The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  They had been flying for nearly thirty-eight minutes by the luminous dial of Roderick’s watch, east from Ceylon over the Indian Ocean toward the Malay Peninsula. The drop zone was somewhere outside Bangkok; only Billy Lightfoot knew exactly where. How long, to bridge the leagues of ocean unrolling behind them in the night? How long before the order to rise, and trust himself to air?

  “The Japs are packing up their shaving kits,” Lightfoot had assured them at the dawn briefing. “They’re peeling out of Bangkok as fast as their yellow asses can take ’em. You may meet a few stragglers in the bush before the city, but we’ve got Friendlies waiting near the drop zone and you should land with no trouble. Once the chutes are cut, you’re free and clear. If some of you don’t make the rendezvous”—he let the lonely idea of hostile terrain sink deep into each of their brains— “get north to the city under your own power. Join up once the liberation’s accomplished.”

  The liberation. It was the first time in all the long years of knife work and encoded signals that an end might be in sight.

  “What about the Siamese?” McQueen had asked. “The Unfriendlies? Pibul and his crowd?”

  During the six weeks of jungle combat training in the bush of Ceylon, Lightfoot had taken care to instruct them in recent Siamese history. For most of the war there had been a military dictatorship run by Field Marshal Pibul Songgram, sympathetic to the occupying Japanese. In 1939 Pibul had renamed the country Thailand: by 1941, he had snatched the opportunity of worldwide warfare to attack the French Protectorates of Laos and Cambodia. He’d seized a chunk of border territory in the name of the Thais, then sat back to pay a fat tribute to Tokyo for the rest of the war.

  “Pibul’s no threat now,” Lightfoot had replied. “He’s been arrested by our old friend Ruth, who runs the Free Thai.”

  Roderick knew Ruth as a tapping in the night, a crackling wireless operator who relayed OSS orders to the Free Thai and throughout the Malay Peninsula. Ruth was a strange nom de guerre, feminine and Biblical, but Roderick understood that Pridi Banomyong was an unusual man. He had trained as a lawyer and a constitutional scholar. He was cultivated, Europeanized, a charismatic fighter with nerves of iron. Ruth for fidelity, for wandering and sacrifice. He had been working with the Thai Resistance and Allied intelligence for the past three years.

  “We’re coordinating our liberation drop with Ruth’s forces,” Lightfoot had told them. “If all goes well …”

  If all goes well, Jack Roderick thought, I’ll be on a boat home to New York tomorrow.

  He had actually enjoyed the weeks of training in the jungles of Ceylon, enjoyed the Sinhalese tribesmen who beat back the undergrowth with huge sticks and led the Allied soldiers around watering holes that sank without warning in the heart of the tea plantations. He liked the sudden fogs of the highlands and the aging sahibs who persisted in British customs despite the ravages of war, with their freshly ironed damask tablecloths and their packs of hounds and their tiger skins scattered over marble floors. But mostly, he loved Billy Lightfoot and the men he led.

  Lightfoot was a soldier’s soldier, a polo-playing lieutenant colonel who trained spies for Wild Bill Donovan. Wild Bill was the backbone and gristle of the clandestine service; the OSS was entirely Donovan’s baby. In the summer of 1940, as Nazi Germany prepared to invade Britain, Franklin Roosevelt had sent William Donovan to London as his personal representative, to observe Churchill’s war preparations. By September, when Britain’s survival hung in the balance and the German bombing raids over the English Channel were both disastrous and commonplace, Donovan had returned to Washington with British-inspired plans for the United States’ first clandestine agency: the Office of Strategic Services. Donovan drew a cadre of raw recruits from among the Old Boys of Yale and Princeton and Harvard, young men desperate to trade Wall Street for occupied territory. He’d given them a purpose for their dusty French and their effortless social skills and their knowledge of the world. He’d given them Billy Lightfoot, detailed from General George Patton’s personal staff, as Head Boy and Eagle Scout.

