by Alisa Smith
“Some queer things are going to happen tonight, but don’t mind them nor interfere,” Bill said.
“Okay,” I said, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant. I drifted over to Bill’s favourite armchair, where a reading lamp shone a bright circle onto a book with a cheap paper cover: Handbook of Irregular Warfare. I picked it up and looked over the page it was open to, where a passage was underlined. “Never give the enemy a chance. Every soldier must be a potential gangster.” It was crossed out and altered to say, “Every gangster must be a potential soldier.”
“A little light reading?” I asked.
“I like to stay informed. Call me a renaissance man.” Bill took the book from my hands, marked the page with a bookmark, and put it in a drawer.
“What queer things might I expect tonight?” I was curious despite myself.
“Shouting, crying, banging, caterwauling, and general commotion. From the servant’s room on the third floor.”
I felt a sudden alarm that he meant to kill Link with his bare hands. No matter my feelings for him, I could not stand by for that.
“I’m doing him a favour. He’s a junkie. I’m getting him clean. I judge it’ll take four days. He’s not so far gone.” Bill sat down in his green velvet armchair. “But he’s going to suffer.”
“This is a new one. Get a man off drugs? You’ll lose a customer through this.” I stared at the books on the shelves, left behind by the previous owner, in all languages under the sun. The bindings were tooled leather embossed with gold. Bill only clung to this collection, remnants of a finer intellect, to put on a pose for his guests.
“By God, you misunderstand me. I have no pity for people who get into drugs for a lark. That’s what I did, and it was my own damn foolery. But a nurse shot up this man with morphine, day after day in that hospital, and he became an addict against his will. That’s not right.”
“True enough. Good luck, then.” I left the library. I don’t know why Bill’s words bothered me. I should want him to be a decent man.
* * *
I HARDLY SLEPT a wink that night. There wasn’t exactly caterwauling as Bill predicted, but it sounded like someone was tap-dancing across the ceiling and Link yammered on and on. After I heard him yell “Lena” once, I muffled my head with pillows. At least I knew Dass was standing guard outside Link’s door, so there was no likelihood that he would rampage through the house.
Bill and I took breakfast in the conservatory surrounded by orchids. The peace was welcome after the disruptions of the night. I cracked open my egg with a small silver knife, and Bill did the same. I sipped coffee from a porcelain cup painted with hale peasants performing mysterious tasks in fields full of windmills. Bill hated these porcelains but he kept them for display after having the mansion’s contents appraised. He had shaken his head, saying, “God knows why but they’re worth a goddamn mint.”
“I know you’re going to see Lena today,” he said out of the blue, and my face felt hot. It was not possible to have a single thought in your head without Bill knowing it. “I advise against it,” he said, cutting up his toast. “She’ll be mad as a hornet. Smile isn’t letting her leave the room. I know she wants to see Link again on the sly. I could see her squirming at that table in the bar, wishing to say things to him but not able to with us around. I would give a deal to know what those things are,” he mused.
“So you’re holding her prisoner.”
“That’s a little harsh, my friend. She’s actually in danger. Some unsavoury elements noted her arrival at the Oriental, and I’m protecting her.” He cut the crusts off his toast one by one.
I banged my fist on the table. “But you’re the one that took her to the Oriental!”
There was a pause, and I was relieved when Bill decided to overlook my outburst.
“No, By God, she took herself. She knows best what risks she’s willing to take to see the lieutenant.”
I wondered what unsavoury elements he meant. His supposed pal, the psychotic chief of police? Those Russians Link mentioned? There were a lot of choices. I undid the top button of my shirt. The sun had risen above the treetops across the river and was glaring through the thousand panes of the conservatory. “We should breakfast earlier if we’re going to do it in a glass box.”
“I like it in here. It’s my favourite thing, to contemplate the flowers,” Bill said. “Ever since I got out of jail.”
