The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  “Yes,” she replied. The tour guide’s description of the friendliest people in Southeast Asia.

  The old man leaned across the bar, his eyes burning with an old hatred. “There are a hundred ways to smile, Miss Fogg, and one of them says I’m going to kill you.”

  If I’m right and you were murdered, Stefani wrote to Max on a sheet of the Oriental’s stationery, then it was one of those three all along Sabine, Jacques or Knetsch. Each of them could have triggered any one of the attacks. The avalanche. The sabotaged binding The final push. Each of them had access to the house, access to information about your movements. But which of them could be bought? Which of them hated you enough?

  She stared over the Oriental’s pool, toward the orchids waving like butterflies in the breeze; over the tanned skin of the privileged and the well-tended who frequented the place, over her untouched glass of rum with its paper umbrella rakish at the rim.

  She had considered drinking herself into a coma. The Stefani of three years ago—of even a year since—would have done it. She would have picked up a stranger by sundown, toured Bangkok with a group of new best friends and remembered nothing of Max by morning.

  But she was not the same woman she had been a few months ago.

  She allowed her eyes to rest at last upon a black-haired, powerfully built Asian who lounged opposite her. He held a newspaper close to his face, but from the indolent sprawl of his tanned knees, she doubted that he was very engaged.

  Sabine: in love with you for years, making dinner now in your house. Invested, perhaps, in your helplessness. Your gratitude. Did you anger her by rejecting her one time too many?

  Jacques: worried about his daughter’s future. Or still pissed at his wife’s affair. Did he hate you because of what destroyed his marriage?

  Knetsch: You didn’t trust him with your will. Why did you call in a Geneva lawyer? You guessed Jeff was drowning in debt. You despised his friends. Why does he insist that you were insane?

  She stopped short, the pen hovering over the question. If Jeff pushed the wheelchair off that cliff, he’d need the death to look like suicide. And if he called Max mad, suicide made more sense.

  She crumpled the letter into a tight ball, shoved it into her tote bag and thrust herself off the deck chair.

  The Asian opposite rose and stretched. As she gathered up her sunscreen and paperback novel, he careened clumsily against her thigh, knocking the bag from her shoulder. Then, with a muttered word of what might be apology, he strode toward the glass doors that led to the lobby.

  Stefani stared after him, frowning. Her book had landed in a puddle of pool water, and her pen was lying on the tile. His careless foot had squashed her tube of sunscreen.

  It was only later, back in her room, that she realized the crumpled sheet of paper was gone.

  3

  Bangkok,

  1945–1947

  They diverted the drop plane to Rangoon, Burma, and for three days Jack Roderick talked to British officers drunk with victory and bartered precious cigarettes for goods that had seemed irrelevant when the mission was liberation. The OSS men who landed in Rangoon had their jumpsuits and boots, a kit containing iodine tablets, rations of beef jerky, extra rounds of ammunition and an Army-issue knife. Some carried crucifixes or rabbits’ feet or pictures of their kids. Roderick had a Polaroid of Rory taken with Santa the previous Christmas and ten dollars’ worth of Siamese baht. He kept hidden in his breast pocket the final letter to Joan in which he overlooked her sins and confessed eternal love.

  With mordant humor he called this his drop-dead letter, in the event he tangled in his chute or the chute never opened or he jumped onto the point of a hostile bayonet. If he survived the war—as it seemed, now, that he might—he would throw the thing in the first available trash can.

  Alec McQueen reverted, in those feverish Rangoon days, to the journalist he had been before war broke out. If he wasn’t drinking whiskey or playing poker he interviewed every Burmese national who understood a word of English and filed endless reports for United Press International. He was giddy with survival, he talked of booking passage on the first boat to the Philippines and demanding his discharge. He posed for photographs with Roderick, a cigar in his mouth.

  On the morning of September 6, 1945, they flew at last into Thailand and found the airport clogged with thousands of fleeing Japanese troops, desperate to avoid the Allied forces and get home. A harried group of Thais—resistance fighters, all of them, with red armbands sewn onto their sleeves—tried unsuccessfully to maintain order. The control tower had been torched the week before; communications were reduced to a megaphone. Three desperate Thais, all lethally sleep-deprived, straddled the roof of an army truck with binoculars in their hands. The aircraft, circling.

