Doublespeak--A Novel

by Alisa Smith

I WOKE WHEN the darkness was broken by a pattern tossed on the floor by the pale blue dawn, coming in through the perforated wooden screens. The air was hot and humid, and I remembered right away I was in Bangkok. I felt a momentary sense of panic, wondering if Miss Maggie could be tracing me every step of the way. But how? I had to focus on Link. He was the reason I’d taken these risks. I had to get moving. I rang the bell by my bed.

  A few minutes later there was a gentle knock at the door, which swung open with a creak. The light flared on over my bed, a crystal chandelier that I found too bright. Byron had some dresses hooked over one arm, and he was also carrying a tray. He must have been awake already.

  “You look better,” he said, and put the tray carefully on my lap. “Eat up, you need your strength.”

  “Does that mean you have news about Link?”

  He sighed and sat down, moving the dress he had draped over the crook of one arm onto the rattan chair. “There’ve been some sightings that sound promising, but we haven’t got him yet.”

  “He’s in danger. There are people who are out to get him.” I tried to sit up, and Byron propped up my pillows for me.

  “There’s nothing we can do in the next five minutes. Will you please eat?”

  “It does smell good,” I admitted as my stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten since I was on the Quarlo with Frederick, I realized. A day ago, if not longer. I had a clear memory of his wooden sailboat now. Surely I would soon be strong enough to look for Link myself. I supposed there’d be time to grill Byron further when I was done eating. He wasn’t going anywhere. I cut up the meat, which seemed to be kidney, and pushed it with my knife onto some warm buttered toast.

  “Sorry it’s so British. These heavy breakfasts are all you can get,” he said. “Only a handful of Americans live here.”

  “It’s delicious,” I said, between mouthfuls. Finished in only a few minutes, I laid down my silverware with a clatter and leaned back against my pillow.

  Fidgeting in his chair, Byron stood up again, and held up the dress. “Do you like it? The one you’re wearing got wrecked.”

  I looked down and saw the orange dust on it, a rip at the sleeve, and splotches of dried blood down the front. “You’re not kidding.”

  He still looked at me anxiously.

  “Yes, I like it,” I said. And I did. At least I would look pretty when I finally saw Link again—if I ever did see him.

  Byron lifted the tray from my lap and put it on a side table.

  “So, from the beginning, Byron,” I said. “How did you end up in Bangkok?”

  He settled himself back into the rattan chair, steepling his fingers in front of his mouth. He looked nervous, but he’d always been nervous around me. “I owned a little bar in Washington. Then I got a message out of the blue from Bill, inviting me to join his business here. He said he’d gone clean, or I never would have considered it.”

  “And is he clean?”

  Byron looked pained, hesitated, and picked up a red fan from the side table. He flipped it open and shut, open and shut. “The business is opium, but he seems to be.” He waved the fan in front of his face. “Believe it or not, the drug’s legal here. The government runs opium dens, and any extra is sold to the British for their Indian hospitals. There’s strict quotas. It’s pretty mundane and bureaucratic, really.”

  “But lucrative, from the looks of your house.”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling.

  “So how did Bill escape from jail?”

  “A powerful person was involved and it was covered up. That’s all I know.”

  “How’d Bill know where to find me?”

  “Shively, the navy man. He was on the Esquimalt base.”

  The name was familiar and I tried to place it. Goddamn it, it was the dreadful little man who brought me Bill’s threats three years ago. I should have known he’d been tracking me, but it hadn’t seemed to matter after I thought Bill died. A dog never does any tricks when the master is gone.

  “Did you know about Frederick?” I asked.

  “Who’s Frederick?”

  His puzzlement seemed genuine. I studied his face a moment longer. “Sho-nuff. He changed his name and got that boat he always wanted. He sailed me here from Honolulu. Bill asked him to do it.”

  “Sho-nuff? That’s strange. Bill never mentioned it. It’s like he’s bringing the gang back together.”

  I ignored that comment. I wanted no part of it. Bill’s schemes were an eternal wheel, crushing everything in its path, and I did not want to get dragged under it.

