The Thai Amulet (18 page)

The other haven of silence was to be found in the temples, or wats. There were hundreds of them in the city, some of them so ancient they were essentially ruins, others more modern and vital. It was to one of these that I took myself one day, the piece of paper with its name written so laboriously by the woman in the amulet market in Bangkok clutched tightly in my hand. Wats are essentially composed of two areas, the quarters of the monks and the more public areas for worship. The residences tend to be rather austere, but the public areas are often a riot of color, and gold, and splendid carving. I presented myself at the wat in question, and asked to meet with an English-speaking priest. To my surprise, they obliged.

I was ushered into one of the public buildings, abandoning my shoes, and ascending a staircase lined with protective serpents, or
nagas.
I had been well instructed never to touch a monk but to kneel in his presence and bow, forehead to the floor on meeting him, to ensure that the bottom of my feet at no time pointed toward either the monk or, more importantly, the Buddha image. I was to call him
ajahn,
which I gather means teacher. I am not religious, I’m afraid, and I was so enchanted by the place, from the decaying frescoes in reds and blues that depicted scenes from the life of Buddha, to his gold image, so calm and majestic, and at least twelve or fifteen feet high and beautifully crafted, that I did not for a time notice the monk who was sitting on a platform, his legs crossed, watching me.

“Oh dear,” I muttered and managed to get myself more or less in the right position. At the monk’s command, I was able to sit up, but had to sit on the floor with my legs tucked to one side, a position that at my age is something of a trial.

I looked up to see a man, his head shaved, dressed in the orange robe of the monk, one shoulder bare in the Thai style. What I noticed most were his blue eyes.

“You’re surprised,” he said softly. “To see a white man here.”

“I suppose I am,” I said. “Where are you from,
ajahn!”

“California, but I have been here many years.” We talked about several things for a few minutes, the weather, how I liked Chiang Mai, his hometown of Fresno.

“Do you miss it?” I said.

“Fresno?” he replied with a slight smile. “California? My former life? Sex?”

That hadn’t been what I’d meant.

“No,” he said finally. But then he said, “You came here for a purpose.”

“Yes. I am looking for a monk. May I?” I said, pointing to my bag. “I have a photograph. I’m told he is associated with this temple.”

“Of course,” he said. He barely looked at the photo before handing it back to me. “He is not here.”

“But he was,” I persisted. The monk did not reply.

“Ajahn,
would you please tell me about him,” I said. “I have no idea if it is relevant, but I do need to know if it is possible to talk to him. I am trying to find a man who abandoned his wife and disabled child in Canada, and I am following up every lead I have, which is not many.”

The monk said nothing for quite a while. Then he said, so softly I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly, “In Buddhism, a cool heart is something to strive for.”

“What?”

“You are very troubled about something.”

I thought about that for a moment or two. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not any more than usual. Well, maybe I am. A little, anyway.”

He didn’t say anything.

I looked at the frescoes for a minute or two, admired the workmanship, the carved windows. Then suddenly I was just burbling away at this total stranger. I told him about Will and Natalie, about Jennifer and Chat, about my relationship with Rob. Part of me was horrified that I was going on like that, but the other was just relieved.

“You don’t have children of your own, do you?” he said when I stopped for breath.

“No.”

“Was that a mistake?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But I have no patience. If they wouldn’t stop crying or something, I probably would have killed them.” There was a perceptible pause. I was dimly aware of chanting off in the distance somewhere, and the ringing of bells, but they had a muffled quality. “Actually,” I said. “That is not true. I would not have killed them. I would not have abandoned them. Will’s daughter is mentally handicapped, but she has the most beautiful smile you have ever seen. How could he do what he did? And you know what? He came here and he started writing a book about a woman who chopped her husband into bits and murdered her child. At least everybody thinks she did. The child’s body was never found. What would it take to make a mother murder her child? What possible conditions, other than utter madness, would have to prevail for that to happen? Surely it is our responsibility as adults to protect our children, our own, or somebody else’s.” I could hear my voice coming out in a croak as I spoke, and I realized that I had had no idea I was this upset about everything. I thought I would choke on my bile.