I just nodded my head, uncertain what to make of Bill’s strange new poetic leanings, which despite his reformed ways were still at odds with his lifestyle. I tugged on my collar, which was sticking to my neck from sweat.
“Look, go visit her if you want,” he said. “Tell her she can see Link as soon as he settles down. She’ll forgive you.”
“Aren’t you worried about her pity for the lieutenant? Pity is like a drug to some women.”
“Not Lena.” He pushed his cut-up toast pieces through the soft yolk on his plate and took a bite. “She hardly knew him. Shively told me that much. What’s more important is she should spend more time around me. It’s your job to make it happen.” He pointed his fork at me. “You’ll convince her to go to the hospital ball with me at the royal palace. I’m one of the biggest donors. The king will be there, and you can tell her that. Bring her one of the dresses I bought to soften her up.”
I stared at him. He had lost his reason. Lena would not want to go to a party with him, dress or no dress. She hated to be manipulated. My job was doomed from the start.
“Wipe that look off your face, By God. If she wants to see the lieutenant, that’s the condition. She’ll come.”
* * *
BILL WAS RIGHT about one thing. Lena opened the door to me when I said it was about Link. But as soon as I proposed the ball, she refused completely.
“What could it hurt?” I asked, grasping at straws, I knew. But this was the only job Bill had given me and I didn’t want to bungle it.
She told me to sit down, giving me the only chair while she sat on the bed. The room was dim with the shutters pulled to keep out the heat. She looked at me with sudden seriousness, then stepped past me to lock the door. She was tired of that goon Smile barging in all the time, she explained.
“Why do you do Bill’s work? He betrays everyone eventually. Including you,” she said as she sat down again. “A copy of your journal turned up on my doorstep three years ago. It was his warning. If he showed it to anyone else, I was done for. My military career meant everything to me.”
I felt like throwing up. “He sent you my private journal?”
“Yes.”
“You were only supposed to get it if I was dead. That was the condition in my will, which the lawyer had, along with the only key. Bill must have corrupted him somehow.”
“Of course he did.” She smiled ironically.
I put my head in my hands, humiliated and not knowing where to look. “I suppose you could always tell how I felt about you, anyhow. That was no secret.”
“I’m sorry how I acted back then.” She took my hand, and hers felt cool, the skin smooth and soft. There was a quiet strength in it also. I was embarrassed that my own hand was sweaty, but what could one do in the tropics? “In the years since, I’ve thought back on how good you were to me,” she said, “and believe me, if I didn’t have the sense to value it then, I do now.”
“I didn’t approve of this scheme.”
“He never listens. I know.”
She was still holding my hand. It was a moment I could have enjoyed forever, except that my humiliation over the idea of Lena reading my journal was so deep. Thinking of it, my anger grew.
“Did you know Bill has a wife in Burma?” I kept out the part that there was no Western ceremony, but he had technically paid the bride price. The Burmese locals considered them married, at least.
“When did he marry?” Her voice was crisp, businesslike.
“About six months ago.”
The warmth in Lena’s eyes had vanishe
d, and her mouth was set in a thin, hard line. I had worried at the Oriental bar when, despite her attempts to ignore Bill, she had accidentally addressed him. And even when she spoke to me, she couldn’t help looking at him briefly each time, before tearing her gaze away. Once Bill saw an open door, he was quick to walk all the way in. I was pretty sure the door was slammed tight again.
“Some rich Englishwoman, I suppose?”
“No. Some tribal girl who rides a horse. That’s all I know. I never saw her.”
“A horse. I see.”
She nodded grimly. I wasn’t sure why equestrian ability was more disturbing than money, but it seemed to be.
“Tell him I’ll come to his damn party,” she said.
I didn’t understand how she agreed after that revelation. She must have some revenge in mind. I did not allow myself a smile until I was outside, on the way back to the palazzo.