  “Frederick did my stitches,” was all I said.

  “The doctor added a few more, but he admitted the ones you had were done well enough, for an amateur job.” Byron paused and seemed to join me for a moment in wondering at the strangeness of it all. “It’s funny to hear him called Frederick,” he said. “It sounds so formal.”

  “I guess we’ve all changed in some way, and don’t want to be seen as we were before.”

  “I’ve certainly changed.”

  I thought of what I’d seen of this mansion when we arrived yesterday. Byron had no need for such show. It wasn’t his style, and he didn’t seem to have changed so much to me. “This is Bill’s place, isn’t it,” I said. I stared around the room, panic and rage battling in me, past Byron drooping in his chair, almost expecting Bill to be somewhere nearby, grinning. The man I once loved more than anything. The man who sold my freedom to Miss Maggie.

  Byron nodded miserably. “I’m sorry.”

  “I won’t stay here another second. I don’t ever want to see him.” I raised myself in bed, suppressing a groan, and put my feet onto the ground. The bastard probably took pleasure in thinking of me crying over his death. I’d never tell him, or Byron for that matter, that I had. Tears were transient, just water, after all—they would sizzle into nothing under a hot sun. It was only sorrow for the time I wasted on him, that was all.

  “You need help,” he said. “I’ll take you to a hotel.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I know Bangkok, and you don’t. I can help you look for Link Hughes. If you’ll let me. I’m on your side.”

  I felt like I was tumbling into a pit in which my old and new life, and all the mistakes from both, were roiling around together, a bunch of bloody crocodiles. I was angry with Byron for going along with it all, but I had to take my allies as I found them. He was easily influenced by Bill, but in the end I meant more to him—or at least I had, in the old days. Maybe Byron would lead me to Link Hughes and I could bypass Bill entirely.

  “Fine. Get me out of here,” I said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JANUARY 16, 1946—MORNING

  I SETTLED LENA into the Sawasdee Hotel near the obscure Ratchini Pier, where Bill had originally planned because it was an area with no curious foreigners. I apologized about the rundown wood-frame building, but Lena said it was lovely to have her own room after the military dormitories she was used to. I steeled myself to answer questions about Bill, but she said no more about him. Her focus on Hughes was single-minded. This did not bode well for Bill. It would have been better if Hughes were here and she could have got him out of her system. Bill had said he hadn’t seemed like much—the man must have still been in the regular ward then, rather than a mental patient, or Bill would have commented on it. I don’t know, maybe Bill even arranged his disappearance. Then Lena would never see Hughes, and the way would be clear for him. Or so he would think. I could not see Lena taking him back. She didn’t need anyone, least of all him.

  “No hope, no hope,” came a call through the screened window from the hotel courtyard. That damn bird. I couldn’t see it, but I knew what it looked like: plump and brown and white, its kind lazed around in the garden of the palazzo. It would likely be good eating. But its feelings had no bearing on me. I glanced at Lena where she sat in an armchair in the corner of the room. She seemed concentrated on something on the floor, though I couldn’t see anything.

  “Don�
�t worry, we’ll find him,” I said. “We’ll turn over every rock.” Chief Phao would certainly be doing that, but lord knew what would crawl out when he did. I didn’t think I’d mention Chief Phao’s involvement to Lena yet. I’d leave that up to Bill.

  I’d tried to convince her to let me look for Hughes while she rested, but she pointed out that I didn’t know what he looked like, while she did, so I was forced to give way. She didn’t have a photograph of him. Somehow that fact pepped me up, as though he couldn’t really be that special.

  Wake up, Byron, I told myself. She had come around the world to find him.

