White Eye

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  When he put down the telephone, he tried to look pensive but calm. “Lek is leaving us, and we’re getting a male keeper,” he announced. “She’s needed back in Thailand.”

  The boys’ expressions were disappointed. “I was just getting used to her,” Steve said.

  “I’ll fly to Sydney tomorrow to meet him and bring him back here. We’ll have to rethink our anti-Pembridge plan, I’m afraid. I’m not sure what the arrangements for Lek’s return to Thailand will be.” She had arrived illegally, via Karatha, without a passport, and would probably have to leave the same way Somchai, however, would be traveling with a passport and ticket.

  By five-fifteen that afternoon, Bangkok time, the taxi carrying Michael Romanus was driving slowly along Khao Sahn. Both pavements were crowded with people, food, and goods for sale—fake Gucci, fake Hermès, fake Levi’s 501s, pirated cassettes, curries in banana leaves, chunks of pineapple and watermelon kept on ice. Music from the 1960s blasted out of loudspeakers near a shop specializing in snakeskin clothing: boots, jackets, sneakers, a pair of two-tone black-and-tan men’s shoes, from the toes of which reared baby cobras. There were stalls where for a hundred dollars you could have the whole of Paradise tattooed on your back. The Thais in this part of town had adopted Western incivility and yelled, “Fuck off!” at tourists who jostled them. Young white men, so stoned they looked like apes, wandered along, batting out of their way child beggars who carried hand-printed cards that said I HAVE A DREAM TO GET ANEDUCATION. On the corner of the alley that led to the guesthouse, there was a secondhand bookshop where Henry James, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, George Eliot, Flaubert (in English), and Goethe (in German) were for sale. A sign next door said WE BUY EVERYTHING: CAMERAS, RADIOS, SUNGLASSES. The restaurants advertised in English the videos they would be screening that day. Unforgiven was a big attraction. As his cab moved slowly toward the alley, Romanus searched the crowd, hoping to see Raoul.

  There was no one in the courtyard except for a woman washing clothes in a bucket. Romanus found the landlady in the kitchen again. She slipped on her plastic outdoor sandals and followed him back across the yard, grumbling about letting him have the Spaniard’s key.

  The rooms were whitewashed, furnished with a double bed, a bedside table, wardrobe, and chest of drawers, and, for five hundred baht extra per month, a ceiling fan, a coffee table, and chairs. At each end of the corridor was a bathroom with klong jars of cold water. People with long leases, like Romanus and Sabea, could decorate their rooms. Raoul had covered his walls with bird photographs. Every time Romanus went in, he would glance at the picture of an eagle flying straight at the camera and think, I wish I’d taken that.

  The eagle picture was lying on the floor when he opened the door. A carousel of transparencies had spilled. Otherwise, the room looked a little disheveled, but normal. Somebody had been lying on the bed; the pillows showed the indentations of a body.

  Romanus picked up the eagle picture. Underneath it was one of Raoul’s shoes. He looked for the other one. Maybe he’s getting it fixed, he thought. A camera with a blimp on it lay on the coffee table. The blimp was cracked, and flecks of whitewash clung to it. He pulled it off and had a look at the film. It was slow black-and-white, and there had been eight exposures. Up-country, he and Raoul always took some black-and-white animal pictures to sell to newspapers in Japan.

  He was about to leave, when he realized that the collection of photographs of former girlfriends Sabea kept on his bedside table on the far side of the room was missing. There were six of them—a couple white, one black, the other three Asian. Raoul told terrible lies about how the affairs had begun, developed, and ended. “Venus is a cruel goddess,” he would say, laughing.

  Romanus walked round to the other side of the bed: the photographs were lying on the floor, and underneath them, broken as if stamped on, was the mobile phone. Everything—the phone, the girlfriends, the floor tiles—was sticky and spotted with old blood. He turned and ran downstairs. “Ten more minutes,” he said, and pushed fifty baht through the window of the cab.

