A special case.
I know nothing
One of Gyapay’s boys.
Nothing, I tell you.
The political section.
Don’t speak of it, fool; better to stop your mouth than utter such things.
The farang is waiting His papers—
Send him to the morgue. That’s where Gyapay’s boys all end.
Roderick’s Packard crawled through a swarm of tuk-tuks down the length of Chulalongkorn Boulevard to the city morgue, where the bodies of the poor and the politically untouchable lay stacked on field stretchers abandoned four years earlier by the Japanese. He walked among the dead, a silk handkerchief covering his mouth and nose, and lifted the rough sacking that covered the corpses.
Old men, their mouths slack and toothless. The obscene nakedness of elderly women. A little girl, dead of dysentery or fever, her rib cage sharp beneath the unformed breasts. A teenager with his throat cut.
Roderick walked the aisles while the dizzying stench of bloated flesh curled in his hair and his nostrils. Flies buzzed around him like an enemy squadron.
When he found Boonreung, Roderick wiped the boy’s face gently with his square of silk. He took careful note of the obvious things—toenails torn from the thin feet; bruises where electrodes had seared the scrotum. Then he lifted the frail body—that bundle of northeast bones—and turned it tenderly on the sagging stretcher. The corpse was slack and Roderick was clumsy with grief, but he saw the wound immediately: no bullet in a fleeing back, no shot fired at random, but a precise hole at the base of the skull. Boonreung’s glossy hair was matted stiff with blood.
He wrapped the boy in a freshly ironed sheet borrowed from the Oriental, and carried him out to the car. Crude, this mismatched pietà, and a grown man weeping.
That night Roderick sat alone in the babble of the Bamboo Bar. Thanom, the young bartender, kept Roderick’s Kentucky bourbon on a shelf next to McQueen’s single malts. Both were procured from Europe through infinite patience and expense; marked with their owners’ names, they were off-limits to the rest of the hotel. Roderick turned the whiskey in his hands, Boonreung’s cockatoo on his shoulder.
“You want a peanut for that bird?” Thanom asked.
“Why not? Somebody ought to eat.”
The bartender dropped a nut on the counter and watched the cockatoo tear into the shell with its sharp beak. Thanom was roughly Boonreung’s age, Roderick thought; certainly the two boys had been friends. Boonreung used to hang around the bar in his free time, laughing and talking in Thai too rapid for Roderick to catch. Thanom knew a lot about everyone at the Oriental— what they liked to eat and drink; how much they gambled and lost; if they preferred boys to girls, and exactly how often. What had Boonreung told Thanom, during those idle half hours? Had he boasted of mad escapes through a maze of khlongs, of car rides to the Laos border? Of a trip to the northeast in a farang car, four days after Pridi’s failed coup?
“You waiting for somebody, Mister Jack?”
“Yes,” Roderick replied. “A man named Gyapay. Know him?”
Thanom swept the counter with a damp cloth, the strokes unfaltering. “I have heard the name, I think. An Army man. My uncle would know.”
“Is your uncle in the Army?”
“Not anymore. What he does now is so secret, he dares not speak of it.”
“I would like to meet your uncle.”
“He is a busy man.” No hesitation in Thanom’s voice; at seventeen, he drove a hard bargain.
Roderick pulled his wallet from his trouser pocket and found a thousand-baht note. Thanom’s monthly salary. He slid the cash across the shining counter and watched the boy’s palm close over it.
“My uncle works at night,” Thanom murmured. “By day you will find him in Thon Buri, near the Chakkawat Market. Ask for Maha. It is the name he goes by.”
The cockatoo screeched and thrust its beak at Thanom. He tossed it a peanut. “A bird like that, she cares for nobody. Where is Boonreung today?”
“Consigned to flames.”
The color drained from the bartender’s face.
“Someone betrayed him, Thanom,” Roderick said softly. “I intend for someone to pay.”
