The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

He’d taken off his shoes then and scooted across the floor in his grandson’s wake while Rory watched them: balancing, balancing.

  * * *

  The breeze was halfhearted in the banana trees, the air thick with moisture. The glare of neon in the red-light district was something new in recent years, electric sketches of faceless nymphs flexing their endless legs. Howling floated down the block as he stood, repulsed and fascinated, under the arched gates; it was a compound of men, Americans mostly, off the ships that had begun to troll the China Sea.

  “The girls wear numbers,” Alec McQueen had told him once, “pinned to their breasts. You pick them off the shelf like candy bars. Jack, you ought to come with me sometime. It makes old Miss Lucy’s look positively quaint.”

  The boys from Spokane and Des Moines and Raleigh had no idea that the women of Siam were among the most bashful on earth, that the display of a shoulder in public was considered licentious, or that the nude country girls working diligently under the harsh lights were amassing their dowries and only tolerated the looks and touch of these farang soldiers because money was money and marriage was everything.

  In her years at the house on the khlong had Fleur been just another working girl? Amassing riches and secrets against some rainy day, when dancing no longer sustained her? Roderick could not say. He had believed in Fleur’s love because she was necessary to his happiness. He knew nothing of what she had felt or all that she had hidden—only what she had sold.

  He turned his back on Patpong.

  It seemed to him that this city he loved—a place of waterways and dancers as lovely as birds, of gilded temples and jasmine bloom—was a fruit left too long to rot. The taint of war and death was upon it.

  He flagged down a taxi and went home.

  * * *

  It was past three-thirty in the morning when at last he mounted the stairs of the house on the khlong. There was a torch burning in the entrance hall and other lights elsewhere; but he thought nothing of this because Rory was visiting, and perhaps young Max suffered from nightmares. He imagined a pot of milk warmed by the houseboy, and Max’s legs kicking at the bedcovers as he drank. Rory’s hands smoothing the child’s hair. He had done that himself quite often in Rory’s early years—a father’s mute gesture of love. But as he turned toward the terrace he heard a murmur of voices through the open doors. Max’s bedroom was dark.

  Two people leaned against the railing—Rory and another man in uniform. Roderick’s gaze swept the length of that never-to-be-forgotten figure and he felt his heart leap. “Billy Lightfoot,” he said softly. “You old son of a gun.”

  “Where the hell you been, Jack?” his OSS trainer chortled. “A grandpa like you shoulda been in bed long ago!”

  Lightfoot seized his palm and slapped his shoulder and guffawed with the grand American bonhomie of a man accustomed to giving orders. That quickly they were both returned to the open door of the jump plane out of Ceylon—August 14, 1945—and Roderick could have sworn he was thirty-nine years old with a drop-dead letter and seven dollars’ worth of Thai baht jingling in his pocket.

  “Son of a gun,” he repeated. “What are you doing in Bangkok? And why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  “Wouldn’t have been a surprise,” Lightfoot rejoined unabashedly. “Thought I’d turn up like a bad penny and have the Legendary American show me the town. Course, you were already out wining and dining. House-boy very nearly wouldn’t let me in.”

  “Chanat is trained to turn the world away.”

  Lightfoot must be over sixty, now, but hard as iron; a ramrod soldier to the death. White hair flecked his temples. His eyes were piercing in the half-light of the terrace.

  “It’s damn good to see you, Billy. You’ve met my son?”

  “Fine boy, though he chose the wrong service. Remember seeing his picture when he was just in diapers.” He punched Rory’s shoulder, a gesture Roderick could never have managed without awkwardness. The command of men, he thought, surveying the two faces, lit by a kindred flush of power and certainty. Billy’s always had it in the blood.

  “You made flag rank.” Roderick eyed Lightfoot’s uniform. “Brigadier general. That’s grand. Come into the house and have a drink.”

  Lightfoot shook his head. “Rory here made me some java and it set me up great. Drove down from Khorat in a Jeep and the thing damn near broke my back, plowing through those ruts. Man! This country!”

  “Khorat?” Roderick was arrested by the word. “Why in God’s name go there? Nobody does.”

