The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  “That was last week. As a trustee of the Met, Jeff’s got to meet with the Ministry of Culture. It’s a busy time for them, between our show and your grab for Jack Roderick’s House—but they seem to manage. They’ve got a crackerjack chief, you know. Sompong’s hand is in every pie.”

  Ankana smiled broadly, and in that moment a series of pennies dropped somewhere in Stefani’s mind.

  Jeff Knetsch was acquainted with Sompong. Jeff Knetsch, Max’s personal attorney and closest friend. According to Oliver, Knetsch had serious financial problems—and Suwannathat could help.

  “Jeff informed on Max,” she said aloud. “He kept tabs on Max’s private life, his movements, his legal problems, his dreams—and sold what he knew to Max’s worst enemy.”

  Ankana shrugged. “Darling, we’ve all got to survive. We prostitute ourselves in various ways. I wouldn’t throw stones, if I were you.”

  19

  Bangkok,

  1954

  No one in Bangkok—not even Alec McQueen—understood how much of a slave Roderick was to dance.

  He guarded the secret as one might a sexual perversion; but this man of cunning and solitude could trace the growth of his obsession through the high-water marks of his past life, knew the wrack it had left in heaps on his personal shore. It had begun when he was a boy, on a trip to Paris with his wealthy and cultured family-Jack at eight, all knees and knickerbockers, as his indulgent papa might have said. L’Après-midi d’un Faune, perhaps, or Rite of Spring—something pulsing and savage by Diaghilev. He’d sat on the edge of his Louis XVI chair, chin perched on his hands as he peered over the edge of the theater box, and after three hours of tumult and color, he was never the same.

  It was the sets, mostly—blocks of vivid paint, abandoned in feeling and beyond the bounds of classic restraint—that moved him as a boy. Later he understood that the shifting screens and monumental objects were mere expressions of something deeper: the violence of a dancer’s heart. He begged his mother to take him to the ballet during his vacations from St. Paul’s. He never spoke of these visits once he returned to school.

  At Princeton he scanned the papers for notices of traveling troupes, and bought furtive tickets as another man might visit a bordello. And at last, a thirty-year-old Manhattan bachelor, he took what funds he had and threw them into the Monte Carlo Ballet, George Balanchine’s experiment in the grand tradition of Diaghilev.

  It was there that Roderick met Joan—on her hands and knees with a paintbrush between her teeth.

  She was thirteen years younger than he, a debutante manqué with a piquant face and prominent collarbones. Her father had lost his fortune in the Crash of ’29; her mother was delicately described as “indisposed,” and resided in an institution somewhere in Poughkeepsie. Joan was an only child, headstrong and outrageously indulged; a product of serial governesses and despairing finishing schools and protracted transatlantic tours. She possessed one talent—the ability to cover large surfaces with brilliant color—an eye for form, and the desire to provoke.

  Her outfits were pastiches of old treasures and designer castoffs. Her body was careless and perfect and could bring a man to his knees. She laughed a great deal, at her own jokes and sometimes at others’. She could talk earnestly and drunkenly in smoky rooms until three in the morning, on behalf of social justice; and when Roderick met her he thought that they were driven by the same things: a repugnance for frivolity, a respect for art and truth. For Joan he abandoned Republicanism and took up with Democrats. As Roosevelt was then in power, a Brahmin like himself, this was no very great leap; but the conversion made him feel dangerously independent. He brought Joan home to meet his family in Delaware, and though he reveled in her cheeky looks and untamed views, he was vaguely reassured that she understood the use of fish knives and iced teaspoons.

  They were married four months later.

  He wanted to give her everything: clothes as bright as plumage, a studio that faced north. He sold his interest in the Monte Carlo Ballet and dedicated himself to architecture. Joan abandoned her set-painting job and dabbled in oils. The two of them sailed firmly out into the sea of Society in which they had both been launched, years before, and found the water not nearly so cold as they remembered.

  It was only in the midst of his son Rory’s third birthday, in 1939—a chance expression intercepted, a hand lingering too long—that Roderick understood. Joan required a full house for each of her performances, and she was cultivating a new leading man. Roderick was surrounded by props and scrims and bit players he hadn’t hired, a character always on the point of exiting. He found it a relief when the Japanese finally bombed Pearl Harbor.

