by Meg Gardiner
Jax said, “Aren’t we lucky that Rio puts cameras everywhere, just in case someone exciting shows up? She was always willing to sell us this club footage, at a discount.”
A mix of Asian and Caucasian men filled the club. The girls were dancing, flirting, sitting on laps. The front door opened and in walked a husky man, handsome, crew cut, tucking aviator shades into his shirt pocket, eyeing the scene like a linebacker hunting for a quarterback to sack.
“I knew Hank was mixed up with Rio. He was a bon vivant. But I didn’t care. He helped build the conduit, getting Rio’s film footage to us.”
She seemed to consider her words.
“I didn’t know he’d been crazy with lust for Rio for fifteen years. For too long I didn’t know they had a child, Christian. I was a fool,” she said. “I convinced myself he would help me get the underage girls out of her cathouse. I didn’t know Rio was splitting her take with him.”
She focused on the camera. “He decided to shop me to the gunrunners. Apparently they paid better than the agency.”
Hold on. This was the tale she’d told me when we first met: that she became involved with an asset, and killed him when he tried to shop her to drug traffickers. Except it wasn’t. It was Jax version 2.0, a new spin on the mythology.
“But I found out. That’s when things got ugly.”
In the club, Hank was ordering a drink. The music rolled over the top of the crowd. The man at the jukebox turned around.
It was my father.
“Real ugly,” Jax said. “And I know there are only two words to explain why I’m alive and here to tell you all this. Phil Delaney.”
He was younger, mid-forties, raw and coiled even as his slow stride took him to the bar. I reached out and touched his image on the screen.
“It wasn’t the agency that extracted me. It wasn’t State. Those prigs wouldn’t rescue Jesus from the cross unless they cleared it with the legal department first. It wasn’t naval intelligence in D.C., or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It was the man on the ground.”
One of Rio’s girls approached Dad—the raven-haired waif with the hungry eyes. She put a hand on his chest.
He removed it. The waif looked over her shoulder and slipped away into the crowd as a woman approached Dad.
When Rio Sanger put her hand on my father’s chest, he didn’t push it away.
He spoke to her, standing absolutely still, hands loose at his sides. His gaze slid past her shoulder as Hank Sanger came toward them down the bar, plowing through the crowd like an icebreaker.
The video faded, the song lingering from the jukebox. Still in peaceful dreams I see the road leads back to you . . .
Jax appeared. “Phil, Tim—you’re the reasons I’m alive. Got me out, saved my soul. So this hatred . . .” She looked away, shaking her head. “It’s wrong.”
I jerked upright and grabbed the sides of the computer.
“We couldn’t rescue all Rio’s girls. But you did rescue me.”
Hatred—between Tim and my father?
“And having Hank Sanger die didn’t turn out to be the end. It was only the beginning. Which is why you’d better be across the date line by now.”
She hit a key. “Remember, there are three of them. Watch out.” The screen went dark. “Eighteen hours. Hope you’re hauling ass.”
We descended into Bangkok from the north, bouncing over a city that spread from horizon to horizon. The airliner’s cabin looked like a college dorm the morning after a party. Blankets, trash, the lingering smell of noodles, a waft from the bathrooms. My eyes felt gritty, my legs stiff. With sunrise the earth had gone green, and through bright haze flecks of light gleamed up at us like mirrored tiles. Bumping lower, I saw that they were tin roofs amid lush foliage.
I felt wired. In my backpack I had a Bangkok guide and several hundred dollars’ worth of crisp, psychedelically colored Thai baht. The address Jax had given me was carefully written on a slip of paper in my pocket. I had five hours to get the next flash drive. The jet strained, wings bouncing. It flared and hit the runway.
With three hundred other passengers, I hustled out into the airy terminal. The first thing that struck me was the signage: The Thai alphabet looked rococo, like scrollwork. Around me, conversation sounded chopped and full of intonations. It hit me exactly how foreign I was here. This wasn’t Mexico or France, where I could decrypt familiar phrases.
