The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  “My father was executed in front of all the American flyers imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton.” He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice; he’d been a kid of eight, for Chrissake, it shouldn’t still matter so much. “He was beheaded. A vengeance killing. And I don’t mean for the bombs he’d dropped.”

  “But why would Jack’s work in Thailand—whatever it was—determine your father’s fate in Vietnam? Where’s the link between the two, Max?”

  “She had to ask,” Knetsch muttered.

  Max ignored him. “During the Vietnam War, Thailand was the only country in Southeast Asia willing to give the United States legroom. Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Malaysia—all hostile, all fighting their own battles with communist insurgencies. Revolt was in the air. But Thailand was a democracy, in name at least, and canny enough to profit from the U.S. presence.”

  “And Jack Roderick brokered the deals? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He shook his head. “I think Gramps disagreed fundamentally with the Johnson administration’s conduct of the war in Vietnam. I think that because Jack refused to support it, he was betrayed and silenced.”

  Her gaze was very steady as she considered the implications of what he’d said. “Silenced by the CIA? His own organization?”

  “Why not? Who else is capable of keeping the whole stinking mess hushed up for more than thirty years?”

  Knetsch groaned despairingly. “They murdered Princess Di, too. Drugged Dodi’s driver and paid off the paparazzi. I read it in the Star.”

  But Stefani was still looking at him. “Even if I thought for an instant you might be right, I don’t see how your father’s execution fits the theory.”

  “The CIA always plays both sides. Maybe they promised something to the North Vietnamese. Maybe Gramps refused to deliver, and was eliminated as a result. When the deal fell through, the Viet Cong retaliated. They beheaded my dad.”

  “You sound like a raving conspiracy theorist.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Can you separate what you remember from what you’ve been told?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were a kid—eight years old—when your father and grandfather died. Whatever you believe about your family’s past springs in part from memory, and in part from half-truths—things your mother may have believed and passed on, for example.”

  “And we know Mom was always high as a kite,” he retorted, “and thus unreliable. But she didn’t talk about Jack’s disappearance—she’d never even met him. My father was reported dead two weeks after Gramps disappeared, and that news overshadowed everything else. Mom preferred to remember the good times—when my dad was alive. That’s what she talked about.”

  “The good times?”

  He studied the crackling flames, and chose his words well. It was important that she understand he had been raised in more than a shooting gallery.

  “My mother was the only child of a wealthy Chicago banker. A leading debutante of 1956. She grew up with my dad, and they were cut from the same mold. Naïve, well-intentioned upper-middle-class Americans with bright smiles, whose lives were blown apart by a conflict they never chose. My father was barely thirty when he died. I’ve outlived him by a decade. I have no idea what he was really like. When I was little, he was the god in the helmet who flew the big jets—every boy’s hero. But it’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen him as anything but a victim.”

  “Of fate? Of U.S. policy?”

  “Of his childhood. That, more than anything.”

  “Explain.”

  Max glanced at her. “We all want to be our fathers, Stef. Boys do, at least. My dad had a war hero for a role model. Jack was James Bond in a Panama hat. Dad spent his life living up to Jack’s legend.”

  “And you?”

  The question brought him up short. “I learned to ski at the age of six because it was the closest I could come to flying.”

  She reached for the warmth of the fire; light dappled the bones of her face. “Did you ever meet Jack?”

  “Once. My father took me to Bangkok when I was four. In the fall of ’63.”

  “He never came to the States?”

  “Not in my lifetime.” The bitterness crept in, despite his care. “Jack abandoned his family. Dad was about five when World War II began, and Gramps never really came back. Bangkok—the silk business, or the life of a NOC— always attracted Jack more than being a parent. Dad resented Gramps—his house, his art, his legend in the expat community. Resented it as much as he wanted to be a part of it. Could you blame him? I’m not really sure why he even took me to Thailand.”

  “What do you remember about the trip?”