Bill was pleased as punch at my news, completely unaware of his doomed position with Lena. Yet he was hardly around for me to gloat over secretly, because in the days of Link’s cure Bill spent hours at a time with him in his room. If Dass was not still on guard at the door, I would have pressed my ear to it to listen. Was Bill spooning him broth and wiping his brow in sympathetic silence, a fellow junkie, or was Link becoming central to Bill’s plans? Surely it was my right to know if someone else was going to be cut into the business. I had to do the accounting of it.
In one of the rare moments when he emerged from Link’s room, I finally approached Bill about it. He was sitting in the library, continuing to ignore his exquisite book collection in favour of the shabby cardboard-bound text on irregular warfare that was placed open, face down, on the side table. He guffawed at my concern.
“He’ll get no money out of me. I’m pleased to turn his brain inside out, is all. Know thine enemy, isn’t that what the Bible says?”
“I don’t think so. That’s more a ‘turn the other cheek’ kind of book.”
“Not the Old Testament. There’s lots of smiting and bloodshed in it.”
I let it go.
“Did Lena like the dress I sent?” he asked.
For half a second I almost felt sorry for him. But only half. “She loved it.”
She had flung it carelessly on the bed. I thought it would be more of a blow if her disgust at everything to do with him hit as a full-force surprise when she arrived.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FIRST TIME TWICE
THE DAY APPOINTED for my meeting with Link was finally here, but I was irritated that I had to follow Bill’s conditions. I couldn’t believe that, after effectively coming back from the dead to barge into my life, Bill was blackmailing me again, and trading this visit for my involvement in one of his schemes. What was the purpose, except to prove that he could control me? Byron had suggested some business agenda Bill wanted me to advance. Perhaps it really was as simple as that. The royal family would clearly be important customers for his gems. But couldn’t his wife do it?
Wife. Who would marry him? Some illiterate girl, I supposed, out for his money and a ticket to America someday. Not knowing that he could never go back there. Why hadn’t he brought her to Bangkok with him? It was not like newlyweds to be separated. Maybe she hated him as much as I did right now. No, that wasn’t possible.
I laid out my five dresses on the bed. Byron had warned me that Link did not remember speaking to me at the Oriental because of his condition. How unbearable, when I thought that the difficulties of seeing him for the first time were not actually over with—that this was the first time all over again. Blue dress, yellow dress, red dress? White or black? It was just as well he did not remember, I thought, because it was not like it had gone well. I was glad to know it was because he was in an altered state. Why were the men in my life plagued with drugs? First Bill, now Link. But at least Link had an excuse, because the hospital had given it to him.
Yellow dress, I thought, holding it up against my face while I peered in the tall mirror on the antique wardrobe. My image wavered in the glass, eaten away by dark voids where the silver had blackened with time. Yellow was an innocent colour, of friendship, roses, and truces. White would have been going too far into surrender and virginity. Though wasn’t yellow also for cowards? I tossed it back on the bed and picked up the blue. I would wear this one. Though I wished it was not so conservative—down past the knees and up to the neck, but all the dresses were like that now. I missed the risqué styles from when I was a teen, but those freewheeling times were long gone.
As I did up the buttons on the back, straining to reach the ones near my shoulder blades, I wished that Byron would be at the palazzo. The knowledge would have calmed me while I waited to see Link, and I’d feel safer if Bill barged in. Byron claimed he had some business to attend to today. I could not blame him, I supposed. He had once cared for me and did not want to deliver me into the hands of someone I had loved, and for all he knew, perhaps still loved. I did not think Byron loved me anymore, what with so much time having gone by, but obviously he still had a soft spot for me. I had wanted to stay angry at him, but I needed him as an ally.
I had to knock on the door to let myself out. As always, Smile stood in the hallway blocking it, my jailor more than my protector.
Smile did not speak the whole way to the palazzo, either in the cab or on the boat. He followed me up to the entrance, where an equally silent Indian man took his place at my side. Bill had always surrounded himself with gregarious types in the past, to add to his merriment. Times had changed. It was apparently all about security and secrets now.
