The Secret Agent (20 page)

“Personal protection,” Marty had suggested during one late-night survey of intelligence. “He’s got a sideline. Something high-risk. These guys are insurance.”

“They’re pretty far away from Bangkok,” Rush had replied doubtfully.

“So’s the sideline. Drugs?”

The Minister of Culture might be cultivating heroin with the aid of his troops—opium poppies, after all, had been the major crop of the Golden Triangle for time out of mind—but Bangkok station could find absolutely no evidence that Sompong was brokering drug sales back home. When in Bangkok, he led a venal but hardly criminal life in the company of his peers. His customary routine was beyond legal reproach. The impenetrability of the minister’s motives—and the frustrating loyalty of his personal staff, which had thus far proved impervious to bribery, threats or seduction—had Marty Robbins foaming at the mouth.

Rush considered telling his boss that he had seen Suwannathat the previous night, in a warehouse near the Thieves Market, examining what appeared to be antique pottery—but Marty’s questions would lead inevitably to the admission that he had spent the better part of the evening insensible in a Bangkok gutter. Rush kept silent.

“What about this Fogg chick?” Marty’s interests roved; as a case officer, his skill lay in connecting parallel lines of investigation. He valued coincidence far more than established patterns. “Is she one of the world’s nasties?”

“I don’t know. She’s not what she says she is. I watched her fabricate one story last night while she told me another. I’m still figuring out which pieces were true.”

“Probably none of ’em. You heard the tape.” Marty stabbed at the recorder once more. “Sompong Shithead Suwannathat ordered a background file on Fogg yesterday, from his private investigative hack. He’s got Jo-Jo staked out at the Oriental. Something’s going down, Rush. What’s the broad doing in Bangkok?”

“Pleasure trip.”

“My ass. No affiliation?”

“None but a series of bank accounts.”

“This has black market written all over it. She’s financing. Or receiving.”

“She was last seen in Vietnam. And Laos.”

“What, no interest in Burma?”

“There, too,” Rush admitted ruefully.

“And you
bought
it? Jesus H. Christ, Halliwell—this woman sells you a crock of shit and you’re lappin’ it up. She must be pretty hot.”

“She inherited Jack Roderick’s place. The museum on the khlong.”

Marty stared at him. “That name just won’t die, will it?”

Rush shrugged. “I’m invited to meet her there this afternoon. She says she wants the embassy’s help with the Thai Heritage Board.”

“Meaning, Sompong Suwannathat. This is too fucking good. Fogg pretends to be hostile to the minister and all his works, and co-opts
you
into the bargain. The lady’s got
cojones.
Think she knew you were Agency?”

“Absolutely.”

“Make that meeting at Roderick’s,” Marty ordered, “and stay on Fogg—in a purely friendly capacity, of course. I want Avril to run her name. See if that story about the house is true.”

Avril Blair was the embassy’s legal attaché—the Federal
Bureau of Investigation’s representative in Bangkok. It was illegal for a CIA officer to run background checks on a U.S. citizen. But the FBI was
encouraged
to do it.

Rush watched Marty pour himself a cup of coffee. Then he picked up the phone and held it two inches from his aching skull.

“Avril,” he said softly into the receiver, “I need to find out who’s storing ceramics in a warehouse off Khlong Ong Ang. Here’s the address.”

Bangkok,
March 1949

T
he morning after he received the news of Boonreung’s death, Jack Roderick appeared at the central police station in the Dusit quarter of Bangkok and demanded the release of the boy’s body. He bore an official document from the United States embassy and one from the Thai Ministry of the Interior, stamped with seals, and he was prepared to wait while the papers were examined. He spoke few words of Thai but understood many more; and as he waited, shrouded in a false air of calm, he listened to the phrases tossed among the men.

A special case.

I know nothing

One of Gyapay’s boys.

Nothing, I tell you.

The political section.

Don’t speak of it, fool; better to stop your mouth than utter such things.

The
farang
is waiting His papers—

Send him to the morgue. That’s where Gyapay’s boys all end.