“And you know what else?” I said. “Almost no one has told me the truth, Thais and whites alike, since I got here. They smile, they are polite, and they lie through their teeth. Or if they haven’t lied, they have withheld information. And that includes you,” I said, pointing at the photograph.

For a moment I thought I would be struck by lightning for speaking to a monk that way.

“I suppose all religious groups have their bad apples,” he said after a minute. “He was one of them. He was a senior monk here, and he was found to have a rather spectacular home outside where he lived with a woman and drove a Mercedes. We thought he was retreating to meditate alone. The Ministry of Religious Affairs investigated—this was all done rather quietly, you understand—and he is no longer a monk.”

“Is that it?”

“No. He obviously had a lot of money. It was thought he was taking money from the temple, but there was no evidence that he had. The police decided his money came from smuggling.”

“Smuggling what?”

“Jewels, drugs, people. He is now in jail.”

“Since when?”

“Two years ago.”

“His father apparently says he is dead.”

“Perhaps he is dead to him.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For telling me.”

“You are quite welcome,” he replied. “Now you should go back to taking care of the children.”

“Could I ask one more question?”

“Yes.”

“These amulets,” I said, handing over my little plastic sandwich bag.

“These are—”

“Blasphemous, I know. But have you ever seen them before?”

“No,” he said, handing them back. “Nor, in the interests of not withholding information, have I seen anything like them.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I feel better.”

“I’m glad,” he replied. “It must be difficult for you trying to be a mother to so many.”

I opened my mouth to protest, to tell him I was childless by choice, that I had a wonderful life, a business that might not make me rich, but one I loved. I was going to tell him I owned a house, had very nice friends, got to travel all over the world, footloose and fancy-free. But I didn’t say any of it. Instead, I bowed my forehead to the floor again, and by the time I looked up, he was gone.

I wandered around Chiang Mai for at least an hour after that, arguing with both the monk and myself in my head. I remembered Clive telling me that I was always flailing about helping people I barely knew, and I wondered if this is what the monk had meant. I supposed Clive was referring to people like Robert Fitzgerald. I’d told Robert I’d try to sell his spirit houses in my store. Spirit houses! And this in a neighborhood that leaned rather more to Armani and Chanel. If Fitzgerald had a problem with his father, was it up to me to try to fix it? Maybe Clive and the monk were right.

On the other hand, Clive could hardly be judgmental, could he? And the comment about people I barely knew was hardly fair. For example, why exactly had I taken him back as a business partner long after our divorce? You couldn’t get much closer to home than that. I told myself it was because he was now my friend Moira’s partner, but maybe it was because I sensed the vulnerability under his rather brash exterior, or maybe because I felt the marriage failed because of me. Certainly I knew that when he went into business in competition with me, and right across the road, that he wouldn’t last long, particularly when he got dumped by his second wife, the rather wealthy Celeste. I could just have waited him out. He was no businessman, no matter how talented a designer.

And then there was William Beauchamp. Why had I ever said I would look for a man I didn’t know very well, for a woman and a daughter I knew even less? Was that what the monk had been talking about?

Maybe the only person in my life I didn’t feel responsible for was Rob. And maybe that was why I was so reluctant to move in with him. I thought our relationship would change, and I would not only be struggling with trying to be a mother to Jennifer, but he’d want me to mother him as well.

Deep in these thoughts, I was quite unaware of my surroundings, walking up and down lanes, barely noticing the buzz of the town around me. I will always think of Chiang Mai as a beehive because of the high-pitched hum of the tuk-tuks that must surely outnumber the cars. They whirred around corners and jostled for position at the intersections like annoying insects. At some point I found myself in the market off Moon Muang Road near the moat that surrounds the Old City. I barely noticed the piles of red, spiky rambutan fruit, the green papaya, the tubs of snakefish, the stacks of tofu and dried fish, the cries of the merchants.

