The Ambassador's wife

“It doesn’t to me either, but it’s not my call.”

Cally slowed the car and pulled up next to the only tollbooth that was open out of a long line of lighted booths that stretched all the way across the highway. The attendant was a fat woman with a face like a wrinkled paper bag and her brown polyester uniform stretched tightly over her heavy arms as she reached out to take the toll from Cally. A light above them changed from red to green and they shot away from the booth and slipped back into darkness.

“Tell me again why we’re going to Pattaya,” Tay said.

“I want to talk to a guy who lives there now. I worked with him at the embassy in Bangkok, but he’s retired. At least he says he is.”

“You used to work here? In Thailand? I didn’t know that.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Sam.”

Tay didn’t say anything to that. There were a lot of things, of course. Now that he thought about it, he realized he knew hardly anything about Cally at all.

“The embassy in Bangkok was my first posting. I was Assistant Regional Security Officer here for two years.”

“Is Singapore a promotion?”

“Well…” Cally thought about it. “I’m an RSO now instead of an Assistant RSO. That’s a promotion. But Singapore is a small mission and Bangkok is a big mission. I guess it’s pretty much a break-even deal.”

“Who is this guy we’re going to talk to?”

Cally didn’t answer immediately and Tay wondered why.

“Look,” she finally said after a long silence, “I don’t want to sound coy, but I don’t think I ought to tell you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t expect you do.”

Cally cleared her throat and Tay waited in silence to see what was coming.

“He says he’s retired, but I don’t think he is.” Cally shot Tay a look, but in the darkness of the car he missed her expression. “He was with the Agency when I was in Thailand.”

“The Agency?”

“The CIA.”

“Ah,” Tay said. “That Agency.”

“If he wants to tell you who he is, he will. But just in case he’s not really retired, I don’t want to say too much.”

Tay thought about that while he looked out the window at the passing countryside. A huge, newly built apartment building abruptly loomed up out of the night. It rose thirty or forty floors over absolutely nowhere at all and was completely dark, apparently empty and abandoned. Beyond it were yards filled with wrecked cars and huge metal warehouses with signs in Thai script. All of a sudden two old cargo airplanes in fading camouflage paint appeared like a mirage just sitting alongside the road. Scrawny cows grazed silently around the planes.

“Why am I here, Cally?”

She turned her head slowly to Tay as if she was seriously contemplating his question and then, just as slowly, turned it back toward the road.

“Because I want you to be,” she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Does this man know I’m coming with you?”

She nodded, but she didn’t say anything.

“And he doesn’t mind?”

Cally gave a little shrug. “He didn’t say one way or the other.”

Suddenly the road was engulfed in a dense grove of palm trees and they crossed a wide, muddy river on a narrow bridge that rattled underneath them. On the opposite bank, a Thai temple was lit stark white against the black sky. It littered like fire from red and yellow glass embedded in its masonry. Then as abruptly as it had appeared the temple was gone and they were driving again through the darkness over hard, featureless scrubland.

“What does your friend have to do with these murders?”

“Nothing, but he knows everything that happens here. Sometimes when I was in Thailand it seemed to me that he knew everything that had ever happened here. And he’ll be honest with me. He’ll tell me the truth or he won’t tell me anything at all.”

Cally glanced over, but Tay didn’t say anything.

“Look, Sam, there’s something about all this that’s not right. I knew it the moment I saw the ambassador’s body. I may be in over my head and I want somebody I trust, somebody I have history with, to tell me whether or not I am. I have to know before I get in any deeper.”

Tay weighed Cally’s words and found something in them he didn’t particularly want to find.

“This man was a friend of yours?”

“Yes. He was.”

“And still?”

Cally let a moment pass before she replied.

“A friend. Just that now. Nothing more.”

Tay nodded. Off in the distance the glow of lights from a town was painting the base of a low layer of clouds with streaks of orange. In at least three separate places lightning danced soundlessly across the night sky.

“I told him we’d meet him at eleven tonight,” Cally said. “It will be late when we’re done so I booked us hotel rooms in Pattaya. I’m just too tired to drive all the way back to Bangkok without getting some sleep first.”

As they drew closer to the lights, the scrub fields began to fill with buildings, most of them no more than one or two stories high and none that looked to Tay to be particularly encouraging. Cally circled a roundabout with some kind of darkened sculpture in its center and turned onto a road that ran along the ocean. On one side of the road the sea was dark and quiet and the narrow beach was empty, but on the opposite side small open-air bars lined the sidewalk. They throbbed with music and pulsed with light.

Tay could see that the customers in the bars were almost all Caucasian men, most middle-aged but some considerably older. Dressed uniformly in shorts and T-shirts, the men sat in ones and twos talking to the girls and playing with the bottles of beer in front of them. There were a great many such men and even more Thai women fluttering around them. The sight made Tay think of seagulls trailing a fishing fleet.

The whole panorama appeared relatively benign, which surprised Tay more than he really wanted to admit. He had always assumed a hard-core place like Pattaya, a town that lived almost entirely off dissipation, would have a slimy, sordid quality to it. But now that he was here, Pattaya didn’t seem to be like that at all. No drunks sprawled in the gutter, no hookers hissed from the shadows, no pimps propositioned passers-by. Whatever was going on, Pattaya seemed to be pretty cheery about it. Tay was sure that wasn’t the truth of the place, but yet that was what he could see. He really didn’t know what to make of it.

“I booked us at the Marriott.” Cally glanced over at Tay and scrutinized his face as the neon lights from the bars rippled across it. “I hope that’s okay.”

Tay didn’t say a word.

TWENTY-THREE

Cally was waiting for Tay in a lounge chair by the Marriott’s swimming pool. It was after ten and, except for her, the pool area was dark and deserted.

When Tay saw that Cally had changed into baggy white shorts and a black T-shirt, he felt a little embarrassed to be wearing the same dark gray slacks and long-sleeved blue dress shirt he had worn on the flight in from Singapore. He thought about turning around and going back upstairs to change, but Cally noticed him before he could decide whether to do that so he sat down on the chair next to her and began rolling up his sleeves as if that had been what he intended to do all along.

“Where are we meeting the mystery man?” he asked.