The Ambassador's Wife (21 page)

“But I didn’t even know which—”

“I called your office about four o’clock to see if you were coming. They said you had just left, so I checked the flight schedules and there was only one flight from Singapore to Bangkok between five and eight. I figured you’d be on it, and…” Cally spread her hands, palms up, “here you are.”

She winked at him. “Not bad for a girl, huh?”

Tay wasn’t sure exactly what to say to that, so he settled for something generic. “It’s really very nice of you to come out to the airport, but I could have just taken a taxi into town.”

“You’re not going into town.”

“I’m not?”

“Nope. You’re going to Pattaya.”

“Where?”

Cally tilted her head and examined Tay with more care than he would have thought his question merited.

“Are you trying to tell me that you’ve never heard of Pattaya?” she asked.

Tay thought he probably had, but nothing was coming to him right at that moment.

“Do you really expect me to believe,” Cally continued, “that you are the only male in all of Asia, perhaps the only male in the entire known universe, who has never heard of Pattaya, Thailand?”

And then Tay remembered.

Pattaya was a slightly shabby beach resort a couple of hours south of Bangkok that had a reputation for commercial sex and freewheeling debauchery sufficient to overwhelm the limits of most people’s imaginations. Tay had never been to Pattaya. He was no prude, at least he didn’t think he was, but he had heard enough about Pattaya to know that he probably wouldn’t like it very much.

To tell the truth, Tay didn’t like anywhere in Thailand very much. Beneath its veneer of exotic cuisine, extravagant temples, and saintly monks lay the dark heart of a country that lived off very little but sex and greed. No matter how you tried to dress the place up, Tay thought, Thailand would always have the soul of a whore.

Tay shifted his bag from his left hand to his right.

“Why am I going to Pattaya?” he asked.

“Not just you. We’re both going.”

“Then why are
we
going to Pattaya?”

“Because I want to talk to a man who lives in Pattaya and I want you to hear what he has to say.”

“What does this have to do with your ambassador being murdered?”

“I’m not sure yet. Maybe nothing. Look, Sam, I’ve got a car outside and I’m driving to Pattaya right now. If you don’t want to go, well…”

Cally pointed over Tay’s shoulder. When he glanced back, he saw a sign hanging above a battered counter that read Hotel Book Here. Behind the counter were two local women, both holding clipboards and looking in his direction with what he thought were unreasonably hopeful expressions.

Tay picked up his bag and followed Cally out to her car.

TWENTY-TWO

CALLY
had the dark blue Volvo up to ninety within a minute or two of hitting the expressway to Pattaya.

“Let me know when we’re airborne,” Tay said.

“I’m a great driver. You’ll see.”

The expressway was a four-lane divided highway set in flat and unpromising countryside. In the median strip, yellow vapor lamps on high aluminum poles streaked the heavy night air with sulphurous stripes. Scrawny brush and thin clumps of unidentifiable vegetation were scattered in patches over the sandy ground along both sides of the road.

“Where did you get the car?” Tay asked.

“Embassy motor pool. I went over there after I looked at the crime scene.”

“Was the crime scene here the same as mine in Singapore?”

“
Your
crime scene?” Cally raised her eyebrows and looked at Tay for longer than he thought the driver of a car going ninety should look at anything other than the road. “Getting a little proprietary on me there, aren’t you, pal?”

Tay said nothing, hoping that would encourage Cally to get her eyes back to where they ought to be.

“There’s a digital camera on the back seat,” she said after the silence had stretched on for a minute or two. “Check it out yourself.”

Tay looked around until he found the camera. After fiddling with it briefly, he located the photographs Cally had taken and began clicking through them.

“Where is this?” he asked.

“It’s an apartment in a small building not far from the American embassy.”

“Was the ambassador shot?” Tay asked without looking up from the photographs flicking by on the camera’s tiny screen.

“Yes. Once. In the left ear.”

“A .22?”

“I told them where to look and what to look for. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy to be sure, but…” Cally paused. “Yes, that’s what it looks like.”

