The Secret Agent (17 page)

T
hat Tuesday night, Stefani made her way back to her room around ten o’clock, leaving Rush Halliwell standing on the river terrace. Halfway down the Garden Wing corridor, the strains of a viola skittered through her brain. She stopped dead, borne back immediately to the moonlit bedroom in the old stone house above Courchevel.

“Max,” she said aloud in the empty hall. “Max, are you there?”

The faint strains died away into silence. She brushed one hand over her eyes, which were suddenly damp, and fumbled for her key.

Of course Rush Halliwell had invited her to dinner. Her bare-faced claim to Jack Roderick’s House was designed to snare his interest, and he’d risen instantly to the bait, as she’d assumed he would. He wanted to know more. Because everything to do with Jack Roderick’s Bangkok life was universally irresistible? Or because the
U.S. embassy’s Third Political Officer was in league with Max’s enemies—whoever they might be?

“I don’t know a great deal about the Roderick story,” he’d offered as he pulled out her chair. “Just the stuff that’s in all the guidebooks.”

Liar,
she’d thought, and said: “That’s what most people know. I was fortunate enough to be a friend of the family.”

“Obviously, if you inherit under a will. But I thought even the family had no idea how Jack Roderick died.”

“Oh, as to that—” she said airily, “there are probably as many theories as there are people to form them. Ideas are everywhere. It’s the truth that’s in short supply, Rush.”

“And is that what you’re looking for? Truth?” His smile was roguish, as though she should hardly take him seriously; but it was precisely
this,
Stefani decided, that he really wanted to know: the depth of the unquiet graves, and whether she carried a shovel.

“I just want my house.” Max’s house. And all its resident ghosts.

“That could be difficult.” Halliwell unfurled his napkin with care. “I
had heard
that Roderick left his house and collection to Thailand. An altruistic gesture. That’s why the place was turned into a museum, isn’t it?”

“If you say so.”

“What other reason is there?”

“Greed. On the part of those who manage the collection.”

“Greed cuts both ways,” he pointed out. “Is it greed to preserve the nation’s artistic heritage—or greed to claim it for yourself?”

“That depends upon how the collection was acquired,” Stefani returned tartly. “In this case, wholesale theft seems an apt description.”

Halliwell shrugged, untouched. “That’s probably how old Roderick came by the stuff in the first place-raiding parties on ancient temples, lost for centuries in the wilderness. The man was a connoisseur, sure—but most swear he was also a pirate.”

“I’ve never known a connoisseur who wasn’t.”

“That doesn’t justify piracy. Look, Stefani—the Thai government maintains Roderick’s hoard and makes it available to the public. Absent that, the collection would have been broken up and sold long ago. Statues of Buddha, figures in limestone and bronze, carved heads— the treasures in that house span fourteen centuries. Roderick owned the finest example of a Thai Buddha sculpture in existence. Add to that the fact that it’s almost a crime in this country to display sacred images in private homes, and by any argument those pieces
belong
in a museum.”

“And yet—that’s not what Roderick wanted. Not what he stipulated in his will.”

“Which will?”

“The one that governs. The one that postdates the 1960 document.”

Rush’s fork arrested in midair. “You’ve seen it?”

“Of course. Roderick probably intended to destroy the 1960 testament. He drew up the final will a few weeks before he disappeared in ’67. Unfortunately, that document was misplaced. It was only recently found in the home of Roderick’s sister, after her death.”

“Along with the Hitler diaries and an unknown play by Shakespeare.”

“It’s been authenticated, Rush.”

He eyed her shrewdly. “Try getting a Thai court to accept that. Jack left everything to his heirs?”

“—And they, to
me.”

He smiled. “What a fortunate girl you are, Stefani.”

I might say the same about you,
she thought, remembering the ample assets of the California Halliwells. “So tell me. How do I get what’s mine?”

He sipped from his water glass. Buying time before answering? “You’ll need a lawyer who understands the Thai justice system. But possession, as they say, is usually nine-tenths of the law. As a foreigner, you’ll have a difficult time winning property rights in this country. Your best bet is some sort of compromise. An out-of-court settlement.”

“I abhor compromise. Particularly when I’m in the right.”

“Then you’ll never thrive in Thailand. Here you must be like the bamboo tree. Bend in a typhoon, lest you break. Do you know how the museum’s managed?”