  The pilots joked about strafing the field in order to make room, or tipping the passengers out the side door, but in the end they managed to land as they had done a thousand times in worse conditions during the course of the bloody Pacific combat. Roderick waited his turn to disembark and, peering over McQueen’s shoulder, took his first look at Bangkok.

  Jungle vegetation. Buildings of stucco and wood. The heart of the city was too distant from the airfield to glimpse, but the countryside seemed little different from Rangoon. Except for the lack of British sahibs.

  We are the sahibs here, he thought with a spark of surprise.

  A cluster of men in olive drab, bereft of insignia, stood waiting on the tarmac in silence. Roderick could not have said whether they were Thai or Japanese, Friendlies or Hostiles, until one of them saluted Billy Lightfoot as the colonel stepped down from the plane.

  “That’s Ruth, God damn it,” McQueen whispered over Roderick’s shoulder. “Pridi Banomyong himself. Short little bastard, ain’t he?”

  The man standing at Ruth’s right stepped forward and bowed, his palms raised high as though in prayer. “Captain Roderick, I believe. I am Commander Ruth’s chief lieutenant. You may call me Carlos. Everyone does.”

  It was Carlos who hot-wired a Jeep abandoned by the Japanese High Command and drove Roderick and McQueen at breakneck pace through the few streets of the city still passable by anything on four wheels. Firecrackers and guns spat, and women with shining black hair and tears on their cheeks surged into the body of the Jeep at every opportunity, flinging ropes of jasmine into Roderick’s lap. He felt bewildered by it all, by the babble of strange tongues and the assault of foreign smells and the sight of canals on every side with their extraordinary wooden boats and gaily colored streamers. McQueen perched on the Jeep’s spare tire, waving his arms and shrieking like a Plains Indian mounting an attack. He kissed the women and slapped the men’s shoulders and seemed unfazed by the lack of verbal communication. Victory, it seemed, was a universal language.

  “You will like Suan Kularb,” Carlos shouted over the din. Ruth’s second-in-command drove with breathless skill, dogs and children scattering before him. “It is a palace set amid gardens, airy and quite clean. You will be most comfortable there. The Japanese were.”

  “You didn’t burn the place down?”

  Carlos shook his head. “We only torched what was worthless. The palaces, we kept in readiness for our friends.”

  A dark-haired boy with a magnificent white bird perched on his shoulder led Roderick to a high-ceilinged bedroom lined in carved teak. The windows were tall and shuttered and gave out onto a veranda overlooking the grounds. At the far end of the lawn, water gleamed in a thicket of green. An old man walked back and forth across the grass with a scythe. Roderick glanced at the bed and felt bone-weary. It had been years since he had slept on anything better than an Army cot.

  The boy poured water into a brass basin and then muttered a word in Thai. His palm was extended. Roderick dropped a coin into it—part of his dwindling fund of baht—and the boy grinned hugely.

  Was he ten years old? Or fifteen? The son Roderick had left behind in New York was barely eight. Would Rory look like this one day, a skinny bag of b
ones on the precipice of manhood, dark hollows under his eyes?

  “What is your name?” Jack asked. But his gaze was fixed on the white bird. A cockatoo, he thought. A feathered crest, jet black eyes. It tugged insistently at the boy’s ear. Roderick tapped his own chest. “I am Jack. Jack. Can you say that?”

  “Meestah Jack.”

  Roderick nodded.

  “Boonreung,” the boy returned, one hand pressing his heart. He tucked the coin into his pants and darted out of the room.

  * * *

  At Suan Kularb it was possible to believe the war had never existed. Roderick awoke to birdsong and after a breakfast of mangosteen would bathe in a marble tub and set about learning the names of the flowers that choked the gardens. Boonreung was his companion in this, as in so many things during those weeks; as the boy’s knowledge of English grew, so did Roderick’s of Bangkok life. He employed the boy as guide and interpreter on his forays into the city, Boonreung perched on the seat of the jeep with his storklike legs drawn up beneath him, pointing excitedly at river boats and noodle vendors and the sellers of amulets who peddled trash and gems in the markets near Bangkok’s Field of Kings.