Suddenly, though, I felt a tuk-tuk dangerously close to me, and tried to move out of its way. I felt a hand grab at the bag on my shoulder and tug at it. I yelled and held on tight, but was thrown very hard against a fruit stand, dislodging a mound of jackfruit, and sliding to the ground. Two or three people nearby rushed to help me, and by the time I was able to look around, the tuk-tuk had disappeared in a haze of blue exhaust.

“You hurt?” the owner of the fruit stall said, helping me up.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Very bad man,” one of the people who had come to my aid said, picking up the fruit and inspecting it before returning it to the pile.

“What happened?” I said.

“Young man on tuk-tuk,” the woman said. “Tried to steal your bag. It is good you hold on tight to it. In day, too. Big risk, I think. No good,” she added, pointing to a rather large bruise that was already forming on my arm. “He hurt you.”

“Maipen rai,”
I said. “I still have my bag, and I’m fine. It doesn’t matter.” So much for thinking too much, though. All it got you was a sore arm and a frayed strap on your bag. As a traveler I should have been paying more attention in a strange place. I resolved to avoid such introspection as much as possible.

I returned to the guest house rather shaken despite what I’d said, but not so much that I didn’t notice that someone had been in my room. There was the maid, of course, as the most logical person, but the bed had been made up before I left. Will’s business card was gone, as was the red dust in the drawer. I decided she had simply come back and cleaned some more, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I kept thinking of the man in the amulet market who had tried so hard to separate me from the blasphemous ones. I carried them in my large shoulder bag at all times, so if someone had been looking for them, they would have been disappointed. But why would they? Could it have been the sword someone was after? That I’d left in Bangkok, determining rather sensibly that it wouldn’t go in my suitcase, and I was unlikely to be allowed to carry it on to the airplane. I decided I was just being silly, that my imagination was expanding in the heat.

Too soon the interlude in Chiang Mai was over, and we all returned to the Chaiwong residence in Ayutthaya. The place was beginning to feel like a prison to me, no matter how splendid the setting. It was not as splendid as before, mind you. This time I was relegated to a room the size of a broom closet. A beautiful broom closet, of course—everything in the place was beautiful—but there was no doubt in my mind that I was now in the servants’ wing. The lovely gold room was now occupied by Yutai. He had also moved into the largest office at Ayutthaya Trading, Jennifer told me, one with glass walls so that he could keep an eye on all goings-on. The man was rising through the ranks at Ayutthaya with breathtaking speed. It was too tempting to speculate why that might be.

Still, it got me back on the trail of Will Beauchamp. I had forgotten, in the chaos of the preceding days, my discovery of the portrait with my—it had come to be my— sword in it. I’d had the opportunity to study both the portrait of the two brothers and the sword very carefully, before the portrait disappeared, and there was no doubt in my mind that they were one and the same. I couldn’t believe there would be two identical swords.

What, I wondered, had made Will think the sword had been used to hack up Helen Ford’s husband? I went back and read the newspaper clipping that had been sent to Natalie very carefully, and there was no mention of it. I had only one clipping of what must have been many, given the nature of the crime in particular, and the propensity of newspapers in general to keep a good story going as long as possible. Still, given the way newspapers summarize an ongoing story every time they add to it, I would have thought the use of a sixteenth-century silver sword as a murder weapon would have been worth a mention at least some of the time.

So, assuming the story about chopping up Mr. Ford was untrue, if Will had happened upon the sword somehow in the course of a buying expedition, what did he do? Did he try to sell it to the Chaiwongs? That’s what you’d do, after all, if you were a dealer—unless you were my kind of dealer, which is to say I fall in love with things I purchase and then can hardly bear to part with them.

But assuming he wasn’t my kind of dealer, if he recognized the sword as the one in the portrait, then he would offer to sell it. If you were the Chaiwongs, given money was no object, surely you’d buy it for sentimental reasons, or just for the novelty of it.

Or, then again, perhaps Will purchased it from the Chaiwongs. It had been in the family at some point in the last half century or so. But why would they sell in the first place? They didn’t need the money. Which brought me back to the possibility that maybe they’d disposed of it because it had been used to hack up a body.