“By a private board—the Thai Heritage Board. It’s funded in part from donations, but mainly through a trust fund managed by Dickie Spencer, the chairman of Jack Roderick Silk. Dickie’s father, Charles, worked for Jack during the sixties. Charles took over the firm after Jack’s disappearance. The Spencers are something of a local dynasty.”

“You’ve done your homework. What exactly was your profession, back in the States?”

“I managed a mutual fund for a while.” She threw him her impish smile; if Halliwell believed she was susceptible to flattery, she’d better look like flattery was working. “I suppose I should tackle Spencer first. He’s the man with the most obvious stake in the house.”

“But the power brokers behind the scenes are the ones who really control it. I know Dickie Spencer rather well. He’s a good front man for the Thai Heritage Board, and he’d hate to lose the house—he’s put a chunk of change into it and it’s a focal point for the silk company—but he’s not emotionally invested.”

“The others are?”

“The others might kill to keep their hands on the place.”

He said it very quietly, but the menace was real. People didn’t joke about Jack Roderick’s legacy. Stefani sat back in her chair and gazed at Halliwell. “Is that a warning? Hands off?”

“I don’t expect you to take it.” He shrugged again. “But you did say you were looking for the truth.”

“Then tell me whom I should be afraid of,” she challenged softly. “The power brokers
behind
the scenes.”

His eyes flicked away from hers. She could almost feel him deciding how many cards to show, and which to conceal. “You understand that all of this is off the record.”

“Of course.”

“A gesture. Not a professional commitment. Not the official statement of the U.S. embassy. I’ve got to talk to my superiors before I can offer you help.”

Have you got any superiors, I wonder? Or do you simply invent them when it’s convenient?
“We’re two acquaintances having a conversation over dinner,” she replied evenly.

“Right.” He raised his glass again, revealing a tanned wrist beneath his elegant cuff. “Positions on the Thai Heritage Board are granted by appointment. They’re considered quite prestigious and are in fact virtually controlled by certain families or interests. Something you should understand about the Thais, Stefani, is that this is a collectivist society. Not as strongly conformist as, say, the Japanese—most Thais talk a lot about individuality and personal freedom—but group-oriented all the same.”

“You mean, the whole country operates on patronage.”

“On clientelism,” he corrected. “Patron-client relationships. Thai society is knit vertically and horizontally by bonds of personal obligation. Favors. Debts. Call them what you will.”

“And so appointments to the board are won by influence?”

“Basically.”

“Who controls the power of appointment?”

Rush smiled. “You must know his name.”

She frowned. “Why would I?”

“You seem to know everything else.”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be having dinner with you.”

“How frank.” He looked rueful. “The man you want is Sompong Suwannathat. He’s Minister of Culture in the current government. He’ll probably be Minister of Defense in the next. Culture and crowd control go hand-in-hand in Thailand.”

Sompong Suwannathat.
“You think this guy is emotionally invested in my house?”

“I think Suwannathat would argue that it’s his house,” Halliwell rejoined mildly. “Sompong’s run the Heritage Board for over ten years. His father was a member before him. If Jack Roderick’s legacy belongs to anyone—”

“Then it’s Sompong, and not the Thai public,” Stefani cut in. “You’ve just made me feel infinitely better, Rush. I’m delighted to rob a fellow power broker.”

“Don’t take this lightly.” The easy charm that had lingered around his eyes had vanished. “Sompong is someone to respect.”

“What does that mean? That he employs thugs?”

“Undoubtedly. But he also employs half of Bangkok. Which means he owns half of Bangkok. If you cross Sompong you’ll get hurt. That’s not a threat. But it is the truth.”

“I’ll call and make an appointment with the man. That’s one way to manage a threat.”

“Like you managed funds. Did you meet Max Roderick trading assets?”

Stefani’s fork slipped through her fingers. Rush bent instantly to retrieve it.

“He’s the only Roderick left,” he added reasonably. “Besides, I skied Tahoe as a kid. Max is a local hero there. And I still follow the World Cup. Didn’t he have a nasty accident last year?”

“He died six days ago.” She said it carefully. “Suicide.”

“I’m sorry.” Halliwell’s somber expression suggested a proper degree of empathy; but the news was not
news
to him, Stefani was certain. “If, as I take it, your inheritance is only six days old, then I wouldn’t topple the Suwannathat throne just yet. You’ll have months to wait before you can justify a claim. Probate is never quick, particularly when it’s done on three continents.”