  “They will,” Lightfoot said sagely. “You know we’ve been beefing up the Royal Thai Air Force over the past few years—giving ’em training and planes we don’t really need—and they’ve been flying air recon for us since ’60.”

  “Over Laos?”

  “Of course, Laos. Place is a hellhole. They’ve got a three-pronged civil war sapping the bejesus out of the countryside—the Communist Pathet Lao, the centrists, the ultraright military faction—and we’ve had reports that North Vietnamese Army regulars are integrating with the rank-and-file Pathet Lao. You see what that means.”

  “An extension of the conflict from Vietnam to Laos.” The war jumping like brushfire from treetop to treetop until all of Southeast Asia was ablaze.

  “Damn straight. Pathet Lao have already shot down some of our planes.”

  “And Khorat makes a perfect staging ground for retaliation.”

  “It’d be illegal to fight this war on Thai soil. We’re not gonna throw bombers into the sky from the northeast— though it’d make a lot of sense, I don’t have to tell you. Pentagon sent me out to find a good staging ground for air recon, pilot rescue and the like. We need that goddamn wasteland they got around Khorat—no people, no rain, no livestock for the F-One-oh-Wonders to buzz.”

  “Just mulberry trees,” Roderick murmured, “and clay pots. You may not plan to fight the war on Thai soil, Billy, but you can’t avoid it. Half the Thais in the northeast are ethnic Lao and Khmer.”

  “Then we’d better make damn sure they know which way their loyalties lie.”

  “With their families. They don’t understand anything else.”

  “We’ll have to start schooling ’em,” Lightfoot said stringently. “We’re not just fighting little men in pajamas and lampshades, Jack. We’re fighting Khrushchev himself. You know what the Russkie bastard said, coupla years back—the U.S.S.R supports these ‘national wars of liberation.’ Seems to me wars are breaking out all over your neighborhood, and you’re content to let the Sovs just roll on in.”

  “Dad—” A strange word in Rory’s mouth. He was flushed with impatience. “Everyone has to choose which side they’re on. Ours—or the Communist Party’s. Thailand’s no exception.”

  Since when have you been an expert on Southeast Asia? Roderick thought. But all he said was, “How can I help, Billy?”

  “I’m due to be posted to Vientiane next month.” Lightfoot beamed. “Military advisor, they’re calling it. I can’t wait to get back into the action again.”

  “Vientiane is a beautiful city.”

  “Probably spend most of my damn time checking the bottom of the Jeep for bombs. Bound to be a target. That Pathet Lao don’t fool around, you know. One of your old friends is pretty high up in the organization—fella by the name of Tao Oum.”

  Tao Oum. Roderick understood, now, the reason for Lightfoot’s sudden visit. Lightfoot had gone operational: Roderick was his best hope for a subagent with access.

  “Rory,” he told his son, “thanks for entertaining Billy. We’ll have a late breakfast in the morning.”

  “I’m not tired,” Rory replied.

  “Kid don’t need to leave on my account,” Lightfoot said easily. “Hell, he’ll be fighting this war in another coupla months. Deserves to know what’s at stake, right? Training in A-4s, he tells me. Pentagon’s got plans for those.”

  “He’s not a kid,” Roderick objected, and heard the strain in his voice. “I hope to God we’re out o
f this before he has to fly bombing runs over Hanoi.”

  “I think I’m the best judge of that.”

  “Of course you do, Rory. But you’ve no idea what this war will be like. I’m betting it won’t match up to the diagrams in the strategy books.”

  “Not if we hit hard, and hit early,” Rory argued.

  The weariness and age Roderick had felt earlier in the evening were like coils of rope, twined about his chest, throttling his throat. He wanted to tear at them with his hands, cast their weight into the khlong. He wanted to watch the years sink from sight like dead leaves.

  “Since when did you turn defeatist, Jack?” Lightfoot demanded. “Wasn’t part of your OSS training, far’s I can tell. Remember how the Japs ran, that day we landed here in Bangkok? I was just telling Rory what this place was like, before his old man moved in and took over.”

  “I didn’t take over, Billy. Nobody does, in Asia.”

