The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  The aromatherapist from New Zealand slapped her guide book closed and stood abruptly. She wore some kind of hill tribe fanny pack instead of a purse, and her bare arms were lean and muscled. Jeff stared at the woman—all rangy legs and sharp angles, the damaged ends of her hair—and felt a desperate impulse to save her.

  “Come with me,” he said urgently. “I’ll get us a room at a nice hotel. We’ll have dinner. Somewhere great. The Peninsula, maybe. Down by the waterfront. Have you even seen the river?”

  The girl glanced at his tie-dyed pants and hopelessly dated T-shirt, his pale white toes in the knock-off Tevas. “Bother me again and I’ll call the cops,” she said.

  * * *

  By three in the afternoon he had drunk his final beer, paid his tab at Jimmy Kwai’s and woven his way through the foreign tourists to the address he’d learned by heart.

  It was a closet of a place, with a beaded curtain across the door and a sign written in five languages, offering Tarot card readings. Jeff slid through the swinging strings of beads and paused on the threshold as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. A joss stick smoldered on a Buddhist altar in the far corner. The air was thick and warm as though someone, somewhere, was showering.

  In such quiet, Max was sure to surface. Knetsch squeezed his eyes shut and began to sing. Three little maids from school are we/Pert as a schoolgirl well can be …

  “May I help you?”

  The Thai woman emerged from the gloom, thin and cramped in a long-sleeved shirt and cargo pants.

  “I’m looking for Chanin.”

  Her expression of hostility deepened.

  “Sompong sent me.”

  “You’re drunk. I can smell the beer on you from here.”

  “I just ate lunch.”

  “Drank it, probably. I do not deal with farang drunkards. Neither does Chanin.”

  Jeff reached a hand to his brow; it was cold and clammy. What was the name of his guesthouse? He’d left his luggage there. His ticket home. Panic surged in his throat. Filled to the brim with girlish glee …

  “I’ve got to see him. It’s important. Sompong—”

  “You use that name too freely.” The woman’s lips had tightened with anger. Behind her, a man’s voice barked out a word of Thai. She glanced over her shoulder, then looked grudgingly back at Jeff.

  “Chanin will see you now,” she told him.

  * * *

  Dickie Spencer usually spent his days in the executive office of Jack Roderick Silk, which occupied the rear of the main store on Surawong Road. The building was only as old as Roderick’s disappearance; Jack had opened the shop weeks before his fateful Easter holiday in March 1967, when the jungle highlands of Malaysia had swallowed him whole. But Spencer’s realm was calculated to suggest the elegance of antiquity: paneled in carved teak, it was furnished with planters’ chairs and vivid silks and clay urns tucked into niches in the walls.

  When Stefani was shown into the room that afternoon, Spencer was bent over a drafting table—a tall, spare man with sandy hair and the mottled skin of an Englishman displaced to the tropics. He wore ivory flannel trousers, a silk shirt of the same shade and a cashmere jacket the hue of sandalwood. She expected his hand, when he offered it, to feel papery and dry, like the leaves of an old book; surprisingly, it was supple as doeskin. On the drafting table, under a light, were colored drawings of textile designs.

  Spencer offered her one of the planters’ chairs, which were backed with enormous silk cushions in carmine and chartreuse. She sank into it, feeling instantly disarmed by its slope and comfort and thus at a tactical disadvantage. This was a chair for drinking rum, not for negotiation. Spencer leaned against the drafting table and stared down at her, completely at ease.

  “You’re very kind to see me on such short notice,” she said.

  “I am,” he agreed judiciously. “I’m usually far too busy to make room for heiresses, particularly pushy American ones. I understand you’d like to snatch the entire business out from under me—the factory, the silks, the old khlong house—lock, stock and priceless barrel. But you arrive without a black limo or a phalanx of lawyers. I am encouraged. More to the point, my next meeting is unaccountably delayed and my schedule, at loose ends. So here we are.”

  She smiled. “I haven’t come for the keys to your empire. Nor to slap down an ultimatum. I want some information.”