“I’m here to see Link Hughes,” I said, in case he imagined that I was visiting his boss instead. He gave me an almost imperceptible nod. I followed him up the curved stairway, with the brief thought that I was entering the thousand and one Arabian nights, what with his pink turban and white pantaloons. That was an unfortunate parallel, I realized, since the woman in that story could only save her life if the story she told was good enough for the king. Today, Link would be my judge.
The Indian deposited me in a large sitting room with pukka fans deranging the air. I stared with confusion at the many chairs scattered about, wondering where to put myself until Link arrived. As my eyes adjusted to the dim, I became aware that a figure was already sitting in the corner.
“Link?”
He didn’t answer.
I sat in the chair beside him, a beautiful antique that turned out to be lumpy and uncomfortable. I was relieved to see that his tube had been removed.
“Your neck is better?” I touched his hand, but he didn’t react. He seemed dissociated from everything, including his own flesh. His eyes were like dry pebbles.
“After I got pneumonia in the camp, there was an infection in my throat. It’s clear now.” His voice still sounded ragged, but he could speak more easily than the other night.
“I heard you don’t remember seeing me at the Oriental. I said sorry then. I’ll say it again. I’ll say it a thousand times if that could make things right.”
“You just did what anyone would do.”
He spoke mechanically. Touching him was worse than not touching him given that there was no response, and I withdrew my hand. I stood and paced nervously, staring through the slits in the shutter, but a tree in front of the window blocked any hope of a view.
“Miss Maggie was blackmailing me. She made me write a report on you and two other men.” I waited for him to ask what she had over me, and wasn’t sure what I’d answer, but he sat in stony silence. “I didn’t think it was you she was after, Link. I didn’t know about the Spanish Consul, or I never would have said anything about him.”
“You probably knew about the Spanish Consul, deep down,” he said in the same monotone.
Did I? Was I the person he must be imagining, who would sell him out for some abstract concept of patriotic duty—which really meant saving myself from Miss Maggie?
“I did,” he continued, “but I let myself be fooled. I was des
perate for money. My family lost everything in the Depression. Spain was a neutral country so I told myself there wasn’t any harm in it. After the bombing, I realized the Consul was giving my intel to the Japs. That was the last thing I wanted.”
“I knew it had to be something like that. I knew you didn’t want to hurt the Captain.” I took a deep breath. “I cared about you.”
From far across the river came the sound of a piano, wispy and melancholy. The further away the piano was, the longer it had been since the player struck the keys. The player’s thoughts and emotions could have changed completely since then. I thought of Einstein’s theories—was the space of this room the same as time? I supposed it would be, if I crossed it; so I stayed standing where I was. I was afraid for time to move forward.
“I was glad when Miss Maggie sent me behind the lines,” he said. “I wish I’d died. But my damn body wouldn’t stop living.”
I tried to think of what to say, but I was at a complete loss. I needed to know exactly what he’d been through, so that I could calculate how large my sin was. Frankly, I didn’t think I could take it. In any case, it wouldn’t be fair to ask him to relive it. Still standing at the window, I felt claustrophobic with the wooden screens shut, and I pushed them open a crack. There was a scuffle in the shrubberies below. Broad shiny leaves twitched and petals fell from pale pink flowers. My shoulders tensed.
“What?” Link said, reaching my side with surprising speed.
“Someone’s down there.”
Nothing for long seconds, and then the shrubs heaved. Something large and grey-green, carbuncled, weathered, and ancient, darted out and away, toward the river.
“Monitor lizard,” Link said.
I buried my face in his chest, and he did not resist. But I wasn’t going to cry over a lizard. What was wrong with me? “I went AWOL to find you, when I heard the Russians were after you. This is the next war.” I stared up at him. “You need to be careful.”