  He sighed and shoved his fingers through his hair, as though he might clutch at the past lodged somewhere in his skull. “Flood water in the streets. It was the end of the rainy season and we went everywhere by boat. Gramps liked the old khlongs better than the new roads they’d built for cars, anyway. He loathed progress. He still called Thailand ‘Siam.’”

  “You see?” Stefani countered. “Those are things you’ve been told. ‘Progress’ and ‘Siam’ aren’t a four-year-old’s words.”

  “Oh, fuck the words. You asked.”

  “Tell me about Jack.”

  He summoned the face—indistinct at best, retouched by later glimpses of photographs—that lurked always on the edge of his mind. “He was a big guy, but then I was quite small. He had silver hair that was always slicked back, and a white bird on his shoulder. The bird’s beak looked exactly like his nose.”

  “Did you like him?”

  Max shrugged again. “Do four-year-olds like anything?”

  “What about the house?”

  “God—the house.” He smiled involuntarily. “A tree house made of teak. Leafy and cool. Rooms with dark floors I could slide across in my socks. Silk pillows. Lizards skittering along the walls. My bedroom was like a ship’s cabin, small and wood-paneled. The smells of jungle and garlic and rotting fruit came through the open windows at night.”

  “For an all-American kid, that must have been a little weird.”

  “It was the most fabulous place I’d ever seen. Like waking up in Never-Never Land, surrounded by the Lost Boys. I didn’t want to leave. When I toured the place again last year, I knew that I’d been trying to get back to that house all my life. Back to the garden, as Crosby, Stills and Nash would say, where fathers live forever and war never comes.”

  A swift glance from the dark eyes; something he’d said had hit home. “Do you remember anything else?”

  “Waking in the night and being afraid.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  “Noise. The kind you can’t ignore. I got up from bed and walked out into the hall. Gramps was standing there, shouting at some guy who was running down the stairs. There was blood on Gramps’s face and my dad was restraining him. They’d been fighting.”

  “Jack and your father? Or Jack and the guy on the stairs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you recognize him? The stranger?”

  “All I remember is that I was afraid. They were angry and the talk was serious, something I shouldn’t hear. I went back to bed and pulled the covers over my head.”

  “Could it have been a thief?” Knetsch suggested.

  “He was a Westerner,” Max replied, as though that made a difference. “He was tall and had a crew cut and wore some kind of uniform.”

  It was a memory he couldn’t shake: broken sleep, shouting and blood, the tall, angry figures flickering grotesquely in torchlight. A nightmare that recurred over thirty years until it became the pivot for obsession: I must know the truth. Jack’s will, the Bangkok house, the priceless collections, the stock in the silk company: were they all merely proxies? Did he just need to lay a ghost three decades old?

  “Have you asked the CIA what they know about Jack Roderick?” she asked.

  “I filed a FOIA request—that’s the Freedom of Information Act. They sent bac
k three sheets of paper blotted out with black ink. Told me squat. But they know more than that—I’m sure of it.”

  “Max, why did you hire me?”

  His eyes slid over to Knetsch’s. The lawyer stared implacably back. “I didn’t. I thought I was hiring Oliver Krane.”

  “To do what? Storm CIA headquarters? Rifle old files in Langley?”

  “You’re a forensic accountant,” he said, feeling his temper slip. “Find my grandfather’s lost cash. Nose out the people responsible for stealing his house and everything in it. Help me and Jeff prove my claim.”

  “You haven’t a shred of proof for a single thing you’ve said.”

  “Exactly. And that’s why I’ve got to go back to Bangkok. To find the truth.”

  Knetsch’s wineglass tipped over and shattered on the stone-flagged floor.

  “Bangkok?” she repeated dubiously. “That could be dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  The devil-may-care look resurged in her eyes; she grinned, and held up her glass in salute.

  Not even death threats could faze this woman. Oliver Krane had known exactly what he was doing when he sent Stefani Fogg to France.