  We tried the ports and the train stations—anywhere a traveller would need to pass through if he wanted to leave the country. When the sun set on our hot and fruitless day of searching the city, we returned to her hotel. I could see she felt discouraged and tired, her hand touching delicately, absently, the bandage on her neck. I told her to stay put and I’d get some food, though there would only be noodles. No food for farangs, as they called white foreigners, in this district. She said that was fine and settled into the one chair to wait. Through the slats in the wooden window screen there was a view of thatched rooftops and the shiny blade of a canal slicing through the city, the rotting smell of which wafted over on the wind. I borrowed a lidded bowl from the manager and went outside to look for a vendor that was busy and clean. Every time I walked on the streets of Bangkok it shocked me anew, being more chaotic than you could ever conceive of back home. I’d sheltered Lena from it by taking taxis all day. An ox team pulling a cart jangled past, nearly knocking me over. I found a little restaurant decorated with calendars from years past, each featuring a picture of the old king until 1936, when Prince Ananda appeared as a child. He was a scrawny little thing, and I pitied him. I rather hoped that Bill was brewing something up to save him from shadowy enemies. Might as well. Whatever Bill’s plan was in the palace—robbery, rescue, or murder—it was going to involve me. Of the three, a rescue sat easiest in my mind.

  Out front, I handed my bowl to a Chinese boy stirring a soup pot, and stood with my hands in my pockets while he threw in some some noodles and what I’d call meatballs, which hopefully weren’t stuffed with strange things. Restaurants in Siam were designed backwards from what I was used to, with the kitchens outside to let the heat from cooking escape.

  I grabbed a South China Morning Post someone had left behind and sat down on a dark wooden stool polished smooth from generations of sitting. The ink smell wafted up as I turned the pages. It was not soothing reading. The rice-factory workers were planning a rally near the Parliament, since the king’s appointed government had legalized labour activity recently. I wondered where it would all lead. With neighbouring China nearly taken over by the Communists, Western governments were nervous about such displays. Maybe the Americans really were sending money to Chief Phao. One thing he was not was a Communist.

  It was not an easy life being a king, I reflected. The old king, Ananda’s father, had abdicated after a coup, and lived in exile with his family in Switzerland. They had been allowed to keep their wealth and status as long as they rubber-stamped the new government. However, winners and losers could change places quickly in this country, and it would be a delicate balancing act. This King Ananda, with his European education, supported democracy and made it clear he would endorse a new constitution that allowed free elections. Pridi, the most popular leader right now, was branded a Communist. Could Siam be the first country in the world where the people elected a Communist government?

  The Chinese boy called out that my soup was ready, and I folded up the newspaper. He ladled the meatballs and soup into my bowl with a tidy flick of his wrist, and he smiled at me shyly. I put the lid on and kept shifting my fingers along the hot rim, trying not to burn myself as I carried it back to the hotel.

  Back at Lena’s room, I locked the door behind me. Lena sniffed at the soup, tasted it, and declared it delicious. I felt as proud as if I had made it myself. At least I’d done something that pleased her. Seated at the single small desk, she finished it off, and dabbed her lips with a napkin. The lock in the door turned by itself and Lena and I stared at each other, my heart thumping. Maybe it was just the maid service, but suddenly I wished I had a gun. Could it be the people who followed Lena? She had said she was probably tailed from Alaska to Hawaii. Funny that life as a bank robber seemed an easy lifestyle compared to whatever she was into now. Her face back then had been open, looking forward to the next adventure. Now I would say that dread composed her outlook.

  “We need to talk.” It was Smile with his tally-ho accent and ill-matched thuggish appearance.

  “You could knock,” Lena said, and I admired her sangfroid in the face of this alarming stranger. “Whoever you are. And who gave you a key?”

  Smile ignored her. “Outside, Byron,” he said. There was no need for him to act so bossy, I thought.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” I said to Lena.

  Sheepishly I followed Smile into the dingy hall, closing the door carefully behind me, and moved well away from Lena’s room.

  “The chief found Link Hughes,” he said, speaking low. “Bill has him. You’d better move quickly.”

  “Where?”

  “The Oriental Hotel bar.”

  “We’ll leave now.”

