On the fifth day she found a familiar face outside the door of his private room. “Mr. Knetsch. Back from New York?”
“I wasn’t really needed at the firm anyway.”
“How sad. You like to be needed, I know.” Stefani kept her voice carefully neutral.
“They seem to have done a lot for Max here.” Knetsch said it grudgingly. “Nothing, probably, that they wouldn’t have done at the General Hospital.”
“I hope they’ll be able to do much more, in time.”
“I’ve been told to thank you,” he added more briskly, “for … services rendered. And to say that Max hopes you’ll have a safe trip back to New York.”
“I’m not going back to New York.”
“Why not?” He glanced suggestively at her crotch. “There’s nothing for you here.”
“Fuck off, Knetsch.”
He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. “Here’s a copy of the letter I faxed this morning to Oliver Krane, terminating Max’s retention of his firm. Max is abandoning the Thai mess, for obvious reasons. You aren’t needed anymore.”
Stefani scanned the single sheet of paper, feeling her anger mount. “This was drafted by you, Jeff. Not Max.”
“I’ve also revised the arrangements you made for payment to this facility. Max is fully capable of footing his own bills.”
“Max told you to do all this?”
“Max trusts my judgment. I’ve known him all my life.”
“And I’ve only known him a week.” Stefani crumpled the letter in her hand. “I want to see him.”
“That won’t be possible.”
“You can’t keep me out of that room!”
“I’m afraid I can.” He thrust his back against the door and smiled at her faintly. “I now have Max’s power of attorney. He gave it to me this morning, when he told me to fire your sorry ass.”
15
She flew out of Paris that evening hating all men with a vengeance, and especially their lawyers.
“Knetsch has a point, ducks,” Oliver had said from the other side of the Atlantic as he consumed his breakfast. “Max hasn’t welcomed you with open arms. He’s been through a good deal, and has worse yet to face. For now, you must come home. As Strangholm said, it’s possible that his feelings will change with time.”
“I don’t give second chances, Oliver,” she raged. “Max has slammed the door. He’s on his own.”
“Second chances are merely a means of forgiveness, old thing,” he warned her. “Fail to forgive, and you hurt only yourself.”
She had considered those words during the sleepless seven hours of her westward journey, a period of extreme turbulence over the North Atlantic when even the flight attendants could be heard shrieking in their compartments. Her anger toward Max—toward Jeff Knetsch—even, absurdly, toward Oliver Krane—hardened into self-hatred. I’m not a woman who’s capable of sustaining life. It was she, after all, who had given up: who had packed her bags and abandoned the man she believed she loved to face his hell alone. She who admitted to being shallow and avoiding pain. To pursuing frivolity rather than truth. Was it any wonder Max had told her to go?
She was still sleepless when the plane touched down. Oliver Krane, uncharacteristically silent, awaited her beyond the international arrivals gate. He bundled her into a sleek black car with a faceless driver, her luggage already stowed; threw a blanket over her legs; made soothing noises all the way into the city; and deposited her at her door without a word of commiseration.
She slept for eleven hours. As she stood once more before the wide glass doors that led to her co-op terrace, dusk fell over Manhattan. She cursed its beauty and heartlessness in fluent Italian just for the hell of it, then turned her back on Gotham.
She lay in bed, staring sightlessly at the ceiling or the heavily draped window, for three days. The phone rang periodically; she ignored it. Oliver left thirteen messages on her answering machine. She caught the note of worry in his tone; but she knew he was surveilling her apartment, and would know that she had not yet left the building. She had ordered no food, collected no mail. I’m not a woman who’s capable of sustaining life.
When at last he threatened to blast her door open with a bit of wire and plastic explosive, she reluctantly picked up the phone.
“You need a sense of purpose, heart,” Oliver said gently. “As a trial run at risk management, Courchevel was a bloody disaster. But I know your talents. You cannot return to FundMarket or any of its competitors. You’re made for better stuff.”
“Such as?”
She was established now in her living room, suddenly ravenous, with cartons of take-out Chinese spread about the floor.
“You might wet your feet in the intelligence pool,” he mused. “Jaunt around the various continents with your head into the wind. Send back reports of an enticing nature. Krane publishes a weekly newsletter, you know, for select clients about the globe. Privileged information, for those who understand what it costs.”
“I can’t stay in the United States,” she said flatly, “and Europe’s out.”
“Chile? Argentina?”
“Possible. Brazil is hopeless, of course.”
“A carnival of thieves,” he agreed. “I once tracked down the Brazilian treasury, you know, which had somehow ended up in its president’s pocket. What about Australia?”
“I’ve never been there.” Stefani’s chopsticks hovered in midair. “What’s in Australia?”
“Nice, safe telecommunications markets. Internet heists. A considerable number of tanned bodies. The food industry. Pharmaceutical supplies. You could mingle with the best set and keep your ears to the ground. And it’s an excellent drop-off point for Asia—”
She stiffened. “Oliver—”
“The Indonesian political system is due to totter at any moment. And there’s always Burma, of course, which must be monitored in the event it decides to join the twentieth century. It will never join the twenty-first.”
