Assignment - Bangkok

by Edward S. Aarons

  He was ready for her.

  He heard the faint click of the clasp as she opened the linen handbag on the bed beside them. He couldn’t see it, the bag was down at her side and below his line of vision, but at the instant that he felt the muscular tension in her right arm, he moved, rolling off her and away, turning his head to see the steely flicker of the needlelike knife in her hand.

  She was quick and surprisingly strong. The blade came down for his back with tremendous force. Her face was contorted her mouth open, her tongue wet against her teeth as she struck. He was not quite fast enough. The edge of the blade was like a razor, slicing through the skin on his left arm as it came down. He rolled all the way apart from her, feeling the hot pain of the wound down to his fingertips. The girl made a hissing sound of exasperation as the knife thudded into the bed. Then she rolled away, too, as fast as a cat, her nude body catching the light from the bathroom door. Durell plunged his hand under the pillow and came up with his short-barreled .38 S&W. Ku rolled again, on her knees, and pulled the knife free of the bedding. Her face glared with hatred, her dark hair swung before her eyes as she slashed at him again with feline speed.

  He had no choice: he aimed for her shoulder, but she was moving too fast, coming at him across the bed with the blade. The sharp, sudden report of his gun did not make too much noise in the hotel room. A hole appeared between her breasts, and she kept coming forward, falling, her eyes suddenly, wide, blank and empty. The knife caught his forearm again and slashed across the back of his wrist. He caught her as she fell forward, face down. “Ku? About Jimmy James—”

  She made a small sound, a whisper of breath that escaped from between her white teeth. The knife slid from her hand. Durell swore softly. His arm was bleeding badly. Quietly, he disentangled himself from the girl.

  She was dead.

  27

  Durell went back into the bathroom and washed his arm and took antiseptic ointment from his suitcase and daubed it on and then tore one of his shirts into strips and bandaged his forearm and the back of his wrist, then applied tape to it. It was quiet in the room. No one seemed to have heard the shot he had fired. When he had the bleeding stopped, he dressed, picking a dark suit and another white shirt and a dark necktie. He went to the corridor door and locked it. Ku Tu Thiet’s nude body lay like marble across the bed.

  The big yellow handbag had fallen off the bed and spilled its contents on the floor—lipstick, comb, coin purse, a currency roll of high-denomination bahts in a man’s gold clip that looked as if it might have been Jimmy’s, or a gift from Jimmy. He used her Thai silk handkerchief to pick up the bag and open it wide, being careful about it, and unzipped the inner side pocket, which bulged a little. From it he took out two plastic caps like black buttons, about an inch in diameter. He frowned, weighing these in the flowery, perfumed handkerchief, and he wondered what Miss Ku had been doing with plastic explosive. He put the caps in his pocket and opened the manila envelope which she had said held proof of James D. James’ involvement with the Muc Tong. He expected to find nothing in it, and he was right. All it contained was a thick, folded wad of yellow typing paper, all blank. It made him feel a little better for what had happened, then.

  He picked up Miss Ku’s slender little knife and wiped his blood off the blade, using tissue from the bathroom and flushing the bloody paper down the toilet. The knife was a gem, the handle intricately carved with small Thai motifs and with a ruby-like jewel at the top of the gold hilt. He decided to keep it, and slipped it into his jacket pocket, covering the honed steel blade with one of his own handkerchiefs wadded thickly around the razor-like edge.

  He did not look at her body again. He went to the telephone and called the Embassy number and spoke to the communications man who had helped him file his report to Washington. The Embassy man’s name was Rogers.

  Durell said briefly, “You’ll have to call the police, of course. Anonymously, and make it Internal Security. You’ll have to wipe my name from the hotel register. Make it look like a lover’s quarrel. Put in a fictitious Thai male name for my room. You’ll have to use all the squeeze you can, Rogers. It’ll cost, but it has to be done.”

  “What will you be doing?”

  “I’m moving out.”

  “You’d better get over here, Mr. Durell.”