At passport control, the woman behind the desk scowled at my photo, and my face, and her screen, and whacked my passport with her stamp. My luggage came and I humped outside. Into a day of buzzing tourist vans, shouting drivers, gushing purple orchids, smog, and humidity. A hot breeze scudded over me.
Welcome to Thailand.
At the taxi rank a driver got out and sauntered around to the curb, greeting me as he popped the trunk and tossed my bag inside. “Sawatdee.”
“Sawatdee.” Peering at my little Thai phrase book, I stuttered, “Bpai tee yoo nee.” To this address. I read aloud the name of the guesthouse I’d booked online from LAX, adding, “Ga-ru-na.” Please. He nodded and climbed in the car.
Even if I was here for only a few hours, I needed someplace to park my luggage while I chased down the next flash drive. The guesthouse cost seven dollars per night and had taken my reservation without asking for a credit card number. I got in the taxi, feeling spacey. The driver pulled out and screeched away.
Down the wrong side of the road.
Whoa—they drove on the left here? I thought this only happened in England. I gripped the door handle, feeling freaked out.
Within minutes he accelerated onto a freeway and sped along, windows down, through thick traffic. Apartment buildings swept past, and thick greenery, lacy tall trees, and random skyscrapers. Shine, dirt. New, old. Decrepit, gilt-laden. Thai talk banged at me from the car radio. The sun was orange in the morning sky. We streamed on, mile after mile, the city so vast that I couldn’t see any discernible skyline on the horizon, just sprawl.
When the taxi lurched to a stop, my eyes popped open. My hair was stuck to the side of my face with sweat. Shoot. I’d fallen asleep.
We were stopped at a red light on a congested surface street. Noise bounced off buildings, smoked-glass offices and old plaster-walled shops painted bright blue or yellow. Greenery gushed from the sidewalks and from every space between buildings. Hawker carts lined the sidewalks, selling clothes, souvenirs, and food from steaming woks.
A traffic cop was directing cross-traffic, wearing a helmet and a surgical mask. Trucks and buses spewed exhaust through the open windows of the taxi. A beggar was working his way down the middle of the street between stopped vehicles. All around, waiting with us at the lights, were motor scooters. A horde of motor scooters, bearing cute teenage girls and boys, middle-aged women, entire families—mom, dad, and grandma packed aboard, a toddler, nut brown and wiry, squirreled on the driver’s lap.
There was a knock on the frame of the car. I turned and went still. The beggar stood at the window, one hand out. His other arm was paralyzed, hanging like a sock full of laundry. The driver turned up the radio and ignored him. I stared. Santa Barbara has some shameless panhandlers, mostly alcoholics hustling cash for booze, or mentally ill homeless people arguing with the sky, which is why I give my money to the shelter run by Catholic Charities. But the man outside my window was sane, sober, and awful, and perhaps the head of a household. He leaned toward me, swinging the useless limb in front of my face.
All I could think was how the sight of this beggar would incite Jesse to sulfurous anger, and how thankful I was that his life didn’t demand such abasement. I jammed money into the man’s hand.
The light turned green. The motor scooters revved, buzzing like a host of demented frogs. The air turned blue with exhaust. The taxi pulled out, leaving the beggar behind.
The guesthouse proved less dicey than I had feared. It was dim, hot, and full of Australian backpackers, rugged guys and gals with white-folk dreadlocks and faded banda
nnas tied around their necks. Hearing English, that tangy Aussie accent, gave me a boost. Once I checked in, I ran up three flights of creaking stairs. The slat windows in my tiny room overlooked an alley lined with cafés and overhung with electric wires. I dumped my luggage on the linoleum floor, changed my socks, and jogged down the hall to the bathroom to wash my face with cold water. I dried my hands on my green combat trousers. Grubby though I felt, I had no intention of showering. This bathroom did not have a floor where I wanted to set bare feet, even if somebody dared me or paid me. Big money.
Back in the room, I turned on the cell phone I had purchased at LAX. It was pay-as-you-go, meaning I hadn’t had to register for the phone network with a credit card. And it was triband, so it was supposed to work worldwide. Now I waited, hoping that “worldwide” included this humid, dingy corner of Bangkok.
