“
Cally said something else Tay couldn’t hear and the man mumbled his reply, which he couldn’t hear either. Tay didn’t understand a word of Thai anyway so he would have had no idea what they were talking about even if he had heard them clearly. When Cally reached into her purse and handed the man a couple of red banknotes, however, Tay got the gist of the conversation.
The old man held the bills in his open palm for a moment, staring down at them as if he wasn’t entirely certain what they were. Eventually he shrugged, pushed the bills into one pocket of his shorts, and pulled a handful of loose keys from the other pocket. He sorted through them for a moment and then handed one to Cally.
“
“I didn’t know you could speak Thai,” Tay said to Cally.
“A few words.”
“Sounded like more than a few to me.”
Cally shrugged and pushed the button for the elevator.
TWENTY-NINE
The apartment was nothing but a single room on the third floor facing the back of the building. It probably had never been much to look at. It certainly wasn’t now.
“My God,” Tay said. “What was an American ambassador doing in a place like this?”
When Cally didn’t answer, Tay glanced over at her and she shrugged again. That was rapidly becoming the gesture of the day, he noticed.
A brown sofa bed was just opposite the door. It was half open and its cushions had been pulled off and dumped haphazardly on the floor. A motley assortment of beaten up chairs and tables had been pushed over to the same side of the room. The carpet was green and thin. It had been partially peeled up and lay rolled back against the front of the sofa bed, leaving the grimy concrete floor underneath it exposed. The windows on the right side of the room were covered with a set of dirty, crooked blinds and a snarl of cords trailed onto the floor. On the left, a door led to what Tay assumed was a bathroom. He was afraid to look in there.
“The body was on the sofa bed?” Tay made half a question out of the phrase, but he had seen the pictures Cally took of the crime scene and he already knew it was.
“Yes.”
“But it was open when you took the pictures, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was.”
“The bed was stripped?”
“Yes. Just like in Singapore.”
“No clothes? No jewelry?”
“Nothing.”
“So the killer cleaned up after himself again.”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“Did the killer do this?” Tay asked, waving a hand at the destruction in the room.
Cally hesitated. It was for only a moment, but it was long enough for Tay to notice and shift his eyes to her.
“No,” she said when she realized he was looking at her. “The room wasn’t like this when I was here.”
“Then how was it?”
Cally took a couple of steps forward and folded her arms.
“The sofa bed was pretty much where it is now, but it was open and the ambassador’s body was on it, of course. The chairs and tables were…”
She unfolded her arms as if she was about to point out where they were, but she didn’t.
“Oh, I don’t know. It just looked like a normal room.”
“Except for the dead body in it, of course,” Tay said.
“Yes, except for that.”
Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything else. He thought Cally might, so he waited. She didn’t. When he got tired of waiting, he took a deep breath and walked over and opened the door opposite the windows. Sure enough it led to a tiny bathroom which was very dirty but otherwise entirely unremarkable.
He closed the door again and went to the windows. Pushing the blinds aside he looked out and saw they were right above where Cally had parked the Volvo. Tired-looking air conditioning units and flapping laundry crowded the balconies of another building opposite the windows and unidentifiable trash was piled up down in the alleyway. Other than that, there wasn’t much to see.
Tay let the blinds drop.
“What’s going on here?” he asked. “Somebody was looking for something. What was it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Tay thought Cally probably did know, but he also thought that this wasn’t the right time to argue the point. Instead, he stood quietly waiting to see if more silence might finally draw something out of her. It didn’t.
Maybe he was wrong, he mused. Maybe the neighbors looted the place after the police left. That would hardly have been surprising in Thailand. On the other hand, maybe someone had come back and trashed the scene to make it harder for them to make any sense out of it. The more Tay thought about it, the less sure he was of anything.
“Then I guess we’re done here,” he said.
Cally nodded and they left. She shut the door behind them. Tay noticed she didn’t bother to lock it.
Downstairs Cally started toward the car, but Tay put a hand on her arm.
“Let’s walk around a little before we leave,” he said.
“What for?”
“I don’t know, but we’re here. Why not?”
There were only three cars in the parking lot. A nondescript gray Toyota, a blue pickup truck of some make Tay didn’t recognize, and a new-looking black Mercedes. Tay shook out a Marlboro as they walked across the lot to the street. When they stopped just opposite the grocery store, he lit it, and then he turned around and looked up at the front of the apartment building. Tay had no idea what he was looking for, none at all; but he stood quietly and smoked and looked the building over with as much care as if he did. The truth, he supposed, was that he just wasn’t ready yet to leave.
There was a taste to the air in Bangkok that was foreign to him. He had noticed it from the moment they left the air-conditioned cocoon of the Volvo, but he hadn’t yet been able to put a name to it. Now it dawned on him what it was and it was a flavor he wanted to savor.
The air in Singapore was different. It was dank and humid, too, but it was scrawny and homogenized. The air in Bangkok was a thick, rich stew of potential, prospect, and promise laced with a whiff of the illicit and a hint of the forbidden. It seemed to contain everything that he had ever imagined all at once: all the things that he had ever been curious about, all of the things he had been warned about, all of the things that he had been told would lead him to ruin. It tasted, Tay thought, exactly as the apple in the Garden of Eden must have tasted to Eve.
“Cally, girl!”
The voice was high-pitched, the squeal of a teen-aged schoolgirl.
Tay looked over his shoulder and was startled to see a middle-aged man hurrying toward them. The man was slim and neatly dressed, his light brown hair cut close to his head in a style that looked military, and his eyes so blue that they made Tay think of a David Hockney painting.
“What are you doing, girl? And what in the world are you doing in
“I could ask you the same thing, Jack,” Cally said to the man with a small smile, “but I’m not really sure I want to know.”
