For months, then years, Hansen functioned that way in the so-called “liberated areas” of northern Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge nominally held sway, until the day he vanished from the village he had made his home. Vanished soundlessly, taking the inhabitants with him. Soon to be given up for dead, another jungle disappearance.
And remained dead until a short time ago, when he had come alive in a brothel in Bangkok.
“Take your time, Ned,” Smiley had urged me on the telephone to Tel Aviv. “If you want to add a couple of days for jet-lag, it’s quite all right by me.”
Which was Smiley-speak for “Get to him as fast as you can and tell me I haven’t got another king-sized scandal on my hands.” Our Station Head in Bangkok was a bald, rude, moustachioed little tyrant called Rumbelow, whom I had never warmed to. The Service offers precious few prospects for men of fifty. Most are blown; many are too tired and disenchanted to care whether they are or not. Others head for private banking or big business, but the marriage seldom lasts. Something has happened to their way of thinking that unsuits them to the overt life. But a very few, of whom Toby Esterhase was one and Rumbelow another, pull off the trick of holding the Service hostage to their supposed assets.
Exactly what Rumbelow’s were I never knew. Seedy, I am sure, for if he specialised in anything, it was human baseness. One rumour said he owned a couple of corrupt Thai generals who would work for him and for no one else. Another that he had managed to perform a grimy favour for a member of the royal household that was not transferable. Whatever his hold on them, the barons of the Fifth Floor would hear no ill of him. “And for God’s sake, don’t rub up Rumbelow the wrong way, Ned,” Smiley had begged me. “I’m sure he’s a pain it the neck, but we do need him.”
I met him in my hotel room. To the overt world I was Mark Seymour, occupation accountant, and had no wish to parade myself at the Embassy or his house. I had been flying twenty hours. It was early evening. Rumbelow spoke like an Etonian bookmaker. Come to think of it, he looked like one a well.
“It was sheerest bloody coincidence we bumped into this bastard at all,” he told me huffily. “One puts out one’s feelers naturally. One keeps one’s ear on the proverbial ground. One knows the score. One’s heard of other cases. One isn’t insensitive. One doesn’t like to think of one’s joe trussed to a stick, being carted through the jungle for weeks on end, while the Khmer Rouge torture the hell out of him, naturally. Not an ostrich. Know the score. Your brown man doesn’t obey the Queensberry Rules, you know,” he assured me, as if I had implied the opposite. And, plucking a handkerchief from the sleeve of his sweat-patched suit, he pummelled his stupid moustache with it. “Your average joe would be yelling for a quick bullet after one night of it.”
“Are you sure that’s what happened to him?”
“Not sure of anything, thank you, old boy. Rumour, that’s all. How can I be sure, if the bastard won’t even talk to us? Threatens violence if we try! For all I know, the KR never had sight nor sound of him. Never did trust a Dutchman, not out here—they think they own the bloody place. Hansen wouldn’t be the first joe to lie doggo when things got too hot for him, then come bouncing back when it’s all over, asking for his gong and his pension, not by any means. Still in possession of all his fingers and thumbs, by all accounts. Not missing any other part of his anatomy either, to judge by where he’s holed out. Duffy Marchbanks spotted him. Remember Duffy? Good chap.”
With a sinking heart, yes, I remembered Duffy. I had remembered him when I saw his name in the file. He was a flamboyant crook based in Hong Kong, with a taste for fast deals in anything from opium to shellcases. For a few misguided years we had financed his office.
“Purest chance, it was, on Duffy’s part. He’d popped up here on a flying visit. One day, that’s all. One day, one night, then back to the missus and a book. Offshore leisure consortium wanted him to buy a hundred acres of prime coastland for them. Did his business, then off they go to this girlie restaurant, Duffy, and a bunch of his traders—Duffy’s not averse to a bit of the other, never has been. Place called The Sea of Happiness, slap in the middle of the red-light quarter. Upmarket sort of establishment, as they go, I’m told. Private rooms, decent food if you like Hunanese, a straight deal and the girls leave you alone unless you tell ’em not to.”