  Around midnight, Max told her it was too late to ski to Le Praz, and offered her his guest room instead. She didn’t protest—didn’t fight her way past him to click into her skis, though the wine and the hours of talk had closed the distance between them and she had more than once caught herself wondering how the line of his jaw would feel under her fingers. While he went in search of sheets, she walked Jeff Knetsch to the door.

  He was still uncomfortable in her presence; all the facts and the effort at professionalism had failed to make him her friend.

  “What do you really think of Max’s story?” she asked him. “Max’s assassination theory?”

  “All that crap about the CIA? I think he’s got too much time on his hands.”

  Or the strong need for a hero. But which man does he want to redeem? Jack Roderick? Or Rory?

  “And as for flying to Bangkok—”

  “You’re worried?”

  The lawyer hesitated, one hand on the massive oak jamb of Max’s door. “He’s pissed off somebody with a lot of firepower. And it hasn’t occurred to him that the strangled whore was just an opening shot. Next time, he could lose something he really values.”

  “Does he listen to you?”

  Knetsch smiled wryly. “Max listens to nobody. Especially when he has paid for the advice. Are you skiing tomorrow?”

  “Off-piste. Max wants to show me the backcountry. Join us, if you like.”

  It was her attempt at a truce. But wariness lingered in the eyes of Max’s oldest friend.

  “I know Max’s backcountry. My leg can’t take that kind of terrain anymore,” he said curtly. “I’ll meet you for a drink afterward.”

  “The Bateau Ivre,” she suggested. “Four o’clock.”

  “Done.” He turned away.

  But as she shut the door behind him, she wondered what had inspired Knetsch’s mistrust. Krane & Associates? Her credentials? Or the fact that she was a woman in Max Roderick’s house?

  7

  Max lay awake well past one, feeling the turbulent night air shudder against the frame of his house. Faces swam in and out of his consciousness: Jack Roderick’s eyes and sharp nose; his father’s, a softer version; and Stefani Fogg’s profile, half-averted. When he thought of her, it was always in profile—the slope and pitch of her facial structure like a piste he had yet to map. He had told her what he could of his family’s past, not because he had paid Oliver Krane to send her here to Courchevel, but because he’d tested and liked her nerve. Max had learned much about the human spirit by watching the human body ski: three days’ observation had shown him how little she feared.

  Except, he suspected, deep emotion. Feeling that might cause pain, or chain her to another human being. Feeling that could wreck the perfect autonomy she’d crafted for herself.

  He avoided the same traps. He’d been terrified of them most of his life.

  Wind buffeted the house’s peaked roof; the door to the balcony rattled faintly in protest. The fog that had blanketed the slopes at dusk had blown into Switzerland; the moon was setting. He rolled over, thrust his feet out of bed, and without turning on the light placed his hand on his viola where it sat in the corner of the room.

  It is possible for one man to ski at world-class level or to play an instrument with orchestral precision—but not in the same lifetime. Max loved his viola with the passion he had long since lost for skis, in part because the viola had always denied him mastery. It submitted to nothing in his repertoire.

  He took up the bow with humility, clutched the instrument by its throat and walked out into the freezing air. The wind was like a knife on his naked back; it pierced the folds of his pajama legs. He might be incapable of subjugating the music under his hands, but he could still subdue his flesh to the elements. He laid his bow across the strings.

  A viola contracts in extreme cold, and the sound it makes is warped and distorted. A chord sang out from the shrinking wood, and then another—melancholy, haunting, a paean to the dying moon. It was as though the mountains themselves were bewitched to speech. And the stories they told were of a sort to terrify children.

  Take good care of your mother, pal. The strong right hand felt like a heavy weight on his shoulder and there was a burning in his nose as though he might sneeze or cry, so he leaned into his dad’s trousers and buried his face in the dress poplin. The whole Navy was watching from the pier, women holding babies and little kids dropping pebbles into the flat black water, the aircraft carrier’s reflection wavering and dissolving with each plunk! plunk! as though it were insubstantial as air. Coronado, a breathless July morning, 1965.