  I watched him depart through the dark hallway and down the stairs with doubt in my mind. Did Bill know what he was doing with this meeting? Of course Bill assumed he was the better specimen now, but physical fitness alone did not win a woman’s heart. Plus, he did not know the image she might hold of this man in her mind, and it might override the present-day reality. That might equally hold true for Bill, and her memory of him could not be pretty. Except for whatever happened between them during her prison visit, which Bill said went poorly, the last time she saw him was when he hit her and she ran away.

  Yet Bill was right about me. I would do as he wanted. I would take Lena to the Oriental and set her down between two men who she would be torn between, and I would just be a bystander. Wouldn’t it at least make her grateful to me? Later, when the dust cleared and she realized both men were part of the past, or just not worthy, I would be standing beside her—her loyal friend. That was something.

  The Oriental Hotel. As always, Bill was either crazy or a deep genius. That’s where the crooked politicians went, the corrupt businessmen, and the underworld kingpins who earned their riches God knows how. Taking Lena there was like trying to hide yourself in the eye of a hurricane.

  I don’t know, maybe it’s safe in there. No one else wants to go in.

  I went back into the room. As soon as I told Lena I knew where Hughes was, she grabbed her purse and said, breathlessly, “Let’s go.”

  We ran downstairs and I had the manager call us a cab, handing him a baht note. “Make it quick.”

  Sitting in the cab, Lena put on some lipstick, her hand steady despite the occasional jounce on the road. Then she carefully blotted her lips with tissue. Thinking of the expression Don’t shoot the messenger made me hold my silence. I hoped she understood that Bill would be there. Could she have forgotten how he was? He wouldn’t just watch things unfold. He would control everything, somehow. I didn’t know what his game was, besides seeing Lena, of course. He had seemed very interested in Link Hughes—beyond what you would expect of a rival for a lady’s heart. Admittedly, his story was unusual. I’d had it in dribs and drabs from both Bill and Lena. It could not be typical to be transferred from a desk job to a British guerrilla force behind enemy lines in Burma. But war yanked people out of all corners of the world and placed them in strange situations. I’d heard about that from the soldiers who came into my bar in Sequim. Farm boys who’d never left Washington State were suddenly perched on the Sphinx in Egypt for a photograph, their legs splayed as though casually riding a mare back home. War seemed to make people good at pretending.

  I kind of wished I’d been in the war.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

&nbs
p; THE MENTAL PATIENT

  THE LONG DRIVEWAY through the hotel grounds was already filled with vehicles, so the cab idled at the gateway. This final delay before seeing Link was maddening. I stared ahead at the native bellboys, in pith helmets and uncomfortable-looking leather boots polished to a high sheen, who waited with excellent posture to open the doors to the hotel. The Victorian eminence was chockablock with archways and half-moon windows, and above its two stories a plaster curlicue loomed, looking ready to tip over from its heavy adornments. I had expected something with less flash and more discretion as a meeting place. I clutched my purse, ready to jump out of the car, impatient with the expats who took their time emerging from their limousines, like lazy butterflies. Oh, lord. The women wore cocktail gowns. I looked down with dismay at my cotton dress. Is this how Link would see me—looking like some afternoon housewife? I sank back into my seat again, suddenly wishing to not go in at all.

  “You look pretty,” Byron said.

  I stared at him, dubious.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know we’d be going out on the town when I brought your clothes,” he said, “but none of these women hold a candle to you.”

  The driver walked around to open my door, and I held up my chin as I got out of the cab. It would not help to slink around ashamed—and I had to admit that Byron’s compliment buttressed me.

  Inside, the place was packed. There was a sea of tables in the main area and the walls were lined with secretive booths, the usual gloom of a dark-wood British pub made strange by Siamese fretwork. It was noisy with chatter and I couldn’t focus. I desperately wanted to see Link before he saw me. I needed time to get over the shock, and to find a way to compose my face. My eyes scoured each table. Fans whirred overhead, the blades whipping round as though aeroplanes were descending, and I felt a sense of dread. It made me think of the battle of Midway, when I listened on the radio as the pilots went down. Link had been listening too, that day.