  Lightfoot was an engineer by education. Nobody’s fool, he’d cut his teeth as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, where he’d learned that fanatics were death, whether Fascist or Communist in their persuasion. Lightfoot had been a champion of democracy ever since. He’d caught shrapnel in his left foot in Spain and afterward was good for nothing but teaching calculus at West Point, until Pearl Harbor declared him fit for action. Then Lightfoot blew up bridges and mined roads and led convoys all over Europe.

  He had a talent for making the OSS feel like a passage through summer camp, and his men the most vibrant and exhilarating tribe ever assembled under one tent. However many girls might type letters and serve cocktails and tap signals from OSS headquarters in New York, the OSS in the field was first and foremost a men’s club: it was a place where the American male could thrive in his natural habitat.

  Jack Roderick loved men’s clubs, loved the unquestioned acceptance and the wordless camaraderie and the utter lack of explanation that prevailed in such places. Princeton in the twenties—and before that, St. Paul’s— had each been men’s clubs; even Manhattan, in the first days of courting Joan, when every man Roderick met was a member of the Right Set.

  Later, at the end of the thirties, with the love and the hatred and the jealousy at his throat, the men’s clubs had become a gallery of ridicule and none of his assumptions was safe anymore. Before Pearl Harbor and the Japanese had released them both, Roderick had felt as though he were adrift on an ice floe, with Joan and the punctured Manhattan skyline receding at increasing speed.

  Roderick had learned to jump with Billy Lightfoot, to use a one-time cipher pad for his midnight radio signals, to string networks of subagents in hostile terrain, to blend effortlessly with the natives of Fez and Corsica and Arles.

  Lightfoot had been ecstatic on the sixth of August, nearly a month before, when the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

  “We’ve shown those yellow bastards how a tough people fights!” he’d yelled in the officers mess at Trincomalee.

  Most of the men had shouted and raised their glasses with Billy in a toast to the firepower of Allied forces. But Roderick had set down his gin and walked out alone into the monsoon. For the first time in all his war, he was uncertain whether Right had prevailed.

  And if I returned to New York tomorrow, he thought as he waited for Lightfoot’s arm to rise in the moonlit airplane doorway, would I find it stranger and more alien than Siam dreaming below?

  A crackle of radio noise filled the cabin. The plane ducked and yawed in the turbulent sky. A burst of words as rapid as machine-gun fire. The improbable sound of cheering. Roderick braced himself against the thin wall of the fuselage and strained to catch the transmission. He glanced at Alec McQueen, and saw that the younger man’s eyes were wide open.

  Lightfoot thrust himself away from the door and lurched toward the cockpit.

  “Do you think it’s Japs?” McQueen asked. “Do you think we’re blown?”

  But Roderick’s eyes were locked on Billy as he careened drunkenly back through the darkened cabin, slapping shoulders as he came.

  “Surrender!” he bellowed. “The Japs have surrendered! Tonight we land as heroes, men! The Allies have won the war!”

  2

  He rolled his wheelchair off the ridge above his house,” Oliver Krane said matter-of-factly, “and fell a thousand feet. I’m dashed sorry, old thing. I know it’s miserable for you.”

  Stefani could not speak.

  “I suppose he couldn’t bear life as a cripple,” Oliver went on awkwardly. “Not that anyone could blame him. A man like that, whose whole life depended upon his body—”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. “It’s a lie.”

  “Stef, darling—”

  “Harry Leeds, Oliver. Harry Leeds under the wheels of a Kowloon taxi. It didn’t fit then and it doesn’t fit now.”

  He hesitated—murder
was the obvious suggestion, after all, given Max’s recent history—then said, “He was seen alone on the ridgeline. And then his chair was at the bottom of it, smashed to bits.”

  “Who found him?”

  “The alpine rescue people are still searching for the body. They believe it’s wedged in a particular crevasse— but there was debris, of course. The chair, and one of his shoes. A scrap of fabric from the shirt he wore.”

  “But who saw the chair, Oliver? Who alerted alpine rescue?”

  “Sabine Renaudie.”

  “Good God! She could have done it herself!”

  “I think not. They’d grown quite chummy of late, she and Max.”

  “You believe she just strolled along the ridge, the day Max killed himself?” Stefani demanded. “Like her father, Jacques, conveniently surfacing at the mouth of the couloir?”