At girlie restaurants, he explained, somehow contriving to suggest he had never personally been to one, young hostesses, dressed or undressed, sat between the guests and fed them food and drink while the men talked high matters of business. In addition, The Sea of Happiness offered a massage parlour, a discothèque and a live theatre on the ground floor.
“Duffy clinches the deal with the consortium, a cheque is passed, he’s feeling his oats. So he decides to do himself a favour with one of the girls. Terms agreed, off they go to a cubicle. Girl says she’s thirsty, how about a bottle of champagne to get her going? She’s on commission, naturally—they all are. Never mind. Duffy’s feeling expansive, so he says why not. Girl presses a bell, squawks into the intercom, next thing Duffy knows, in marches this bloody great European chap with an ice bucket and a tray. Sets it down, Duffy gives him twenty baht for himself, fellow says ‘Thank you’ in English, polite enough but no smiles, clears out. It’s Hansen. Jungle Hansen. Not a portrait . . . himself!”
“How does Duffy know that?”
“Seen his photograph, hasn’t he?”
“Why?”
“Because we showed Duffy the bloody photograph, for heaven’s sake, when Hansen went missing! We showed it to everyone we knew, all over the bloody hemisphere! We didn’t say why—we just said if you spot this man, holler. Head Office’s orders, thank you, not my idea. I thought it was bloody insecure.”
To calm himself, Rumbelow poured us both another whisky. “Duffy roars back to his hotel, phones me at home straight away. Three in the morning. ‘It’s your fellow,’ he tells me. ‘What fellow?’ I say. ‘Fellow you sent me that pretty picture of, back in Hongkers a year ago or more. He’s potboy at a whorehouse called The Sea of Happiness.’ You know how old Duffy talks. Loose. I sent Henry round next day. Bloody fool made a hash of it. You heard about that, I hope? Typical.”
“Did Duffy speak to Hansen? Ask him who he was. Anything?” “Not a dickie bird. Looked clean through him. Duffy’s a trouper.
Salt of the earth. Always was.”
“Where’s Henry?”
“Sitting downstairs in the lobby.” “Call him up.”
Henry was Chinese, the son of a Kuomintang warlord in the Shan States and our resident chief agent, though I suspect he had long ago taken out reinsurance with the Thai police and was earning a quiet living playing both ends against the middle.
He was a podgy, over-eager, shiny fellow and he smiled too much. He wore a gold chain round his neck and carried a smart leather notebook with a gold pen in it. His cover work was translator. No translator I had ever met sported a Gucci notebook, but Henry was different.
“Tell Mark how you made a bloody fool of yourself at The Sea of Happiness last Thursday evening,” Rumbelow ordered menacingly.
“Sure, Mike”
“Mark,” I said.
“Sure, Mark.”
“His orders were to take a look. That’s all he was to do,” Rumbelow barged in before Henry could tell anything at all. “Take a look, sniff, get out, call me. Right, Henry? He was to spin the tale, sniff, see if he could spot Hansen anywhere, not approach him, report back to me. A discreet, no-contact reconnaissance. Sniff and tell. Now tell Mark what you did.”
First Henry had had a drink at the bar, he said; then he had watched the show. Then he had sent for the Mama San, who hurried over assuming he had a special wish. The Mama San was a Chinese lady from the same province as Henry’s father, so they had an immediate bond.
He had shown the Mama San his translator’s card and said he was writing an article about her establishment—-the superb food, the romantic girls, the high standards of sensitivity and hygiene, particularly
the hygiene. He said he had a commission from a German travel magazine that recommended only the best places.
The Mama San took the bait and offered him the run of the house. She showed him the private dining rooms, the kitchens, cubicles, toilets. She introduced him to the girls—and offered him one on the house, which he declined—to the head chef, the doorman and the bouncers, but not, as it happened, to the enormous round-eye whom Henry had by then spotted three times, once as he carried a tray of glasses from the private dining rooms to the kitchens, once crossing a corridor pushing a trolley of bottles and once emerging from an open steel doorway which apparently led to the drinks store.