  By November, however, Roderick had tired of the luxurious isolation of Suan Kularb. He followed Alec McQueen to the Oriental Hotel, and took Boonreung with him.

  The Oriental at the end of 1945 was a ramshackle hive of expatriate Allies sliding perceptibly into the brown river. It was hot and damp. The rooms had no doors, only swinging louvered shutters; the sway-backed mattresses were swathed in mosquito netting. Alec had a room above the lobby, which was also the Bamboo Bar, amid the floating pool of junior officers that shipped in and out during those chaotic postwar days. McQueen had calmed down a bit since his discharge, but he was still the perpetual cub reporter: given to colorful profanity, rumpled suiting, shirts that wilted instantly in the monsoon heat. He had expected to spend a month in Bangkok when they landed that September. By January he’d started a newspaper out of his hotel room that he called the Bangkok Post. He never went back to his desk job in the States.

  McQueen was always in the process of seducing a woman, British or French or occasionally Thai, but Roderick was faithful to some memory of Joan and to the picture of the boy he kept propped on the window ledge in his room next to Alec’s. Near Rory sat a photo of Billy Lightfoot, who had vanished back to West Point and the vagaries of Peace.

  Without a war or an enemy to fight in those first aimless months, Roderick felt at loose ends. He had no desire to return to New York, but he didn’t know why he stayed. He mounted hiking expeditions to the jungle coast and took orders from Harold Patterson, the OSS station chief in Bangkok, who had spent part of his missionary childhood in Thailand and spoke the language haltingly. Patterson was a silent man whose fingers were stained yellow from the cheap cigarettes he chain-smoked. His war had been one long undercover operation with the Free Thai, and it was clear that he was ready to go home. Since his time in Bangkok was short, Patterson chose Roderick as apprentice. To him he imparted what sense he could of the city and its ways.

  “The key to Southeast Asia, Jack, is the men who learned their letters at the feet of the French and now are turning to bite the hands that fed them,” the station chief advised. “Penetrate the brotherhood of Frog Haters on Thailand’s flanks, and you’ll have the coming revolution by the balls.”

  Patterson took Roderick to meet exiled Cambodians with the manners of aristocrats and Laotians who had served as diplomats in Paris before the war and ideologues who espoused free love and Communism with equal ardor. First among these was the man named Tao Oum, Patterson’s chief subagent and a gentle Laotian with a brilliant mind. Tao Oum was rumored to be Minister of War in the Laotian shadow government, the democratic opposition that lived in perpetual fear of French reprisal, and he loved to argue the finer points of constitutional law with Roderick, who knew next to nothing about law. The Laotians and the Cambodians and even some of the Burmese regarded Bangkok as a haven and all Americans as saviors, because America had thrown off colonial domination two centuries before and forged a path to freedom with their British oppressors’ guns. Roderick listened to revolutionary dreams and bought rounds of drinks and tried to memorize the names of movements and partisans, tried to distinguish his friends from future foes.

  Harold Patterson knew every monk and every whore and every dealer of Asian antiquities in the labyrinthine khlongs. With the fatality of a man who would never return he fretted at loosening his hold on the city. For Roderick he ordered food so hot it destroyed the bowels, for Roderick he commandeered boats and Jeeps and spent entire days traversing the countryside; for Roderick he journeyed three hours north over broken roads to the ancient capital of Ayutthaya and walked among the ruins. In the Nakorn Kasem—the Thieves Market of Bangkok—where every manner of plunder was sold, Patterson found pieces of handwoven silk and delicate vases of celadon and richly brocaded Burmese tapestries. Roderick bought them all and sent them back to Manhattan, where his wife Joan unpacked them in amusement and disgust.

  When she wrote asking for the divorce late in 1946, he returned to New York immediately, traveling by tramp steamer around the horn of India and then overland through Paris. He arrived haggard and desperate and two months too late. He fought her because it seemed the only possible thing to do, fought for the boy and that look in Rory’s eyes he could not bear to lose. But Jack Roderick lost, as he had known even in Bangkok he would lose. He handed Joan his power of attorney and returned to Thailand in early 1947.