Roderick’s Packard crawled through a swarm of
tuk-tuks
down the length of Chulalongkorn Boulevard to the city morgue, where the bodies of the poor and the politically untouchable lay stacked on field stretchers abandoned four years earlier by the Japanese. He walked among the dead, a silk handkerchief covering his mouth and nose, and lifted the rough sacking that covered the corpses.

Old men, their mouths slack and toothless. The obscene nakedness of elderly women. A little girl, dead of dysentery or fever, her rib cage sharp beneath the unformed breasts. A teenager with his throat cut.

Roderick walked the aisles while the dizzying stench of bloated flesh curled in his hair and his nostrils. Flies buzzed around him like an enemy squadron.

When he found Boonreung, Roderick wiped the boy’s face gently with his square of silk. He took careful note of the obvious things—toenails torn from the thin feet; bruises where electrodes had seared the scrotum. Then he lifted the frail body—that bundle of northeast bones—and turned it tenderly on the sagging stretcher. The corpse was slack and Roderick was clumsy with grief, but he saw the wound immediately: no bullet in a fleeing back, no shot fired at random, but a precise hole at the base of the skull. Boonreung’s glossy hair was matted stiff with blood.

He wrapped the boy in a freshly ironed sheet borrowed from the Oriental, and carried him out to the car. Crude, this mismatched
pietà,
and a grown man weeping.

That night Roderick
sat alone in the babble of the Bamboo Bar. Thanom, the young bartender, kept Roderick’s Kentucky bourbon on a shelf next to McQueen’s single
malts. Both were procured from Europe through infinite patience and expense; marked with their owners’ names, they were off-limits to the rest of the hotel. Roderick turned the whiskey in his hands, Boonreung’s cockatoo on his shoulder.

“You want a peanut for that bird?” Thanom asked.

“Why not? Somebody ought to eat.”

The bartender dropped a nut on the counter and watched the cockatoo tear into the shell with its sharp beak. Thanom was roughly Boonreung’s age, Roderick thought; certainly the two boys had been friends. Boonreung used to hang around the bar in his free time, laughing and talking in Thai too rapid for Roderick to catch. Thanom knew a lot about everyone at the Oriental— what they liked to eat and drink; how much they gambled and lost; if they preferred boys to girls, and exactly how often. What had Boonreung told Thanom, during those idle half hours? Had he boasted of mad escapes through a maze of khlongs, of car rides to the Laos border? Of a trip to the northeast in
a farang
car, four days after Pridi’s failed coup?

“You waiting for somebody, Mister Jack?”

“Yes,” Roderick replied. “A man named Gyapay. Know him?”

Thanom swept the counter with a damp cloth, the strokes unfaltering. “I have heard the name, I think. An Army man. My uncle would know.”

“Is your uncle in the Army?”

“Not anymore. What he does now is so secret, he dares not speak of it.”

“I would like to meet your uncle.”

“He is a busy man.” No hesitation in Thanom’s voice; at seventeen, he drove a hard bargain.

Roderick pulled his wallet from his trouser pocket and found a thousand-baht note. Thanom’s monthly
salary. He slid the cash across the shining counter and watched the boy’s palm close over it.

“My uncle works at night,” Thanom murmured. “By day you will find him in Thon Buri, near the Chakkawat Market. Ask for Maha. It is the name he goes by.”

The cockatoo screeched and thrust its beak at Thanom. He tossed it a peanut. “A bird like that, she cares for nobody. Where is Boonreung today?”

“Consigned to flames.”

The color drained from the bartender’s face.

“Someone betrayed him, Thanom,” Roderick said softly. “I intend for someone to pay.”

A water taxi
ferried him upriver to the bend in the Chao Phraya, and left him on the landing below the Chakkawat Market. If he was hunted by the men who hated and feared Pridi Banomyong, as Alec McQueen believed, he was more likely to be caught in his room at the Oriental than in the maze of canals on the city’s edge. Increasingly uneasy, Roderick listened to the whistles of those who lived on the water, ringing from bank to bank like the calls of nightbirds.