  “Seems to me that’s the crux of the problem.”

  “Hear, hear,” Rory muttered.

  Behind the brisk impatience of both of them lay a continent’s worth of ignorance. Roderick’s heart sank. He glanced at his son’s face and saw disdain for this father who’d gone native, who was so patently out of step.

  And so he’ll make war, Roderick realized, in spite of Max and the wife he loves and the future before him, to prove he owes nothing to me. To show the world we’re utterly different people. Jesus, this life and everyone in it are fucked.

  “This isn’t the time for false sympathy, Jack.” Lightfoot sounded confused—worried, even, as though in the dark he’d blundered against a stranger. “If we don’t stop the cancer in Laos and Vietnam, it’ll spread to Thailand next—and your silk business will be one big Commie co-op.”

  “It already is, Billy. I set it up that way.”

  “Shit—you been gone from the States too long.”

  “Perhaps I have.” Roderick reached for the packet of cigarettes he was not supposed to smoke and lit one deliberately. “And maybe you’ve been gone too little.”

  There was a tense silence as Lightfoot considered and changed tactics. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Nobody’s got this neighborhood down like the Legendary American—you know that’s what they call you up in Khorat? We need your help, Jack—and I’m not afraid to ask for it.”

  An encircling maneuver, Roderick thought, once the frontal assault has failed.

  “I’ve been reading reports,” Lightfoot went on. “Rafts and reams of ’em, to get me up to speed. Reports in Washington, reports on the transport plane over here, reports that date back twenty years. Agency stuff, mostly. The covert boys are all over the hills of northern Laos. But I liked the old pieces best—the real background. You wrote most of those papers.”

  Roderick blinked as the smoke bit at his eyelids. “That was a long time ago. I sell silk now.”

  “Your networks,” Lightfoot persisted. “The guys you used to run. Some of ’em must still be out there. You must know what happened to ’em. Like that Tao Oum, in Vientiane. Think he’s open to reason? A heart-to-heart with his old pal Roderick?”

  “From what I know of Agency operations in Tao Oum’s neck of the woods,” Roderick replied, “I’d get a bullet in the brain if I so much as contacted him.”

  The undeclared war in Laos had been raging, now, for three years. It was conducted through sabotage and betrayal and payoffs and throat-slitting; it involved the parachuting of trained double agents into the countryside, where they were invariably captured, killed or doubled back against the next team to be dropped at night. Roderick was familiar with the charming, well-mannered young men who orchestrated such operations. He had entertained the first wave of them at his home on the khlong, before he understood what they were prepared to do. He recognized in their classically molded faces and their extensive educations the natural successors of the men’s club he’d known in the OSS-recognized, too, that the Good Fight of 1945 had evolved into the Cold War, where ideals were secondary to expediency. He’d come to loathe the profound ignorance of region and culture these men exhibited; loathed their self-assurance and the offhand way they spoke of casualties, as though death were a tool like any other they deployed. He had thrown elections in his day, but never entire countries into the maw of civil war. In November of 1960 he resigned his unofficial, unmentionable espionage role—a life that had been second nature for as long as he could remember—and settled down to sell silk full-time, instead of secrets. He tried not to regard this as a defeat.

  “I assume the CIA is still in touch with the agents I once ran,” Roderick said. “They’d be happy to brief you before you head out to post. But I told you, Billy: I retired from the business a good while back. I didn’t like the trend I saw in local politics.”

  “Then help us reverse the trend.” Lightfoot gripped his shoulder painfully, a soldier’s weight in his fingers, bearing down. “What about your old buddy holed up in the hills—the guerilla commander? Code name Carlos. He worked with Pridi Banomyong during the war, and went AWOL soon after. You never gave him to the Agency handlers.”

  “I have no idea where he is.” Roderick’s face was rigid with suppressed rage. Not Carlos. Never Carlos. I will be true to one thing in the end, at least.

  Lightfoot glanced at Rory. “Your Old Man doesn’t get it, son. This is a war we’re fighting!”

  “Dad,” Rory said with brittle anger, “if the General’s asking for help, don’t you think you should give it? You owe it to your country. To me, for God’s sake. I’m the one whose life will be on the line.”