  “Evidently she was at the house that evening to prepare dinner. Renaudie was with her, and the lawyer, Knetsch. It was to be a small celebration.”

  “More like a gathering of thieves.”

  “Max pushed himself to the top of the ridge—he’d become adept at such excursions—while his lawyer trotted alongside.”

  He had regained the use of his hands, then. And never written a word.

  “Max sent Knetsch back to the house for a bottle of beer; Knetsch passed the girl on his way down the ridge. Five minutes later he heard her scream.”

  “Did she actually see the chair go over?”

  “I don’t think so. She went to the spot where Max was supposed to be, and found the pages of a letter scattered on the ground.” Oliver paused. “One of yours, I’m afraid. So she went and peered over the edge of the cliff in the direction the pages led her.”

  Stefani closed her eyes. Had she written anything in that last letter which might drive a man to suicide? “Knetsch could have pushed Max off before he went back to the house. Before he even passed Sabine.”

  “He could,” Oliver conceded bluntly. “But remember how depressed Max was—how he gave you those marching orders. Even old Strangholm noticed it. A man at war with his body, wasn’t that what Strangholm said? He might have done anything.”

  “Oliver, did anyone look at the wheelchair?”

  “I did, as a matter of fact. I’m in France, you see. In the interest of client relations.”

  Although the client was now dead. “And?”

  “The brake mechanism was set in the locked position.”

  “Jesus—”

  “He might have had second thoughts. After he rolled toward the cliff.”

  She saw Max clutching hard at the brakes in desperation—Max with his weak hands, clutching too late—and said, “The brakes were locked because he was shoved, Oliver.”

  “But consider the will, ducks.”

  “The will to die? Or to live?”

  “The last will and testament. Max drafted his about five weeks ago. He was clearly contemplating death.”

  “Did he have Knetsch draw it up?”

  “No. Knetsch was quite shocked to learn of the will’s existence. Apparently Max called in a firm from Geneva.”

  “So he didn’t trust Knetsch, in the end.”

  “Not with this. Max could expect disapproval.” Oliver’s voice had taken on the idle, distant tone she knew he used to disguise emotion. “Because he left everything to you. The house in Courchevel—the bank accounts in Zurich—and the entire Bangkok legacy of Jack Roderick, should that claim ever be proved.”

  Damn you, Max. His obsession outlived even the grave.

  “Mr. Knetsch will never be counted among your friends,” Oliver added implacably. “He’s citing the will as evidence that Max was out of his mind.”

  She poured herself three inches of Bombay Sapphire neat and sat in the middle of the silk duvet to drink it. She was one week and half a world away from a dead man she should never have left. They had got to him somehow— murder or suicide, they had got to his very heart.

  She imagined him soaring off the ridgeline as he had done a thousand times before, the wind ripping through the tousled hair, his eyes searching for landfall. And suddenly she hoped to God that he had deliberately chosen such an end. Better than the brutal push, the sickening realization of what was happening, the inability to stop it or save himself—

  The gin glass shattered against the bedroom wall.

  The man who had paid for the murder of Max Roderick placed a call that afternoon to Krane & Associates’ New York headquarters. He was connected quite rapidly to Oliver Krane, whom he might be forgiven for assuming was also in New York.

  “Sompong.” Oliver’s greeting was genial. “It has been months since I heard your voice. Everything grand in Bangkok and Phuket? Wife keeping well? Mistress also?”

  The man named Sompong glanced down at the pair of sixteen-year-olds sleeping in the darkened room and his lip curled. He demanded so much in these daily sessions that they often slept as though dead. He placed a thousand-baht note on the dressing table and moved toward the door.

  “I require the services of your firm,” he said abruptly, “on the matter we once spoke of.”

  “Matter concluded,” Oliver replied breezily. “File closed.”

  “Roderick is dead, yes. But he left a will. I want to know everything about the woman who inherits. This Stefani Fogg.”

  “Been chatting with your attorney, I see.”

  “Everything,” Sompong repeated curtly. “By six A.M. Bangkok time.”