Three continents.
In that single phrase, he’d just betrayed himself: he knew a bit more about Max than was usual for a Third Political Officer in Southeast Asia, even one who followed the World Cup. She thought of the powerful man in the dark suit and the perfectly groomed hair, the man who had taken so long to request directions to the bathroom from Rush that evening. She thought of the crumpled paper stolen from her bag, and the names and suspicions written on it. She thought of accidents that were not accidents. Of murder dressed up as suicide. Of Max, sailing out into thin air with his hands locked on the brakes—

“You’ve been so helpful, Rush.” She smiled up into his green eyes. “I’m planning to visit Jack Roderick’s House tomorrow afternoon—won’t you meet me there?”

* * *

She thrust her
key into the bedroom door. Turn-down service, the stereo softly playing, and beyond the windows, river traffic like a festival of lights. Someone had left her lychee fruit in a porcelain dish. She allowed herself thirty seconds to soak in the peace before she picked up her phone.

“Feeling better, ducks?” Oliver asked.

“Exhausted to the damn bone.”

“That must be why you called from your room. I’d prefer, in future, that you try the street.”

“Sloppy,” she agreed, stung by the note of reprimand in his voice. “Sorry.”

“I suppose you need something.” Again, she heard annoyance.

“I need a good lawyer. Somebody who practices in Bangkok. An American, if possible.”

“Civil or criminal? Corporate? Or litigation?”

“Trusts and Estates, as I think you can guess. Someone who can tell me how to prove a will in the Thai courts.”

Oliver sighed. “You only want the earth, and of course you want it yesterday. Very well. I shall put in a call to the home of a man who owes me a favor, and disturb his sleep unforgivably. You may expect Matthew French on your hotel terrace by breakfast. The back terrace, mind. Don’t be late. Matthew’s time is exorbitant.”

“Thank you, Oliver.”

“That’s not the end of it, surely?” He affected astonishment. “You must have a few odd fires that require putting out.”

“I’d like you to run some names. They could be important.”

“For your inheritance?”

“For resolving a series of troubling deaths,” she returned sharply.

He sighed again. “Then do us a favor, love, and send them over the black box.”

Her encrypted laptop e-mail system. Oliver was battening down the hatches. “Has something happened?”

“Something is always happening. Just do as I ask.”

“Right,” she replied. But the line was dead.

She sank into a chair and stared out at the river, feeling unloved. Oliver hadn’t even waited to hear about the stolen sheet of paper. Was he simply short on sleep? Angry? Or was he worried?

That phrase of music in a minor key fluttered at the edge of her brain. Whatever Oliver’s problem, it couldn’t be fixed from a distance of six thousand miles. She closed her eyes, and said Max’s name aloud.

Bangkok,
November 8, 1947

G
unfire rang sporadically now from the wide oval field known as the Pramane Ground, a few hundred yards from the riverbank; had he been able to stand up in the floor of the sampan and stare intently through the darkness, he might have glimpsed flames rising in the sky over the Grand Palace. The tanks were positioned like a noose around the government buildings and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. They would fire on anyone who dared to hurl a rock or a Molotov cocktail at the leaders of the coup—but no one, he felt certain, would dare. It was one thing to fight against the Japanese as so many had done only a few years before—to creep with a knife through the dreaming gardens and reach under mosquito netting for the flesh of a throat—and quite another to oppose tanks. A coup was nothing more than a squabble among potentates.

The boatman Roderick had sent to carry him off the quay below the Temple of the Emerald Buddha had
thrown rough sacking over his head; it stank of garlic and itched. He lay facedown, his nose hovering over the stinking bilge; crates of live guinea fowl rocked perilously on his back. His suit was of silk and his shoes had been made in Bond Street; there had not been time to change. No warning but the nervous smile of Tao Oum, the Lao, who appeared abruptly in the midst of dinner: Mr. Roderick had news—he must come at once—there was no time to delay. Tao Oum’s words, swift and urgent, as they ran toward the river, the boat waiting with its signal lantern doused. Tanks rumbling already in the distance.

He fought the urge to sneeze. The soft flutter of wings above his head, the musk of feathers, the surging thrust of the boatman’s pole—Boonreung, Roderick’s youthful friend and confidant, a child of the arid northeast who understood thirst and hardship and what it was to avenge. Boonreung was maybe seventeen, but he was already a seasoned fighter. Boonreung he could trust.