“But who is your farang who carries the bottles for you?” Henry had cried out with amusement to the Mama San. “Must he stay behind and work because he cannot pay his bill?”
The Mama San laughed also. Against farangs, or Westerners, all Asians feel naturally united. “The farang lives with one of our Cambodian girls,” she replied with contempt, for Cambodians are rated even lower than farangs and Vietnamese in the Thai zoology. “He met her here and fell in love with her, so he tried to buy her and make a lady out of her. But she refused to leave us. So he brings her to work every day and stays until she is free to go home again.”
“What kind of farang is he? German? English? Dutch?”
The Mama San shrugged. What was the difference? Henry pressed her. But a farang who brings his woman to the brothel and pushes drinks about while she goes with other men, he insisted, and then takes her home again to his bed. This must be quite some girl!
“She is number nineteen,” said the Mama San, with a shrug. “Her house name is Amanda. Would you like her?”
But Henry was too excited by his journalistic coup to be sidetracked. “But the farang, what is his name? What is his history?” he cried in great amusement.
“He is called Ham Sin. He speaks Thai with us and Khmer with the girl but you must not put him in your magazine because he is illegal.”
“I can disguise him. I can make it all disguised. Does the girl love him in return?”
“She prefers to be here at The Sea of Happiness with her friends,” the Mama San said primly.
Henry could not resist taking a look. The girls who were not with clients lounged on plush benches behind a glass wall, wearing numbers round their necks and nothing else, while they chatted to each other or tended their fingernails or stared vacuously at an ill-tuned television set. As Henry watched, number 19 stood up in response to a summons, picked up her little handbag and a wrap and walked from the room. She was very young. Many girls lied about their age in order to defeat the regulations—penniless Cambodians particularly. But this girl, said Henry, had looked no more than fifteen.
It was here that Henry’s excess of zeal began to lead him astray. He said his goodbyes to the Mama San and drove his car into an alley opposite the rear entrance, where he settled down to wait. Soon after one o’clock the staff began leaving, among them Hansen, twice the height of anyone else, leading number 19 on his arm. In the square, Hansen and the girl looked round for a cab and Henry had the temerity to pull up his car beside them. Pimps and illegal cab drivers thrive at that hour of night, and Henry in his time had been both, so perhaps the move came naturally to him.
“Where you want to go, sir?” he called to Hansen in English. “You want me to drive you?”
Hansen gave an address in a poor suburb five miles north. A price was agreed, Hansen and his girl got into the back of the car; they set off.
Now Henry began to lose his head in earnest. Flushed by his success, he decided for no reason he could afterwards explain that his best course of action would be to deliver his quarry and the girl to Rumbelow’s house, which lay not north but west. He had not of course prepared Rumbelow for this bold manoeuvre; he had hardly prepared himself for it. He had no assurance that Rumbelow was at home, or in any condition, at one-thirty in the morning, to conduct a conversation with a former spy who had disappeared off the map for eighteen months. But reason, at that moment, did not predominate in Henry’s mind. He was a joe, and there is not a joe in the world who does not, at one time or another in his life, do something totally daft.
“You like Bangkok?” Henry asked Hansen gaily, hoping to distract his passengers from the route he was taking.
No answer.
“You been here long?’
No answer.
“That’s a nice girl. Very young. Very pretty. She your regular girl?”
The girl had her head on Hansen’s shoulder. From what Henry could see in the mirror, she was already asleep. For some reason, this knowledge excited Henry further.
“You want a tailor, sir? All-night tailor, very good? I take you there. Good tailor.”
And he drove wildly into a sidestreet, pretending to look for his wretched tailor while he hurried towards Rumbelow’s house.
“Why are you going west?” said Hansen, speaking for the first time. “I don’t want to go this way. I don’t want a tailor. Get back on the main road.”
The last of Henry’s commonsense deserted him. He was suddenly terrified by Hansen’s size and Hansen’s tactical advantage in sitting behind him. What if Hansen was armed? Henry jammed on the brakes and stopped the car.