“What has happened to your Thai clients, Oliver?”
“Made a noise like a hoop and rolled away,” he answered. “Round about the time friend Max took his tumble. They left a great deal of hard currency in their wake, of course. Harry would be gratified to know that he died for the sake of my net worth.”
The bitterness only thinly veiled.
“And you’re willing to let Harry’s death rest?” she asked him.
“For the moment, I regard myself as having no choice. But I am a quite patient man. I shall deal with Harry’s killers in my own time and way.”
“Asia,” she murmured. “Not safe at all, is it?”
“Not so’s you’d notice. I believe you’re recovering apace, darling,” he said.
And so had begun the odyssey of her last six months. Stefani had danced her way through Melbourne, through Adelaide and Perth and the Great Barrier Reef; through Port Arthur and Kuala Lumpur and Seoul. She had descended upon Rangoon at the behest of a furniture designer who had established an empire there, fingered lacquer boxes and wandered through sustainable-growth forests. She researched market conditions in Laos and copyright piracy in Hong Kong and police repression and child labor in the jungles of Malaysia. The substance of what she saw found its way into Oliver Krane’s intelligence reports. After six weeks she began to enjoy herself—to be quickened by novelty, to revel in the warmth of strangers, to be humbled by all that she had to learn.
During her first visit to the ancient Vietnamese capital of Hué—a visit conducted sensibly in the dry season-she made fast friends with a surgeon named Pho, and learned from him that in Vietnam ear surgery was still performed with a hammer and chisel. Coagulant drugs were unknown in the operating room. Eyeglasses were never worn among the burgeoning population—which no doubt accounted for the hazards of motorcycle traffic in the city’s congested streets. Eyeglasses, Pho explained, had once been deadly. They were worn by the intelligentsia, and thus branded those who must be shot.
But now, Stefan
i reasoned, with capitalism on the rise and relations normalized, Vietnam should experience an optometry boom. And a rush to surgical drills and pharmaceuticals and all the trappings of Western healthcare. Oliver Krane agreed: and posted the news on his corporate Web site.
From that first visit to Hué in May she traveled on to Saigon and Phnom Penh and Singapore and at last, with a feeling almost of sacrilege, to Bangkok and the Oriental Hotel.
It was there, three months after she had flown out of Courchevel, that she wrote her first letter to Max.
She said nothing of what had been between them. She never mentioned his accident. She wrote instead of river traffic on the Chao Phraya, and the whistles flying back and forth across the swollen water. She wrote of the gnarled hands of the women who sold dogs for dinner on the streets of Hanoi; of the bead maker she had met in Laos and the sweetness of a child’s face turned toward her from the back of his mother’s motor scooter. She wrote of life in all its variety and richness, and to the old stone house in France she sent the pages without a word of love.
Max did not reply.
Stefani kept writing. It was possible that he had never regained the use of his hands, after all; possible that he trusted no one to transcribe a letter for him; possible that he did not know, yet, what he should say or how much could be shared. But the fact that he did not return her letters heartened her immeasurably. He must read her words—and perhaps he found solace in them She kept writing on stationery headed with the names of the most exotic commercial palaces in the world. And in the end, she knew, she was writing for herself. Forgiveness, as Oliver had said, was a personal journey.
Max wore thin leather gloves on his hands when he pushed the chair, thrusting hard at the wheels that propelled him forward along the mountain path. He’d refused a motorized version or Sabine’s help once his hands were strong enough to work the wheels. It was an obsession with him, now, this physical training. The first two fingers of his left hand remained numb; and at first, his wrists had been as weak as a baby’s. He spent every spare moment squeezing rubber balls in his palms, or flexing each foot at the ankle with one-pound weights. In the house, where the floors were level, he generally used a walker to navigate the rooms, and was able finally to complete twenty paces on his own—but he could not yet trust his balance or strength to the challenge of the ridgeline.
“You’re getting too fast for me, buddy,” Jeff grumbled, as they reached the head of the ridge.
“You’re out of shape,” Max returned. “We’ve only come about a hundred yards from the house.”
“I know it. Too many power lunches.” He flung himself down beside Max’s wheelchair and stared out over the valley. A stone’s throw from where they sat, the granite alp sheared off a thousand feet or more in jagged folds punctuated by sudden crevasses. A brutal landscape, even when brushed with the color of late September.
Jeff cocked his head and studied Max’s face. “You’ve made a helluva comeback.”
“Thank you,” Max rejoined dryly. “I couldn’t have done it without my friends. I’m starting to take an interest in everything again.”
“So I gathered.” Jeff looked away. “There’s a guidebook on the kitchen table. For Thailand. You’re not thinking of all that old crap again, are you?”
“I’m always thinking, Jeff. That’s the only way I know I’m alive.”
His friend plucked at a wisp of yellowed grass. “Last I heard, Stefani Fogg was in Asia.”
“In Thailand, in fact.” Max felt the weight of her letter against his chest, where he had tucked it into his polo. She had written from Thailand but was headed for Vietnam, and might be gone for some time.
