The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  It was possible, Rush thought, that he’d been led here on purpose—that this was Jo-Jo’s bolt hole, and the street cook was paid to steer the inquisitive in the wrong direction. It was possible, even, that a thug with steel knuckles waited beyond the warehouse door. He had not survived a decade of tours in Southeast Asia without cultivating a healthy caution. He ducked into the crawl space between two shuttered buildings and crossed to the next block, approaching the warehouse from the opposite side.

  A sliver of light framed the main door. Rush Halliwell sauntered up the paving with an air of indifference, the echo of his footsteps drowned in the clamor of the city. He slid noiselessly into the entryway and fixed one eye on the scene just visible through the door’s narrow opening.

  Four people were grouped under a floodlight suspended from the ceiling: A tall, thin Westerner Rush didn’t recognize, in a rumpled business suit. A Thai woman in high-heeled patent-leather boots and a miniskirt, whose long black hair was bleached orange. A third man stood behind a desk in an attitude of respectful misery. And at the desk itself, with a jeweler’s monocle fixed to his eye—surely that was none other than—

  Footsteps behind. Before Halliwell could turn, a bomb exploded at the base of his skull. Jo-Jo, he thought as he fell over into the street; and then he knew nothing more.

  11

  Bangkok,

  March 1949

  Jack Roderick stood near the French windows that lined the ambassador’s office, one hand parting the heavy drapery, the other nursing a cigarette, his body canted away from the sights of a possible sniper’s gun. Once he had believed that the Thai police would never fire upon the embassy of the United States—the police chief, after all, was on Roderick’s payroll. But that was before the summary executions of his Thai friends during the first week in March, before the pretty little dance pavilion in Amphorn Gardens had been abruptly converted to an official interrogation chamber, before Tao Oum had fled back to Laos three nights ago.

  “How many are out there today?” Alec McQueen was slumped in a Moroccan leather chair that Ambassador Stanton had shipped from Washington along with a ’47 Ford and a pair of aged poodles. His long legs were sprawled lazily across the Turkish carpet and his socks had slid down to meet his shoes, exposing a strip of white skin. He was eating kumquats now, noisily, as another man might chew peanuts at a prizefight.

  “Groups of three, every second corner, all the way down New Road,” Roderick reported.

  “Damned hot work in the noon hour,” Stanton muttered from his desk. “Hope the bastards are well paid.”

  “They’re allowed to live,” Roderick replied absently, “and these days that’s enough.”

  They had all danced together under the pavilion in Amphorn Gardens on the night of Pridi’s failed coup. The penultimate night of February, 1949. When Roderick thought of the interrogations held in the pavilion now, he saw the glow of Chinese lanterns, the faces of the accused grotesquely framed in fancy dress. The Bangkok police stationed in the street below were in costume, too, he thought—their uniforms vaguely British, although Siam had never been part of the empire. They turned as precisely on their chaotic corners as if the horde of vendors that lined New Road was hired specifically for this performance.

  “They watch me all the time,” the ambassador barked. “Do they watch you, Alec?”

  McQueen laughed. “Remember the article? That damned noble article I had to go and print?”

  There was only one article, now, that mattered.

  Pridi Banomyong had reappeared in Bangkok on February 27 in a hail of bullets that failed to change history or even impress anyone much. Four men—former ministers in the old Pridi government, friends of Jack Roderick’s—were arrested that night. They had been friends of Pridi’s, too, it seemed. Seven days after the coup all four were murdered in what the police called a “mysterious ambush” and what Alec McQueen bluntly suggested, in the pages of the Bangkok Post that same day, was in fact an execution conducted by the police themselves. McQueen had viewed the bodies. The corpses were riddled with more than eighty bullets. Two of the men had been tortured. Not a single member of the police “escort” was wounded in the “attack.”

  Later, Roderick slipped out of his shoes and knelt beside the hushed and frightened widows in the temple. Four bronze urns filled with ashes, four large photographs of unsmiling men. Joss sticks and lamentation. Roderick bowed his head and begged forgiveness from any god that might listen. The taste of ashes in his mouth.

