“That?” she said when Sarah pointed it out. “I fell on the deck of our suite when I’d drunk too much rum. It doesn’t hurt.”
She picked up Whiskey and thanked Sarah for being so obliging. The dog had eaten all her prepared meals faithfully, and she seemed as attached to Sarah now as she had been to Pop the day before.
“She’s such a flirt,” Mali said, shaking Whiskey up and down and then tucking the dog under her arm. “All small dogs are. They have to be to survive. If they’re not flirts they get eaten.”
Would Sarah come down later for a drink on her balcony? She could meet Ryo, who was still there.
“Sure, I’d love to meet him.”
“Shall we say in an hour?”
Sarah found herself yet again in front of the lime-green door with a box of Royce Japanese chocolates she had bought earlier in the week from the Emporium mall. Once she had bought them, she lost all desire to eat them, and they had sat in her fridge until tonight. The door to Mali’s apartment was already open—inviting her to enter—and there was the sound of jazz coming from the open-plan kitchen at one end of a long main room that ended with high windows that faced west. Here, Mali stood at a chopping board slicing up a cucumber with a Japanese knife.
She was now in sweatpants and gym T-shirt and her hair was tied back out of her face as she worked. The dog swirled around her legs, and Mali looked up unsurprised. There was a glass of red wine already poured for Sarah, and Mali invited her to take a seat in the living room. Mali came over with her own glass and the dog at her heels. There was nothing in the room but an L-shaped sofa and the table; no pictures or art on the walls, no chairs or rugs or lamps.
“Ryo’s asleep,” she said, sitting down beside Sarah and touching her arm for a moment. “I was just making him something. You’re not hungry, are you?”
“No.”
“Let’s drink cabernet then.”
“Chaiyo.”
Sarah asked how her weekend had been.
“We went out on a boat and it wasn’t raining. Unlike here. I got a little sunburned—”
The bruise on her shoulder now looked darker and more pronounced. Almost the shape of someone’s hand, Sarah thought.
“Ryo’s out cold. Let me go check on him.” Mali gave her a sly smile. I know, it’s exactly what you’re thinking, it said.
She got up and walked over to the bedroom door, then peered in to check that he was still asleep. Then she closed the door behind her and came back to Sarah.
“I’m sorry, I know it’s very rude of him, but he’s exhausted. We got up early. Maybe we should keep our voices down.”
They talked for an hour, devouring all the chocolates and eventually forgetting him entirely. The room was dark; there was only the light from the kitchen and the steady glare from the city. The murmur of jazz and air-con. Soon a strange thought came into Sarah’s mind: They were actually alone and no one else was there. There was no proof for the existence of Ryo at all. She hadn’t looked into the bedroom herself and she hadn’t heard a sound from him. For a moment she felt like charging to the bedroom door and pulling it open. Instead, they drank two more glasses. Sarah’s head loosened. Then, out of nowhere, there was a dull thud from the outside world, a sound like that of a whole wall collapsing in an instant, and they froze with their glasses suspended. It might have been the construction site, but Sarah knew that it wasn’t. They went onto the balcony, from where part of the site could be seen.
The arc lamps were on and men in hard hats swarmed around the pits. They strained to see what was happening, but there didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary. Along the freeways came the flashing lights of police cars, but without sirens, and soon even they had melted away again. But something had happened. In the gaps between the buildings they could see groups of people standing aimlessly at street corners. From those same corners came the echoes of car horns, and around them other people stood on their balconies looking down on the same things. It was a bomb, Sarah thought, and she knew that Mali had thought it as well. She turned to glance at her and she saw that Mali had begun to smile. It was a bomb and she knew it all along.
“It sounded like a pipe bomb,” Sarah whispered.
Mali reached up slowly and touched the lobe of her ear as if it were time to dislodge the earring and turn in to sleep.
“It might not be what you think,” she said.
And, with artful timing, a plume of thin smoke had appeared, rising like the trail of a bonfire.
“What if it was?” Mali said. “Do you know what it means?”
But Sarah was thinking more quickly. The stable tourist metropolis she had assumed would conceal and nourish her had now revealed a fault line, and the secret haven she had chosen for herself was perhaps not as secure as she had imagined it to be. The thought must have risen visibly into her face because Mali seemed to read it there and react accordingly. Sarah was afraid—it was easy to see—because she didn’t understand the context of the place in which she was living. Even the name of the building was perhaps obscure to her. She knew that the original developer, Mr. Lim, had been all his life a most fervent patriot and devotee of the revered monarchy. His naming of the building therefore had been no accident. He and his wife, from whom he had inherited most of his money, had intended to make a patriotic gesture and to have it understood as such. At the time of its construction by himself and his father-in-law, the Yoon patriarch, it was one of the most technologically advanced and dazzlingly luxurious residential complexes in the city. Its fame spread far and wide, and TV actors and celebrities, models, and playboys all lined up to put down payments on the hundreds of newly constructed units. Government ministers vied for the garden penthouses, where society scandals were perpetrated almost monthly.