  “Can’t do that, yet. Have you heard from Mr. James?” “Nothing, sir. Not a word.”

  “He may be dead,” Durell said. “But I’ve got to look for him.”

  “Won’t that be a bit risky, sir?”

  Durell could still smell Miss Ku’s perfume in the room. “What isn’t risky?” he said softly, and hung up.

  Outside the hotel, he took a taxi and told the driver to head for the Chao Phraya River. Traffic was heavy, and he thought he might have done better using a motorized sam-law that could weave through the congestion. It was only nine o’clock in the evening.

  His left leg ached again, and when they passed an American-type drug store, he told the driver to stop and wait, and he went in and purchased an elastic knee bandage and slipped it on behind the counter. He bought some aspirin, asked the druggist for water, and took three tablets, then returned to the cab. In the back seat, he unwrapped Miss Ku’s knife and slipped it into the knee bandage on his left leg. It would not be too easy to get at speedily, but it might still be useful, he thought.

  Near James D. James’ house, he had the taxi wait, and walked the short distance down the narrow soi that led toward the klong and the river. The lane was dark, and the adjacent houses behind their private walls looked peaceful and innocent enough. The gate to James’ property was not locked. No lights shone from the windows under the wide sweep of gracefully tiled roof. He stopped just inside the gate, in the deep shadow of a tall oleander bush, and simply stood and listened and watched. He was filled with a sense of urgency that fought against the need for patience. Through the shadows, it seemed that the ornate front door stood ajar, with a column of darkness just showing where he could look inside. Starlight gleamed on the small brass name plate beside the door. Nothing moved. He heard a boat go by on the klong. A radio played Thai ballet music. He did not hear or smell the cats. Their cages across the lawn seemed to be empty. The absence of the cats troubled him.

  After a time, he walked through the shadows and reached the overhang of the upturned roof eaves; he approached the door from the side. Nobody stopped or challenged him. He used his fingertips to ease the door all the way open.

  There was a spitting sound, a brief yowl, and small feet scampered away into the large living room. The house was black with shadow, silver with reflected fight that came through the windows. He saw all of the cats then, small shapes with great eyes shining in the darkness, all watching him. He drew his gun and went all the way in.

  Nothing was the same. The place looked as if a wild animal had gone on a rampage through it. The coffee table was smashed, the elegant draperies torn from their brass rods over the windows, pictures pulled down from the wall, cushions ripped open and emptied of their stuffing, the rugs pulled back and hurled to one side. The place was empty. He walked through the forest of overturned furniture, and the cats gathered silently around him, watching. They followed him through the kitchen, and he looked at the open cupboards, the small mountain of utensils piled on the floor, the open oven door. They had even taken the heating elements out of the built-in stove, in their search.

  The search was too thorough to have been done quickly. What was done here had taken hours, and they hadn’t cared to hide their effort, certainly.

  Durell went into the bedroom and saw that the bed had been torn apart, ripped open, the pillows emptied, the wardrobe closets scorned; James’ elegant clothing was piled in ripped and crumpled tatters on the floor. He went on into the radio room. The GK transceiver was smashed. The locks on the files were broken, and the dossiers and folders were gone. He made a faint clucking sound, and one of the cats spoke to him in reply and suddenly jumped on his shoulder. He let it st
ay there. It was the Lilac Point. He spoke to the Siamese quietly, soothing it, and it stopped clawing at his shoulder and let him carry it about.

  There would be hell to pay over K Section Central’s missing files here in Bangkok. But that was for Washington to worry about.

  Nowhere was there any trace of personal violence to James himself. Or any trace of James.

  In every Central station there was an emergency cache, that followed a world-wide system of coded locations. In James’ house in Bangkok, Durell knew, the code was Sigma Fifteen. He went back to the front door, carrying Phan on his shoulder. At the door he faced inward and then paced off fifteen steps along the wall to his left. A couch had stood in front of this wall, but it had been pulled out several feet from the paneled wall and overturned and ripped apart with a large knife, so that the stuffing stood out in great balls and strands, like a man’s intestines when his stomach has been ripped open. The thought made him pause. The paneling on the wall was of fine Philippine mahogany, and there had been a picture hanging here. The hook was still in the wood, but the painting had been taken down and the back paper torn off and then thrown across the room. Durell touched the hook, and Phan clawed at his shoulder and murmured. The eyes of the other cats were luminous glowing circlets in the shadowed, silent room.