  “Oh, very well,” Oliver said impatiently, “but you’d damn well better make it worth my time.”

  She walked into the Bamboo Bar that afternoon in search of an old man named Thanom—just Thanom, the name by which he had been known at the Oriental for over fifty years. He was polishing the gleaming surface of the counter with methodical sweeps of one wizened hand. At this hour, the bar—an updated version of the oldest expatriate watering hole in Thailand—was empty. The drinkers were sitting outside, under the wide umbrellas that ringed the pool. At the sight of Stefani, the old man tucked his bar towel out of sight and bowed.

  “May I help you?”

  “I hope so. My name is Stefani Fogg. I’m looking for a man named Thanom. Mr. Rewadee said I might find him here.”

  “I am he.”

  Stefani slid onto a seat and placed her pointed chin in her hands. She studied the man’s face—mottled by sun, scarred with time, the eyes set like dashed pebbles in the hollows of the skull. “Mr. Rewadee tells me you have been here a long time.”

  “I have indeed. Would you like something to drink, Miss Fogg?”

  “Tonic with two limes. How long, exactly?”

  Thanom smiled, but the expression was not entirely friendly. “If you have bothered to talk to Mr. Rewadee, you know already that I have worked at the Oriental since 1946, when I first came to Bangkok from the southern provinces. I was a boy of fourteen then. I carried baggage, and ran errands for Mlle. Krull—”

  Germaine Krull. The Frenchwoman who had bought the hotel with a handful of investors, one of them Jack Roderick, early in 1946.

  “—and now I tend bar.”

  “Nineteen forty-six,” she mused. “Then you must have known Jack Roderick. He was part owner in Mlle. Krull’s time, wasn’t he?”

  Thanom set a glass of ice carefully on the counter and raised a siphon. “Mr. Roderick put some money into the place, yes. Then he quarreled with the rest of the owners and he pulled his money out; but he continued to live here like a thorn in Mademoiselle’s side. And later when Mademoiselle was forced to sell and the big money came to Thailand and changed the Oriental forever, Roderick laughed the loudest. He put his silk shop in the lobby and he decorated the Royal Suite free of charge and he made money on the corpse of Mademoiselle’s dream. We watched him do it.”

  “Tell me about Roderick.” Stefani’s eyes were fixed on the man’s face. “Rewadee says you knew him well.”

  Thanom regarded her impassively. Then he reached for a knife and a lime
and with ruthless motions sliced the flesh of the fruit and slid the wet, transparent green into the depths of her glass. “Why you wish to know about Mr. Roderick?”

  She took a sip of tonic and shrugged.

  “Always the tourists they want to know about Mr. Roderick.” He said it with soft contempt. “But he was a quiet man. He did not say much to his friends and certainly not to Thanom who carried bags and tended bar. Not even when he was drinking.”

  “Did he drink here?”

  Thanom’s agate eyes flicked along the ceiling, the animal-print cushions and the glass-topped tables. They came to rest on the chemical-blue waters of the pool that glittered beyond the windows. “Not here. In Mr. Roderick’s day the farangs crawled up from the river dock straight into the lobby with the mud and sweat of the jungle still on their skin, and they drank and boasted and lied here till dawn. Roderick always listened. He stood rounds of drinks for his new friends and he laughed at their jokes but he did not drink deeply and he said nothing about his own affairs. Is such a man to be trusted?”

  “He sounds discreet enough.”

  Thanom pulled out his towel and began polishing the counter again, his eyes averted. “Roderick listened so that he might own his friends. One drinks betrayal who drinks with such a man.”

  “You believe the rumors, then. That he was a spy.”

  “A spy must have a master. What Jack Roderick did, he did only for himself. Perhaps that is why he died.”

  Her fingers tightened on the chill glass. “What do you mean, Thanom?”

  “Roderick had eyes that could see a mosquito fly through the dark and ears that could hear the river current; he was strong with all he knew and he believed that nothing could destroy him. He grew powerful and had great wealth and they called him King behind his back when he wandered among the khlongs. But he forgot, Miss Fogg, that he was not a Thai himself in this land of the Smiling Thai. You have heard that expression—the Smiling Thai?”