  “About Jack Roderick? I never say a word. A legend deserves to be left … legendary.”

  “To be frank, I’m more interested in Sompong Suwannathat.”

  Wariness flickered across Spencer’s features, and was immediately replaced by the blandest inquiry. “You mean the Minister of Culture?”

  “The man who controls the Thai Heritage Board that governs the disposition of my house. I imagine he puts more than a finger into your business as well.”

  “My dear, I run a company that employs over one hundred thousand silk weavers and thirty textile designers. I export my goods worldwide. Sompong may like to offer advice from time to time, but he represents the public sector and I the private.”

  “Nothing’s that clear-cut in Thailand. You grew up in Bangkok. Your father worked for Jack Roderick, when Sompong Suwannathat was just a boy. You’re embedded in this culture and your company couldn’t survive without favors won, and favors bestowed. You must have a thousand reasons to respect—or hate—the minister.”

  Spencer quirked an eyebrow. “You’re never subtle, are you, Ms. Fogg? I admit that personal and professional histories can become a bit tangled in Bangkok. But I’m too old a farang to be caught in my own snare.”

  “Mr. Spencer,” she retorted bluntly, “I intend to win title to Jack Roderick’s House. The process may require months. Or it may take decades. I may spend a fortune in legal costs. None of that matters. A man I loved died violently because he wanted that house. His grandfather had left it to him in his will. I intend to see that legacy placed in the proper hands.”

  Spencer’s lips twitched. “You don’t know Thailand at all, do you? Proper hands don’t exist. They’re all too busy grabbing what they can.”

  “I came here today to make a deal,” she rejoined implacably. “When I am awarded the rights to Jack Roderick’s House, I may do any number of things. I could auction the art collection at Sotheby’s. I could use the place as a weekend retreat. Or I could turn it into a luxury inn and charge a fortune for a single night’s stay.”

  “All of which would be a tragic waste,” Spencer replied softly, “of a very great national treasure.”

  “I agree.” She sat back and gazed up at him. “I might be prepared to consider, however, turning over the house, and the management of its collections, to a hand-picked team of curators and trustees. I’d prefer to see them handled by the same people who’ve safeguarded the Jack Roderick Silk Company all these years. People like you— and those you employ—have kept Roderick’s legend alive. Not politicians or bureaucrats. Not Sompong Suwannathat.”

  “I see.” Spencer met her eyes steadily. “May I thank you, Ms. Fogg, for that testimonial of faith. What you want is help in toppling Sompong’s personal empire?”

  “Got it in one.”

  For the space of heartbeats, he studied the dust motes trapped in a band of sunlight that divided the room between them. He said finally, “I only heard about the will a few months ago. The second will, I mean. I had often wondered where it was. I was asked to witness it, you see, along with my father, five or six weeks before Jack disappeared. And then no mention of it was ever made again.”

  “I saw your signature on the document. Roderick placed the will between the pages of some blueprints and sent them off to his sister. The will went undiscovered for over thirty years.”

  “How terribly sad to think that no one bothered to study those blueprints. Jack was such a superb draftsman. These are some of his designs, you know. He had a flawless sense of color.”

  Spencer handed her the sketches of fabric she had glimpsed on the draf
ting table. An intricate damask of blue and green, fluid as the sky where it meets spring grass; a plaid of cherry red and mango yellow that sprang off the page. A strong, light hand had penned one word in the lower corner: Roderick. She traced the name with her fingertip, and longed for Max.

  “You realize the risks in what you ask of me, Ms. Fogg? Or are you just terribly naïve?”

  “Both. But no one speaks of Sompong Suwannathat without adding that he’s dangerous— a man to respect, they say. That kind of man always has enemies, Mr. Spencer. I intend to befriend Sompong’s enemies.”

  “How very Thai of you. I think you should call me Dickie.”

  Surprised, Stefani laughed out loud. “Very well. Tell me, Dickie—why did Jack write a new will five weeks before he disappeared?”