  Another high-water mark in Roderick’s life, etched in torchlight on the back terrace: the night he first saw Fleur Pithuvanuk dance.

  There was nothing in the movements of lakhon to suggest Diaghilev; no echo of drums that conjured Debussy. A feral pulse, all the same. Roderick watched with his back to the wall and his cigarette burning between his fingers. Fleur turned, her arms outstretched in an attitude of war. The branching flames flickered. Fleur shuddered, her eyes lost and swooning; and his heart rose wildly in his chest.

  He employed all the tradecraft he had ever learned, by art or instinct, in stalking her.

  There were the casual comments to friends and acquaintances, when they chanced to thank him for the evening’s entertainment: Yes, those Thai girls are really quite good. They should get more support from the foreign community than they do. I’m thinking of speaking to the ambassador about it. There were the subtle hints to one of Alec’s reporters that he might consider donating silk to the lakhon production company. And when he chanced to learn that the latest American ambassador had a daughter who loved ballet, there was the utterly spontaneous proposal of a cross-cultural festival of dance, under the auspices of the embassy and Jack Roderick Silk.

  Philanthropy gave him cover. Philanthropy allowed him to observe Fleur’s lakhon troupe, in its severe rehearsals, for six weeks; and to shower the dancers with attention and flowers. Philanthropy gave him access to Fleur herself, and hours in which to memorize the line of her back, the tilt of her chin, the precise length of her smallest finger as it curled upward toward her wrist. She was lovely, ethereal and heartbreakingly sad, like a bird dying for lack of flight. With his palm clutched in the hand of the ambassador’s little girl, Roderick watched Fleur sway. And contemplated the ruin of Vukrit Suwannathat.

  She came to him on a night of torrential rain, two days before the cross-cultural festival was scheduled to close, and stood under the shelter of his house with her feet in the floodwaters of the khlong.

  “Fleur,” he said, from the pool of light at the top of the stairs. “What is it?”

  Her black hair streamed and her eyes were blank with terror; her lip torn where Vukrit had struck her. She had taken a bus and then walked through the flooded streets.

  “His wife. A terrible scene. I could not bear to stay, but when I tried to go he struck me in the face. I hate him, Jack.”

  It was the first time she had ever said his name. He went slowly down the steps, careful not to touch her. But she reached out a hand and placed it on his shoulder, as if they might waltz together beneath the soaring house; and though the monsoon air was heavy and warm, she trembled uncontrollably. He should have been warned.

  “Your lip,” he said. “It’s bleeding.”

  “I do not feel it.”

  He fetched her towels and a robe and as she changed her clothes he warmed sake over an open flame. The rain beat upon his red-tiled roof as though it were a boat battened down at harbor; the floor beneath his feet rocked and swam. He set down the sake and drew a steadying breath. He was forty-nine years old. He assumed she was not yet twenty.

  When he looked up, Fleur sat with her face toward the old brick terrace, watching the palm fronds whip in the storm. He crossed the room and proffered the sake.

  “Is there somewhere I could take you? A friend’s house
, perhaps?”

  Her head turned in alarm.

  “Urana—what about Urana?” he asked.

  Urana was the mistress of lakhon, a tight-lipped and exacting woman.

  “She will call Vukrit,” Fleur whispered, “and make me go back. Our troupe depends upon the Ministry of Culture.”

  He understood, then—the practiced abuse of power. Vukrit held one string of his government’s purse. The minister chose where to place the funds at his disposal. And in return, Urana was willing to act as pimp. There were other lakhon troupes for Vukrit to support; but as long as Fleur was available to the minister, Vukrit would support Urana’s. It was a classic business exchange in a land where everyone—everyone, Roderick thought—had something to sell.

  “He would never come here. It is the one house he fears to enter. He told me so himself. He hates you, Jack, as much as I hate him.”

  He should have been warned.

  But instead he touched her lip where the blood had dried. She closed her eyes and curled her cheek into his palm.

  “You’ll have to go back.”

