The phone in the Silk Room rings at 11:17 P.M.
The man in the big bed is awake immediately. Late-night phone calls are so common that his wife sleeps in the Teak Room, more than thirty meters down the hallway. It is a very big house.
“Yes.” He switches on the bedside lamp, and the pale silk walls of the room appear. He listens for a moment, until something he hears brings him up to a full sitting position. His forehead wrinkles and then smooths immediately, automatically erasing the display of concern even though there’s no one to see it. “Seriously? A farang?”
He peels back the blankets and gets up, a lithe, slender, balding man in his early fifties, whose face retains the fine bone structure that had made so many well-bred hearts flutter when he was younger, the bone structure that landed him the problem daughter of one of Thailand’s oldest families, now sleeping down the hall. He wears silk pajamas. “Was he drunk? He must have been drunk.”
A desk, the work of some English craftsman who’s been dead for three centuries, gleams between the heavily curtained front windows. On one corner is a silver tray holding a decanter of water and a heavy, deeply cut crystal glass. The man cradles the phone between ear and shoulder and uses both hands to pour, being careful not to splash any water onto the wood. He picks up the water and sips. “No,” he says, “not at all. You were right to call.” He puts the glass back on the tray and picks up a pen. “Spell it?” He listens and then writes, Rafferty. The man on the other end asks him a question.
“Let me think about that for a second.” His underlings call him “Four-Step” behind his back, because of his insistence on thinking things through four and sometimes even five steps in advance. He closes his eyes briefly, his finger making tiny circles on the wooden surface of the desk.
His eyes open. “Good idea,” he says. “Two in English and two in Thai. All morning papers, and one of them should be the Sun. You’ll need to make the calls right now and use my name to make the morning editions. And I need information about Rafferty. By the time the papers come out.” He listens again for a moment, and impatience twists his face. “Everything,” he says. “I need everything.”