If they found him, the Army and the police would shoot him like a dog for a royal murder he had not committed. The familiar nausea and fear surged in his throat—the lies of past escapes, of night raids, of a thousand bullets dodged like raindrops. He refused to think now what he must do. He refused to think of his wife.

His name was Pridi Banomyong, though for years he had called himself “Ruth” on the clandestine radio networks that sprang up around Bangkok during the war. He had led the Free Thai in secret; he had done what the Free Thai leaders in Washington and London had ordered him to do, and many things they had never dreamed possible. His men had loved him for his easy charm, his cultivated manners, his fervent belief in democracy; they had adored him and for him they had died in sometimes shaming and excruciating ways.

When the war had ended more than two years before and the Japanese retreated from Bangkok, the Allies took over the occupation billets at the palatial villas dotted about the city and the people had carried him through the streets with brilliant streamers and burning braziers of incense. He had declared the pro-Japanese Pibul a war criminal and invited the young king-in-exile, Ananda Mahidol, to return to Thailand in triumph. Two months after the Japanese surrender, in December 1945, Pridi Banomyong—Ruth—had become Prime Minister of a democratic and devastated Thailand.

He mingled with the foreigners flooding into this Venice of the East—
the farangs
who thought they had invented Bangkok. He called the British ambassador friend, he ate with the Americans, he traded jokes and war stories with Jack Roderick himself—Roderick, who had infiltrated France and Italy with the OSS, who knew more secrets than most men still alive, who had helped Pridi run agents through all the jungles of Southeast Asia when Ruth was nothing but a voice and a promise carried on the hiss of a radio wave.

But Ananda had died only ten months into his reign and now Pridi Banomyong was a murderer of kings, an assassin on the run. Rumors flew about the city, growing large in the retelling. Pridi’s quarrels with the monarch were made to look like a motive for regicide; but no one accused the Prime Minister outright, there was never a trial or the possibility of clearing his name. In public, the royal family remained silent; in secret, they cultivated Pridi’s enemies. Ananda’s successor, Bhumpibol, left his quiet life in a provincial monastery and ascended the throne days after the young king’s murder. The new king was not the sort to argue with dictators or democrats or even the royal family. Five months after the shot rang out in the Grand Palace on June 9, 1946, Pridi
Banomyong had resigned from the office of Prime Minister and vanished from public life.

He had been granted a year of relative peace while his chief enemy, Pibul, gathered support as stealthily as a rat scavenged garbage. Now the tanks were in the streets.

The river bucked
under the old boat’s frame like a seasoned whore; brackish water flooded his nostrils, choking him, and he lurched upward so that the guinea fowl squawked and the sacking shifted. Boonreung mouthed a caution through the darkness but it meant nothing to Pridi. The five courses of his half-consumed dinner twisted in his entrails and he vomited. A bullhorn rent the night. Tao Oum was beside him, one hand on the back of his neck, forcing him down into his own puke—
police boat,
the Laotian hissed—and then the sacking covered him.

He felt the sampan lose way; felt the jolt as the police launch came alongside. Brilliant light flooded his closed eyes; he lay motionless, in the stench of chickens and vomit, water seeping through his trousers and the soles of his leather shoes. He would be shot and his body dumped over the sampan’s side to float with the dead dogs and the garbage. His wife would never know the truth of what happened to him. For how long would she believe that he still lived?

The bullhorn again, Tao Oum’s strained voice answering in Lao-accented Thai. The beam rippled over the sacking and the outraged guinea fowl. The sampan rocked as a booted foot landed heavily in the bottom. Had the police joined the traitorous army? Did they know that he had fled? Were all the borders watched? In a moment the stench of vomit would hit their nostrils, they would pull back the sacking to reveal—

Tao Oum’s voice was steadier now. He was offering the policeman money. The guinea fowl, he said, were for his sister—her children were sick, they required fresh eggs—not a moment to be lost—the soft chink of coins as the bribe changed hands. The sampan dipped and surged. The policeman left the boat.

Relief swept over Pridi like a scalding wind. He bit the sleeve of his jacket to keep from whimpering in the dark. The police launch moved off.

Tao Oum sighed and mopped his forehead with a dirty handkerchief. Boonreung waited an instant, took the launch’s wake bow-on, then thrust his pole once more into the murky bottom.

“Where will you
go?” Roderick asked.

