The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

“Civil or criminal? Corporate? Or litigation?”

  “Trusts and Estates, as I think you can guess. Someone who can tell me how to prove a will in the Thai courts.”

  Oliver sighed. “You only want the earth, and of course you want it yesterday. Very well. I shall put in a call to the home of a man who owes me a favor, and disturb his sleep unforgivably. You may expect Matthew French on your hotel terrace by breakfast. The back terrace, mind. Don’t be late. Matthew’s time is exorbitant.”

  “Thank you, Oliver.”

  “That’s not the end of it, surely?” He affected astonishment. “You must have a few odd fires that require putting out.”

  “I’d like you to run some names. They could be important.”

  “For your inheritance?”

  “For resolving a series of troubling deaths,” she returned sharply.

  He sighed again. “Then do us a favor, love, and send them over the black box.”

  Her encrypted laptop e-mail system. Oliver was battening down the hatches. “Has something happened?”

  “Something is always happening. Just do as I ask.”

  “Right,” she replied. But the line was dead.

  She sank into a chair and stared out at the river, feeling unloved. Oliver hadn’t even waited to hear about the stolen sheet of paper. Was he simply short on sleep? Angry? Or was he worried?

  That phrase of music in a minor key fluttered at the edge of her brain. Whatever Oliver’s problem, it couldn’t be fixed from a distance of six thousand miles. She closed her eyes, and said Max’s name aloud.

  9

  Bangkok,

  November 8, 1947

  Gunfire rang sporadically now from the wide oval field known as the Pramane Ground, a few hundred yards from the riverbank; had he been able to stand up in the floor of the sampan and stare intently through the darkness, he might have glimpsed flames rising in the sky over the Grand Palace. The tanks were positioned like a noose around the government buildings and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. They would fire on anyone who dared to hurl a rock or a Molotov cocktail at the leaders of the coup—but no one, he felt certain, would dare. It was one thing to fight against the Japanese as so many had done only a few years before—to creep with a knife through the dreaming gardens and reach under mosquito netting for the flesh of a throat—and quite another to oppose tanks. A coup was nothing more than a squabble among potentates.

  The boatman Roderick had sent to carry him off the quay below the Temple of the Emerald Buddha had thrown rough sacking over his head; it stank of garlic and itched. He lay facedown, his nose hovering over the stinking bilge; crates of live guinea fowl rocked perilously on his back. His suit was of silk and his shoes had been made in Bond Street; there had not been time to change. No warning but the nervous smile of Tao Oum, the Lao, who appeared abruptly in the midst of dinner: Mr. Roderick had news—he must come at once—there was no time to delay. Tao Oum’s words, swift and urgent, as they ran toward the river, the boat waiting with its signal lantern doused. Tanks rumbling already in the distance.

  He fought the urge to sneeze. The soft flutter of wings above his head, the musk of feathers, the surging thrust of the boatman’s pole—Boonreung, Roderick’s youthful friend and confidant, a child of the arid northeast who understood thirst and hardship and what it was to avenge. Boonreung was maybe seventeen, but he was already a seasoned fighter. Boonreung he could trust.

  If they found him, the Army and the police would shoot him like a dog for a royal murder he had not committed. The familiar nausea and fear surged in his throat—the lies of past escapes, of night raids, of a thousand bullets dodged like raindrops. He refused to think now what he must do. He refused to think of his wife.

  His name was Pridi Banomyong, though for years he had called himself “Ruth” on the clandestine radio networks that sprang up around Bangkok during the war. He had led the Free Thai in secret; he had done what the Free Thai leaders in Washington and London had ordered him to do, and many things they had never dreamed possible. His men had loved him for his easy charm, his cultivated manners, his fervent belief in democracy; they had adored him and for him they had died in sometimes shaming and excruciating ways.

  When the war had ended more than two years before and the Japanese retreated from Bangkok, the Allies took over the occupation billets at the palatial villas dotted about the city and the people had carried him through the streets with brilliant streamers and burning braziers of incense. He had declared the pro-Japanese Pibul a war criminal and invited the young king-in-exile, Ananda Mahidol, to return to Thailand in triumph. Two months after the Japanese surrender, in December 1945, Pridi Banomyong—Ruth—had become Prime Minister of a democratic and devastated Thailand.

