The Ambassador's wife

“We need to talk.”

Tay wasn’t expecting anyone to call other than Cally or Sergeant Kang, but if he had been expecting someone else it certainly wouldn’t have been John August. They hadn’t exactly hit it off the one time they had met, had they?

“How did you get this number?” Tay asked, thinking as he did what an insipid thing it was to say.

August snorted. He didn’t even try to answer him, which Tay recognized was pretty much the kind of response his question deserved.

“Where are you?” August asked.

“In Bangkok. At a hotel. The Marriott.”

Tay cleared his throat unnecessarily. “Look, Cally was supposed to be back here by now and-”

“What room?” August interrupted.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Cut the crap, Tay. I don’t have time for it now. What room are you in?”

“Six thirty-four.”

“Two hours,” August said.

Then he hung up without another word.

Tay was sitting in a chair staring out the window and watching construction cranes turn on a distant building when he heard the knock on his door. He looked at his watch. Two hours, very nearly to the minute.

When he opened the door, August nodded and came in without saying anything. He didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did Tay.

August was carrying a large manila envelope which he dumped on the bed. Then he took the chair Tay had just been sitting in. It was the only chair in the room so Tay sat on the bed next to the envelope.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Tay asked automatically.

August shook his head. “She’s dead,” he said.

Tay didn’t need to ask August whom he was talking about.

He was surprised, of course, but not shocked. Some part of him was already prepared for something, even if he was not really prepared for this, not exactly. He let the weight of knowing take him and didn’t fight against it. In the most rational part of his mind, he couldn’t understand why he felt it so much. He had hardly known Cally, he supposed, but perhaps he really had. What is that supposed to mean? Closing his eyes, he lay back across the bed and rubbed at his face with his open hands.

“I’m sorry, Sam.” August’s voice sounded as if it was coming from a television set playing in another room. “I’m really sorry.”

Tay sat up again. “What happened?”

“She was on a raid out in Ratchaburi. The Thai police had a suspect in your murders and surrounded a house where they thought he was. She went in with them and the suspect shot her.”

Tay struggled to understand what August was telling him.

“She was just going to the embassy. She didn’t say anything about-”

“She didn’t know,” August interrupted. “DeSouza didn’t tell her about the raid until she got there this morning. That’s when she decided to go.”

“DeSouza?”

“Yeah. He was there, too.”

“Why?”

“It was his operation really. The Thai cops were just along to make it look good.” August pointed to the envelope he had dropped on the bed. “There are photographs if you want to see them.”

Tay reached over and pulled the envelope over. He was oddly conscious of the way it felt as it scraped across the bedspread. The flap was unsealed and he lifted it and pulled out the thin stack of 5x7 color prints. The photographs looked as if they had been made with a phone, then emailed to a computer and printed. They were lousy photographs, poorly framed and a little blurred, but they did the job.

Tay glanced up at August.

“Who are you?” he asked. “I mean…who are you really?”

“Why do you care?”

“CIA? FBI? Defense Intelligence Agency? What is it?”

August shrugged and looked away.

“Let’s try it this way then,” Tay said. “What do you do here in Thailand?”

“I do what I can.”

“Which is what?”

“Whatever is necessary.”

“This isn’t going to get me anywhere, is it?”

“No,” August said, shifting his eyes back to Tay. “It isn’t.”

Tay shook his head and went back to examining the stack of photographs.

The first three showed the exterior of two shophouses with some men in Thai police uniforms standing around in front of them. They were all carrying automatic weapons and had their faces covered with balaclavas. The next two photographs showed the interior of a building, presumably one of the shophouses, and either the same men or men who were similarly dressed were running up a flight of bare concrete stairs.

The final five photographs were the hardest for Tay to look at. In two of them, a man he did not know lay spread-eagled on a concrete floor. The man was wearing a wrinkled T-shirt, dirty jeans, and one sandal. The front of the T-shirt had been shredded by what looked like a shotgun blast. Although Tay couldn’t see the chest wounds clearly, it was obvious the man was dead.

In the other three photographs Cally lay sprawled on what appeared to be the same concrete floor. She was as alone as the man, and she was also dead. The entry wound in her forehead was small and neat, but she had bled a lot and the blood had streaked her face and collected in a dark pool under her head. Cally’s eyes were open and Tay thought he could see both surprise and puzzlement in them. He wondered if he would be surprised and puzzled, too, at the moment he realized the time of his death was upon him.

“She was shot with a.22.” August said. “DeSouza thinks it may have been the same gun that was used to murder Rooney, but that still has to be confirmed.”

“You talked to DeSouza?”

“Not directly.”

Tay nodded, his eyes still on the pictures.

“He came into the room right behind Cally,” August continued. “DeSouza shot Dadi after he killed Cally.”

“Shot who?”

“Dadi. The suspect they were taking down. The man in the other photos.”

Tay thought about that for a moment.

“How did DeSouza shoot this guy if…” Tay hesitated. “What’s his name?”

“Dadi.”

“Indonesian?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of weapon did DeSouza use?”

“It looks to me like it was a combat shotgun of some kind.”

“How many times was the guy hit?”

“I don’t know.”

Tay picked up one of the photos of Cally. Holding it in his right hand, he turned it toward August.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“What do you want me to see?”

“The blood. Look at all that blood.”

August nodded. “I see it.”

Then Tay took one of the photographs of Dadi and held it up in his left hand right next to the photograph of Cally.

“No blood,” Tay said. “His chest torn to ribbons by a point-blank shotgun blast and no blood.”