  Five minutes was all he would need to develop negatives from the film in the blimped camera. He pounded up the stairs again and into his room. “C’mon, c’mon,” he whispered as he shook the cylinder of chemicals. He could read negatives as easily as a layman reads prints. When he pulled the wet roll out of the shaker, the first two were black. The third was out of focus but showed Raoul’s wall, where the eagle picture hung. A short man was standing in front of it, features so blurred Romanus could not make out who he was. On the fifth exposure he recognized the face, and on the sixth he saw the knife. The man, holding a knife with a blade about twenty-five centimeters long, was looking at Raoul, who must have been holding the camera in his lap. The seventh negative was another blur, but Romanus thought he could see a second figure behind Somchai; the eighth was of the ceiling.

  “Dry, get dry,” Romanus muttered to the strip of celluloid. As soon as it was dry enough, he rolled it up, put it in a film cylinder, and gathered up some clothes. His photographic equipment was still packed. He shoved the clothes into a nylon sports bag.

  The cabdriver was looking hot with impatience when Romanus ran downstairs with three bags and a tripod just before six, but he cheered up immediately at the word “airport.” At this time of day, it was a two-hour trip.

  Sonja left work exactly at the official close of business, nine minutes to five, on Tuesday and cycled home. It was a warm, mild autumn afternoon. The country looked refreshed after the rain of the past couple of weeks, and the air was pleasantly soft with moisture. It was unusual, so far inland, to have the sort of milky air one found in the eastern coastal cities—but there it was filthy, humid air. As she cycled, a sense of well-being enveloped her, the rhythm of her legs pushing down on the pedals, the wheels spinning, her breath flowing easily through her chest. A decision she had made earlier had kept her happy all afternoon.

  Before leaving for work that morning, she had cooked the leek, onion, and potato for a vichyssoise that would be the first course of a moonlit dinner that evening. The soup had been too hot to put in the refrigerator before she left for work, but it would have cooled to room temperature by the afternoon. All she needed to do was add cream and chill the whole lot for half an hour. For the second course she planned grilled lamb skewers and a Greek salad. Lamb shish kebab was John’s favorite meat, and vichyssoise was his favorite cold soup. Even Hilary acknowledged that Sonja’s vichyssoise was good. Hilary was not speaking to her at the moment—not since Sonja had rung her last week after the directors’ meeting to tell her what she thought of the way she was running her portfolio. Hilary had replied, “Listen, you pissant, if ever I ask for advice from you, you’ll know I’ve got Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, just shut up and enjoy earning ninety thousand dollars a year, which is eighty thousand more than you are worth!” She hung up.

  “She’ll get over it and say she’s sorry,” John said.

  “I don’t want her to,” Sonja replied.

  All morning she had looked forward to her seduction dinner with John. He won’t go off to that Thai bitch tonight, she told herself, because I will get him first.

  But just after lunch that day, John had arrived in her office to say he would not be eating or sleeping at her house tonight but at his condo, because he needed to be up and away early. He had to catch the minibus into Kalunga at seven-thirty next morning, he said, to make Kalair’s nine o’clock flight to Sydney to meet the new animal keeper. Sonja had remained calm.

  “While Lek’s still here, I’m not sure where the new chap will sleep,” he continued. “I don’t want to put him in the cabin with her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well—in Thailand, men and women don’t …” He gestured vaguely.

  “Good God! Now we’re running a boarding school. I’m sure that for a week, or however long it takes to get rid of her, they can both sleep in the cabin. Lek’s not a nun”

  He was leaning on the edge of her desk, look
ing out the window at the lake, ready for a nice, leisurely chat, totally unaware of how she was feeling. She wanted to scream: Last night you got out of my bed and went and had sex with that slut. Tonight I’ve made you vichyssoise, but you’re not even going to eat with me, because your work is more important than I am.

  “What will you do this evening?” he asked.

  She gave a radiant smile. “I’ll do some decoupage.”

  He ruffled her hair. “Good girl. See you tomorrow night.” At the door, he paused and blew her a kiss.

  By a quarter to seven that night, an enormous yellow ball had appeared above the lake. Sonja left the veranda to go to the bedroom for her second daily injection. She put the needle she had just used in the top drawer of her dressing table, beside the bottles of insulin. Then she reached to the back of the drawer.