  He mingled with the foreigners flooding into this Venice of the East—the farangs who thought they had invented Bangkok. He called the British ambassador friend, he ate with the Americans, he traded jokes and war stories with Jack Roderick himself—Roderick, who had infiltrated France and Italy with the OSS, who knew more secrets than most men still alive, who had helped Pridi run agents through all the jungles of Southeast Asia when Ruth was nothing but a voice and a promise carried on the hiss of a radio wave.

  But Ananda had died only ten months into his reign and now Pridi Banomyong was a murderer of kings, an assassin on the run. Rumors flew about the city, growing large in the retelling. Pridi’s quarrels with the monarch were made to look like a motive for regicide; but no one accused the Prime Minister outright, there was never a trial or the possibility of clearing his name. In public, the royal family remained silent; in secret, they cultivated Pridi’s enemies. Ananda’s successor, Bhumpibol, left his quiet life in a provincial monastery and ascended the throne days after the young king’s murder. The new king was not the sort to argue with dictators or democrats or even the royal family. Five months after the shot rang out in the Grand Palace on June 9, 1946, Pridi Banomyong had resigned from the office of Prime Minister and vanished from public life.

  He had been granted a year of relative peace while his chief enemy, Pibul, gathered support as stealthily as a rat scavenged garbage. Now the tanks were in the streets.

  The river bucked under the old boat’s frame like a seasoned whore; brackish water flooded his nostrils, choking him, and he lurched upward so that the guinea fowl squawked and the sacking shifted. Boonreung mouthed a caution through the darkness but it meant nothing to Pridi. The five courses of his half-consumed dinner twisted in his entrails and he vomited. A bullhorn rent the night. Tao Oum was beside him, one hand on the back of his neck, forcing him down into his own puke— police boat, the Laotian hissed—and then the sacking covered him.

  He felt the sampan lose way; felt the jolt as the police launch came alongside. Brilliant light flooded his closed eyes; he lay motionless, in the stench of chickens and vomit, water seeping through his trousers and the soles of his leather shoes. He would be shot and his body dumped over the sampan’s side to float with the dead dogs and the garbage. His wife would never know the truth of what happened to him. For how long would she believe that he still lived?

  The bullhorn again, Tao Oum’s strained voice answering in Lao-accented Thai. The beam rippled over the sacking and the outraged guinea fowl. The sampan rocked as a booted foot landed heavily in the bottom. Had the police joined the traitorous army? Did they know that he had fled? Were all the borders watched? In a moment the stench of vomit would hit their nostrils, they would pull back the sacking to reveal—

  Tao Oum’s voice was steadier now. He was offering the policeman money. The guinea fowl, he said, were for his sister—her children were sick, they required fresh eggs—not a moment to be lost—the soft chink of coins as the bribe changed hands. The sampan dipped and surged. The policeman left the boat.

  Relief swept over Pridi like a scalding wind. He bit the sleeve of his jacket to keep from whimpering in the dark. The police launch moved off.

  Tao Oum sighed and mopped his forehead with a d
irty handkerchief. Boonreung waited an instant, took the launch’s wake bow-on, then thrust his pole once more into the murky bottom.

  “Where will you go?” Roderick asked.

  He discarded his cigarette in a flaring arc over the edge of the Oriental’s quay. It sputtered in the river and vanished.

  “I don’t know,” Pridi muttered. He glanced over his shoulder fearfully, but they were alone at the edge of the hotel garden, the tall palms and dense foliage a screen through which the figures of dancers flickered like moths. His wife had been dressing for this ball when he fled their house. There were to be charades. The whole farang community was present.

  “We could get you to the border of Laos by dawn,” Roderick said thoughtfully. “Boonreung—take His Excellency through the khlongs to the northern end of the city. Tao Oum will meet you there with the car.”

  The whites of the young Thai’s eyes were shining in the dappled glow of lanterns. Boonreung was a beautiful boy, Pridi thought idly; skin as smooth as a girl’s, the head classically molded. He was exhilarated by darkness and subterfuge as Ruth had once been drunk with danger; but that was many years and too many deaths ago.

