AS THE LONGTAIL boat cut through the Chao Phraya, I stared glumly into the dark water, and the moon reflected like a thousand shards in the wake. I stood alone in the stern. Lena was mad at me, and maybe she’d never forgive me. I was too tightly bound to Bill. That was what I had run from those years ago in Washington, when I knew the cops had him and it was my chance to be free. And here I was, like a chump, his sidekick again of my own free will. Or was it? Shively would have allowed no refusal.
The shadowy form of a temple pierced the moonlit sky as we motored against the current, while wind rustled the palm trees and shook the banyans. No, I had to admit I wanted to come here. To Siam for adventure—me, who had never left Washington until I met Bill. I’d been an accountant and then a barkeep. That had been the extent of my exploits on my own. I sighed, but it was like the sound never existed, drowned as it was in the murmur of wind, river, and boat.
Bill and Link sat together in the front of the longtail in silence. It was no great joy that Link was staying with us. I was baffled and angered by this new alliance. If I had to give up Lena for Bill’s friendship, at least he could show appreciation for my loyalty. And on Bill’s end, he could be making a terrible mistake. I didn’t know how he could stand to be in such close quarters with his rival for Lena’s affection, although looking at Link, I had to agree with Bill’s assessment that he was a shattered wreck. It was hard to imagine what Lena had seen in him, and harder to imagine her seeing it still. But shades of horror and sadness had passed through her eyes when she looked at him, especially when she first noticed the tube in his neck, and her hangdog ways signified guilt. Guilt was like a glue between people. I knew that.
The palazzo grounds were silent but for a no-hope bird sighing in its sleep in the trees. I passed through the front doors where two servants stood sentry in the place where Dass usually had his post, and walked past the library. A hand shot out and grabbed my lapels. It was Bill, and he pulled me inside.
“Some queer things are going to happen tonight, but don’t mind them nor interfere,” Bill said.
“Okay,” I said, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant. I drifted over to Bill’s favourite armchair, where a reading lamp shone a bright circle onto a book with a cheap paper cover: Handbook of Irregular Warfare. I picked it up and looked over the page it was open to, where a passage was underlined. “Never give the enemy a chance. Every soldier must be a potential gangster.” It was crossed out and altered to say, “Every gangster must be a potential soldier.”
“A little light reading?” I asked.
“I like to stay informed. Call me a renaissance man.” Bill took the book from my hands, marked the page with a bookmark, and put it in a drawer.
“What queer things might I expect tonight?” I was curious despite myself.
“Shouting, crying, banging, caterwauling, and general commotion. From the servant’s room on the third floor.”
I felt a sudden alarm that he meant to kill Link with his bare hands. No matter my feelings for him, I could not stand by for that.
“I’m doing him a favour. He’s a junkie. I’m getting him clean. I judge it’ll take four days. He’s not so far gone.” Bill sat down in his green velvet armchair. “But he’s going to suffer.”
“This is a new one. Get a man off drugs? You’ll lose a customer through this.” I stared at the books on the shelves, left behind by the previous owner, in all languages under the sun. The bindings were tooled leather embossed with gold. Bill only clung to this collection, remnants of a finer intellect, to put on a pose for his guests.
“By God, you misunderstand me. I have no pity for people who get into drugs for a lark. That’s what I did, and it was my own damn foolery. But a nurse shot up this man with morphine, day after day in that hospital, and he became an addict against his will. That’s not right.”
“True enough. Good luck, then.” I left the library. I don’t know why Bill’s words bothered me. I should want him to be a decent man.
I HARDLY SLEPT a wink that night. There wasn’t exactly caterwauling as Bill predicted, but it sounded like someone was tap-dancing across the ceiling and Link yammered on and on. After I heard him yell “Lena” once, I muffled my head with pillows. At least I knew Dass was standing guard outside Link’s door, so there was no likelihood that he would rampage through the house.
Bill and I took breakfast in the conservatory surrounded by orchids. The peace was welcome after the disruptions of the night. I cracked open my egg with a small silver knife, and Bill did the same. I sipped coffee from a porcelain cup painted with hale peasants performing mysterious tasks in fields full of windmills. Bill hated these porcelains but he kept them for display after having the mansion’s contents appraised. He had shaken his head, saying, “God knows why but they’re worth a goddamn mint.”
“I know you’re going to see Lena today,” he said out of the blue, and my face felt hot. It was not possible to have a single thought in your head without Bill knowing it. “I advise against it,” he said, cutting up his toast. “She’ll be mad as a hornet. Smile isn’t letting her leave the room. I know she wants to see Link again on the sly. I could see her squirming at that table in the bar, wishing to say things to him but not able to with us around. I would give a deal to know what those things are,” he mused.
“So you’re holding her prisoner.”
“That’s a little harsh, my friend. She’s actually in danger. Some unsavoury elements noted her arrival at the Oriental, and I’m protecting her.” He cut the crusts off his toast one by one.
I banged my fist on the table. “But you’re the one that took her to the Oriental!”
There was a pause, and I was relieved when Bill decided to overlook my outburst.
“No, By God, she took herself. She knows best what risks she’s willing to take to see the lieutenant.”
I wondered what unsavoury elements he meant. His supposed pal, the psychotic chief of police? Those Russians Link mentioned? There were a lot of choices. I undid the top button of my shirt. The sun had risen above the treetops across the river and was glaring through the thousand panes of the conservatory. “We should breakfast earlier if we’re going to do it in a glass box.”