  In the kitchen, she removed the soup tureen from the refrigerator and ladled two servings into attractive blue-and-white stoneware bowls. One she placed on a tray, and laid beside it a silver soup spoon and a miniature salt-and-pepper set. The other bowl she returned to the fridge. She found a blue napkin that matched the blue of the soup bowl and set off the pale-colored soup. I need a napkin ring, she thought. She fumbled around in the napery drawer until she felt one of the silver pair she had bought for herself and John. Hers was round. His was oblong. She thought the round one would make the better fit. And indeed, when she wrapped the napkin around her tools, she could only just push the napkin through the ring.

  “Right,” she said aloud. She was feeling cheerful as she carried the tray through the garden. It was not heavy, so she could hold it in one hand as she knocked on the cabin door. “Lek,” she called. “I’ve brought you some soup.”

  That night, Susan Miller rang her father at home. When he heard her voice, his first thought was that she wanted to cancel his invitation for the weekend.

  “You always imagine the worst.” She laughed.

  “That way you never get caught.”

  “I’ve talked to Nelly, Dad.”

  From his armchair in the living room Joe could see the big yellow moon, so full it looked ready to burst. He remembered how when he was a kid they used to look forward to the Easter moon, because it meant the end of Lent was close and they could soon start eating steak and chops and all the good things his mother refused to cook during the fasting season. “Nelly’s read Nichols’s closed files,” Susan was saying. “And guess what? He was running an illegal steroid supply network in Sydney.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was supplying all the eastern and inner-city gyms. He’s got lists of clients and suppliers going back ten years.”

  “I’ll be buggered.”

  “There’ll be plenty of arrests.”

  “Well,” he said, “I picked him as a closet queen, but a scam fits too. Something must’ve gone wrong, though, to make him move out here. Anything about the work he did at the Research?”

  “All his files from 1990 to 1993 have been erased. Nelly’s trying to reconstruct them.”

  “You heard anything about the postmortem blood tests they did on him?”

  “Not yet.” She gave a yawn. “Oh—I must go to bed. I’ve got to be up at five. I’m on first shift at the airport, and I’ve got this new kid I’m training.…”

  “How’s the Sydney weather?” he asked.

  “Hot! Today was the hottest April day for thirty years. Heat wave, plus full moon, plus the beginning of the holidays … Listen to this.” She held her telephone toward the window. The sound of a police siren came blaring from the street outside.

  They made their final arrangements for the weekend: he would arrive at her flat in Ocean Street on Saturday morning, and they would go straight down to the surf. Joe pictured the long, glassy waves with their curled lip of white water. He could remember the exhilaration of leaping into a rolling wheel of seawater and being lifted up.

  When Michael Romanus decided to get out of Bangkok as fast as possible, he did not know exactly what he should do. Between realizing that Grossmann had sent his man to murder Raoul and telling the taxi driver to go to the airport, he had no time to work out a plan.

  The cab had smoked-glass windows, but all the same he sat well back in the seat and from time to time took a quick look out the back. How had Otto found out? They had only one more day’s work to do on Siam, and then Grossmann’s neck would be so far in the noose he would not be able to escape.

  His first thought had been to flee to Kalimantan, go up-country, and spend a few months photographing orangutans. But when he reflected on the thousands of hectares of uninhabited jungle and how the law in a place like that was pretty much what people made of it, he changed his mind. If Otto could send Somchai after Raoul in the middle of Bangkok, he could send him to Kalimantan to find me. So where to? Los Angeles and the Primate Rescue Organization people? They had good contacts with the local police. Romanus opened his phone and began to dial, before realizing it was 3:00 A.M. in L.A. His leg jigged with nervous energy. I’ll go home, he thought.

  At the airport, he went straight to the hotel, booked in, and rang a travel agent on the list in the guest directory. “I want to fly to Australia tonight,” he said. The 10:00 P.M. flight was full, with a waiting list. It took almost an hour of fiddling, but by nine o’clock he was booked on a flight from Bangkok via Singapore and Jakarta to Sydney, leaving just before midnight.