  “It’ll be dicey,” Roderick added. “Army patrols. But it’s your only hope. You can’t stay here.”

  The car was Roderick’s own, a prewar Packard he’d shipped from New York the previous year. Pridi remembered that it had carried the American into the northeast on several occasions. Roderick had a fondness for the northeast—he had plucked Boonreung from obscurity there, made the boy his driver and his secretary and some said his assassin. Tao Oum, too, had traveled often through the desolate hinterland with Roderick at his side; Tao Oum and all the other Lao revolutionaries plotting independence from the French in the drawing rooms of Bangkok. Pridi understood, suddenly, as he waited in the jasmine-scented darkness with the strains of Tommy Dorsey floating through the Oriental’s garden, that Roderick had never stopped running agents. The end of one war was merely the prelude to another, more subtle and thus more lethal.

  A cannon boomed. Miles away and from the east, by the sound of it.

  “Tao Oum knows the roads,” Roderick said. He stood with his back to Pridi, talking to himself or the river. He wore a white dinner jacket and black trousers with knife-edged creases and his voice suggested that coups were regrettable but not unforeseen. How long had the American embassy known of Pibul’s plans before tonight’s attack?

  Laos. Pridi’s old lieutenant, Carlos, was there. With time, they might raise an army.

  He had changed into the clothes Roderick had given him—the drawstring pants and rough cotton shirt of a fisherman. Boonreung had swabbed the vomit from the sampan’s bottom. Tao Oum sat a little apart, his eyes closed and his chin sunk upon his chest. It was a habit learned during the height of the resistance and not yet forgotten two years after the war: snatch sleep in odd moments, against the difficult hours to come.

  The guinea fowl, Pridi supposed, would end up in the Oriental’s kitchen.

  He pressed his hands together and raised them high to his forehead. Roderick repeated the gesture with an air of reverence surprising in a farang. Then he drew from his pocket a polished stone that flickered bloodred under the Chinese lanterns and held it aloft. “Tell me one thing, Pridi,” he said softly. “Did you kill him?”

  “The king?”

  In his mind’s eye, Pridi saw His Royal Highness Rama the Eighth—just a boy named Ananda, really, fresh from a Swiss prep school—glare haughtily and motion with one finger. The dead king said nothing about the gun or the bullets or who had pulled the trigger; nothing about the blood-spattered pillow in the royal bed. There had been so much blood. Ananda’s eyes were open and lost in death, his head turned toward the window. Some said his assassin had fled through it; others, that the gunman lived in the palace itself.

  It was Pridi who would go down in history as a regicide.

  He looked now at Jack Roderick—at the cool self-possession of the American, who would never cower in the filth of a sampan while his city went up in flames—and he wished, with a surge of anger, for the simpler rules of war.

  “I thought you knew me, Jack,” Pridi replied, and stepped into the boat.

  Jack Roderick was the last thing he saw on the river that night, backlit by mermaids in ball dress and the strains of Dorsey and the flares of cannon and the whole fantastic enterprise of the old farang hotel on the banks of the Chao Phraya. Roderick was smoking again, his eyes glittering in the moonlight. Telling sad stories of the death of kings. Pridi knew he owed the man his life but he could not weigh the cost. That would come later, when they met again as equals.

  Roderick followed the sampan’s prow as it picked its course through the ruins of a bridge. When his cigarette had burned down to ash and Boonreung had turned without a wave into a khlong on the Thon Buri side of the river, he pocketed Carlos’s ruby, and went back inside to the dance.

  10

  The powerful man in the dark jacket lifted his newspaper higher. Rush Halliwell knew him by sight as a paid bodyguard and by name simply as Jo-Jo. Sometimes he drove cars; sometimes he sat in the passenger seat as an obvious piece of protection; at other times he roamed the streets of Bangkok or London or L.A., a wolf tracking prey. The sight of Jo-Jo in the midst of the Oriental’s private cocktail party had impressed Rush Halliwell enormously. He’d studied the man as he moved like a pickpocket through the shifting cadre of international guests, wondering what spoor Jo-Jo was following this evening. He’d chatted him up by the sushi bar in a deliberate attempt to glean information. And then, at the first sight of Stefani Fogg, he’d watched the man bolt.