  “Not for hours and hours,” she said dreamily. “Perhaps never.”

  It was a lie, of course. At the time, he believed lies would be enough.

  20

  Sompong Suwannathat intended to wait for darkness before he returned to the airport and his ministry plane.

  In the hours of sunlight that remained, Wu Fat put the men through their drills and set up target practice and offered Sompong a young Akha girl after their lunch of roasted kid.

  As night fell he visited the General’s shrine. It sat on a slight rise near a trickling stream, and prayer scarves hung from the nearby trees, saffron and scarlet. Sompong thought of the ashes melting deep into the alkaline soil. He thought of a gun butt, warm in his hand on that night fifteen years before. Then he tossed his cigarette aside and whistled for Wu Fat.

  The six men wore Royal Thai Army uniforms Sompong had borrowed from a friend at Defense. Wu Fat had a colonel’s stripes. The uniformed men fell into correct military line near the baggage hold, swinging the heroin sacks hand over hand from the Jeep into the plane. Wu Fat directed them and inspected each wooden crate of missiles and grenade launchers himself. The whole operation required only eighteen minutes, which was five minutes less than the first time they had done it.

  “I will return soon,” Sompong told Wu Fat. “Tomorrow night or perhaps Saturday morning. Prepare the hut for trial.”

  He saluted on the tarmac. Wu Fat raised his right hand and offered a blessing in Chinese. The plane’s engines roared and the men dropped backward into darkness.

  Twenty-three minutes after takeoff, Sompong drew a report out of his briefcase and found the page where he’d stopped reading that morning.

  Her hallmark is a short attention span. She’s intrigued with Max Roderick’s legacy in about the same measure as she was intrigued with Roderick himself. Give her a few weeks. She’ll move on.

  “You’re slipping, Mr. Krane,” he said softly into the shadows. “I never give a woman more time.”

  The hollow-eyed man in the Hard Rock T-shirt and the drawstring pants was staggering slightly as night began to fall on Khao San Road. He had not slept in thirty-six hours, he was jet-lagged and giddy on cheap beer, but his singing head kept terror at bay as long as the daylight remained.

  There’s a fascination frantic, in a ruin that’s romantic; do you think you are sufficiently decayed? Lines from The Mikado, executed in falsetto. There was another phrase Jeff Knetsch was searching for—the name of the operetta he could not remember: something about black dogs howling at the moon, and the ghosts’ high noon.

  The ghosts’ high noon.

  He came to rest by a public telephone kiosk, and fished aimlessly in his trouser pockets for a coin that might work in the machine. He could not find one.

  Was it envy, he wondered, of a life whose high points he’d never quite equaled? No, envy was too petty an emotion to warrant the absolute destruction of a man he’d loved. As he leaned against the booth in the fading heat of a tropic day, he remembered himself, suddenly, at the age of thirteen, teeth chattering with fear as he stared down the racecourse from the starting gate. The ice, perhaps, had shaken him—or was it the brutal falls of three previous competitors, one of them carried screaming off the course? Max at his elbow, impatient, incredulous. “The clock’s running! The buzzer sounded! Get off your ass, Knetsch!” He was still not sure whether Max pushed him, in the end.

  Max lived without hesitation. He never second-guessed. Knetsch controlled for every possible variable and only then moved forward. And he had risked too little. Until the final gamble: Sompong’s money on the table, his dearest friend’s life on the line.

  There was a shadow lurking beyond the corner of his eye, a shadow that vanished the instant he turned to stare. Go away, he pleaded, and heard a child’s shrill voice. Accusing him of something.

  What he needed was a drink. His hands were shaking and darkness was falling. Darkness cut both ways—it hid the predators as well as their prey.

  As he worked his way among the plastic chairs and metal tables of Joe’s Fish & Chip, it happened: a burly Asian with sleek black hair and dark glasses clipped his shoulder clumsily. The lawyer fell backward against a table, caught in the grip of claustrophobia so intense it bordered on panic. The Asian steadied himself with a hand at Jeff’s hip, and muttered some words in Thai. A second later he was gone.