  You’re the man of the house now, Maxie Max. I’m depending on you to keep Mom safe. You’ll be in first grade soon, so once you know how to write I’ll expect a letter every week, telling me how things are. Your house log for the S.S. Roderick. Got that?

  He nodded up into his father’s face, arms still clutching his trouser leg, but the sun behind Rory’s head blotted out his features. The hand lifted from his shoulder, cupped his mother’s chin—

  Take good care of y our mother, pal.

  He had tried his best, using sheet after sheet of grade-school paper, his eraser tearing dimples in the flimsy stuff. He’d written about trips to Evanston and the big old house by the lake his grandparents still owned and the pounding rain on his bedroom eaves. He’d written about the dead snake he’d discovered in the cellar and the road trip he and his mom took to Lake Tahoe and how he’d seen a deer beneath Half Dome in his first Yosemite hike.

  It was not the first time his father had been away on carrier duty. Max was used to living alone with his mother for months, used to the circle of closeness they pulled in like a tent flap against the lurking beasts beyond the doors, but this was the most dangerous tour his dad had pulled. At times his mother’s expression grew distant, she took to ironing clothes relentlessly during the long winter afternoons. After one of these bouts when he was six, she drove Max into the hills and rented him skis.

  There were hurried patches of leave during the two long years his father was gone, unexpected as Christmas. Phone calls knifed with static. Trinkets that arrived in crushed cardboard boxes covered with strange ink seals. TV footage of downed planes that Anne hurriedly switched off whenever Max entered the room.

  Take good care of your mother.

  When his father’s A-4 fell out of the sky that January morning half a world away, he knew nothing about it until he found her lying in a stuttering coma, drunk as a lord, on the kitchen floor of the San Francisco apartment. By April, when they knew Dad was dead and no body was coming home, Anne began walking the streets at all hours, an old raincoat of his father’s wrapped around her emaciated body. She burned incense and hung beads from the door frames and sang phrases of half-remembered songs under her breath, and when she
looked at Max he was convinced she saw through him.

  Take good care of your mother.

  One night at three A.M., on his way to the bathroom, he tripped over her body in the dark. What he could not say to Stefani Fogg—what he could not find the words to tell anyone—was that thirty years later, as he’d stared at the expression of horror in the eyes of a dead Thai hooker, it was his mother’s face he’d seen.

  He awoke at dawn and drank his coffee in front of the living room’s wall of glass. Snow had fallen sometime after he propped the viola back in its place and returned to bed. There would be a foot of powder in the glades, but most of the tourists would grab the tram to Saulire. The backcountry would be empty and quiet on this Friday, tracked only by local guides and the kids who cared nothing for avalanche danger. He felt his heart surge at the thought of it: silence amid the blanketed conifers, the mass of snow trembling above the trees like a wave poised to curl.

  He set off alone with a backpack and his usual gear to the rented villa in Le Praz. Stefani had given him her key the previous night, and told him where to find a change of clothing. They both knew she was not the sort to rise early, even for the best new fall of powder in the world.

  And so Jacques Renaudie saw Max that morning as he swept his doorstep, riding the platter lift out of town in defiance of all rumor.

  “The concept of skiing within-bounds is pretty much an American one,” Max told her somewhere around mid-morning, as they paused for breath in their hike up a crevasse. Their skis were slung over their shoulders and in their packs they carried water, protein bars, ropes and picks and beacons. Stefani’s back was aching.

  “Boundaries exist for the National Forest Service— which owns the land most American ski areas are built on—and because too many skiers have died in backcountry avalanches.” He wore his helmet again today, and had forced her to wear one as well. “If you map out your terrain, and fire avalanche cannon every morning in peak snowslide season, you can control the snow pack and fend off the worst disasters.”

  “Simple risk management.” Stefani briefly considered the idea of Oliver Krane standing in the path of an avalanche. “Whereas in Europe, nobody worries about skiers dying?”