He was thinking, That should make the Peepers happy, when the door chimes announced the arrival of his special friends.
Aroon and Sakda, slight boys in their early teens with short hair and golden skin, bowed to greet the man they knew as Mr. Paul Meile. Then they laughed and threw their arms around him as he called them by name.
The massage table was set up on the private balcony facing the beach, and as the boys smoothed the sheets and got oils and lotions out of their bags, Henri set up his video camera and framed the scene.
Aroon helped Henri out of his robe, and Sakda folded the sheets over his lower body, and then the boys began the specialty of the Pradha Han spa, the four-hand massage.
Henri sighed as the boys worked in tandem, stroking across the grain of his muscles, working in the Hmong cream, rubbing away his tensions of the past week. Hornbills screeched in the jungle, and the air was scented with jasmine. This was one of the most delicious of sensory experiences, and it was why he came to Hua Hin at least once a year.
The boys turned Henri over and pulled at his arms down to the pads of his fingers in unison, did the same with his legs and feet, stroked his brow, until Henri opened his eyes, and said in Thai, “Aroon, will you bring me my wallet from the dresser?”
When Aroon returned, Henri took a stack of bills out of the wallet, quite a lot more than the few hundred baht he owed for the massage. He waggled the money in front of the boys’ faces, asked, “Would you like to stay and play some games?”
The boys giggled and helped the rich gentleman sit up on the massage table.
“What games would you like to play, Daddy?” Sakda asked.
Henri explained what he was thinking, and they nodded and clapped their hands, seeming very excited to be part of his enjoyment. He kissed their palms, each in turn.
He just loved these sweet boys.
It was a true joy to be with them.
Chapter 59
HENRI WOKE UP alone, hearing the chimes, then calling out, “Come in.”
A girl with a red flower in her hair entered, bowed, and served his morning meal on a bed tray: nam prik — rice noodles in a chili and peanut sauce — plus fresh fruit and a pot of strong black tea.
Henri’s mind was churning as he ate, thinking over the night before, getting ready to edit his video for the Alliance.
Taking his tea to the desk, he called up the raw footage on his laptop, scrolled through the scene of the massage. He cut away to the shots of water flowing into the soaking tub under the round eye of the skylight, putting a title over the running water, “Ochiba Shigure.”
His next scene was a loving and long tracking shot starting at the boys’ innocent faces, panning down their nude young bodies, lingering on the ropes that bound their limbs behind them.
When his own face showed on the screen, Henri used the blur tool to obscure his features as he lifted and lowered the boys into the bath. This shot was a beauty.
He cut and pasted the next sequence, making sure to edit the action so that it appeared seamless: a tight shot on his hands holding down the boys’ heads as they fought and floundered, the bubbles coming from their mouths, then angles on their bodies floating, ochiba shigure, Japanese for “like leaves floating on a pond.”
Next a jump cut to Sakda’s slack face, droplets of water clinging to his hair and skin. Then the camera pulled back to reveal both boys lying limp on chaises beside the tub, their arms and legs splayed out as if in a dance.
A fly made a four-point landing on Sakda’s dewy cheek.
The camera zoomed in, then the screen faded to black. Off camera, Henri whispered his signature line, “Is everybody happy?”
Henri ran the film again, tweaked it, and cut it to ten minutes of savagely beautiful videography for Horst and his company of pervs, a teaser to get them hot for another film.
He composed an e-mail, attached a still shot from the video: the two boys open-eyed, underwater, their faces contorted in terror.
“Offered for your viewing pleasure,” he wrote, “two young princes for the price of one.” He sent the e-mail as the door chimes rang again.
Henri tightened the sash of his robe and opened the door.
The boys burst out laughing, Aroon saying, “So, are we dead, Daddy? We don’t feel dead.”
“No, you look very much alive. My two good, lively boys. Let’s go to the beach,” Henri said, putting a hand on each of their slender shoulders, leading the boys out the back door of his villa.
“No games, Daddy?”
He tousled the boy’s hair, and Sakda grinned up at him. “No, just swimming and splashing,” Henri said. “And then back here for my lovely massage.”
Chapter 60
HENRI’S WELL-EARNED HOLIDAY continued in Bangkok, one of his favorite cities in all the world.
He met the Swedish girl in the night market, where she was struggling to translate baht into euros so that she could decide whether to buy a small wooden elephant. His Swedish was good enough that she spoke to him in her own language until, laughing, he said, “I’ve used up all of my Swedish.”
“Let’s try this,” she said in perfect, British-inflected English. She introduced herself as Mai-Britt Olsen, telling Henri that she was on holiday with classmates from Stockholm University.
The girl was striking, nineteen or twenty and nearly six feet tall. She wore her flaxen hair cut straight at the shoulders, drawing his attention to her lovely throat.