  “Because Jack was an old man. He was worried about his son and he wanted, at the end, to give him all the things he’d failed to offer during the boy’s life. You know about Rory?”

  “—And the Hanoi Hilton? A little. My friend Max— from whom I inherit the house—was Rory’s only child.”

  “Ah.” Spencer rubbed at his eyes as though they pained him. “The Vietnam War did terrible things to Jack Roderick. It seemed to place in question the value of his whole life in Asia.”

  Stefani waited in silence for him to explain.

  “Jack had this vision of what Thailand could be, when he arrived here after the Second World War. But the years Jack spent here—perhaps even the work he did?— resulted in a different sort of country than he’d hoped.” Spencer shrugged. “He hated the new roads and the filled khlongs and the sex workers and the ugly, slapdash concrete skyscrapers. By the time he disappeared, he no longer seemed to enjoy the things he’d always loved—the silk weavers’ homes in Ban Khrua, the dealers in the Thieves Market. Perhaps he was merely tired.”

  “You blame the war. Did Jack?”

  “I don’t know,” Spencer mused. “My father told me that Jack didn’t support the American engagement in Southeast Asia. For the first time in his life, Jack Roderick was at odds with the country he’d always served.”

  “Meaning the United States? Or Thailand?”

  “Hard to separate the two. They were hand-in-glove during the Vietnam War. It was one of the best periods in history for Thai-U.S. relations. Washington needed a friendly staging ground for troops; Thailand needed support in the region—everyone else in Southeast Asia was battling Communist insurgencies or revolution or both. It was a marriage of convenience between two strangers marooned on an island.”

  “How old were you in 1967?” she asked impulsively.

  “I had my sixteenth birthday three weeks after Jack disappeared.”

  “And people knew that Jack was a spy?”

  “We preferred, in our family, to call him an intelligence operative,” Spencer answered. “A spy might be anything— a man without honor, telling tales to the highest bidder. Jack Roderick had integrity. Perhaps that’s why he said: No more.”

  “Max was convinced that his grandfather died because he opposed the Vietnam War.”

  “Eliminated by right-thinkers on one side or the other?” Spencer shook his head. “I don’t believe anyone killed Jack. I suspect he set about quite purposefully to drop off the face of the earth—and from the look of things, he succeeded.”

  Stefani stared at him wordlessly.

  “No one believes me, Ms. Fogg.” His smile was disarming. “No one agrees. It’s far too simple a solution, you see. But consider the money. Consider Fleur.”

  “Fleur?” she repeated, bewildered.

  “Fleur Pithuvanuk. Jack’s once-and-forever mistress, an exquisite dancer of lakhon. She was decades younger than he and they’d drifted apart toward the end of his life, but she reappeared a few weeks before Jack left for Malaysia. I think Fleur’s the reason Jack went.”

  “I’ve never heard her name before.”

  “Fleur is the key to everything.” Spencer said it softly. “She was another man’s mistress before she was Jack’s. Jack lured her away from Vukrit Suwannathat, Sompong’s father. Blood was bad between Roderick and Vukrit, from that time forward.”

  Stefani remembered something Rush Halliwell had said. “Sompong’s father was Minister of Culture once, too.”

  “It’s a family sinecure.”

  “Dickie—do you think Vukrit hated Roderick enough, because of Fleur, to kill him in the Cameron Highlands?”

  “I think Vukrit hated Jack so much he could have killed him with his bare hands. But Vukrit was investigated thoroughly—if not by his pals in the Thai government, then by the U.S. team that tracked the Roderick case. Jack’s family was persistent. Vukrit was never accused.”

  “But why should Jack just … vanish? Without explaining where he went?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t want to be found,” Spencer suggested. “Look—two days before Jack left for Malaysia, he took me aside in this very room. He put a sealed envelope and a briefcase in my hand. Dickie, he said, I need you to run an errand. Go to the bank and give that letter to the manager Then do as he tells you. Come straight back here and don’t talk to anyone along the way.”

  “What was in the briefcase?” she asked.