“I like it in here. It’s my favourite thing, to contemplate the flowers,” Bill said. “Ever since I got out of jail.”
I just nodded my head, uncertain what to make of Bill’s strange new poetic leanings, which despite his reformed ways were still at odds with his lifestyle. I tugged on my collar, which was sticking to my neck from sweat.
“Look, go visit her if you want,” he said. “Tell her she can see Link as soon as he settles down. She’ll forgive you.”
“Aren’t you worried about her pity for the lieutenant? Pity is like a drug to some women.”
“Not Lena.” He pushed his cut-up toast pieces through the soft yolk on his plate and took a bite. “She hardly knew him. Shively told me that much. What’s more important is she should spend more time around me. It’s your job to make it happen.” He pointed his fork at me. “You’ll convince her to go to the hospital ball with me at the royal palace. I’m one of the biggest donors. The king will be there, and you can tell her that. Bring her one of the dresses I bought to soften her up.”
I stared at him. He had lost his reason. Lena would not want to go to a party with him, dress or no dress. She hated to be manipulated. My job was doomed from the start.
“Wipe that look off your face, By God. If she wants to see the lieutenant, that’s the condition. She’ll come.”
BILL WAS RIGHT about one thing. Lena opened the door to me when I said it was about Link. But as soon as I proposed the ball, she refused completely.
“What could it hurt?” I asked, grasping at straws, I knew. But this was the only job Bill had given me and I didn’t want to bungle it.
She told me to sit down, giving me the only chair while she sat on the bed. The room was dim with the shutters pulled to keep out the heat. She looked at me with sudden seriousness, then stepped past me to lock the door. She was tired of that goon Smile barging in all the time, she explained.
“Why do you do Bill’s work? He betrays everyone eventually. Including you,” she said as she sat down again. “A copy of your journal turned up on my doorstep three years ago. It was his warning. If he showed it to anyone else, I was done for. My military career meant everything to me.”
I felt like throwing up. “He sent you my private journal?”
“Yes.”
“You were only supposed to get it if I was dead. That was the condition in my will, which the lawyer had, along with the only key. Bill must have corrupted him somehow.”
“Of course he did.” She smiled ironically.
I put my head in my hands, humiliated and not knowing where to look. “I suppose you could always tell how I felt about you, anyhow. That was no secret.”
“I’m sorry how I acted back then.” She took my hand, and hers felt cool, the skin smooth and soft. There was a quiet strength in it also. I was embarrassed that my own hand was sweaty, but what could one do in the tropics? “In the years since, I’ve thought back on how good you were to me,” she said, “and believe me, if I didn’t have the sense to value it then, I do now.”
“I didn’t approve of this scheme.”
“He never listens. I know.”
She was still holding my hand. It was a moment I could have enjoyed forever, except that my humiliation over the idea of Lena reading my journal was so deep. Thinking of it, my anger grew.
“Did you know Bill has a wife in Burma?” I kept out the part that there was no Western ceremony, but he had technically paid the bride price. The Burmese locals considered them married, at least.
“When did he marry?” Her voice was crisp, businesslike.
“About six months ago.”
The warmth in Lena’s eyes had vanished, and her mouth was set in a thin, hard line. I had worried at the Oriental bar when, despite her attempts to ignore Bill, she had accidentally addressed him. And even when she spoke to me, she couldn’t help looking at him briefly each time, before tearing her gaze away. Once Bill saw an open door, he was quick to walk all the way in. I was pretty sure the door was slammed tight again.
“Some rich Englishwoman, I suppose?”
“No. Some tribal girl who rides a horse. That’s all I know. I never saw her.”
“A horse. I see.”
She nodded grimly. I wasn’t sure why equestrian ability was more disturbing than money, but it seemed to be.
“Tell him I’ll come to his damn party,” she said.
I didn’t understand how she agreed after that revelation. She must have some revenge in mind. I did not allow myself a smile until I was outside, on the way back to the palazzo.
Bill was pleased as punch at my news, completely unaware of his doomed position with Lena. Yet he was hardly around for me to gloat over secretly, because in the days of Link’s cure Bill spent hours at a time with him in his room. If Dass was not still on guard at the door, I would have pressed my ear to it to listen. Was Bill spooning him broth and wiping his brow in sympathetic silence, a fellow junkie, or was Link becoming central to Bill’s plans? Surely it was my right to know if someone else was going to be cut into the business. I had to do the accounting of it.
In one of the rare moments when he emerged from Link’s room, I finally approached Bill about it. He was sitting in the library, continuing to ignore his exquisite book collection in favour of the shabby cardboard-bound text on irregular warfare that was placed open, face down, on the side table. He guffawed at my concern.
“He’ll get no money out of me. I’m pleased to turn his brain inside out, is all. Know thine enemy, isn’t that what the Bible says?”
“I don’t think so. That’s more a ‘turn the other cheek’ kind of book.”
“Not the Old Testament. There’s lots of smiting and bloodshed in it.”
I let it go.
“Did Lena like the dress I sent?” he asked.
For half a second I almost felt sorry for him. But only half. “She loved it.”
She had flung it carelessly on the bed. I thought it would be more of a blow if her disgust at everything to do with him hit as a full-force surprise when she arrived.