“Mr. Hansen, sir, I am your friend!” he cried in Thai, much as he might plead for mercy. “Mr. Rumbelow is your friend too. He’s proud of you! He wants to give you a lot of money. You come with me, please. No problem. Mr. Rumbelow will be very happy to see you!”
That was the last speech Henry made that night, for the next thing he knew, Hansen had pushed the back of Henry’s driving seat so hard that Henry’s head nearly went through the windscreen. Hansen got out of the car and hauled Henry into the street. After that, Hansen lifted Henry to his feet and flung him across the road, to the dismay of a group of sleeping beggars, who began whimpering and clamouring while Hansen strode to where Henry lay and glared down at him.
“You tell Rumbelow, if he comes for me, I’ll kill him.” he said in Thai.
Then he led the girl up the road in search of a better cab, one arm round her waist while she dozed.
By the time I had heard the two men’s story to the end, I was suddenly dreadfully tired.
I sent them away, telling Rumbelow to call me next morning. I said that before I did anything else I was going to sleep off my jet-lag. I lay down and was at once wide awake. An hour later, I was presenting myself at The Sea of Happiness and buying a ticket for fifty dollars. I removed my shoes, as custom required, and moments later I was standing in a neon-lit cubicle in my stockinged feet, staring into the passive, much painted features of girl number 19.
She wore a cheap silk wrap with tigers on it, but it was open from the neck down. Underneath it she was naked. A heavy Japanesestyle make-up covered her complexion. She smiled at me and thrust her hand swiftly towards my groin, but I replaced it at her side. She was so slight it seemed a mystery that she was equal to the work. She was longer-legged than most Asian girls and her skin was unusually pale. She threw off her wrap and, before I could stop her, sprang on to the frayed chaise longue, where she arranged herself in what she imagined to be an erotic pose, caressing herself and uttering sighs of desire. She rolled on to her side with her rump thrust out, draping her black hair across her shoulder so that her tiny breasts poked through it. When I did not advance on her, she lay on her back and opened her thighs to me and bucked her pelvis, calling me “darling” and saying “please’. She flung herself away from me so that I could admire her back view, keeping her legs apart in invitation.
“Sit up,” I said, so she sat up and again waited for me to come to her.
“Put on your wrap,” I said.
When she appeared not to understand, I helped her into it. Henry had written the message for me in Khmer. “I want to speak to Hansen,” it read. “I am in a position to obtain Thai papers for yourself and your family.” I handed it to her and watched her study it. Could she read? I had no
way of telling. I held out a plain white envelope addressed to Hansen. She took it and opened it. The letter was typed and its tone was not gentle. It contained two thousand baht.
“As an old friend of Father Vernon,” I had written, using the wordcode familiar to him, “I must advise you that you are in breach of your contract with our company. You have assaulted a Thai citizen and your girlfriend is an illegal Cambodian immigrant. We may have no alternative but to pass this information to the authorities. My car is parked across the street. Give the enclosed money to the Mama San as payment to release you for the night, and join me in ten minutes.”
She left the cubicle, taking the letter with her. I had not realised till then how much noise there was in the corridor: the jangling music, the tinny laughter, the grumbles of desire, the swish of water down the ramshackle pipes.
I had left the car unlocked and he was sitting in the back, the girl beside him. Somehow I had not doubted he would bring the girl. He was big and powerful, which I knew already, and haggard. In the half darkness, with his black beard and hollowed eyes and his flattened hands curled tensely over the back of the passenger seat, he resembled one of the saints he had once worshipped, rather than the photographs on his file. The girl sat slumped and close to him, sheltering against his body. We had not gone a hundred metres before a rainburst crashed on us like a waterfall. I pulled in to the kerb while each of us stared through the drenched windscreen, watching the torrents of water swarm over the gutters and potholes.
“How did you get to Thailand?” I yelled in Dutch. The rain was thundering on the roof.
“I walked,” Hansen replied in English
“Where did you come over?” I yelled, in English also.
The Secret Pilgrim Page 24