DARK SECRETS
The more concerning moments for Cavalier were at night. If he ventured back to the condo late, he would be vigilant just outside the entrance, in the foyer and in the corridor to his apartment. This caution made him think about obtaining a weapon. He had his disassembled high-powered rifle inside Big Betty, the hollowed-out oversized cricket bat, but it was for his other professional work, which he had stepped away from while in hiding. He thought about the Glock 17, which he had placed in a safety deposit box so long ago. He still had the key and the receipt for the box at the Bangkok Bank, but under his real name. After some research, he discovered that the bank branch he had used had been moved to the Airport Plaza, along with all the deposit boxes.
He found the bank’s new address, but was apprehensive about entering it as Victor Cavalier. To his surprise, he did not have to show a passport or any ID to visit his box. All he needed was the receipt and the key. He took the package from it and later, in his apartment, unwrapped the weapon.
Cavalier took it to a firing range in south-west Chiang Mai, but was not allowed to use a private gun. A day later at dawn, he rode up Doi Suthep mountain to near a bend in the road three-quarters of the way up and found a secluded spot in the rainforest evergreens, He walked well into the wooded area, marked two thick tree trunks and fired off six shots from twenty paces.
At first, Cavalier was unsure if his aim was off or the gun needed calibrating. After some adjustment with a screwdriver and knife, he judged that the plastic had deteriorated a fraction, enough to spoil a perfect shot. Six shots more at the second attempt were satisfactory and he was pleased with his aim and the gun’s proficiency. He carried it from then on in his brown valise, and felt more secure.
In his first few months, not even some of Cavalier’s long-term friends would see him before he became comfortable in the new environment, or heard that Cortez had been dealt with by the Americans. He considered writing a book about his life in the demi-monde of spies and his clandestine assignments. Yet every time he thought of a narrative in non-fiction, or even fiction, it covered terrain that he could never publish. Apart from the possibility of incriminating himself, Cavalier knew too many secrets about intelligence services in many countries, including Thailand. This left him with his freelance journalism, with outlets in France and Australia. He would use Chiang Mai as a base, as he had thirty years ago, with more and easier access to ten different cultures within three or four hours’ flight. He had applied for a long-term visa on his false passport and was using a precocious young English lawyer to obtain it for him. Technical help from among Gregory’s contacts had set him up so that he used an Internet server based in Russia. He could browse using an assumed Internet address that assigned his location to a country other than Thailand and Australia. Without any particular outlet for his writing, Cavalier had to be content with a false byline and the choice of mostly apolitical colour features. He knew the income stream would be meagre to begin with.
He thought about contacting Pin, but they had been divorced several years and he had not been in touch, even when he believed their daughter, Pon, had been murdered in Mexico. She had always believed this anyway and he judged that telling her of the distressing video, which appeared to show Pon had been decapitated by Mendez, would only be bad for her bipolar condition. It had flared when she was under stress, and the video of Pon being dragged into a dungeon, having her head placed on a block and the guillotine coming down would have been too much for her.
Pin believed that her special angel doll Serena, which she’d had for three decades, had protected Pon as she journeyed into the ‘next world’, as she called it. Soon after her disappearance, this had been a contentious subject between Cavalier and Pin. He stopped short of calling her more than ‘irrational’ for her faith in Serena, the ‘inanimate piece of hideous plastic’. He had grown to appreciate Thai culture, its beliefs and superstitions. He had studied its roots and had kept an open mind about the prevalent concept of ghosts and spirits, mainly because of two inexplicable experiences he’d had, decades earlier in England. Yet he could not justify the doll worship as anything beyond mumbo jumbo. And he could not understand why his exceptionally intelligent wife had such faith in it.
Cavalier had kept contact with his stepdaughter Far, who was a thirty-four-year-old doctor married to an American television talk-show host and living in New York. She and Cavalier had a good relationship, and he felt an unspoken bond with her because of his effort to save her from her father. Cavalier had made sure she had a good life and education through university. Far had been unaware of the extreme step Cavalier had gone to on her behalf. He couldn’t even foresee himself making a deathbed confession about killing her biological father Kun, whom she hated even as a toddler. Cavalier did not see the point.
*
Dwelling on Pon’s fate, along with Ted’s disclosure, had caused more sleepless nights. He’d had intermittent nightmares in the last year over the video depicting his daughter’s murder, even after he had himself disposed of her apparent killer Mendez. There was always a different dream version that had not been appeared in the actual video. In one, Mendez held up the severed head of his daughter, who pleaded for help. In another the head smiled at him and he woke up thinking instantly that she wasn’t dead. In a third horror reverie, he saw the guillotine slam down and blood everywhere. But instead of his daughter’s severed cranium being lifted from the floor, it was that of Serena the doll. It also spoke, but not to him and without saying anything intelligible. After that he awoke in a terrible state of shock at 3 a.m. and could not go back to sleep. Instead, he poured himself a strong double malt whisky and sat alone on the balcony trying, and failing, to make sense of what his inner mind was regurgitating.