“You have remarkable blue eyes,” he said.
She said, “Oooh,” and batted her lashes comically, and Henri laughed. She waggled her little elephant, and said, “I’m looking for a monkey, also.”
She took Henri’s arm and they strolled down the aisles of colorfully lit stalls of fruit and costume jewelry and sweets.
“My girlfriends and I went to the elephant polo today,” Mai-Britt told him, “and tomorrow we’re invited to the palace. We are volleyball players,” she explained. “The 2008 Olympics.”
“Truly? That’s fantastic. Hey, I hear the palace is really stupendous. As for me, tomorrow morning I’m going to be strapped into a projectile heading to California.”
Mai-Britt laughed. “Let me guess. You’re flying to L.A. on business.”
Henri grinned. “That’s a very good guess. But that’s tomorrow, Mai-Britt. Have you had dinner?”
“Just little bites in the market.”
“There’s a place close by that few people know. Very exclusive and a little risqué. Are you up for an adventure?”
“You are taking me to dinner?” Mai-Britt asked.
“Are you saying yes?”
The street was lined with open-air restaurants. They passed the boisterous bars and nightspots on Selekam Road and headed to an almost hidden doorway that opened into a Japanese restaurant, the Edomae.
The maitre d’ walked Henri and Mai-Britt into the glowing, green-glass-lined interior, partitioned with aquariums of jewel-colored fish from floor to ceiling.
Mai-Britt suddenly grabbed Henri’s arm, making him stop so she could really see.
“What are they doing?”
She jutted her chin toward the naked girl lying gracefully on the sushi bar and a customer drinking from the cup made by the cleft of her closed thighs.
“It’s called wakesame,” Henri explained. “It means ‘floating seaweed.’ ”
“Hah! That is quite new to me,” she said. “Have you done that, Paul?”
Henri winked at her, then pulled out a chair for his dinner companion who was not just beautiful, but had a daring streak, was willing to try the horsemeat sashimi and the edomae, the raw, marinated fish that the restaurant was named for.
Henri had already fallen half in love with her — when he noticed the eyes of a man at another table fixed on him.
It was a shock, as though someone had dumped ice down the back of his shirt. Carl Obst. A man Henri had known many years ago, now sitting with a lady-boy, a high-priced, very polished, transvestite prostit
ute.
Henri was sure that his own looks had changed so much that Obst wouldn’t recognize him. But it would be very bad if he did.
Obst’s attention swung back to his lady-boy, and Henri let his eyes slip away from Obst. Henri thought he was safe, but his good mood was gone.
The enchanting young woman and the rare and beautiful setting faded as his thoughts were hurled back to a time when he was dead — and yet somehow he still breathed.
Chapter 61
HENRI HAD TOLD Marty Switzer that being in an isolation cell was like being inside his own bowel. It was that dark and stinking, and that’s where the analogy ended. Because nothing Henri had ever seen or heard about or imagined could be compared to that filthy hole.
It had started for Henri before the Twin Towers came down, when he was hired by Brewster-North, a private military contractor that was stealthier and deadlier than Blackwater.
He’d been on a reconnaissance mission with four other intelligence analysts. As the linguist, Henri was the critical asset.
His unit had been resting in a safe house when their lookout was gutted outside the door where he stood guard. The rest of the team was taken captive, beaten just short of death, and locked away in a prison with no name.
By the end of his first week in hell, Henri knew his captors by name, their tics and preferences. There was the Rapist, the one who sang while hanging his prisoners like spiders, their arms chained above their heads for hours. Fire liked to use burning cigarettes; Ice drowned prisoners in freezing cold water. Henri had long conversations with one soldier, Cocktease, who made tantalizing offers of phone calls, and letters home, and possible freedom.
There were the brutes and the ones who were more refined, but all the guards were sadistic. Had to give credit where it was due. They all really enjoyed their work.
One day Henri’s schedule was changed.
He was taken from his cell and kicked into the corner of a windowless room — along with the three remaining men from his unit, all bloodied, with broken bones and oozing sores.
Bright lights flashed on, and when Henri could finally see he took in the cameras and the half-dozen hooded men lined up against a wall.
One of those men grabbed his cellmate and friend Marty Switzer, pulled him to the center of the room, and hauled him to his feet.
Switzer answered their questions, saying that he was Canadian, twenty-eight, that his parents and girlfriend lived in Ottawa, that he was a military operative. Yes, he was a spy.
He lied as expected, saying that he was being treated well, and then one of the hooded men threw Switzer to the ground, lifted his head by his hair, and drew a serrated knife across the back of his neck. Blood spouted, and there was a chorus of the takbir: Allahu Akbar. Allah is great.
Henri was transfixed by how easily Switzer’s head had been severed with a few saws of the blade, an act both infinite and quick.
