I SETTLED LENA into the Sawasdee Hotel near the obscure Ratchini Pier, where Bill had originally planned because it was an area with no curious foreigners. I apologized about the rundown wood-frame building, but Lena said it was lovely to have her own room after the military dormitories she was used to. I steeled myself to answer questions about Bill, but she said no more about him. Her focus on Hughes was single-minded. This did not bode well for Bill. It would have been better if Hughes were here and she could have got him out of her system. Bill had said he hadn’t seemed like much—the man must have still been in the regular ward then, rather than a mental patient, or Bill would have commented on it. I don’t know, maybe Bill even arranged his disappearance. Then Lena would never see Hughes, and the way would be clear for him. Or so he would think. I could not see Lena taking him back. She didn’t need anyone, least of all him.
“No hope, no hope,” came a call through the screened window from the hotel courtyard. That damn bird. I couldn’t see it, but I knew what it looked like: plump and brown and white, its kind lazed around in the garden of the palazzo. It would likely be good eating. But its feelings had no bearing on me. I glanced at Lena where she sat in an armchair in the corner of the room. She seemed concentrated on something on the floor, though I couldn’t see anything.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find him,” I said. “We’ll turn over every rock.” Chief Phao would certainly be doing that, but lord knew what would crawl out when he did. I didn’t think I’d mention Chief Phao’s involvement to Lena yet. I’d leave that up to Bill.
I’d tried to convince her to let me look for Hughes while she rested, but she pointed out that I didn’t know what he looked like, while she did, so I was forced to give way. She didn’t have a photograph of him. Somehow that fact pepped me up, as though he couldn’t really be that special.
Wake up, Byron, I told myself. She had come around the world to find him.
We tried the ports and the train stations—anywhere a traveller would need to pass through if he wanted to leave the country. When the sun set on our hot and fruitless day of searching the city, we returned to her hotel. I could see she felt discouraged and tired, her hand touching delicately, absently, the bandage on her neck. I told her to stay put and I’d get some food, though there would only be noodles. No food for farangs, as they called white foreigners, in this district. She said that was fine and settled into the one chair to wait. Through the slats in the wooden window screen there was a view of thatched rooftops and the shiny blade of a canal slicing through the city, the rotting smell of which wafted over on the wind. I borrowed a lidded bowl from the manager and went outside to look for a vendor that was busy and clean. Every time I walked on the streets of Bangkok it shocked me anew, being more chaotic than you could ever conceive of back home. I’d sheltered Lena from it by taking taxis all day. An ox team pulling a cart jangled past, nearly knocking me over. I found a little restaurant decorated with calendars from years past, each featuring a picture of the old king until 1936, when Prince Ananda appeared as a child. He was a scrawny little thing, and I pitied him. I rather hoped that Bill was brewing something up to save him from shadowy enemies. Might as well. Whatever Bill’s plan was in the palace—robbery, rescue, or murder—it was going to involve me. Of the three, a rescue sat easiest in my mind.
Out front, I handed my bowl to a Chinese boy stirring a soup pot, and stood with my hands in my pockets while he threw in some some noodles and what I’d call meatballs, which hopefully weren’t stuffed with strange things. Restaurants in Siam were designed backwards from what I was used to, with the kitchens outside to let the heat from cooking escape.
I grabbed a South China Morning Post someone had left behind and sat down on a dark wooden stool polished smooth from generations of sitting. The ink smell wafted up as I turned the pages. It was not soothing reading. The rice-factory workers were planning a rally near the Parliament, since the king’s appointed government had legalized labour activity recently. I wondered where it would all lead. With neighbouring China nearly taken over by the Communists, Western governments were nervous about such displays. Maybe the Americans really were sending money to Chief Phao. One thing he was not was a Communist.
It was not an easy life being a king, I reflected. The old king, Ananda’s father, had abdicated after a coup, and lived in exile with his family in Switzerland. They had been allowed to keep their wealth and status as long as they rubber-stamped the new government. However, winners and losers could change places quickly in this country, and it would be a delicate balancing act. This King Ananda, with his European education, supported democracy and made it clear he would endorse a new constitution that allowed free elections. Pridi, the most popular leader right now, was branded a Communist. Could Siam be the first country in the world where the people elected a Communist government?