“Restraint marks?”

“Wrists and ankles. Same as Singapore.”

Tay couldn’t see the photographs all that well on the tiny screen, but he could see them well enough to tell the ambassador’s face had been beaten until it looked like freshly ground hamburger. He couldn’t determine from the photographs whether the beating had been inflicted before or after the woman was dead, of course, but he had seen violence like that only once before in his entire career and it had been the violence inflicted on Elizabeth Munson.

The ambassador’s body also appeared to have been posed in the same degrading manner as Elizabeth Munson’s. The details all looked alike to Tay, right down to the chrome-bodied flashlight protruding from the woman’s vagina.

The same man who had killed Elizabeth Munson had killed this woman in Bangkok. Tay had no real doubt of that. No other explanation made any sense.

“They look the same to me as the photos of
your
crime scene,” Cally said. “They are, aren’t they?”

Tay shut off the camera and returned it to the back seat.

“Yes,” he said. “I think they are.”

Cally nodded slightly, more to herself than to Tay, but said nothing else.

“An anonymous call?” Tay asked.

“What?”

“You said the Thai police got an anonymous call about the ambassador. That was how they discovered the body.”

“All they told me was that the caller was a man who spoke English. He gave them the address and said they’d find the body of the American ambassador there. They thought it was just some crazy, until—”

“Was the call taped?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did they get a caller ID?”

“Look, Sam, this is the Thai police we’re talking about here. They’ve got telephones. That’s about it.”

Cally turned her head and looked over at Tay. “There’s something else you should know,” she said. “We’re going to sit on this for a few days.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The FBI has decided not to publicize the murder of Ambassador Rooney yet and State is going along with them. They say that a public announcement now would affect the investigation.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“It doesn’t to me either, but it’s not my call.”

Cally slowed the car and pulled up next to the only tollbooth that was open out of a long line of lighted booths that stretched all the way across the highway. The attendant was a fat woman with a face like a wrinkled paper bag and her brown polyester uniform stretched tightly over her heavy arms as she reached out to take the toll from Cally. A light above them changed from red to green and they shot away from the booth and slipped back into darkness.

“Tell me again why we’re going to Pattaya,” Tay said.

“I want to talk to a guy who lives there now. I worked with him at the embassy in Bangkok, but he’s retired. At least he says he is.”

“You used to work here? In Thailand? I didn’t know that.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Sam.”

Tay didn’t say anything to that. There
were
a lot of things, of course. Now that he thought about it, he realized he knew hardly anything about Cally at all.

“The embassy in Bangkok was my first posting. I was Assistant Regional Security Officer here for two years.”

“Is Singapore a promotion?”

“Well…” Cally thought about it. “I’m an RSO now instead of an Assistant RSO. That’s a promotion. But Singapore is a small mission and Bangkok is a big mission. I guess it’s pretty much a break-even deal.”

“Who is this guy we’re going to talk to?”

Cally didn’t answer immediately and Tay wondered why.

“Look,” she finally said after a long silence, “I don’t want to sound coy, but I don’t think I ought to tell you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t expect you do.”

Cally cleared her throat and Tay waited in silence to see what was coming.

“He says he’s retired, but I don’t think he is.” Cally shot Tay a look, but in the darkness of the car he missed her expression. “He was with the Agency when I was in Thailand.”

“The Agency?”

“The CIA.”

“Ah,” Tay said. “That Agency.”

“If he wants to tell you who he is, he will. But just in case he’s not really retired, I don’t want to say too much.”

Tay thought about that while he looked out the window at the passing countryside. A huge, newly built apartment building abruptly loomed up out of the night. It rose thirty or forty floors over absolutely nowhere at all and was completely dark, apparently empty and abandoned. Beyond it were yards filled with wrecked cars and huge metal warehouses with signs in Thai script. All of a sudden two old cargo airplanes in fading camouflage paint appeared like a mirage just sitting alongside the road. Scrawny cows grazed silently around the planes.