When the executioner held up Switzer’s head for the camera, his friend’s expression of despair was fixed on his face. Henri had thought to call out to him — as though Marty could still speak.
There was one other thing that Henri could never forget. How as he waited to die, he felt a flush of excitement. He couldn’t understand the emotion, and he couldn’t put it down. As he lay on the killing floor, he had wondered if he was elated because soon he’d be free of his misery.
Or maybe he’d just realized who he really was, and what was at his core.
He got a thrill from death — even his own.
Chapter 62
FRESH TEA WAS POURED into his cup at the Edomae, and Henri came back to the present; he thanked the waiter automatically. He sipped the tea but couldn’t entirely pull himself back from the memory.
He thought of the hooded tribunal, the headless body of a man who’d been his friend, the stickiness of the killing floor. His senses had been so acute then; he could hear the electricity singing in the light fixtures.
He had kept his eyes on the remaining men in his unit as they were separated from the heap. Raymond Drake, the former marine from Alabama who screamed for God to help him. The other boy, Lonnie Bell, an ex-SEAL from Louisiana, who was in shock and never said a word, never even screamed.
Both men were beheaded to exultant cries, and then Henri was dragged by his hair to the bloody center of the room. A voice came out of the darkness beyond the lights.
“Say your name for the camera. Say where you are from.”
He answered in Arabic, “I will be armed and waiting for you in hell. Send my bottomless contempt to Saddam.”
They laughed. They mocked his accent. And then, with the smell of shit in his nostrils, Henri was blindfolded. He waited to be shoved to the ground, but instead a coarse blanket was thrown over his head.
He must have passed out because when he awoke, he was tied with ropes and folded into the rear of a vehicle in which he rode for hours. Then he was dumped at the Syrian border.
He was afraid to believe it, but it was true.
He was alive. He was alive.
“Tell the Americans what we have done, infidel. What we will do. At least you try to speak our language.”
A boot struck him hard in the lower back, and the vehicle sped away.
He returned to the United States through an underground chain of friendly back doors from Syria to Beirut, where he got new documentation, and by cargo plane from Beirut to Vancouver. He hitched a ride to Seattle, stole a car, and made his way to a small mining town in Wisconsin. But Henri didn’t contact his controller at Brewster-North.
He never wanted to see Carl Obst again.
Still, Brewster-North had done great things for Henri. They’d eradicated his past when they hired him, had thoroughly expunged his real name, his fingerprints, his entire history from the records. And now he was presumed dead.
He counted on that.
Across from him now, inside an exclusive Japanese club in Thailand, the lovely Mai-Britt had noticed that Henri’s mind had drifted far away from her.
“Are you okay, Paul?” she asked. “Are you angry that that man was staring at me?”
Together they watched Carl Obst leave the restaurant with his date. He didn’t look back.
Henri smiled, said, “No, I’m not angry. Everything is fine.”
“Good, because I was wondering if we should continue the evening more privately?”
“Hey, I’m sorry. I wish I could,” Henri told the girl with the most elegant neck since Henry VIII’s second wife. “I really wish I had the time,” he said, taking her hand. “I have that early flight tomorrow morning.”
“Screw business,” Mai-Britt joked. “You’re on holiday tonight.”
Henri leaned across the table and kissed her cheek.
He imagined her nakedness under his hands — and he let the fantasy go. He was already thinking ahead to his business in L.A., laughing inside at how surprised Ben Hawkins would be to see him.
Chapter 63
HENRI SPENT a three-day weekend at the airport Sheraton in L.A., moving anonymously among the other business travelers. He used the time to reread Ben Hawkins’s novels and every newspaper story Ben had written. He’d purchased supplies and made dry runs to Venice Beach and the street where Ben lived, right around the corner from Little Tokyo.
At just after five that Monday afternoon, Henri took his rental car onto the 105 Freeway. The yellowing cement walls lining the eight-laner were illuminated by a golden light, randomly splashed with spiky vines of red and purple bougainvillea and gothic Latino gang graffiti, giving the drab Los Angeles highway a Caribbean flavor, at least in his mind.
Henri took the 105 to the 110 exit at Los Angeles Street, and from there he made his way through stop-and-go traffic to Alameda, a major artery running to the heart of downtown.
It was rush hour, but Henri was in no rush. He was keyed up, focused on an idea that over the last three weeks had taken on potential for life-changing drama and a hell of a finale.
The
plan centered on Ben Hawkins, the journalist, the novelist, the former detective.
Henri had been thinking about him since that evening in Maui, outside the Wailea Princess, when Ben had stretched out his hand to touch Barbara McDaniels.
Henri waited out the red light, and when it changed he took a right turn onto Traction, a small street near the Union Pacific tracks that ran parallel to the Los Angeles River.
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