  Durell traced the fine, almost microscopic lines of a small door built into the paneling. He didn’t think the emergency cache had been opened, but he went across the room and picked up one of the long brass curtain rods and took the time to bend one end into a hook that would catch the one nailed into the wall that had held the painting.

  When he was satisfied, he returned along the wall and flattened against it at the distance of the rod and then maneuvered the brass pole so that it caught on the picture hook. He was eight feet away from the wall safe. His first attempt to pull the door open failed. The Lilac Point jumped from his shoulders with a hissing sound. He waited, watching all the cats, but they did not go out of the room. He tried the rod again, caught it in the hook, and swung it more carefully, pulling it with a sudden yank that all at once released the spring mechanism and opened the door.

  The room thundered and shook and lit up with a brief flare of red light. The explosion gushed outward, shooting bits of metal and debris from the square hole in the wall. If he had been standing in front of the little door, he would have had his head blown off.

  He coughed from the acrid smoke that filled the house. A window across the room cracked and a large piece of glass slowly slid from the sash and broke on the floor. The echoes of the explosion seemed endless.

  Durell felt in his pocket and took out the two plastic detonator buttons he had found in Miss Ku Tu Thiet’s handbag. He tossed them away, and felt even better when he thought of her lying dead in his hotel room.

  He wasted no further time in the house. The explosion would surely bring inquiries from neighbors, and eventually the local police.

  When he left, he opened the front door wide and urged the cats out ahead of him. They were not reluctant to leave the house now. They scampered out on the lawn, tails erect, and headed for the gate and vanished.

  Durell walked back to the taxi.

  28

  “Benjie?”

  “Yo, Sam. You woke me up.”

  Her voice did not sound sleepy. He said, “Where is Mike?”

  “In his bed, where else? I had our doctor come and put a cast on his ankle. It was fractured, actually, so he’s laid up for a while. Shall I call him to the phone?”

  “No.”

  She said, “Are you all right?”

  “More or less.”

  “Still working?”

  “Trying. Have you had any visitors?”

  “Nobody. Like cops, you mean?”

  “Like people taking your house apart. Like people coming in to kill you.”

  “Oh, you and your spook business.” She laughed. “Sam —darling? Why don’t you come over here and rest for the night?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Then come on over. Mike is asleep with a sedative. We can—well, I’m wide awake now. I went to sleep thinking about you.”

  “Benjie, lock your doors. Lock your windows. Stay awake, whether I get there or not.”

  “You sound strange, Sam. Are you in trouble?”

  “No, I’m fine. Just be careful.”

  “I thought it was all over,” she protested. “You aren’t really working now, are you? Not really? I thought you were all set to leave tomorrow, and I feel funny about it, your going away on your damned spook business, just when we—when you and I—”

  “I’ll see you later,” Durell said. “Don’t open your doors to anyone but me.”

  “Nobody wants anything from me now,” she said. “I don’t have anything anyone could possibly want.” “Probably not. But be careful, anyway.”

  He hung up. The taxi was waiting outside the restaurant where he had made the telephone call. He got in, favoring his bandaged knee, and tried to remember the name of the alley where Uncle Hu lived. It wouldn’t come to his mind. He was too tired, he thought. He was pushing himself too far, too fast. But he couldn’t stop now. It was the only place he could think of, the only thing he could do next. He told the driver to go across the bridge over the Chao Phraya and directed him to the left, down the narrow street for several blocks. After a short distance he recognized the watergate market, where sampans and barges huddled in dark shadows, and the smells of cooking and marketing vegetables filled the warm night. The poor houses that crowded at the edge of the klong, the endless murmur of voices, babies crying, men talking, radios blaring, and the general press of life behind the bamboo-curtained windows, was not the sort of environment that James D. James would have appreciated.