“Why am I here, Cally?”

She turned her head slowly to Tay as if she was seriously contemplating his question and then, just as slowly, turned it back toward the road.

“Because I want you to be,” she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Does this man know I’m coming with you?”

She nodded, but she didn’t say anything.

“And he doesn’t mind?”

Cally gave a little shrug. “He didn’t say one way or the other.”

Suddenly the road was engulfed in a dense grove of palm trees and they crossed a wide, muddy river on a narrow bridge that rattled underneath them. On the opposite bank, a Thai temple was lit stark white against the black sky. It littered like fire from red and yellow glass embedded in its masonry. Then as abruptly as it had appeared the temple was gone and they were driving again through the darkness over hard, featureless scrubland.

“What does your friend have to do with these murders?”

“Nothing, but he knows everything that happens here. Sometimes when I was in Thailand it seemed to me that he knew everything that had
ever
happened here. And he’ll be honest with me. He’ll tell me the truth or he won’t tell me anything at all.”

Cally glanced over, but Tay didn’t say anything.

“Look, Sam, there’s something about all this that’s not right. I knew it the moment I saw the ambassador’s body. I may be in over my head and I want somebody I trust, somebody I have history with, to tell me whether or not I am. I have to know before I get in any deeper.”

Tay weighed Cally’s words and found something in them he didn’t particularly want to find.

“This man was a friend of yours?”

“Yes. He was.”

“And still?”

Cally let a moment pass before she replied.

“A friend. Just that now. Nothing more.”

Tay nodded. Off in the distance the glow of lights from a town was painting the base of a low layer of clouds with streaks of orange. In at least three separate places lightning danced soundlessly across the night sky.

“I told him we’d meet him at eleven tonight,” Cally said. “It will be late when we’re done so I booked us hotel rooms in Pattaya. I’m just too tired to drive all the way back to Bangkok without getting some sleep first.”

As they drew closer to the lights, the scrub fields began to fill with buildings, most of them no more than one or two stories high and none that looked to Tay to be particularly encouraging. Cally circled a roundabout with some kind of darkened sculpture in its center and turned onto a road that ran along the ocean. On one side of the road the sea was dark and quiet and the narrow beach was empty, but on the opposite side small open-air bars lined the sidewalk. They throbbed with music and pulsed with light.

Tay could see that the customers in the bars were almost all Caucasian men, most middle-aged but some considerably older. Dressed uniformly in shorts and T-shirts, the men sat in ones and twos talking to the girls and playing with the bottles of beer in front of them. There were a great many such men and even more Thai women fluttering around them. The sight made Tay think of seagulls trailing a fishing fleet.

The whole panorama appeared relatively benign, which surprised Tay more than he really wanted to admit. He had always assumed a hard-core place like Pattaya, a town that lived almost entirely off dissipation, would have a slimy, sordid quality to it. But now that he was here, Pattaya didn’t seem to be like that at all. No drunks sprawled in the gutter, no hookers hissed from the shadows, no pimps propositioned passers-by. Whatever was going on, Pattaya seemed to be pretty cheery about it. Tay was sure that wasn’t the truth of the place, but yet that was what he could see. He really didn’t know what to make of it.

“I booked us at the Marriott.” Cally glanced over at Tay and scrutinized his face as the neon lights from the bars rippled across it. “I hope that’s okay.”

Tay didn’t say a word.

TWENTY-THREE

CALLY
was waiting for Tay in a lounge chair by the Marriott’s swimming pool. It was after ten and, except for her, the pool area was dark and deserted.

When Tay saw that Cally had changed into baggy white shorts and a black T-shirt, he felt a little embarrassed to be wearing the same dark gray slacks and long-sleeved blue dress shirt he had worn on the flight in from Singapore. He thought about turning around and going back upstairs to change, but Cally noticed him before he could decide whether to do that so he sat down on the chair next to her and began rolling up his sleeves as if that had been what he intended to do all along.

“Where are we meeting the mystery man?” he asked.