“Max—” The expression in his friend’s eyes was flat and gray as gunmetal. “You’ve been handed what most men dream of, and never get: a second chance. Don’t blow it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re lucky to be alive. Forget her. Forget Thailand. They’re both deadly.”
“Jeff, how deep are you in debt?”
“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”
Max studied him, debating the question. But instead he said merely, “It’s hot out here. I could use a beer.”
“So could I. I’ll get us some.” Jeff pushed himself upright and trudged back down the path.
Jacques Renaudie sat on the stone terrace of the house, watching his daughter’s dark head as she moved about Max’s kitchen. She had planned this dinner obsessively, the first she would make in Max’s house, dinner for his oldest friends. Max took for granted Sabine’s self-appointed role as nurse; he accepted the books she brought and her bright ceaseless chatter and he patted her head as though she were a favored dog. It broke Jacques’s heart to see her so blind and so unquestioning, so passionately in love with the wrong man.
“He will never care for you, chérie,” he said to his daughter. “He is not capable.”
Her head came up, and she stared at Jacques through the open door of the terrace. “He is the one man I know who is capable of anything. He grows stronger every day. It is only a matter of time.”
“He will never love you, ma pauvre.”
Her eyes flashed hot with malice and anger. “What do you know of love, hein? You could not even keep Mama happy, you drove her away with your coldness—”
“I know that Max’s heart is given to another,” Jacques insisted, “and that is all I need to know.”
Sabine froze, her hands suspended over a dish of cassoulet. “What other?” she asked him tremulously.
Jacques moved slowly into the living room; his entire body was weary. “All those letters,” he muttered. “From all over the world. He carries them everywhere. You see, chérie?” He turned the girl toward the view from the terrace. Max’s bent head could just be glimpsed around an outcropping of rock in the distance. “He is reading one of them now.”
There are two Bangkoks, one that lives in the caverns between the soaring skyscrapers, breathing smog and noise, and another that moves with the current of the water. By the river and the khlongs are the ghosts of an older Bangkok, one that remembers torches and elephants and the bodies of dancers swaying in the flickering light. I walked alone last night down an alleyway just a block from this hotel, and found the abandoned building of the old French Legation, a marvelous colonial structure of tile roofs and peeling shutters that fronts on the water. The windows are boarded up and the stone is crumbling into dust, but entire families squat in the ramshackle place, and the scents of lemongrass and fish sauce and garlic and hot oil rise from the braziers in the darkness …
Tomorrow I plan to see your grandfather’s house …
Stefani Fogg stepped out of her bath in the Oriental Hotel that Tuesday afternoon in early October, and considered the lunch she had ordered.
She was still exhausted, still dreaming with half her mind of the floodwaters of Hué, of Pho’s rooftop and the dead cats swirling by on the current. But the stench of the Perfume River’s mud had been washed from her skin, which now smelled faintly of eucalyptus; the down comforter on her bed was sheathed in Thai silk; and she had scheduled a massage for the afternoon. It was time at last, she thought, to sleep.
The phone rang by her bedside.
“Thank God I’ve reached you, darling,” said Oliver Krane. “You’ve been the very devil to track down. And you’ve done a wretched job, I might add, of keeping in touch.”
“My cell phone got wet in Vietnam,” she told him. “No batteries until Bangkok.”
“Tai fun?”
“At least one. I’ve been sleeping on the roof of a house in Hué for the past five days. Someone could make a fortune in Vietnam by funding a national weather service.”
“I’ll suggest as much to a woman I know. Look, heart—I’ve some rather dreadful news. That’s why I’ve been so desperate to reach you. Max Roderick committed suicide six days ago.”
1
Ceylon,
August 14, 1945
Billy Lightfoot was silhouetted against the night sky, a hulking barrel of a man blotting out the stars, his head sheathed in an aviator’s cap. Billy was searching for the flares that marked the drop zone, and in a few more minutes he would raise his arm and they would all stand, Jack Roderick and the rest, and hurl themselves out into the blackness simply because he asked them to.
Alec McQueen was strapped into the jump seat next to Roderick, his eyes squeezed tight and his fingers clenched on his harness. An ace reporter who’d worked the beats of New York and Chicago before Pearl Harbor was attacked and the OSS recruited him for intelligence work, Alec was twenty-six years old to Roderick’s thirty-nine and he’d known a different war than Jack. He’d worked the Pacific while Roderick dropped first into North Africa and then into Italy and France, always the hurtling planes, the heart-stopping plummet through freezing altitude, the snap and jerk of the chute rising like a hangman’s noose. If the chute drifted over open land instead of trees or water and Roderick survived the drop, there was always the danger of impact, a leg shattering under him, or a landing party of Hostiles waiting to cut his throat. To jump, in Jack Roderick’s mind, was a wager akin to Pascal’s: If I survive the void, then there must be a God. And if the void takes me—does God matter?
Alec had been his bunkmate in Ceylon, a poker-playing, foul-mouthed kid who chain-smoked and called Roderick the Old Man when they weren’t crawling through the tangled vegetation together, their knees squelching suddenly into elephant dung. Now Roderick turned his face away from McQueen; he knew that the other man was praying.
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