The Jacuzzis and steam rooms that equipped some of these apartments were unheard of at the time, and for six years until the financial crash of 1997 the Kingdom was a zircon in the city’s rickety diadem, an address so desirable that the children of millionaires put themselves on its agonizingly selective waiting lists. Yet Mr. Lim was not distracted from his patriotic emotions by this frivolous commotion. He had intended to make a building as beautiful and forward-looking as the country he loved, and in the eyes of both the nation and himself he had succeeded. He often claimed that he had been inspired by Walt Disney’s notebooks in which the master had sketched the medieval skyline of Dijon. The marble had come from Carrara—naturally—and the striking blue tiles had been fired in a special factory in Taiwan. He had himself designed the soaring atrium and the public gardens, which had come to him one night in a dream. This included the peacocks, who often came to him in nightmares. He had envisioned a city within a city, but also a scale model of order and interpersonal serenity. His children told him that he had succeeded, and he believed them. In those early days he could often be seen walking through the gardens with his butler behind him wheeling a service cart filled with his morning coffee. Never for a moment had he foreseen the crash that eventually wiped out most of his holdings, along with the fortunes of many of his most prestigious tenants. As a youth Lim had believed in the nation in the way that men believe in their marriages, knowing that Thailand was a kingdom neighbored by Communist states, its pomp and golden throne exalted by the CIA during the Vietnam War. He had grown up in the ethnic Chinese financial aristocracy rooted in tax collection and textiles, tobacco and medicinal drugs—all of which had formed his formidable and autocratic personality. The shock of the crash was immense, though in the end his stoicism had served him well. The Kingdom was shaken, but when the economy recovered he made yet more money with figurine factories in Wuhai and a buffalo mozzarella business in Chiang Rai. He had cunningly foreseen the boom in Bangkok’s Italian restaurants. His tenants, on the other hand, had not been so fortunate.
As the crash destroyed their real estate investments many of them were forced to live on inside the Kingdom as ghosts of their former selves. Their cash had dissolved but they still had seven-room apartments with state-of-the-art kitchens, and this faded glamour became their new medium. Many were still there, growing old and marooned, as if stunned by their misfortune. But the country returned to a boom, the elites who had been shaken soon stirred themselves back to vitality, the tourists flowed into the city in record numbers, China tripled its GDP, and Bangkok became a great money-laundering machine for her footloose capital. The old tenants safe inside the Kingdom weathered this new storm, as well as the military coups in 2006 and 2014, while the army, the monarchy, and the urban middle classes and elites faced off with insurrectionary “Reds” orchestrated by the exiled billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra. Now there was a new king and the game had changed. The military, in power for years, had tightened its grip while the new king, who resided most of the year in a villa in Germany and was often seen cycling through the Bavarian countryside dressed in a strange bikini, asserted ever greater control over the real kingdom. The Lims, like the Yoons, were his devoted supporters. They admired his ruthless sangfroid. However, like many of their class they kept themselves withdrawn from the unpredictable vagaries of politics. They had no need of unwelcome attention and they didn’t seek it. Enthroned in their lush penthouse surrounded by tropical vegetation they busied themselves with their family dramas and their portfolios while Mr. Lim himself pursued a vigorous interest in amateur astronomy. Everything, in sum, could have continued as it had been in both kingdoms had not the economic downturn altered the equation yet again.
The second crash, though milder and more protracted, had brought the latest real estate boom to a halt, as one could see in the construction sites around the Kingdom that were gradually losing steam. The workers were being laid off bit by bit; the huge machines were less active than they had once been. Companies owned by the great and arrogant families were once again faltering. The dictatorship responded with fiscal packages, media campaigns, and subsidies, but this time the sweeteners had failed to sweeten. Over the winter the air had become so polluted that its indices were worse than Beijing and Delhi. Days of smog so toxic that schools had been closed for a week. But now, since the economy had stalled, the discontents of earlier years had resurfaced in a novel way. A younger generation of students had found their insurrectionary voice, inspired by the protests in Hong Kong. At first it was just small demonstrations inside malls where tourists would notice them, isolated acts of civil disobedience on the trains, but when these were greeted with brutal counteractions by the police the protests had quickly escalated as they had in Hong Kong.
