The Ambassador's Wife (27 page)

“They give us a good rate.”

Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

“The Bangkok Marriott is a really classy place,” Cally prompted. “You’d probably like it a lot.”

Tay was pretty certain there was a compliment in there, but he was too tired to tease it out.

“Then take me to the Marriott, driver,” Tay said, leaning back in the seat. “I place myself entirely in your hands.”

A few days before, Tay would have cheerfully bet his life he would never spend a single night in any Marriott hotel anywhere, ever. Now he was about to spend his second in two days.

Wasn’t it extraordinary what a mess of a man’s principles the intrusion of a beautiful woman could make?

THIRTY

THE
Bangkok Marriott looked like an ocean liner unaccountably run aground on lower Sukhumvit Road. The lobby was lush and romantic with art deco furnishings and melodramatic lighting. Just walking across it made Tay feel like Fred Astaire in
Flying Down to Rio
. Cally was probably too young to have ever heard of Fred Astaire, of course, so Tay kept the idea to himself.

There was room at the inn and the front office manager even offered Tay the same government rate that Cally was getting. To tell the truth, Tay liked the look of the place so much that he would have stayed regardless of what they wanted to charge him.

They checked in and headed for the lifts.

“I think I’ll hit the gym,” Cally said. “You want to go?”

Tay looked at her as if she had begun speaking Urdu.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “It’ll do you good.”

“I doubt that,” Tay said. “Besides, as luck would have it, I didn’t bring anything with me I can wear in a gym.”

“Then how about a swim instead?”

“No swimming gear either.” Tay spread his hands, palms up. “Sorry.”

“Just walk out front.” Cally pointed toward the main road. “I’ll bet one of the street vendors sells bathing suits.”

“Buy a bathing suit off the street?”

“Oh, God.” Cally put her hands on her hips and looked at Tay. “You are
such
a Singaporean. What are you thinking here? If it’s not wrapped in plastic at a department store, it’s not clean enough for you to wear?”

That was exactly what Tay was thinking, of course, but he tried to look thoughtful and said nothing at all. A faint chime announced the arrival of the lift. When it opened it was empty and they got on. Tay didn’t like talking in lifts and apparently neither did Cally, so he had a few moments of silence in which to weigh his options.

Going for a swim with Cally was certainly an appealing idea or, to jump straight to the important point without flinching at the unadorned political incorrectness of it, hanging around with Cally while she was wearing a bathing suit was certainly an appealing idea. On the other hand, he couldn’t sit by the pool with Cally wearing a white dress shirt and dark slacks. The whole concept led inevitably to the necessity of him putting on a bathing suit, too. That was perhaps not altogether such an appealing idea.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tay could see Cally was watching the lights that tracked the upward progress of the elevator. Experimentally, he sucked in his stomach a bit and tried to hold it there. Could he keep that up for an hour or so? Well…maybe.

The chime sounded again and the elevator stopped on the eighth floor. Cally got off and looked back at Tay.

“I’ll be sitting by the swimming pool in half an hour,” Cally said. She pointed her index finger at him and smiled. “Be there.”

Then the lift door closed again.

By the time Tay reached his room on the tenth floor he had made up his mind. He would take his chances. He would buy a bathing suit somewhere and meet Cally at the hotel pool. He was not that great a swimmer, that was true, but he could manage and what better way to get to know Cally than to spend time with her sitting around the pool?

If he could only hold in his stomach and avoid drowning at the same time, perhaps everything would go well. It was, he supposed, worth a shot.

TAY
had hardly expected to find grass and trees on the sixth floor of a Marriott hotel right in the middle of Bangkok, but lush green grass and swaying palm trees was exactly what he found. The pool was on an open deck next to the gym. A luxuriant garden surrounding water so blue Tay could have sworn it had food coloring in it.