  “Paper’s been clapped under official censorship,” Alec said, “and I’m not chump enough to walk home alone. Tried to bed a willing woman three nights in a row and caught some jerk spying in my windows. My houseboy’s quit and my cook’s balls shriveled out of sheer fright. I’m seriously considering skipping town.”

  “Don’t.” Roderick’s eyes remained focused on the noonday street. “We need you.”

  “We?” McQueen tossed another kumquat in his mouth. “Who’s ‘we’? You and Truman and the dumb-fuck chief of whatever they call the OSS, now?”

  “The Central Intelligence Agency.” Roderick said it patiently. He was not surprised Alec found it hard to track the acronyms of intelligence; they changed almost monthly. Roderick’s Office of Special Operations—the OSO—had given way in 1948 to the OPC—the Office of Policy Coordination. Roderick’s conception of his job underwent a similar reorganization every few weeks. He had expected to be Washington’s point man on the future of Thailand: collecting what information he could about political movements, persuading right-minded intellectuals to support democracy instead of Communism, setting an example of the worth and superiority of the American Way. But he soon saw he was simply Washington’s bagman. The Soviets were flooding the Third World with funds to foment the proletariat revolution. Roderick was flooding Bangkok with cash to avert disaster.

  “I’m not worried about the States,” he told Alec, “but Siam needs you.”

  McQueen snorted. “What Siam needs is to be left in goddamn peace. You and the rest of Truman’s friggin’ boy scouts have thrown this country right into Marshal Pibul’s lap, and he’s got his thighs clamped tight as a virgin’s. Have you heard from that horse’s ass Ruth lately? Or is he too busy raising another army?”

  “Heard from your willing woman, Alec? Or is she too busy telling the cops about the size of your dick?”

  “Jack,” Stanton chided quietly.

  It had always been like this between Roderick and McQueen. When the fever pitch of combat training had been too much to take, four years before, McQueen broke the tension by spouting profanity, and Roderick, by snapping his head off.

  “Ruth is in China.” He turned away from the window and the drapery swung closed, obliterating the sunlight. “He’s recruiting men from the Chinese National Army— the Kuomintang.”

  “I thought the KMT was running south,” McQueen objected. “Chiang Kai-shek’s losing his shorts to that peasant Hitler, Mao Tse-tung.”

  “Exactly. Chinese Nationalist troops are flooding into Laos and Burma and Thailand’s northern provinces. Armed men desperate for a leader and a cause. It’s a balls-up and a fucking rout and it’s perfect for Ruth. Freedom fighters and resistance all over again.”

  “Good Christ!” Stanton burst out. “He could have gone to New York or London merely for the asking! He’s still got friends in Washington.”

  “Ruth won’t raise another army in London or New York,” McQueen interjected petulantly, “and that’s all the prick can think of.”

  Roderick saw again in his mind’s eye the masquerade ball in Amphorn Gardens and the terrified face of the young Thai girl under her kinnari headdress—a mythical figure, half-bird, half-woman—whom he had driven home at dawn. He saw the boiling smoke and the desperate exchange of gunfire and heard the shouts and pleading from the captured radio station over the crackling night air. Saw the hero they still called Ruth, cornered by the Thai army that had not gone over to his cause, break away from his co
mrades and race toward the river, leaving the men who had followed him to certain death. It had not been Roderick who’d saved Pridi this time.

  “If he tries it again,” the ambassador declared, “he may expect the full force of American disapproval. We shall not lift a fucking finger to protect his ass in future.”

  “We didn’t lift a fucking finger in the past,” Roderick retorted. “We dumped him over the side like garbage and recognized the government of a man who collaborated with the Japs. As far as Pibul’s concerned, the Allied victory was just a brief vacation.”

  “Tell that to the Pentagon, Jack. I’m sure the Top Brass would love to hear they fought the last war in vain.”

  “The Pentagon?” Roderick scowled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “A delegation of military observers.” Stanton glared at him from under his brows. “They’re due to arrive in Bangkok any day, and your briefing is high on their dance card. Can’t think why. Somebody named Lightfoot asked for you by name.”

