car and joined him in the back seat. I accomplished that by opening and closing my own door. It really wasn’t all that hard.
“You know, Tommy,” I said as we pulled away, “I’ve never been absolutely clear just what a Thai spy actually does.”
“I’m shocked, Jack. Shocked. I’m not a spy. I’m merely the deputy to the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
The Mercedes had pearl-gray curtains on its side windows and I pushed the one on my side of the car back and forth on its chrome rails a few times, trying it out. The car’s windows were already so dark I probably could have fired off a flare gun inside without anyone seeing it, so the curtains seemed a bit much. Still, when they were closed I had to admit that the whole effect was very pleasant. The Mercedes became a dim, cool submarine sliding silently through the debris of the Bangkok streets.
“So anyway, Tommy, what does a Thai spy really do?”
Tommy sighed and seemed momentarily absorbed in studying something outside his window; then he sighed again and jerked his curtain closed.
“Thailand is in an unusual position as nations go, Jack. We are small and unimportant in the great scheme of world politics, and yet not entirely a joke. Much of what matters in the world seems to pass through us in one way or another. You should think of Thailand this way: we are like a hallway.”
“A
“No one really cares about a hallway. It’s not a significant room in any building. It’s just a way to get back and forth between the places where the important things happen. But you know, if you stand quietly in a hallway, sometimes you can hear and see extraordinary things. Sometimes you can learn more standing in the hallway than if you’re invited right into the rooms.”
I didn’t quite know how to respond to Tommy’s moving tribute to the importance of hallways, so I just sat and watched his soft, almost pink face in the glow of the lights from outside the car.
Tommy wasn’t very tall. He was slightly overweight and he wore a conservative gray suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. He could be anybody, I thought to myself. If someone told me Tommy was really a Canadian grocery store owner or a Portuguese real uo;av shestate developer, I would have had no reason at all to doubt them. That was exactly what made Tommy such an effective spy.
The big Mercedes left the campus and turned north on Phayathai Road. It edged steadily through the heavy traffic between Siam Square and the imposing bulk of the Mah Boonkrong Center, an eight-story concrete bunker with a huge shopping mall inside it through which thousands of people poured every day of the year searching for cheap mobile phones, pirated software, and knock-off designer clothing.
“You going to tell me where we’re headed?” I asked Tommy, but he didn’t answer. Instead he pushed the curtain on his side open again and sat quietly examining a crowd of university girls gathered under a bus shelter.
The driver punched the accelerator to make the light and I saw we were going east toward the Sukhumvit residential district, the area where most of the foreigners in Bangkok lived in a forest of luxury high-rises that had sprouted over the last few years from what had not so long before been only rice fields. Those Thais who had the extraordinary good fortune to be the heirs of the farmers who had owned those rice fields had grown wealthy beyond most people’s understanding of the word. Those Thais whose ancestors had owned fields that were just a few hundred yards away in one direction or another had grown envious beyond most people’s understanding of the word.
“What have you been doing with yourself, Jack?” Tommy abruptly asked. “I mean recently.”
“Teaching my classes. Hanging out with Anita. The usual.”
“No adventures?”
“Not so as you’d notice.”
Tommy smiled.
“Miss the action?” he asked.
“No.”
Tommy chuckled, crossed his legs at the knee, and turned his head back toward the window. “You’re full of shit.”
“Possibly,” I allowed. “But not about that.”
Tommy chuckled again.
“Believe me or not, little man,” I said. “It is so.”
“Don’t give me that crap, Jack. You were a player. And now you’re just…well, what? You teach a little? You do some consulting? And you’re happy? Don’t try to shit a shitter, man. You miss the action. I know you do. I’ll bet sometimes you even wonder if you could still cut it in a big game, don’t you?”
That was a little close to the nerve, so I glanced away from Tommy and concentrated on the back of the driver’s head.
“Shit,” Tommy snorted. “I knew it. Once a player, always a player.”
I took a deep breath and turned toward Tommy, staring at him until he stopped fidgeting and held my eyes.
“Listen very closely, my friend, and make notes if you want to, because I’m going to tell you something you ought to remember.”
I imagine I sounded a bit testy and I didn’t particularly care.
“I have a nice life and a woman who loves me, and I will fight you or anyone who threatens to screw it up for me to the death. You hear me, Tommy? To the very fucking death.”
The Mercedes slowed and moved over to the middle lane. It edged past a handcart loaded with straw brooms that a stooped old woman was pushing along next to the curb. Tom thhe Mercedemy didn’t answer me, but I hadn’t really expected him to. Instead he tilted his head back against the seat and shut his eyes.
Since Tommy didn’t seem much inclined to continue the conversation, I pushed open the curtain on my side and looked out at the street. We were in a residential neighborhood I vaguely recognized, one somewhere between New Petchburi Road and Sukhumvit Road. I hated driving in that area since I always got turned around in the bewildering warren of tiny streets. The problem was that the street signs were all in Thai, which no westerner I knew could read, and there were no other real landmarks to navigate by. The high concrete walls that enclosed the small apartment buildings and huge, unseen estates all looked more or less alike, and the broken glass and sharpened iron spikes that lined the top of most of them gave the whole area an air of secret and no doubt illicit doings.
After a while I gave up on trying to make sense of our route. We were going where we were going and I wasn’t about to give Tommy the satisfaction of showing too much interest.
At one point the street we were traveling on made a right-angle bend between two high walls and the Mercedes came to a complete stop while a green truck with sheets of dark canvas strapped over it slipped past us in the opposite direction. The space between the walls was narrow and the truck came so close to the Mercedes that a bulge in the canvas hit the driver’s mirror. The
As we sat there waiting for the truck to pass, my eyes drifted to a black metal gate in the wall at my side of the car. The gate was open a crack and in the gap I could see a tiny girl in a blue and white school uniform who couldn’t have been more than five or six. She was looking out at us, and her huge, deep brown eyes stared at me without expression. I wondered if the proximity of the big car and my white face looking out of it frightened the girl or just tickled her curiosity, but I could read nothing at all in those big wet eyes, not even whether she could actually see me through the dark glass of the windows. I smiled and wiggled my eyebrows stupidly at the little girl just to see what would happen, but I got no response. Then, after a moment, the truck passed by, the Mercedes began to edge forward again, and the little girl was gone.
Less than five minutes later the car stopped at a pair of gates built of close-set green metal bars with gold curlicues on the top. A guard wearing a uniform of some sort walked up to the driver’s window and bent down, and the driver opened the window a crack and said something in a low voice I didn’t quite catch. It must have been the right thing, because the guard whipped out a crisp salute then stepped around in front of the car and pushed open the gates. The Mercedes rolled forward and I saw we were in the courtyard of what appeared to be a small
