heart.
His heart.
He laughed mirthlessly. Perhaps he should leave Bangkok, and put behind him forever the factions and the folly and the endless cycle of warlords supplanting warlords in the name of democratic process. He had no love for Communism but he could not distinguish it from the military dictatorships in Siam that called themselves constitutional monarchies, and he could not support this new American “engagement”—a word for a wedding party!—with Vietnam. He had dreamed a dream of Asia that sprang from silk and the bones of a boy named Boonreung, but art and the desire for justice both grew cold with the passage of years. Perhaps he should go home to die.

Mother’s not well,
his son Rory had said the previous afternoon as they stared at each other across the gleaming expanse of his teakwood floor. “She’s got high blood pressure. There’s the possibility of stroke.”

He had tried to imagine Joan as she must look now, twenty years further into her gaudy gypsy life. He failed to conjure a face. Joan, with high blood pressure. A box she could not paint herself out of.

And there was Rory standing in his living room—a tall stranger in a naval uniform, his hair clipped short and his cap tucked neatly under his arm. All the lost years like high water between them. In the absence of photographs, Roderick had conjured Rory’s face a thousand times. And never imagined
this.

The boy had sent letters, of course—at least three of them scrawled childishly on lined yellow paper, several others that were typewritten and signed. For his part, Roderick had corresponded persistently after the final break in 1946—mailing cheerful, abrupt, unrealistic
letters. He shipped lengths of silk to Joan and sketches of the dresses she might make of them. Hand-carved wooden toys the boy had long outgrown. Pictures of himself with Boonreung’s old bird on his shoulder. And money. Bank drafts were the surest antidote to guilt Roderick knew.

He had made four trips back to the United States during his years in Asia. He’d visited his son in Evanston and California and at the Naval Academy when Rory was a cadet, Roderick established in an elegant hotel room, the boy delivered like a package by an efficient bellman. Joan flitted in and out on these occasions, waving gloved hands, and spoke heartily of Rory’s need for “man time.” They visited museums together. They conferred on the finer points of baseball. They shook hands efficiently at parting.

But Rory was no longer a boy. It was September 1963, and he was twenty-seven years old, married now to the daughter of a Chicago banker he’d known since he was eleven. He’d brought to Bangkok a four-year-old named Max—Roderick’s only grandchild, whom he had never before seen. They had three days until Rory joined his carrier group in Subic Bay.

“How long has it been?”

He stood, correctly gripping his son’s hand, Rory’s gaze on a level with his own at last.

“Since that trip to Stowe? I’d just turned sixteen.”

Roderick remembered then the patchy snow of Vermont in January, shining blue with ice in places, and the way Rory’s fear had hunched his body over the skis, so that the boy was rigid with the certainty of falling. Had the kid ever skied again?

“But I came to Annapolis,” he protested. “For your commission.”

“So you did. Five years ago, then.”

The house was lashed with rain; the khlong curled above its banks in a heavy brown spume. It was the height of the monsoon season. Roderick introduced Rory to Chanat Surian, the houseboy, who took young Max under his wing and fed him rice pudding made with coconut milk. Roderick filled the silences with anecdote. He found he was bracing for some vital communication-news of a death, of emotional upheaval—that might explain his son’s unexpected visitation.

“Your life’s nothing like I imagined it.” Rory’s gaze roamed the soaring rafters of the room. “I always saw you in the jungle, surrounded by crocodiles. Like the ends of all the old maps:
Here there be dragons.”

Roderick liked the sailor’s image, though the truth of it pained him. “Your wife,” he said diffidently. “She doesn’t mind you being gone for months at a time?”

“Annie hates it. And I swore if I married I’d never leave like …”

… I left you,
Roderick supplied mentally.

“But what can I do? I can’t catch tailhooks in the middle of Illinois. That’s why I brought Max on this trip. I’ve got carrier duty next week. He’ll be almost five by the time I get back.”

Max, with a shock of blond hair and the self-absorbed expression of a child who lives in his head, was sliding across the floorboards in his stocking feet. Murmuring to himself. The sounds were akin to birdsong.

“You never found … anyone else, I suppose? After Mother?” Rory asked unexpectedly.

“No,” Roderick lied. “I never found her.”

He’d taken off his shoes then and scooted across the floor in his grandson’s wake while Rory watched them: balancing, balancing.

* * *

The breeze was
halfhearted in the banana trees, the air thick with moisture. The glare of neon in the red-light district was something new in recent years, electric sketches of faceless nymphs flexing their endless legs. Howling floated down the block as he stood, repulsed and fascinated, under the arched gates; it was a compound of men, Americans mostly, off the ships that had begun to troll the China Sea.

“The girls wear numbers,” Alec McQueen had told him once, “pinned to their breasts. You pick them off the shelf like candy bars. Jack, you ought to come with me sometime. It makes old Miss Lucy’s look positively quaint.”

The boys from Spokane and Des Moines and Raleigh had no idea that the women of Siam were among the most bashful on earth, that the display of a shoulder in public was considered licentious, or that the nude country girls working diligently under the harsh lights were amassing their dowries and only tolerated the looks and touch
of these farang
soldiers because money was money and marriage was everything.

In her years at the house on the khlong had Fleur been just another working girl? Amassing riches and secrets against some rainy day, when dancing no longer sustained her? Roderick could not say. He had believed in Fleur’s love because she was necessary to his happiness. He knew nothing of what she had felt or all that she had hidden—only what she had sold.

He turned his back on Patpong.

It seemed to him that this city he loved—a place of waterways and dancers as lovely as birds, of gilded temples and jasmine bloom—was a fruit left too long to rot. The taint of war and death was upon it.