A water taxi ferried him upriver to the bend in the Chao Phraya, and left him on the landing below the Chakkawat Market. If he was hunted by the men who hated and feared Pridi Banomyong, as Alec McQueen believed, he was more likely to be caught in his room at the Oriental than in the maze of canals on the city’s edge. Increasingly uneasy, Roderick listened to the whistles of those who lived on the water, ringing from bank to bank like the calls of nightbirds.
His old friend Carlos had known the Thon Buri side of Bangkok intimately, but Carlos was three years gone into the hill country of Laos. Glad that the water was low with the dry season, Roderick felt his way by instinct along the muddy banks, toward the huddle of sampans and stilted houses near the marketplace. There was a widow named Dunadee who lived in a boat on a dead-end khlong—a widow with several children. She had harbored Carlos once, when escape was all that mattered. It was possible, Roderick thought, that she would know how to find the man named Maha.
* * *
Two days later Colonel Billy Lightfoot breezed into Bangkok at the head of a delegation of U.S. military brass. The colonel laughed out loud at the difference four years could make, at the neat new airfield and the prosperous mood of the people. He slapped McQueen on the back and drank sherry with Stanton in the ambassador’s office, he introduced his colleagues and made sure they knew the name of Jack Roderick.
“All those reports you’ve read on Laos, fellas?” the colonel barked. “About the revolution to come? The end of Indochina? This is the guy who’s got the goods.”
Later, when the stag dinner was done and the delegation had toddled off under McQueen’s aegis to see the glittering underbelly of Bangkok life, Roderick took his old trainer for an unofficial tour.
“Never thought Pridi Banomyong would turn out to be such an unholy fuck-up,” Lightfoot mused, as the Packard nosed through the traffic on New Road. “Remember how we admired him, Jack, in the OSS days? The way he refused to lie down while the Japs rolled over him? Ruth stood for something then. Now he’s just a lousy sideshow. Disrupting traffic every time he reenters the country.”
“And the guy we kicked out of town is back in office. Makes you wonder why we bothered.”
Lightfoot sighed. “At least Pibul’s a soldier. Duty and honor before personal gain, right? And he’s no Communist.”
“Neither was Hitler.”
“Hitler’s dead. Stalin’s alive and kicking. You know what Truman’s facing in Korea? A whole Red army, hellbent on revolution. The Commies are agitating in Vietnam, too, and it’s Mao who’s bankrolling the fuckers. Communism’s the next great war, Jack. At least Field Marshal Pibul’s on our side this time.”
“It’s not a goddamn football game, Billy.” Roderick pulled up before a shuttered storefront on Silom Road, empty of life at this hour. Chinese characters advertised a laundry, but Lightfoot couldn’t read them.
“You got a woman shacked up here?”
“A man. Name of Gyapay. Minister of Torture in the Pibul government, and head of the secret police.”
Lightfoot whistled softly under his breath.
“Five men operate inside that building, Billy. Two work electric shock, one does the punching and kicking, another patches up the victim for as long as they need him and the last one—Gyapay—asks the questions. I know the names and faces of all five.”
“Jesus. Nothin’ gets by you, old buddy.” Billy Lightfoot squinted through the darkness as though it were a gun sight.
“I followed a man named Maha—whose personal specialty is castration—from his home two nights ago. I waited here in the street until dawn, to watch Maha and his friends come out. Over the past thirty-eight hours I’ve learned where each man lives and exactly what he does. Gyapay’s the criminal in the bunch. The rest just do as he a
sks.”
“What’s the point, Jack?”
“This is how your good soldier Pibul handles duty and honor, Billy. He tortures the opposition into silence. He tortured a friend of mine to death.”
“Was your friend Communist?”
“My friend was just a kid.”
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Lightfoot muttered. “Thank God we live in the good old U.S. of A.”
* * *
When the first body appeared in Thon Buri the next morning, none of the boat people gave it much thought. It was true that Old Man Maha’s throat was viciously cut, and that by the time his corpse was dragged from the khlong, the rats had gnawed out his eyes. But as Widow Dunadee judiciously said, Old Man Maha was an evil soul; it was the end he deserved. The boat people burned joss sticks and fingered amulets and averted their eyes until Maha’s relatives came to dispose of their dead.