  Lightfoot. Roderick glanced at McQueen. The mere mention of the name, and the two of them were back in the darkened cabin of an OSS drop plane. Billy Lightfoot’s arm rising in the moonlit doorway.

  “Since when did the Pentagon give a rat’s ass about Thailand?” McQueen demanded.

  “Washington is quite concerned about the state of affairs in Southeast Asia,” Stanton said reprovingly. “We have my cogent cables to thank, no doubt. Unrest on all sides, colonials in revolt, the Red Menace flourishing in the north—compared to Mao Tse-tung, Jack my boy, our friendly Field Marshal Pibul looks like the second coming of Christ. And don’t you forget it.”

  “I can’t forget it, Ed,” he shot back. “I’m paying Pibul a thousand bucks a month to make nice to the United States. What are you giving him? A few cookies when he comes for tea? I’m the biggest employer in Bangkok, Mr. Ambassador. I pay kids of nineteen to hand out leaflets in support of democracy at Thammasat U. I pay radio announcers to broadcast the truth to illiterates who can’t read Alec’s newspaper. I pay the leaders of the Democratic Opposition to run for office, I pay the thugs in power to behave themselves, I pay the local Communist underground to stay there, and I’m sending the police chief’s kid to college in Philadelphia, for Christ’s sake. I bought the top-ranking general in the Thai army a brand-new Ford. All in the name of stability and democracy and death to Red China. So don’t tell me about your asswipe brown-nose jackshit cables, all right?”

  “Jack.” McQueen rose, eager to get out the door. But Roderick was still staring at the ambassador. Stanton’s face was purple, his eyes snapping. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. The pencil he held between his fingers snapped abruptly in two.

  He was not, Roderick thought, a bad man. One to respect, even, in certain places and certain times. But Stanton was confused right now—bewildered by the lack of rules, by the wild fluctuation of the playing field and the arbitrary composition of these foreign teams. He took orders from Harry Truman and advice from Roderick and he pretended to represent some sort of inviolable standard that had perished in the trenches of Europe a generation ago. He believed he was an authority at the embassy, when the Thais knew he was just a figurehead. Roderick might have pitied the man if he had not despised him so much.

  “Your secretary,” Stanton spat out. “Your young assistant.”

  “Boonreung.” A vise twisted in Roderick’s bowels. “What have you heard?”

  “More than you. What did you do, forget to pay the chief torturer?” Stanton fingered his shirt collar. “Your young friend was shot last night while trying to escape.”

  Roderick braced himself against the window frame, heedless for once of all snipers. He’d lost Boonreung on the fourth of March, six days after Pridi’s failed coup, in a deserted northeastern hotel run by a tired war widow. Five men in Army uniforms and an official black car, Boonreung dragged from the dinner table while Roderick stood helpless with a rifle at his back. Shouting. In English no one understood.

  “Tell the truth, Stanton,” he said through his teeth. “You don’t escape Pibul’s goons. They put Boonreung through hell. Then they blew his brains out.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack.” Alec’s hand was on Roderick’s shoulder. “He was a good man.”

  “He was a boy.”

  “He was a traitor to the present government,” Stanton corrected, “and we all know it. Jack, you’ve been running Boonreung in and out of Laos for months. The boy was your liaison with Ruth, for God’s sake. If it weren’t for that American passport of yours, you’d be lying dead in the khlong beside him.”

  “Think he talked before the end?” McQueen asked.

  One of the fancy-dress cops in the street below was staring straight up at the embassy. Roderick thought of Boonreung as he had been the day they found the Buddha cave, more than three years ago, his skin shining in the torchlight. He thought of the careless honesty in the black northeastern eyes and all the blood and loss those young eyes had seen. He shook his head. “Boonreung would die before he’d screw his friends.”

  “All the same, Jack,” McQueen said as they walked swiftly down the embassy’s back stairs and through the gate that led to an old, disused khlong long since drained— Roderick’s preferred method of retreat, through the overgrown gardens and refuse piles of the people who lived near the waterway—“you ought to lie low. Go to Europe. Finger Italian silks. Finger Italian broads.”

  “And miss Billy Lightfoot? Not a chance.”