  He had an hour free before check-in. He took a table in a downstairs restaurant from which he could watch both the entrance and the door to the kitchen. At ten o’clock he pushed his luggage carrier across the walkway to the terminal building, just missing Somchai, who was catching the earlier, direct flight.

  Somchai had only a backpack for luggage.

  “You may carry that on board, sir, if you’d like,” a woman at the check-in counter said.

  He shook his head. He could not take the backpack inside the airplane, Khun Otto had warned him, because it had his knife in it. And his knife had to be inside the backpack, not on his leg, where it belonged, because people were not allowed to wear knives on airplanes.

  “Why not?” Somchai had asked.

  A lingering uneasiness affected Grossmann’s mood. Early yesterday, when his chauffeur had returned to the house to say he had driven the Spaniard to Saraburi and now he was dead, Grossmann caught sight of a whirling madness in the small, dark eyes. I have the power to raise demons, he thought. Do I have the power to still them? A twinge of fear took hold of him. “It’s just a rule,” he’d replied.

  On Wednesday, when Joe Miller unlocked his door, he saw his computer blinking with the sign that it had a letter for him. He typed in the code word and pressed Enter. Onto the screen came the row of symbols indicating that the letter was from Homicide. “Quick,” he said, hitting Next Page.

  First came the blood analysis. Nichols had AIDS. Next was the record of interview with his physician. Jason wanted to keep his condition secret, his doctor said, for his parents did not know he was gay. The doctor pointed out that in a country town Jason’s illness would easily become known from the batches of AZT sent to the local GP, so Nichols decided to drive to Sydney to collect his medicine from the Saint Vincent’s Hospital pharmacy—and to visit the channelers, clairvoyants, and psychic healers who had set up shop around the inner city. By late 1992 he was sweating at night and suffering from low-grade infections. In March 1993, his condition deteriorated suddenly. On the Friday before he was found dead, he had learned that his T cells had dropped from 400 to 250. He became upset during the consultation, hinting that he was being blackmailed by people who had discovered he had AIDS. The doctor guessed that Jason was doping horses for them. He had been urging him for more than a year to drop the pretense of being well and heterosexual and to tell his parents, at least, that he was ill. He had noted an increasing paranoia in Nichols in recent months: he was blaming different people for deliberately infecting him, saying, “They deserve to die.”

  Chapter Seventeenr />
  Sonja did not usually watch television at breakfast time, but on Wednesday morning she had reasons to do so. She wanted to hear the weather forecast for Sydney, where John would be. The other reason was less clear to her, but it had something to do with Tuesday night. The forecast was appalling: 32 degrees, followed by a thunderstorm. In April? Well, that was greenhouse, and it was too late to escape. As John said, the lifeboat was already sinking under the weight of its passengers: “It’s time to start throwing some overboard. Either we do it ourselves or the planet will do it for us.”

  After breakfast she hung out the clothes to dry. It was another beautiful day, warm but not hot, with a tall blue sky that was cloudless now although, later, fluffy cumulus clouds would probably form in the east. She felt so blithe she took credit for the fine weather and almost skipped to the clothesline. That morning, she had put fresh linen on the bed, cold white cotton that smelled of lavender. The sickly incense-ponging sheets and pillow slips from two nights ago were washed. She hung them evenly so they would dry straight and not need ironing. When she had finished, she stepped back to admire them. Everything was under control.

  She opened the door to U-1 and went downstairs. The boys were already at work, Phil and Freddie seated side by side in front of a screen where the image of a swollen blue-and-red thing like a blackberry engaged their attention. Steve was writing at his bench.

  “Lek’s not well,” Sonja said. “She wants to stay in bed today. Can you look after the animals until this evening?”

  “Yep,” Steve answered without looking up from his notebook.

  “Does she need anything?” Freddie muttered.

  “No. And she told me she doesn’t want visitors.”

  Phil, who had been intent on the blackberry, suddenly tuned in. “That’s no good!” he said, frowning and looking first at Freddie, then across the room to Steve. “Lek has to help us move the chimps and stuff, in case that nut from the Ethics Committee wants an inspection.”