The phone chirped and the network signal came in strong. I put it in my backpack along with my computer. That was staying with me, no matter what.
Ten minutes later I was striding down the crowded street with sweat and grime working into my pores. Above my head, laundry hung on poles outside apartment windows. Music poured from boom boxes. Tuk-tuks droned past, open-air taxis that were basically rickshaws bolted to mopeds. Signs said McDonald’s, 7-Eleven, Tiger Beer. Everybody else was having a great time. Everybody else was smoking. Outside a souvenir shop, vividly colored sarongs waved like palm fronds. Nearby, the shop’s proprietor squatted in the shade. Thais and Western tourists packed the sidewalk cafés. I must have looked like the grimmest ratty backpacker in town.
The down-ticker on my computer read three hours and two minutes.
At the corner I hailed a taxi. I showed the driver the address and pronounced it for him: Ajahn Niram, 2 Sanamchai Road.
The road was jammed with Toyotas and scooters and tuk-tuks struggling to accelerate. My hair batted around my face in the wind. I had no idea what kind of place I was going to. We drove for twenty minutes, until we reached a broad boulevard that edged a vast plaza with a park in the center. Museums and elegant temples lined the exterior. Two billboards bore photos of the king and queen. They looked noble and resolute in their formal regalia and thick spectacles.
Traffic thickened, and the driver crawled down one side of the square under a leafy canopy of trees. He pulled to a stop alongside the whitewashed walls of what looked to be a fortress.
He pointed at a gate in the wall. “Wat Po.”
My slip of paper said nothing about Wat Po. “Ajahn Niram?”
Again he pointed, speaking syllables I couldn’t grasp. I got out into the broiling sun and paid him, saying, “Kop khun.” Thanks. The walls, reflecting the light, were whiter even than the glazed surface of the sky.
I walked through the gate, into the grounds of a Buddhist temple.
14
My shoulders slumped. Wat Po was more than a temple. It was a city within the city, an expanse of monuments and cloisters and museums—a university campus, essentially. How on earth was I supposed to find the flash drive in here?
Paying the entrance fee, I wandered into the grounds. There was a sense of elegance and grandeur, and about a million tourists. The buildings were of a classical Thai style, whitewashed with orange-and-green tile roofs and gold spires along their gables. Imposing and ornate, they stretched along tree-lined walkways. Near the walls, kiosks sold knickknacks, maps, incense, and ice cream. Bands of monks strolled by, shaven headed and swathed in saffron robes. Where there was open space, round spires rose from the ground like stalagmites, covered with bright mosaic tiles. The whole place shone in the sun like a solar-collecting system.
“It’s called a chedi.”
I looked around. “Sorry?”
The young woman had an Australian accent and a generous smile. She nodded at the ornate mosaic spire I was staring at. “They’re pagodas. Shrines.” She strolled over, propping a pair of sports sunglasses on top of her head. “Saw you at the guest lodge, didn’t I?”
She did look familiar, but that may have been the backpacker’s clothing and sense of ease and adventure she exuded.
“You seem lost,” she said.
“Jet lag.” Hopefully I asked, “Are you a tour guide?”
“Nah, tourist. I’m waiting for Russell; he’s my boyfriend? I’m Terry.”
“Hi.” I felt disconcerted, but that could have been the sleep deprivation. I glanced again at the slip of paper with this address written on it.
Her perky look evaporated. “You all right? You don’t look so great.”
I needed guidance, a clue, and I needed it now. And all at once I knew that I was on the verge of losing it: too hot, tired, and depleted.
“You’re dehydrated. Come on; let’s get you some water.”
I let myself be pulled along to a stall selling drinks. Speaking some loud combination of Thai and Aussie, Terry got me a large bottled water. We wandered over to a planter and sat down in a shred of shade. She twisted the top off and handed the bottle to me. I downed half of it.
“Thanks,” I said.
She took off her bandanna, poured some water onto it, and pressed it against the back of my neck. I felt immensely grateful.
“Not to pry,” she said, “but are you in trouble?”