His old friend Carlos had known the Thon Buri side of Bangkok intimately, but Carlos was three years gone into the hill country of Laos. Glad that the water was low with the dry season, Roderick felt his way by instinct along the muddy banks, toward the huddle of sampans and stilted houses near the marketplace. There was a widow named Dunadee who lived in a boat on a dead-end khlong—a widow with several children. She had harbored Carlos once, when escape was all that mattered. It was possible, Roderick thought, that she would know how to find the man named Maha.

* * *

Two days later
Colonel Billy Lightfoot breezed into Bangkok at the head of a delegation of U.S. military brass. The colonel laughed out loud at the difference four years could make, at the neat new airfield and the prosperous mood of the people. He slapped McQueen on the back and drank sherry with Stanton in the ambassador’s office, he introduced his colleagues and made sure they knew the name of Jack Roderick.

“All those reports you’ve read on Laos, fellas?” the colonel barked. “About the revolution to come? The end of Indochina? This is the guy who’s got the goods.”

Later, when the stag dinner was done and the delegation had toddled off under McQueen’s aegis to see the glittering underbelly of Bangkok life, Roderick took his old trainer for an unofficial tour.

“Never thought Pridi Banomyong would turn out to be such an unholy fuck-up,” Lightfoot mused, as the Packard nosed through the traffic on New Road. “Remember how we admired him, Jack, in the OSS days? The way he refused to lie down while the Japs rolled over him? Ruth stood for something then. Now he’s just a lousy sideshow. Disrupting traffic every time he reenters the country.”

“And the guy we kicked out of town is back in office. Makes you wonder why we bothered.”

Lightfoot sighed. “At least Pibul’s a soldier. Duty and honor before personal gain, right? And he’s no Communist.”

“Neither was Hitler.”

“Hitler’s dead. Stalin’s alive and kicking. You know what Truman’s facing in Korea? A whole Red army, hellbent on revolution. The Commies are agitating in
Vietnam, too, and it’s Mao who’s bankrolling the fuckers. Communism’s the next great war, Jack. At least Field Marshal Pibul’s on
our
side this time.”

“It’s not a goddamn football game, Billy.” Roderick pulled up before a shuttered storefront on Silom Road, empty of life at this hour. Chinese characters advertised a laundry, but Lightfoot couldn’t read them.

“You got a woman shacked up here?”

“A man. Name of Gyapay. Minister of Torture in the Pibul government, and head of the secret police.”

Lightfoot whistled softly under his breath.

“Five men operate inside that building, Billy. Two work electric shock, one does the punching and kicking, another patches up the victim for as long as they need him and the last one—Gyapay—asks the questions. I know the names and faces of all five.”

“Jesus. Nothin’ gets by you, old buddy.” Billy Lightfoot squinted through the darkness as though it were a gun sight.

“I followed a man named Maha—whose personal specialty is castration—from his home two nights ago. I waited here in the street until dawn, to watch Maha and his friends come out. Over the past thirty-eight hours I’ve learned where each man lives and exactly what he does. Gyapay’s the criminal in the bunch. The rest just do as he asks.”

“What’s the point, Jack?”

“This is how your good soldier Pibul handles duty and honor, Billy. He tortures the opposition into silence. He tortured a friend of mine to death.”

“Was your friend Communist?”

“My friend was just a kid.”

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Lightfoot muttered. “Thank God we live in the good old U.S. of A.”

* * *

When the first
body appeared in Thon Buri the next morning, none of the boat people gave it much thought. It was true that Old Man Maha’s throat was viciously cut, and that by the time his corpse was dragged from the khlong, the rats had gnawed out his eyes. But as Widow Dunadee judiciously said, Old Man Maha was an evil soul; it was the end he deserved. The boat people burned joss sticks and fingered amulets and averted their eyes until Maha’s relatives came to dispose of their dead.