  Uncle Hu’s house, like James’ house, was dark and silent when he approached. He remembered the klong pit and the tunnel and the kamoys who had attacked him here when he had first arrived in Bangkok. Only seventy-two hours had gone by since then. He paused, then crossed the tiny garden with its spirit house on a pole. The bottle of whiskey and the wad of money he had left on the tiny, ornate platform to placate the phis and Uncle Hu were gone. He walked on down to the edge of the canal, under the leaning palm trees. The sampan was still there, tied to a tall bamboo pole. A dim light glowed in the tiny cabin up forward.

  Durell drew back into the shadows. A boat went by on the canal, its wake made the sampan rock a little at its mooring. Across the canal, he could see the blue flicker of a television set through a window opening on a veranda. A child cried. A woman sang. He felt oppressed both by life and death.

  Finally he stepped down onto the sampan. Behind him, Hu’s house remained dark and silent. The light boat tipped under his weight as he moved forward among the pots and pans and clay jars and fish nets used by the old Thai in his daily business.

  “Uncle Hu?” he called softly.

  The old man sat motionlessly in the tiny cabin, in front of his charcoal stove. His ancient eyes, like a lizard’s, were wide open, staring at nothing. For a moment, Durell thought he was dead. Then the old man blinked and slowly lifted a blue china cup of tea to his dry mouth. His gnarled, work-hardened hands trembled slightly.

  “Uncle Hu.”

  “Ah, it is the fahrang once again, with his mixed blessings.”

  “You sound bitter, Uncle.”

  “Should I not be?” the old man whispered. “My wife Aparsa, the two nephews . . .”

  “Kem is alive and meditating in the mountains.”

  The old man’s eyes blinked again. “You have seen him?”

  “He has been very helpful. The debt is discharged.” “Ah.”

  “Are you all right, Uncle?”

  “I am not well. I am lonely. I am thinking of another wife. But you should not come to my house again. You should go away.”

  Durell felt a shock at the old man’s words. It was not in the Thai tradition to be inhospitable, whatever the situation. He stared at Hu’s wrinkle
d face, but he could read nothing in its lined and seamy contours. He smelled the tea, smelled dried fish. The ancient lizard eyes blinked again.

  “Go,” Hu said.

  “I am looking for a man.”

  “You looked before. You found him.”

  “A fahrang,” Durell persisted. “My boss, in a way. His name is James D. James.”

  “Go away,” said Hu.

  “Have you seen such a fahrang?”

  “There is nothing but death here, nothing but desolation in my house. I do not say that it was you who brought it, Nai Durell. It is not for me to say that one dies because of another’s acts. It is the will of Buddha, and it is sometimes cruel and inscrutable, this work of Heaven, and I am not a man who likes to turn the other cheek, as you Christians claim that one must do. I do not see you doing so, in any case. You axe all barbarians. And you think that we Thai are barbarians, in our way. We do not understand each other. Go away.”

  “Have you seen James? Did he come here?”

  “Yes.”

  “When? How?”

  “Today. Not long ago. You persist? I have warned you to leave. I have seen too many evil things in my life.” The old man sighed and put down his teacup. His twisted hands were steady now. It was as if he had been sitting here on his sampan, not knowing who or what to expect, and now that he saw it was Durell who had come aboard his boat, he felt better. But there was little of this in his brown face and dark old eyes. He said, “I am not alone here. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Durell said.

  “There is no help to be had anywhere. A man must gain his own revenge. It is not written that one should act in cruelty or vengeance, but man is what he is, and evil lives in him as well as good, and so he is always torn, first this way and then that, and afterward he does not know what he has done to his soul.”

  “Is James still here?” Durell asked.

  “He came to look for you, and said you were a bad man, a traitor to your country. Or so he thought. He also looked for another fahrang, a man named Mike Slocum. He said you had both tried to betray him.”