  “That old fucker Lightfoot.” McQueen basked in a moment of nostalgia. “We’ve got a night of hard drinking ahead of us. Like old times.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “What?” Alec glanced at him sidelong.

  “The willing woman. The one you’re seducing.”

  “Nobody, really.”

  “Someone’s wife? Stanton’s, for instance?”

  “She’s Thai.” He said it flatly, a closed door. The men Roderick knew might admit to lovers among the native population, but they never introduced these women around the farang community and they were rarely seen together in public. “And not as willing as I make out. She’s scared to death of her father. He could slit her throat just for meeting me.”

  “She should be scared of you.”

  “But nobody listens to warnings, and we all give death the finger. Look, Jack—” McQueen gripped his arm. “I’m serious. If Boonreung talked, and they know, now, that he was working for you when he helped Ruth escape the first time, last year—”

  “They’ll come after me, day or night, and fuck the U.S. passport. You don’t have to say it.”

  Roderick stopped abruptly under the leaves of a longan tree and pulled out his cigarettes. He shook one into his palm, offered the pack to McQueen and waited while the other man produced a lighter. Smoke drifted upward in a blue haze.

  “Alistair Farnham’s shipping home,” McQueen observed.

  Farnham was Roderick’s opposite number at the British embassy. Secret Intelligence Service, Bern, during the last war. Suspected by the Pibul government of transporting his old chum Ruth to China the night after the failed coup, through an SIS pipeline.

  “I stood drinks for him yesterday,” Roderick replied. “He’s gotten death threats. He doesn’t want to leave, but he’s thinking of Marjorie.”

  “We’ve all thought of Marjorie,” Alec sighed. Farnham’s wife was a legend in the expatriate community: clever, charming, blue-blooded and disappointingly faithful. Roderick considered her aquiline nose and her brilliant eyes and then thought of Boonreung, crucified under a bare lightbulb. He inhaled sharply.

  “Are you in love with her?” he asked McQueen.

  “Marjorie?”

  “Your Thai girl.”

  Alec shrugged. “Call it that if you like. Go to Paris, for God’s sake, Jack. I don’t want to print your obit in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “I wanted Joan that way,” Roderick said through the cigarette haze. “I wanted her with a
violence I’d never known and that I thought would consume me. I’d watch her talk to another man across the room at one of those damn parties and want to crush her throat in my hands.”

  “But you walked away,” Alec said brutally.

  Roderick shrugged and tossed his butt into the drained khlong. “It’s no kind of life, with murder in your heart. Besides, I was hurting the boy.”

  The boy. Rory with his pale face and his gnawed fingernails, peering through the crack in the doorway at his father’s rage. Joan languid in the satin dress that hugged her curves, diamonds choking her neck. A glass of whiskey shattered on the parquet floor. The rich and lovely apartment thirty stories above Park Avenue, a cage they prowled together. Roderick had not seen his son in two years. Not since the divorce.

  “Is your buddy Carlos with him?”

  “With whom?”

  “Ruth. The KMT.”

  Roderick shrugged. “Alec, if Boonreung talked, then a month in Italy won’t help. I could never come back.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “I don’t see you leaving Bangkok.”

  “I’m not trading potshots with the dictator, pal. Given a choice between death and Europe, I’d take Europe any day.”

  “A hunted man has nothing to lose,” Roderick muttered, “except the hunters.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Roderick walked on beside the stinking khlong, while the high-pitched screech of an angry woman drifted across the back gardens and the sagging water gates. The scent of fish sauce and fried mangos and garbage spiked his nostrils. The smell of something rotten.

  He never answered McQueen.

  12

  Stefani Fogg, in a large straw hat and a silk sarong, picked her way through the orchids and rustling palms of the Oriental Hotel’s back garden. At seven on a humid Wednesday morning in early November, the grounds were almost deserted. The hotel barge ferried a few early risers from the main dock to the spa and gym, a peak-roofed structure on the Chao Phraya’s opposite bank; but in general she had the world to herself. Except for the shadows that hung just beyond the range of vision: Jack Roderick and his pals, smoking a last cigarette under the waving fronds.