In the days that followed, three more bodies were found, each in a different part of the city. One had a knife wound straight to the heart, one a bullet hole in the temple. The third had been garotted to death. The murders made no ripple in the Thai-language press: the victims were known to be members of the secret police, and thus were hated. But by the time the fourth corpse surfaced, Alec McQueen at the
Bangkok Post
caught wind of something.

“Ex-Army men, all of ’em,” he mused as he read the police homicide records. “Knives in the dark. Christ. It smells of resistance, all over again.”

But when he dropped by Jack Roderick’s room at the Oriental Hotel, Roderick showed no interest in the story. Jack had been hard to reach, McQueen thought, ever since that boy’s murder.

On the final
night of Billy Lightfoot’s stay, Roderick and McQueen stood several rounds of drinks for everyone in the Bamboo Bar. Thanom wore a black armband and watched through heavy-lidded eyes while the
farangs
swapped war stories and got each other drunk. Then Roderick gathered his friends into the aging Packard and went to dine in the Thai manner. He and McQueen talked while Lightfoot choked on Kaffir lime leaves and
galangal,
washing down the pineapple curries and fried catfish with copious amounts of beer. Three golden-limbed women danced for their pleasure in the stylized, hypnotic fashion of traditional Thai
lakhon,
and when McQueen announced he was horny enough to fuck a goat, Roderick suggested they pay a visit to Miss Lucy’s Hall of Girls.

The Hall of Girls was famous in
the farang
quarter as the one place a Western man could get a slice of Thai ass without fear of entanglement or murder. Roderick sailed into Miss Lucy’s in time for the nightly revue, when the girls shed what little clothing they still wore. He consigned Billy Lightfoot to a tall, rangy Russian émigré who went by the name of Lola. McQueen had too many favorites among the Asian girls; Roderick chose for him, and followed him upstairs with Miss Lucy herself.

She was a canny woman with sharp eyes, a ready smile and fabulous legs; legs that, according to local legend, had once graced the Paris stage. Roderick admired Lucy’s charms in company with every man in Bangkok, but what he valued most was her discretion. Lucy was an old friend and confidante of Harold Patterson—Roderick’s predecessor as Bangkok intelligence chief—and it was Patterson who’d told Jack to trust Lucy implicitly. She’d never proved him wrong.

He watched her kick off her shoes, shimmy out of her dress and present her overflowing brassiere to his ready hands. He stuffed a wad of currency into her cleavage and pecked her on the cheek.

“Jack, Jack,” Lucy mourned. “Always it is business? Never pleasure?”

“Pleasure increases, sweetheart, the more it’s delayed. Cover for me. I need three hours.”

He let himself down as quietly as a cat from the bedroom window, into the lush depths of the whorehouse garden. The sound of laughter and Western jazz, tinny with distance, floated out on the perfumed air.

Chacrit Gyapay was
a compact man of fifty-three with a bland face and brown eyes reminiscent of a basset hound’s. He was neatly dressed this evening in a formal Army uniform, and though his mistress had spent nearly an hour disarranging his pomaded black hair, it was now slick and shining beneath his military visor. Each night at three minutes after eleven, he strode from the apartment house where he kept his woman to the chauffeured car that waited at the curb. Tonight was no different. Gyapay adjusted his cuffs and glanced up and down the deserted pavement. Like many side streets in Bangkok, this one was without lights. The dim glow from the apartment house outlined his idling car, the driver behind the wheel. All as it should be. Why, then, did a finger of uneasiness stir at the base of his spine? Why did the brutal deaths of four men—seasoned professionals, it is true, but nothing to match the terror of Gyapay’s name—disturb his peace?

He paced briskly toward the backseat. His chauffeur slid from behind the wheel to open his passenger door. He heard the satisfying
thunk!
of heavy steel as the door swung closed. The car pulled away from the curb and he glanced idly over his shoulder at the lights of his mistress’s building. It was twelve minutes past eleven before he realized that his car was headed in the wrong direction.

* * *

Why did you
torture and kill the boy named Boonreung?

“I torture nobody—I do not know what you mean.”