In the days that followed, three more bodies were found, each in a different part of the city. One had a knife wound straight to the heart, one a bullet hole in the temple. The third had been garotted to death. The murders made no ripple in the Thai-language press: the victims were known to be members of the secret police, and thus were hated. But by the time the fourth corpse surfaced, Alec McQueen at the Bangkok Post caught wind of something.
“Ex-Army men, all of ’em,” he mused as he read the police homicide records. “Knives in the dark. Christ. It smells of resistance, all over again.”
But when he dropped by Jack Roderick’s room at the Oriental Hotel, Roderick showed no interest in the story. Jack had been hard to reach, McQueen thought, ever since that boy’s murder.
On the final night of Billy Lightfoot’s stay, Roderick and McQueen stood several rounds of drinks for everyone in the Bamboo Bar. Thanom wore a black armband and watched through heavy-lidded eyes while the farangs swapped war stories and got each other drunk. Then Roderick gathered his friends into the aging Packard and went to dine in the Thai manner. He and McQueen talked while Lightfoot choked on Kaffir lime leaves and galangal, washing down the pineapple curries and fried catfish with copious amounts of beer. Three golden-limbed women danced for their pleasure in the stylized, hypnotic fashion of traditional Thai lakhon, and when McQueen announced he was horny enough to fuck a goat, Roderick suggested they pay a visit to Miss Lucy’s Hall of Girls.
The Hall of Girls was famous in the farang quarter as the one place a Western man could get a slice of Thai ass without fear of entanglement or murder. Roderick sailed into Miss Lucy’s in time for the nightly revue, when the girls shed what little clothing they still wore. He consigned Billy Lightfoot to a tall, rangy Russian émigré who went by the name of Lola. McQueen had too many favorites among the Asian girls; Roderick chose for him, and followed him upstairs with Miss Lucy herself.
She was a canny woman with sharp eyes, a ready smile and fabulous legs; legs that, according to local legend, had once graced the Paris stage. Roderick admired Lucy’s charms in company with every man in Bangkok, but what he valued most was her discretion. Lucy was an old friend and confidante of Harold Patterson—Roderick’s predecessor as Bangkok intelligence chief—and it was Patterson who’d told Jack to trust Lucy implicitly. She’d never proved him wrong.
He watched her kick off her shoes, shimmy out of her dress and present her overflowing brassiere to his ready hands. He stuffed a wad of currency into her cleavage and pecked her on the cheek.
“Jack, Jack,” Lucy mourned. “Always it is business? Never pleasure?”
“Pleasure increases, sweetheart, the more it’s delayed. Cover for me. I need three hours.”
He let himself down as quietly as a cat from the bedroom window, into the lush depths of the whorehouse garden. The sound of laughter and Western jazz, tinny with distance, floated out on the perfumed air.
Chacrit Gyapay was a compact man of fifty-three with a bland face and brown eyes reminiscent of a basset hound’s. He was neatly dressed this evening in a formal Army uniform, and though his mistress had spent nearly an hour disarranging his pomaded black hair, it was now slick and shining beneath his military visor. Each night at three minutes after eleven, he strode from the apartment house where he kept his woman to the chauffeured car that waited at the curb. Tonight was no different. Gyapay adjusted his cuffs and glanced up and down the deserted pavement. Like many side streets in Bangkok, this one was without lights. The dim glow from the apartment house outlined his idling car, the driver behind the wheel. All as it should be. Why, then, did a finger of uneasiness stir at the base of his spine? Why did the brutal deaths of four men—seasoned professionals, it is true, but nothing to match the terror of Gyapay’s name—disturb his peace?
He paced briskly toward the backseat. His chauffeur slid from behind the wheel to open his passenger door. He heard the satisfying thunk! of heavy steel as the door swung closed. The car pulled away from the curb and he glanced idly over his shoulder at the lights of his mistress’s building. It was twelve minutes past eleven before he realized that his car was headed in the wrong direction.
* * *
Why did you torture and kill the boy named Boonreung?
“I torture nobody—I do not know what you mean.”