The bathing suit he bought from a street vendor in front of a McDonald’s fit better than he had expected. It was a little big maybe, but then again so was Tay. Against all odds, he thought he actually looked pretty good in it. Cally was at the pool when Tay got there just as she said she would be. She was stretched out on a teak lounge under a tall palm tree. The pool boy dragged another lounge chair over for Tay and spread out two thick, yellow towels for him. Cally ordered a Diet Coke and Tay said he would have the same. The boy went off to get their drinks and Tay settled himself next to Cally.

From the sixth floor of the Marriott, Bangkok looked a good deal better than it did from ground level. The forest of office towers around them gleamed like columns of white marble. Off in the west the unrelenting sun had been tamed to nothing more than wisps of yellow and purple floating on the horizon and the sky had turned the color of a ripe peach. An involuntary collaboration of nature and the effluent drifting in Bangkok’s air was producing a spectacular, if less than environmentally pristine, sunset.

Tay glanced at Cally and when he saw her eyes were closed he allowed his own to linger. It was an awful cliché, Tay knew, but at rest Cally made him think of a cheetah or perhaps a jaguar. Languid and serene, but only a blink from blurring into motion.

Her body was long and sleek. Her black Lycra tank suit was cut high on her thighs and it emphasized both the length and the firmness of her tanned legs. Their shape was really remarkable: thighs slim, knees perfectly formed, calves muscled, ankles elegant; and feet … well, lovely. Tay had never before felt moved to think of anyone’s feet as lovely, but Cally’s were. There was just no other word for them.

“If you want to check out my ass, too, just say the word. I’d be glad to roll over for you.”

Tay’s eyes jumped away from Cally in embarrassment. For a moment he tried studying the skyline out beyond her lounge chair with feigned concentration but, almost at once, feeling ridiculous, he abandoned the feeble subterfuge.

“Okay,” Tay said. “You got me.”

The pool boy returned at that moment and set out their Diet Cokes, which blessedly saved Tay from having to say anything else. When the boy had gone, Cally pushed herself into a sitting position and clasped her hands around her knees.

“I don’t know about you, Sam Tay.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been looking at you.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what …”

Tay felt a strong tide tugging him toward deeper water and he was powerless to swim for shore.

“I don’t know
anything
about you, Sam. You pull things out of other people, but you give nothing away about yourself. I think you’re hiding something.”

“Not really. What you see is pretty much what you get.”

“No, it’s not. Sometimes you’re almost scary.”

Tay had never thought of himself as particularly scary so he wasn’t at all sure what to say to that.

“You underplay yourself,” Cally continued. “You pretend to be over your head when you’re not. Why do you do that?”

“Maybe I’m just a modest kind of guy.”

“No, it’s more than that. You approach everything with the same sort of caution. I can’t quite figure out where it comes from, but I see it in your eyes. You never let your guard down.”

Tay was unprepared for the rate at which their seemingly casual conversation had turned intimate. Come to think of it, he was probably unprepared right now for any kind of intimate conversation at all, regardless of the speed at which it developed. Of course he had hopes that eventually he and Cally might reach such a point, but he had been thinking in terms of weeks, perhaps even months. In ten minutes Cally had taken them straight from small talk to a place from which both good and dangerous things were within their grasp.

He should probably stay well away from American women. That was the real lesson here. Their directness was just too alarming for him. Christ, he needed a Marlboro.

Fortunately, he had come prepared. He fished in the pocket of his bathing suit for the pack he had brought down from his room and shook out a cigarette. A breeze had come up and it took him three tries to light it, but by cupping the match carefully in his hand he was eventually able to manage the feat. The pool boy appeared at his elbow with an ashtray. Tay took it, dumped the burned-out match, and the boy scampered away. Tay was just congratulating himself on killing nearly a full minute without having to respond to Cally’s observations about him, but then he exhaled and glanced quickly through the smoke at her and saw that he wasn’t going to escape quite that easily. He may have earned himself a reprieve, but it was not going to turn into a full pardon.

“Do you want to have sex with me, Sam?”

Tay choked and began to cough uncontrollably.

“It’s a serious question, Sam. Do you?”

“No,” he stammered when he was finally able to speak again.

That isn’t right
, he thought to himself,
but I can hardly say yes, can I?