From the balcony, Mali pointed to a line of framed photographs arranged on one of the empty bookshelves in her apartment. They were incongruous in such a bare space but they appeared to contain images of an elegantly dressed Thai woman, undoubtedly her mother. Mali went on smoothly: “My mother holds to one value, what we call siwilai. Good breeding, manners, order, modern things. Back in those days it also probably referred to air-conditioning and cleanliness. Civilized. Siwilai. What it really means is endless evasion and halls of mirrors held in place by a large army.”
In the streets below, the police had arrived and there was an upswell of male shouting, of officials reasserting order. Mali took out her earring and let it roll in her palm while she looked at it, as if the scene were of less consequence than a jade stud. She added something else: that the tenants were largely behind the army in these dangerous days but that the ground staff of the Kingdom, the doormen, the gardeners, the receptionists, the odd-job men, were not at all on the same page. Quietly, and fearing being fired if they ever dared to give voice to their sympathies, they supported the protests rippling across the city and sometimes joined them after work without their employers noticing. It was a comedy, this dance of pro and con, but such was the strict internal order of the Kingdom that it could go on for months without either side confronting the other openly. Nor was such confrontation even necessary. The tensions were always held in reserve, papered over by an innate discretion and dislike of conflict. Held just beneath the surface, those tensions simmered with a quiet permanence and they could be felt only by a mind attuned to its rhythms. To an outsider everything would appear calm, right up until the moment when the system broke down and ancient hatreds returned. It could happen within a single day. If she was unlucky Sarah might see it for herself, but the odds were rather against it.
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Mali said, enjoying the trace of terror on Sarah’s face. “It’s still siwilai.”
Medics had now appeared, pickups with plainclothesmen who dispersed into the shadows. Mali took Sarah’s arm and steered her back inside. They walked together out onto the landing and Mali told her again not to worry. There was a coup every ten years here, sometimes every five years, and nothing would ever penetrate the Kingdom. They were protected by high social connections. Even if things got out of hand they could probably watch from their balconies, drink in hand. Her manner had not ceased to be supremely confident and knowing. It was quietly mocking of Sarah’s evident alarm. What did you expect? she seemed to say with her eyes, and getting no reply Mali assumed the authority to reassure the naïve foreigner. She took out her remaining earring and held it in her palm in the same way as she had the other one, as someone does when they are preparing for bed or a bath. It was curious how easily they had forgotten about Ryo, supposedly asleep in the apartment. He had not come up even as a subject of conversation.
Sarah felt there was a ripple of energy between them, something fiercer than sympathy, as they walked to the gold doors of the elevator and the musty atmosphere of the atrium fell upon them with its floating dust and scent of moldering houseplants.
Mali said, “By the way, I assume you keep all your cash under the bed. You should if you don’t. That’s the only precaution you need to take.”
“I do,” Sarah blurted out, and immediately regretted it.
But Mali was no threat to her secrets; she was, after all, merely suggesting that it was normal practice.
“That’s wise, Sarah. I do that too. So does my mother.”
“Does everyone in this building do that? Just in case?”
“Yes, exactly. Just in case.”
The next day Sarah took her swim early and read The New York Times until the middle of the afternoon, when the rains began. She sank into an inertia of Winter Palace tea and napped until she was woken by something her unconscious mind must have noticed and continued to watch. High up among the rows of windows a face had appeared, a young girl of about school age as far as she could see, her hair ribboned in the style of the 1930s. At first Sarah assumed that it must be a daughter of one of the tenants on her way to a costume party—they were held frequently at the Kingdom for the benefit of the resident children. Then she counted her way up the windows to determine which floor the girl was on, and found that it was the sixteenth, the one above hers. In her hair were pale pink ribbons, obviously made of silk, because they shone intensely. Sarah half waved, then desisted, seeing no reaction on the girl’s part. And yet she had clearly been observing Sarah for some time, patiently gazing downward through the filthy glass. And it might not have been the first time. It then occurred to Sarah that if she was being observed it might not be by the figures conjured by her imagination.
There was no escaping the gaze of an innocent child. You couldn’t complain about it to anyone, for example. You had to endure it, work around it as best you could. In many ways, a child was the perfect surrogate agent.
She was about to wave a second time when the face withdrew from the outer light and melted into the darkness of the landing. Sarah decided to go up to the exact place where the girl must have been standing and look down at the spot where she had been lounging a few minutes earlier. It was indeed a perfect vantage point. She looked around, into the landing and the atrium corridors. There was no trace of the girl, no evidence of disturbance.