Liar. Tell me. Before I execute you as I executed the men you made.
Gyapay had shrugged wearily, as though he had no patience with the foreplay of death.
Did he die for me? Or for one of my friends?
“He died because the minister ordered it.”
Which minister?
“There is only one who matters.”
I want his name.
“Why should I tell you, Roderick? You’ll still blow my head off.”
He was right, of course: Roderick would never stoop to torture, as Gyapay would, just to get information. Roderick had killed him, finally, because there was nothing else to do.
Miss Lucy was waiting for him, sunk deep in the bed cushions, filing her nails. Roderick left her at dawn and got Lightfoot a shower and some eggs before the colonel flew out of Bangkok. Then, alone, he turned the Packard north and drove deep into Khorat, with the small iron box that contained Boonreung’s ashes.
“I avenged your son’s murder,” he told the tiny woman who waited among the wizened mulberry trees. “His spirit is at peace.”
“But yours is not, farang. I do not think it ever will be.” She placed a wreath of jasmine around his neck and bowed deep in the ceremonial wei.
Roderick opened the car to the wind as he drove back to the city. The smell of death remained.
14
The television cameras—at least three different networks, including a unit from CNN’s Asia bureau-were waiting patiently in the main courtyard of Jack Roderick’s House that Wednesday afternoon, despite the raincloud that had burst minutes before. The do-cents in traditional Thai dress and the coolly efficient, Donna Karan-suited women who worked in the offices above the retail store attached to the museum had attempted, at first, to turn the reporters away. They had been overwhelmed, however, when the straggle of radio and print journalists was bolstered by the arrival of satellite vans and klieg lights. The docents had settled for roping off the press in a tight bunch in the far corner of the courtyard, to distinguish them from the tour groups in seven languages that waited patiently in the adjoining café. The cool women in business suits stood aimlessly near the front entry of the museum, with clipboards and microphones clutched to their breasts.
“What exactly is going on?” Dickie Spencer inquired, as he shook the rain from his umbrella at a quarter to one. The Managing Director of Jack Roderick Silk had received a message from the Thai Heritage Board’s dismayed secretary that afternoon, informing him that he was wanted at the museum. Spencer had driven to Jack Roderick’s House without delay.
“Some sort of press conference,” one of the women with clipboards told him. “We thought you knew.”
By one o’clock there was quite a crowd assembled in the courtyard. The peaked roofs of Jack Rod
erick’s House, with their deep red tiles, and the jungle foliage of the garden made a striking backdrop for the television cameras; the technicians were already focusing their lenses and barking orders about lighting. The cloudburst ceased as if on cue. The tourists were gawking openly at the spectacle, ignoring the docents who pleaded with them to check their cameras and remove their shoes in order to preserve the polished teak floors. Someone whispered that royalty was paying a call, but whether British or Thai, no one could say. Dickie Spencer ran blunt fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair and called his assistant on his cell phone.
A cream-colored Mercedes sedan driven by a uniformed chauffeur was admitted to the courtyard at seven minutes after one, and Spencer immediately paid his respects to the figure seated in its shadowed interior. He thrust his head through the open window and chatted for several seconds, but was not invited to sit in the car itself. Then Spencer darted across the courtyard to the retail store and the gaggle of well-suited women. He disappeared inside.
At one-fifteen precisely, a long black car nosed down Soi Kasemsan, the narrow lane that terminated in Roderick’s compound. Three reporters vaulted over the cordon that separated the press pool from the courtyard proper, and raced to better positions by the entrance gates. Lights flashed. The car halted near the front door, and a silver-haired farang emerged from the backseat with such aplomb that for an instant, the watching crowd was completely fooled and believed it was Jack Roderick himself, sleek head and elegant form untouched by thirty-five years of age and absence.
Someone shouted, “He’s returned! Roderick has returned!”
The gray-suited figure held up his hand and smiled. The waiting crowd saw then that this was no Silk King, no Legendary American. He reached into the depths of the black car and drew forth a woman: slim, correct and clothed entirely in black. A figure of mourning.
The Secret Agent Page 23