He discarded his cigarette in a flaring arc over the edge of the Oriental’s quay. It sputtered in the river and vanished.

“I don’t know,” Pridi muttered. He glanced over his shoulder fearfully, but they were alone at the edge of the hotel garden, the tall palms and dense foliage a screen through which the figures of dancers flickered like moths. His wife had been dressing for this ball when he fled their house. There were to be charades. The whole
farang
community was present.

“We could get you to the border of Laos by dawn,” Roderick said thoughtfully. “Boonreung—take His Excellency through the khlongs to the northern end of the city. Tao Oum will meet you there with the car.”

The whites of the young Thai’s eyes were shining in the dappled glow of lanterns. Boonreung was a beautiful boy, Pridi thought idly; skin as smooth as a girl’s, the head classically molded. He was exhilarated by darkness and subterfuge as Ruth had once been drunk with
danger; but that was many years and too many deaths ago.

“It’ll be dicey,” Roderick added. “Army patrols. But it’s your only hope. You can’t stay here.”

The car was Roderick’s own, a prewar Packard he’d shipped from New York the previous year. Pridi remembered that it had carried the American into the northeast on several occasions. Roderick had a fondness for the northeast—he had plucked Boonreung from obscurity there, made the boy his driver and his secretary and some said his assassin. Tao Oum, too, had traveled often through the desolate hinterland with Roderick at his side; Tao Oum and all the other Lao revolutionaries plotting independence from the French in the drawing rooms of Bangkok. Pridi understood, suddenly, as he waited in the jasmine-scented darkness with the strains of Tommy Dorsey floating through the Oriental’s garden, that Roderick had never stopped running agents. The end of one war was merely the prelude to another, more subtle and thus more lethal.

A cannon boomed. Miles away and from the east, by the sound of it.

“Tao Oum knows the roads,” Roderick said. He stood with his back to Pridi, talking to himself or the river. He wore a white dinner jacket and black trousers with knife-edged creases and his voice suggested that coups were regrettable but not unforeseen. How long had the American embassy known of Pibul’s plans before tonight’s attack?

Laos.
Pridi’s old lieutenant, Carlos, was there. With time, they might raise an army.

He had changed into the clothes Roderick had given him—the drawstring pants and rough cotton shirt of a fisherman. Boonreung had swabbed the vomit from the sampan’s bottom. Tao Oum sat a little apart, his eyes
closed and his chin sunk upon his chest. It was a habit learned during the height of the resistance and not yet forgotten two years after the war: snatch sleep in odd moments, against the difficult hours to come.

The guinea fowl, Pridi supposed, would end up in the Oriental’s kitchen.

He pressed his hands together and raised them high to his forehead. Roderick repeated the gesture with an air of reverence surprising in
a farang.
Then he drew from his pocket a polished stone that flickered bloodred under the Chinese lanterns and held it aloft. “Tell me one thing, Pridi,” he said softly. “Did you kill him?”

“The king?”

In his mind’s eye, Pridi saw His Royal Highness Rama the Eighth—just a boy named Ananda, really, fresh from a Swiss prep school—glare haughtily and motion with one finger. The dead king said nothing about the gun or the bullets or who had pulled the trigger; nothing about the blood-spattered pillow in the royal bed. There had been so much blood. Ananda’s eyes were open and lost in death, his head turned toward the window. Some said his assassin had fled through it; others, that the gunman lived in the palace itself.

It was Pridi who would go down in history as a regicide.

He looked now at Jack Roderick—at the cool self-possession of the American, who would never cower in the filth of a sampan while his city went up in flames—and he wished, with a surge of anger, for the simpler rules of war.

“I thought you knew me, Jack,” Pridi replied, and stepped into the boat.

Jack Roderick was the last thing he saw on the river that night, backlit by mermaids in ball dress and the strains of Dorsey and the flares of cannon and the whole
fantastic enterprise of the old
farang
hotel on the banks of the Chao Phraya. Roderick was smoking again, his eyes glittering in the moonlight. Telling sad stories of the death of kings. Pridi knew he owed the man his life but he could not weigh the cost. That would come later, when they met again as equals.

Roderick followed the
sampan’s prow as it picked its course through the ruins of a bridge. When his cigarette had burned down to ash and Boonreung had turned without a wave into a khlong on the Thon Buri side of the river, he pocketed Carlos’s ruby, and went back inside to the dance.