  Oh, Rory, he thought, you burn to put it there.

  “This Carlos,” Lightfoot continued. “He’s got Chinese in his troops—you wrote that, in your reports.”

  “Nationalist Chinese,” Roderick reminded him patiently. “They hate the Communists, Billy. They’re not a threat to U.S. security.”

  “Those boys in the hills are vicious as hell,” Lightfoot countered. “They’re mercenaries. They know the border country, they’ve got jungle tactics. A gift or a curse to U.S. forces, depending how they’re handled. We need to sign ’em up for our side, before Uncle Ho adds ’em to his column.”

  “And if they want no part of a foreign war?”

  “Then we neutralize ’em, before they stab us in the back.” Lightfoot’s eyes had hardened. “Come on, Jack. You know the score. Remember Miss Lucy’s? The broad in the whorehouse marking time, while you whacked that backroom goon?”

  “You knew about that?”

  “About what?” Rory’s head swiveled from one man to the other.

  “I put two and two together,” Lightfoot retorted. “Didn’t take a rocket scientist. One night we’re touring the torture district, and the next the torture chief is dead.”

  “Miss Lucy sold out seven years ago, Billy, and you already know enough about Carlos. You don’t need me.”

  “I need to know where your sympathies lie, Jack.” Lightfoot stepped closer, his massive chest like a blunt wall. “You handled this joker for years. I’m giving you a choice: Take our position to Carlos and get his commitment in writing. Sign him up for our side.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “… Then stand down. And don’t cry at the consequences.”

  Roderick studied Billy Lightfoot—his cropped hair, his clear gaze, his untroubled brow. Billy fought the good fights. Billy carried certainty in his heart. Billy understood that the world was one of brute survival, a place where friendship and trust and obligation were secondary to the demands of the nation he served. Billy was fortunate in having only one country to love, only one way of life that made sense. He had never lived in the wilderness between black and white, where every secret agent ends.

  “I want no part of your war,” Roderick told him softly, “and I’ll act as I think best.”

  Later, he could not have said whether it was Billy’s fist or Rory’s that hit him first.

  He stood at the head of the stairs, wat
ching Lightfoot descend in blunt, angry steps. It was nearly dawn. He held a white silk handkerchief to his bleeding nose and Rory— who should have thought of his career, and left with Lightfoot in a hired taxi, never to return—was crouching in the doorway of Max’s bedroom.

  “It’s okay, Max,” he told the four-year-old, over and over, stroking his hair just as Roderick had imagined he would. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep. It will all be fine in the morning.”

  4

  Awareness that one is a hunted animal will focus the mind wonderfully; but not, it seemed, upon I Was Amelia Earhart. Abandoned in Rush Halliwell’s apartment, Stefani found the character of the doomed aviatrix uncongenial. She dropped her book a mere twelve minutes after Rush’s exit, and roamed restlessly about his apartment in search of distraction.

  She did not, as he suspected, watch at his window to be certain he was truly bound for the embassy. She ran one finger over a Bencharong vase he had placed squarely in the middle of his bookshelf and scanned the few photographs, mostly European landscapes—there seemed a marked absence of people in Rush’s private world—that he had propped on surfaces about the room. She had no interest, as some partygoers might, in examining the bathroom medicine cabinet for clues to his weaknesses. She was leashed like a dog in the confines of her own mind, prowling the walls without discovering an escape hatch. Flight, Rush had said, is not an option.

  It occurred to her that if the sum of a person’s talents might be regarded as, for example, a mutual fund—then she had performed very poorly since her departure from FundMarket. She had operated on untested assumptions: that Oliver possessed integrity, and valued her as a person; that her instincts were sound; that her native intelligence would save her from mortal error. When viewed in retrospect, however, her actions of the past eight months were appalling. She had misjudged almost everyone. She had badly miscalculated the level of risk in the games she played, and fatally underestimated the depth of her own entanglement. Sompong Suwannathat had possessed greater knowledge of her movements than she had known of his; he had outmaneuvered her from the start. It was reasonable, in sum, to feel like an ignorant fool.