  Jeff sucked in a shallow breath, sweat beading his forehead. The crush of bodies, the constant noise of tuk-tuk engines—he groped for a vacant seat at a table already occupied by two boys and sank into it.

  He was nursing his ninth beer of the day when the shadow at the corner of his eye materialized.

  Solid, immovable, blocking his view of the street. The boys sitting opposite—two Germans on holiday—looked alarmed.

  “Are you Jeffrey Knetsch?”

  “I used to be.”

  A gloved hand descended upon his arm. The police officer should have smiled at him, Jeff thought—he was, after all, an American. The two Germans pushed back their chairs. Jeff stumbled to his feet.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “You’re under arrest.”

  “For having a drink?”

  Like a conjurer, the officer pulled a small plastic bag of white powder from Jeff’s hip pocket. “Heroin possession. Please—come with me.”

  The main corridor of the Garden Wing was always empty, despite the fact that at least twenty guest rooms lined the hallway and each had a butler dancing attendance. They danced, Stefani presumed, well out of sight; and the guests themselves were too busy to spend much time in transit from elevator to luxury suite.

  It was the dinner hour at the Oriental, but Stefani intended to order room service. She needed quiet and privacy. Her visit to Spencer’s office that afternoon had given her too much to consider. She knew, now, that Sompong Suwannathat had run two agents in Courchevel the previous March: Jeff Knetsch and Ankana Lee-Harris. Either might easily have sabotaged Max’s skis and caused his crippling fall. Knetsch had been in France again when Max died. And now both Ankana and Knetsch had arrived in Bangkok—to watch her claim Max’s inheritance?

  The battle lines had shifted. Yesterday she’d assumed she was in charge of this campaign—but Sompong had anticipated and outmaneuvered her. She could feel him at work in Jo-Jo’s shadow, behind Ankana’s shrewd eyes; she could sense his malevolence as she had once glimpsed, fleetingly, the man’s profile in the depths of his limousine. She would have to step lightly if his net was not to close upon her.

  Where the hell is Oliver Krane? Rush Halliwell had been right to warn her. She needed to watch her back.

  She thrust her key into the door. As it swung open, a hand closed around her neck like a vise. The room was plunged into complete darkness.

  The iron hand at her neck dragged her across the threshold; the door slammed shut. Wildly, she swung out as a se
cond hand gripped her hair, forcing her head back. There was no sound but the tearing gasp of her breath. From the power of the gloved hand and the thickness of the fingers, she guessed her attacker was male. She scrabbled at the wrist nearest her throat, nails clawing.

  Useless. She couldn’t breathe. There was a soft metallic click—a sound she recognized sickeningly—and she knew instantly how it would be: the switchblade unerring through the darkness, the spurt of blood bubbling at her neck. Over in a matter of seconds.

  She reached back with both hands, gripped the man’s shoulders, then bent double with such sudden force that her assailant was thrown off balance. He flipped over her head, landing heavily on his back. Something skittered over the carpet—the switchblade, with any luck. Stefani lunged for the man’s chest, her hands driving for his throat. The C-clamp Oliver had taught her: shove inward, upward against the Adam’s apple. The black-clad Ken doll shrieked. She had to silence the alarm. She had to turn it off—

  His windpipe moved beneath her fingers, then collapsed like a soft-boiled egg. The man gave one choking sigh and lay lifeless on the floor.

  Gulping air, Stefani scrambled to her feet. Her hand jabbed at the lights.

  He lay face upward, a woman’s stocking grotesquely flattening his features. In that instant she knew.

  She had expected Jo-Jo. This man was a stranger.

  21

  Chiang Rai Province,

  1955

  Jack Roderick had been on the road for the first three weeks of June 1955. He’d lurched in a borrowed Jeep over the dirt tracks of Khorat and up into the mountains of Laos. Everywhere he saw the poverty and hardscrabble existence of the Asian countryside, but on this trip—his first in months—there was a new and more sinister presence: guns. Boys as young as ten carried rifles jauntily on their backs; they fired bullets at makeshift targets the way they had once lobbed stones at the river. When Roderick tried to learn where the weapons came from, he got vague or mendacious answers. The boys clutched at his hands, pleading for coins, but they told him lies.