“See what I mean? You’re not giving me an honest answer.”

“Look, Cally,” Tay cleared his throat and stared at his feet, “I just don’t know what to say to that.”

“Am I embarrassing you?”

“Of course you are.”

“Why?”

“
Why?
For God’s sake, what do you expect me to say? Yes, I’d like to have sex with you? I can’t say something like that.”

Cally nodded slowly, but she remained silent.

“Besides, right now I’m …” he trailed off.

It had not entered his mind up until this moment to tell Cally about his mother, but all of a sudden that was exactly what he wanted to do.

“You’re what?” Cally asked.

“Tired. Messed up. I don’t know what.” Tay looked at Cally. “My mother died.”

“Your mother?” Cally sat up and swung her feet to the ground. “When?”

All at once it occurred to Tay that he wasn’t sure.

“Yesterday, I think. I’m not even sure. She died in New York. Some lawyer from there called me.”

“Oh God, Sam.”

Cally leaned toward Tay and took his left hand in both of hers. Tay could feel the smoothness of them. For a moment, he could think of nothing else.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I am so very sorry.”

Tay didn’t know quite what to say. He hadn’t planned any of this and wasn’t sure where to go with it. Cally apparently mistook his silence for grief because she gripped his hand harder.

“When is the funeral?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But you can get there in time, can’t you?”

“I suppose.” He hesitated, but the truth had gotten him this far so he decided to stick with it. “It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going.”

“To your own mother’s funeral? You’re not going?”

Tay looked away.

“I wasn’t close to my mother and I don’t like funerals,” he said. “I have something to do here that matters more.”

Cally nodded at that, but she didn’t say anything.

“How are you doing?” she asked him instead.

“I’m good.” Tay scratched his cheek and examined the horizon briefly. “No, I’m not. I’m not good at all. I may not have been close to my mother, but she was the last connection I had to the rest of the world. And now she’s gone.”

“You’ve never had any children of your own?”

Tay looked at Cally as if she had suddenly gone mad.

“So you’re not married?” she plowed on.

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“No.”

“
Never
married?”

“No. Never.”

“Wow.” Cally thought that over for a moment. “Why not?”

“I…”

Tay wondered, not for the first time, how to answer that question and decided to stick with his newfound policy of telling the truth.

“I just don’t know.” Tay looked at Cally. “And I don’t know where that leaves me now.”

“I do. With your life in front of you.”

Tay thought about that while Cally continued stroking his hand.

“Yes, you’re probably right,” he said after several minutes had passed. “But right now I need to find the man who killed these two women. I need to do that.
That’s
who I am, not the son of somebody I don’t really know.”

“Okay,” Cally nodded slowly. “I can help you.”

“I wish you would.”

“Do you trust me, Sam?”

The question stopped Tay. It wasn’t because he didn’t know. He did know. To his astonishment, the answer was yes. He did trust Cally. Still, all at once just saying yes didn’t seem enough somehow. He had to tell her exactly what yes meant. And that was what he didn’t know exactly how to do.

“Okay,” she said after long moments had gone by without Tay saying anything. “Then let’s take it this way. I am going to trust you and then I am going to ask you to trust me in return. I guess we’ll see if you can do it.”

Tay was losing control of the conversation, if he ever had any control of the conversation, which he doubted. More and more he felt like he was just along for the ride.

“You asked me whose apartment Ambassador Rooney’s body was found in. Remember, Sam?”

Cally’s sudden shifts of direction were giving Tay a serious case of whiplash. First it was the deeper meaning of his life, after that it was having sex, then it was the death of his mother, and now she was on to two murdered and abused women. If he didn’t tell her to cut it out, she was going to drive him crazy. But he didn’t tell her to cut it out.

“I remember,” was all he said.

“Well then, here’s my offering of trust, Sam. I know who owns that apartment. And I’m going to tell you.”

THIRTY-ONE

CALLY’S
eyes slid away from Tay and she sat looking silently out across the pool. Tay wondered if she was going to change her mind.