  “Nothing at all. I could tell by the weight that it was empty. I didn’t question the fact, or read the sealed letter. I ran errands for Jack quite often—it was one way to learn the business. I went to the bank in a hired tuk-tuk and I remember every meter of the journey. It was beastly hot and the fumes from the traffic were stifling. I thought I should never arrive.”

  He paused, and peered at her soberly. “I can recall almost nothing of the trip back. I was in shock. I had never held so much money in a black bag in my life. That letter I gave the manager must have cleaned out the entire Roderick account.”

  “Jack used the funds to start a new life?”

  “He’d written his will, leaving everything else to his heirs. He couldn’t help his son Rory, trapped in the Hanoi Hilton. And he’d grown mortally tired of Bangkok. Jack cut his losses and got out.”

  “Did this Fleur woman disappear, too?”

  “On Good Friday, Jack took Fleur and that briefcase full of cash to the Cameron Highlands. On Sunday night, he disappeared. But for some reason, Fleur stayed behind. She never explained why.”

  “You spoke to her?”

  “The entire world spoke to her.” Spencer sounded amused. “She’d been privy to one of the most spectacular vanishing acts in history. The New York Times sent their Bangkok stringer, the Agence France-Press, UPI, even the Bangkok Post.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She insisted that Jack had got lost in the jungle. And in a sense, of course, he had—with over a million dollars in U.S. currency. We should all be so lucky.”

  There was a knock at the office door. “Sorry, Dickie,” Spencer’s assistant said, “but the woman from the museum has finally arrived. She’s brought a rather large portfolio, so I’ve put her in the conference room.”

  “Very well,” Spencer replied. “I’ve enjoyed our discussion, Ms. Fogg. But I’m afraid—”

  Stefani’s farewell was drowned in a gushing British voice.

  “Dickie, darling, it’s so fabulous to see you again! I couldn’t wait to get out of London—you know how dreary it always is in October. How is your delicious place in the suburbs? Is the houseboy still pining for me? Shall I come to dinner tonight?”

  There could be only one woman with that peculiar combination of familiarity and affront.

  “Ankana.” Stefani turned toward the door. “Ankana Lee-Harris. What are you doing in Bangkok?”

  “I might ask the same of you—if I hadn’t seen the morning papers!” The woman held her arms wide. “Dearest Stefani. So tragic about Max. I cried buckets when I heard. Of course, his life was over—no skiing, no sex, no fun in a wheelchair, one could hardly expect him to put up with it. We must accept that he died as he lived—mustn’t we? And move on?”

  Spencer looked fr
om Stefani to Ankana. “You two know each other.”

  Ankana slid her manicured fingers along Spencer’s sleeve. “Ummm. That cashmere’s perfectly yummy, Dickie, but then so’s the arm beneath it. Ready to talk? Or should we relax a bit, first?”

  “Talk,” he said firmly. “In the conference room. You were expected an hour ago.”

  Roguishly, she laughed. “I’m worth the wait! You’ll love the things I’ve brought—I had to sell my very soul to get them.”

  “Ankana and I are coordinating on the big Met show that opens in a month,” Spencer explained to Stefani. “Two Thousand Years of Southeast Asian Art. A fortune in sculpture and ceramics will soon be winging its way to New York.”

  “From Roderick’s House?” Stefani turned to Ankana. “And the Hughes Museum?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “Nothing we’ve got can touch Jack Roderick’s treasures. You’re so right to want the collection for your greedy little self—God knows I would. Have you any idea what it’s worth?” Malice gleamed in the woman’s sloe eyes. “I couldn’t believe Max left you a fortune like that. ‘Must be a pretty fabulous lay,’ I told Jeff, ‘if he turned over the kit and caboodle for a mere week of her life! He might have left me his wine cellar, at least.’”

  “I’ll send you a bottle,” Stefani said smoothly. “So you’ve talked to Knetsch recently?”

  “Yesterday. Jeff’s in Bangkok, too.”

  And Oliver Krane had dropped out of sight. What had she called her precarious position? A highwire act, with no safety net? “I thought Knetsch was in France.”