  If, as Rush suspected, Jo-Jo was stalking the American heiress, her level of risk had just skyrocketed.

  Rush stood quietly near the protective screen of a massive ceramic ginger jar that anchored the hotel’s main corridor, and surveyed the lobby beyond.

  Jo-Jo was not the type to waste an entire evening in such a place. He looked perfectly at home in the soaring room—attractive, well dressed, flush with other people’s money—but he preferred dimly lit holes pulsing with neon. There was petulance around his mouth tonight. Rush watched him troll uncomprehendingly through the pages of the Financial Times, a cigarette dangling from his left hand. A small cairn of ash had collected on the elegant carpet below.

  And then Paolo Ferretti, the hotel’s assistant manager, crossed smoothly to Jo-Jo’s chair and bent, with an air of concern and apology, to murmur in the man’s ear.

  The fluttering pages of the Financial Times stilled. Jo-Jo stared at Ferretti’s face without a hint of amity in his own. Then he stood. Folded the newspaper precisely and handed it to Ferretti as though the latter were a bellboy. And crossed to the Oriental’s revolving door.

  “What did you say to him?” Rush asked as Paolo passed him seconds later.

  The assistant manager stopped short. “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Halliwell. May I be of some assistance?”

  “You ran that guy out of the lobby like a common backpacker. Admit it.”

  Paolo drew himself up. “Do you know how difficult that was for me? How repugnant?”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  Paolo hesitated. “He’s been hanging around the hotel all day. It’s a public meeting place—one can’t prevent people from using it, provided they’re properly dressed and well behaved—but he crashed our private cocktail party. That disturbed our guests.”

  Halliwell smiled. “I’ll remember in future never to appear without an invitation. So what was the phrase, exactly? ‘Pay for that Scotch you drank, or I’ll have the law on you’?”

  “It was vodka,” Paolo responded stiffly. “Straight. And I asked to see the contents of his pockets. One of our guests accused him of picking hers.”

  Rush clapped him on the shoulder. “It was a great party, all the same. Thanks, Paolo. And good night.”

  He sauntered across the hotel lobby as though he hadn’t a care in the worl
d. And was just in time, as he exited the place, to catch a final glimpse of Jo-Jo turning right at the foot of the drive. All that stood on that side of the Oriental was a convent school for girls, quite dark at this hour—and the dock for the commuter boat line, the Chao Phraya Express.

  Halliwell gave him thirty seconds. Then he moved down the drive in Jo-Jo’s wake.

  He led Rush a pretty dance, although he betrayed not the slightest awareness that he was being tailed. He abandoned the water ferry four stops beyond the Oriental, at the Ratchawong dock; and for half an hour he walked the length of Charoen Krung Road into the heart of Chinatown. There Halliwell hired a tuk-tuk, one of the three-wheeled taxis that cluttered Bangkok’s roads, and ordered the driver to move slowly. Under cover of night and the galaxy of Bangkok lights, he was virtually undetectable; but Jo-Jo never even glanced behind.

  When his quarry dove into the Nakorn Kasem, Rush paid off his driver and followed on foot, his suit jacket folded under his arm and his shirtsleeves rolled high. It was late, but the market crowds were still thick, and he used them as screen and distraction, fingering the goods laid out on the pavement. Jo-Jo led him to the Chakkrawat Road, a few blocks from the old Thieves Market; and then, abruptly, he disappeared into thin air.

  Halliwell’s feet slowed. At the foot of the street was the dirty scar of Khlong Ong Ang. To one side, a handful of diners huddled around a glowing brazier manned by a street cook with a sweating face. To the other, blank warehouse doors. One of these must have opened for Jo-Jo. The man was either inside, or he’d pulled the oldest dodge in the book—passed through and exited on the far side of the building. Halliwell reached into his pocket and withdrew his wallet.

  “The man in the dark suit,” Rush said softly in Thai to the street cook. “The one who just walked past. Which door?”

  The cook stared at him, then thrust a thumb in the direction of a warehouse half a block farther down the street. “The one on the end. Near the khlong.” His fingers closed over Halliwell’s money.