To escape the claustrophobia of her thoughts, in the late afternoon Sarah went out into the streets. She walked alone up Soi 31 past the Holey Bakery until she was at the corner with Soi 39, where a shisha pipe place stood across from the Gion karaoke bar. There she sat for a while with a mint tea and a pipe watching the Gion girls line up under the lanterns to greet the salarymen and executives arriving in their limos. A teasing hue and cry, a collective bow amid explosively opening umbrellas. Irasshaimase! Dusk was the only glamorous hour. Quicksilver clouds emerged and dissolved over the streets and the tangled cables that swung alongside them like demented vines as she pondered at her own pace, between puffs of apple-flavored smoke, the things that Mali had said to her the night before and the unexpected jolt that the sight of the spying girl had had upon her. She had begun to realize that she had misunderstood every single thing up till then. Looking at the geishas at the entrance to the Gion, in their scarlet kimonos one night, dark green the next, Thai girls remade as Japanese, everything in their welcome contrived to make an effect on customers who spoke not a single word of the language. Neither side understood the other, and the men sat in the dark and belted out Nana Mizuki songs while the Thai girls used their eight words of Japanese over and over to make the financial wheels turn. It was a theater built around desires that could be acted out. She had taken this world too literally. Its face value was not the value according to itself, and below its surface there flowed cross-currents she could feel but whose force she could not yet gauge.
The following morning, the maid sent by Nat finally appeared at her door, waiting patiently for her on her landing. Goi, as Sarah knew she was called, wore a shabby pink dress and carried a shopping bag, which looked as if it might contain a change of clothes. Sarah had forgotten about her, and was therefore unprepared. Since her surprise was written brightly on her face the maid stepped into the breach. “Is it all right?” she said at once, in her employer-affected English. “Miss Natalie said I should come on Tuesday at this time. Is it wrong?”
“I think it was Wednesday.”
“Wednesday cannot. Tuesday.”
“Well, since you are here—it’s all right with me.”
Sarah looked at her watch, but it was more to show her annoyance than for any real reason. She was sure that she had agreed to Wednesday. Yet she forced herself to behave as nonchalantly as possible, opening the door wider by way of invitation, her privacy finally invaded. The maid kicked off her sandals and came, half-bowing deferentially, into the hallway. She set down her bag and Sarah showed her around the apartment with a breezy rapidity. Since all the units at the Kingdom bore a generic similarity to one another, the maid already knew where everything was and how it worked. She could do the washing and ironing in the outdoor area and maid’s room behind the kitchen, and she could leave anything she needed to leave at the apartment there as well. But that day, Sarah said, she didn’t need to stay the whole four hours. She could do two hours and then leave early; she could make up for that time the following week, if she didn’t mind. “Ka,” Goi agreed, and Sarah gave her the standard 500-baht fee.
“You can do the ironing next week as well, since there’s hardly any to do.”
“Ka.”
When it was agreed, Sarah left her in the kitchen and went to the spare room to lock the suitcase stored in the cupboard. There was no way she could conceal it entirely. She had to hope that the maid wouldn’t be too nosy and try to open it herself. Should Sarah make a point of it openly by asking her not to, that would only bring attention to the suitcase. In any case, there was nothing she could do about it now. She let Goi do as she pleased and sat mutely at the bar in the kitchen reading magazines, making sure that the new maid didn’t look too closely through her things. Soon, meanwhile, she recalled that the maids at the Kingdom had their own passkeys, and that they let themselves into the apartments while their clients were at work during the day. This raised the question of whether Goi had a key for her unit and could come and go as she liked—it was obviously an honor system that everyone obeyed. She wondered if she should ask Goi directly. But when the time was up and Goi was preparing to leave, she decided not to ask after all. It felt like an etiquette she didn’t quite grasp but that she shouldn’t question too much. Khun Goi was merry and innocent, and she even offered to make dinner next time, though Sarah declined. She bowed to Sarah and told her that she would be back at the same time the following week.
There was no harm in her that one could see, and when she had gone Sarah felt ashamed of being so uncharitable toward her. She could see that Goi was kindly and bustling by nature, and since she worked for, and had been referred by, the haughty couple on the twenty-first floor she would be eager to make a good impression and do so as unobtrusively as possible. She wanted to get in and get out as efficiently as possible in return for the 500 baht. All the same, Sarah made a mental note to be at home at the same time next Tuesday. She preferred to have as little interaction with the staff as she could, because she had the feeling that they were inveterate gossips. Did that include Goi? Of course it did. No one gossiped more than maids. They were ambulatory grapevines seething with malice, even if outside the play of gossip they were the sweetest people imaginable, or made themselves seem as much. The persona presented for public display was rarely the intuitive personality that hovered beneath it, as was true in any culture. But then, the same was true of her, was it not? Her inside and her exterior were incompatible realities much of the time, little different from the world inside the Kingdom and the one outside it.