  He found the city the same, and utterly changed. Before, it had seemed exotic; now it was as though he held the khlongs and hovels in the palm of his hand.

  Bangkok was his baby, in a manner of speaking: he had been appointed chief of intelligence for the OSO, the Office of Special Operations, the postwar remnant of the OSS. Whether the OSO would find a use for Roderick remained to be seen. It was an uncertain organization at best, in search of a mission, and governed by a new body called the Central Intelligence Agency, set up by Harry Truman that same year. But Roderick had found the OSO peopled with old friends—from Manhattan, and Princeton, and the half-forgotten drop zones all over Europe. Another Men’s Club, this one staffed and primed for intrigue.

  “Are you back for good, Jack?” Alec McQueen asked when Roderick returned and once more propped Rory’s solemn-eyed photo on his window ledge.

  “That depends.”

  “On what? A job? You can have one from me, any time. You listen, and you watch. That’s all it takes to be a journalist.”

  Roderick smiled. “Thanks, Alec. But I’ve got something else in mind. Open that packet.”

  McQueen picked up the brown paper parcel that sat on the dresser, and tore at the wrapping. A shimmering length of rose-colored fabric spilled through his hands.

  “What is it?” he asked stupidly. The stuff was like a bloodstain on the old wooden floor.

  “Silk,” Roderick replied. “Raw Thai silk. They grow mulberry trees in the northeast, Alec, in the countryside of Khorat. Boonreung showed me the trees and the silk thread last week. He’s from that part of Thailand, you know—the kid was born in a mulberry grove. His entire family picks cocoons after breakfast.”

  “Boonreung,” McQueen repeated. “Jack, you can’t be serious.”

  “I found a family of weavers on a khlong not far from here. In an area called Ban Khrua. I hired them all. Piecework, for a share of the profits.”

  “Nobody goes to the northeast. It’s a goddamn wasteland.”

  “A wasteland with a border,” Roderick countered, “and across that border, Alec, a whole lot of unhappiness. Unhappiness is my job.”

  McQueen reached for the silk. He held it up to the light. “Of course,” he muttered. “The war’s never really ended. Is that what this is about? Protective cover?”

  “I’ll send the first hundred yards back to New York,” Roderick mused, taking the silk from him and running it between his fingers. “A publicity stu
nt. I’ll give them to the editor of Vogue. If she promotes Siamese silk—I’ll have investors.”

  “In what? Civil disobedience?”

  “Shares of my company.” Roderick stared through the window of the Oriental, past Rory’s photograph, his attention caught by something McQueen couldn’t see. “I’ll call it Jack Roderick Silk.”

  4

  Ms. Fogg!” cried the Oriental’s assistant manager delightedly as she appeared in the doorway of the Authors Lounge that Tuesday evening. “Welcome back to the Oriental!”

  The weekly cocktail party for special guests—a group culled by invitation only—was in full swing. Tiers of delectable tidbits sailed by on the arms of waiters. A table festooned with flowers and exquisitely carved fruit held an assortment of sushi. White-haired men in blue blazers murmured confidentially to women with dowager’s humps. Ascots were actually worn. One young man with a luxuriant black mustache had chosen to appear in wildly patterned harem pants that ballooned around his ankles, but few had such poor taste. Stefani wore a sleeveless dress of lime-green Thai silk and black Majorcan pearls.

  “Hello, Paolo,” she said to the assistant manager. “This is quite a crowd.”

  Paolo was originally from Milan and he had spent the better part of fifteen years in the most select hotels in the world. He was earnest, blond and unfailingly polite; and he never forgot a name, whether the guest had stayed at the Oriental five weeks ago or the Cipriani thirteen years before.

  “Stefani.” He took her hand. “It’s good to see you. I understand you were caught in a typhoon.”

  She had almost forgot Vietnam.

  Over the rim of her glass she noticed a vaguely familiar face—a middle-aged woman of the stage or screen. Beside her was a man in evening dress who attempted, and failed, to disguise his role as bodyguard. And beyond them, leaning against the wall behind the sushi station, was the powerful Asian who’d bumped into her that afternoon at the pool.