The Chinese boy called out that my soup was ready, and I folded up the newspaper. He ladled the meatballs and soup into my bowl with a tidy flick of his wrist, and he smiled at me shyly. I put the lid on and kept shifting my fingers along the hot rim, trying not to burn myself as I carried it back to the hotel.
Back at Lena’s room, I locked the door behind me. Lena sniffed at the soup, tasted it, and declared it delicious. I felt as proud as if I had made it myself. At least I’d done something that pleased her. Seated at the single small desk, she finished it off, and dabbed her lips with a napkin. The lock in the door turned by itself and Lena and I stared at each other, my heart thumping. Maybe it was just the maid service, but suddenly I wished I had a gun. Could it be the people who followed Lena? She had said she was probably tailed from Alaska to Hawaii. Funny that life as a bank robber seemed an easy lifestyle compared to whatever she was into now. Her face back then had been open, looking forward to the next adventure. Now I would say that dread composed her outlook.
“We need to talk.” It was Smile with his tally-ho accent and ill-matched thuggish appearance.
“You could knock,” Lena said, and I admired her sangfroid in the face of this alarming stranger. “Whoever you are. And who gave you a key?”
Smile ignored her. “Outside, Byron,” he said. There was no need for him to act so bossy, I thought.
“I’ll just be a minute,” I said to Lena.
Sheepishly I followed Smile into the dingy hall, closing the door carefully behind me, and moved well away from Lena’s room.
“The chief found Link Hughes,” he said, speaking low. “Bill has him. You’d better move quickly.”
“Where?”
“The Oriental Hotel bar.”
“We’ll leave now.”
I watched him depart through the dark hallway and down the stairs with doubt in my mind. Did Bill know what he was doing with this meeting? Of course Bill assumed he was the better specimen now, but physical fitness alone did not win a woman’s heart. Plus, he did not know the image she might hold of this man in her mind, and it might override the present-day reality. That might equally hold true for Bill, and her memory of him could not be pretty. Except for whatever happened between them during her prison visit, which Bill said went poorly, the last time she saw him was when he hit her and she ran away.
Yet Bill was right about me. I would do as he wanted. I would take Lena to the Oriental and set her down between two men who she would be torn between, and I would just be a bystander. Wouldn’t it at least make her grateful to me? Later, when the dust cleared and she realized both men were part of the past, or just not worthy, I would be standing beside her—her loyal friend. That was something.
The Oriental Hotel. As always, Bill was either crazy or a deep genius. That’s where the crooked politicians went, the corrupt businessmen, and the underworld kingpins who earned their riches God knows how. Taking Lena there was like trying to hide yourself in the eye of a hurricane.
I don’t know, maybe it’s safe in there. No one else wants to go in.
I went back into the room. As soon as I told Lena I knew where Hughes was, she grabbed her purse and said, breathlessly, “Let’s go.”
We ran downstairs and I had the manager call us a cab, handing him a baht note. “Make it quick.”
Sitting in the cab, Lena put on some lipstick, her hand steady despite the occasional jounce on the road. Then she carefully blotted her lips with tissue. Thinking of the expression Don’t shoot the messenger made me hold my silence. I hoped she understood that Bill would be there. Could she have forgotten how he was? He wouldn’t just watch things unfold. He would control everything, somehow. I didn’t know what his game was, besides seeing Lena, of course. He had seemed very interested in Link Hughes—beyond what you would expect of a rival for a lady’s heart. Admittedly, his story was unusual. I’d had it in dribs and drabs from both Bill and Lena. It could not be typical to be transferred from a desk job to a British guerrilla force behind enemy lines in Burma. But war yanked people out of all corners of the world and placed them in strange situations. I’d heard about that from the soldiers who came into my bar in Sequim. Farm boys who’d never left Washington State were suddenly perched on the Sphinx in Egypt for a photograph, their legs splayed as though casually riding a mare back home. War seemed to make people good at pretending.
I kind of wished I’d been in the war.