I shook my head. “Thank you for your help.” I showed her the piece of paper with the address on it. “Does this mean anything to you?”
She tipped her head. “Ajahn Niram.”
“Know how I can find it?”
“Not it. Him. Ajahn, that’s like . . . teacher, or reverend. It’s a title for a monk.”
The duh landed on me like a lump. With a concerted push, I stood up.
And felt a rush in my head. I waited for it to subside. “Can you do me one more favor?”
She accompanied me back to the food stall. A group of twelve-year-olds was crowded around the counter eating snow cones. The food coloring had turned their lips turquoise and purple. The woman in the stall glanced at me, barely moving in the heat.
“Ajahn Niram?” I said.
She kept serving the schoolkids but nodded at some buildings in the distance and spoke rapidly, words that meant zip to me. I glanced at Terry.
“She said something about the main temple,” Terry said.
The woman repeated the monk’s name and tapped her cheek. She pointed toward the center of the temple grounds and said clearly, “Wat Phra.” When I repeated that, she nodded and said, “You go. He come there.”
I thanked her and walked toward the temple. Terry came along.
“Listen, I’m feeling much better now,” I said.
She continued along with me. “No worries. You gonna tell me what this is about?”
“Long story.”
“I got time.”
“Where’s your boyfriend?”
“Probably went to find something to eat. He likes noodles more than Buddhas.”
I didn’t want to be rude, but I didn’t want her along either. “Thanks for your help. I’m fine now.”
“Glad I could give you a hand. Wat Phra’s up ahead.” She pointed and led the way.
The temple was in the center of a cloister, surrounded by green grass, high walls, and a cocooning quiet. Seeing rows of sandals and boots outside the doors, I removed my hiking shoes and went in.
I’d never been in a Buddhist temple. There were no pews, no music. Columns inlaid with ornate tilework rose to the dark recesses of the ceiling. At the far end of the room, a towering altar bore a golden Buddha. Offerings were set out on the floor before it—photos, flowers, food. On the carpet, twenty monks sat cross-legged in prayer.
Terry appeared beside me. “You can kneel or sit, but don’t show the soles of your feet to the Buddha. That’s very rude.”
We knelt. It was calm and blessedly cool, but I gazed at the monks with dismal anxiety. In my head I heard a ticking sound.
Five minutes, ten—finally the monks stood to leave. I scanned each of their young faces, hoping for some fl
ash of inspiration. And I saw him.
His glasses were thick, and the stubble on his shaved head showed gray. Beneath the one-shouldered saffron robe, he had the body of a blacksmith. The scar ran from the bridge of his nose across one cheek and back to his ear.
Quietly I said to Terry, “Excuse me. I have to go.”
I stood and walked over to him. Putting my hands together in front of my face the way I’d seen the local people doing, I said, “Sawatdee.”
He did the same.
“Ajahn Niram?”
His gaze was old and ferocious. The scar was lumpy, as though the wound had not been repaired so much as bundled back together under rough conditions. He seemed to be waiting. I took Jax’s religious medallion from my pocket and handed it to him. He eyed the Madonna. Closing his hand around it, he walked outside.
I followed, retrieving my hiking shoes and jogging after him. He rambled into the sunshine. His robes lit like a sunset.
“Do you have a name?” he said.
“Evan Delaney.”
He gazed into the distance. “You have your father’s way.”
My throat closed up. “You know Dad?”
“I knew him. And I know what you want.”
“Do you have it?”
From the folds of his robes he produced a cell phone. He made a call in rapid-fire Thai, flipped it shut, and said, “Five minutes.”
Though he continued staring into the distance, his bearing seemed not meditative but eager. I felt a strange conviction—that he, like I, had been given something dangerous for safekeeping by Jakarta Rivera. And now he was relieved to be getting rid of it.
“How do you know my father?”
He turned the medallion over in his palm. “That was another time. Not literally another life, but morally and physically it might as well have been.”
As he turned the medallion in his palm, I got a clear view of the tattoo on his forearm: wings unfurled around an open parachute.
