The Ambassador's wife

her life? He had no idea at all.

There was an even more pressing question right at the moment, of course. Was he going to drop everything and fly to New York for his mother’s funeral? At least Tay thought he had the right answer to that one. No, he wasn’t. What difference would it make to anyone anyway? Certainly, it would make none at all to his mother. He would just be undertaking a journey halfway around the world as an empty gesture, a gesture that would accomplish nothing for anyone.

Worse, going to New York now would take him away from something that did have meaning. Two women were dead. There might soon be more. It was his job to make sure that did not happen. Not just his job, his moral responsibility. That was what he did. That was who he was.

Tay watched the Volvo’s hood slicing into the smog like the prow of an ocean liner cutting through a dingy sea. He was amazed how hard the death of his mother had hit him and he examined the emotion with caution. Was it grief? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t certain he knew what grief felt like.

Even if it was grief, was it grief for the loss of his mother, he wondered, or was it really just another manifestation of his own endless self-absorption? Perhaps that was all it really was, just more grief for the unrelenting emptiness of his own life. No brothers or sisters, no wife, his father long dead, and now his mother gone, too. He was alone. If he had ever doubted that before, he could doubt it no longer. He was alone and, worse, he was now at the head of the line to leave this earth. He would be next.

Just past Chonburi, still some thirty miles from Bangkok, they finally broke out of the grimy haze. In the hard white light of the swampy coastal plain, the city lay before them like a spread-eagled tart on a rumpled bedspread. A few pockets of commercial decay and residential rot were the only breaks in the monotony of the drab land through which they ran. With an intense and colorless sun remorselessly pounding the countryside, it looked as bleak as any place Tay had ever seen.

He tilted his head back and closed his eyes against the glare. Within minutes he was asleep and his mind was poking through tunnels of memory too subterranean for him to have had any conscious awareness they even existed. When he woke a short time later, he did so abruptly and without any sense that he had ever been asleep.

“I want to see where the body was found,” he said to Cally as he sat up in his seat.

Cally turned her head slightly and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. A yellow-and-white bus blew past them in the inside lane. The driver leaned on his air horns and Cally shifted her attention back to the road.

“You really know how to sweet-talk a girl, don’t you, Sam?” she said, smiling faintly.

“What?” Tay asked.

He was fully awake now.

“I said that you really know how to sweet-talk a girl.”

“What do you mean? Did I just say something to you?”

Cally glanced over at Tay and realized that he was completely serious. “You said you wanted to see where the body was found. I presume you meant Ambassador Rooney’s body.”

Tay didn’t remember saying anything of the sort but, regardless, it sounded like a good idea to him.

“Can we?”

“Sure.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“An hour or so,” Cally said. “Depends on the traffic. Maybe a little longer.”

Tay didn’t ask where they were going or what sort of place it was. He would find out soon enough.

“Fine,” he said.

Then he tilted his head back against the seat and closed his eyes again.

IT was not at all what he expected.

When he saw the building the first word that came to mind was squalid, but perhaps that was a little harsh. The structure was five stories high, red tile with grimy concrete trim around the windows that was cracked and pitted from the accumulated moisture. It sat on a narrow road directly across from a doubtful-looking grocery store and a tattoo parlor. An asphalt parking lot covered the whole of the ground level except for a small windowless room built of concrete blocks that had apparently once been painted white or something close to it. The blockhouse appeared to function as a lobby for what Tay assumed were apartments above it.

Cally drove all the way through the parking lot without stopping and parked behind the building. They got out and Cally locked the Volvo.

“Where are we?” Tay asked.

“Pretty much the middle of Bangkok.” Cally pointed off to the south. “The American embassy is about a mile over there.”

“These are apartments?” Tay asked, looking up at the building.

“Yes. Mostly for locals.”

“Foreigners, too?”

Cally looked up at the building. “Not likely.”

“What about the apartment the ambassador was found in? Who lived there?”

Tay noticed a look cross Cally’s face before she could chase it away. He didn’t understand what it meant so he said nothing.

“I don’t know yet,” Cally said. “It’s a company rental. Somebody at the embassy is working on finding out who’s behind it.”

Tay nodded at that. He didn’t believe Cally, but he let it go for now and continued studying the building.

“What was happening when you got here yesterday?” he asked.

“There were a lot of Thai cops standing around with some people from the embassy. They had asked the Thai police to leave the scene intact until I got here so nobody was doing much of anything except waiting for me. I went upstairs and…” Cally shrugged. “You saw the photographs I took. That pretty much covers it.”

“Then the Thai police had finished processing the scene before you got here?”

“Look, Sam, things don’t work the same way here they do in Singapore. Things aren’t quite as …” Cally paused, searching for a word, “exacting.”

“Did the Thais do any forensics at all?”

“They went through the motions, but … not really.”

“Did your embassy people do any?”

“We’re not equipped for it.”

“So what you’re saying is that you don’t have anything at all from the scene that you can use.”

“Nothing at all.”

Cally kicked at the ground without looking at Tay.

“So,” she said. “You want to go in now or just stand out here for the rest of the afternoon?”

Tay reached for his Marlboros, but before he could either answer Cally or light one up Cally opened a metal door in the blockhouse and disappeared through it. Tay put the Marlboros away with a small sigh and followed.

The space inside was quite a bit larger than he expected. There was actually a small apartment sandwiched between the elevator and the alleyway, or at least he gathered it was probably an apartment since the number 1 was painted on the wooden door in black. Cally knocked while Tay stood just behind her. She had to knock a second time before anyone opened the door and by then she had taken her State Department identification out of her purse and was holding it open directly in front of her.

“Dichan yak ja doo apartment eek tee na kha,” she said to the old man who opened the door. He had a face like a fish, big ears, and a bad haircut. Dressed in a dirty, white undershirt and gray shorts, he looked so thin he was nearly cadaverous. A half-burned cigarette hung from his lower lip.

“Haam kao na krap,” the man mumbled.

Tay watched in fascination as the cigarette jerked up and down with every word.

“Kao pai dai kha,” Cally went on in a firm voice that seemed to Tay to brook no nonsense. “Ma jag sa tarn tood.”

The old man appeared unimpressed.