But he had soon forgotten about them, as he sat double-parked in a white beetle-backed Volkswagen about thirty yards up from the hotel entrance. It was raining hard now and the street was jammed with determined ranks of traffic, driven in laconic bursts of speed between shrieks of brakes. He had the windows rolled down and his jacket off, with the engine idling. Several taxis, of various makes, pulled up outside the hotel, exchanged fares and drove off. Trade, like the traffic, was brisk without being frantic.
One minute to four o’clock. Rain splashed through the Volkswagen window, bringing a freshness to the dust-choked air. Poor, frail, ancient Bangkok, he thought: its golden spires crowded in with high-rise construction, its canals and Floating Market cemented over in an arid, treeless, sprawling extension of the Great Suburb Society.
He looked up and went stiff all over.
In the driving mirror a taxi had pulled up just a few yards behind him. It was a cream-coloured Toyota, and in the rear seat he could just make out, through the rain blurred windows, a chubby face under a porkpie hat. He thought rapidly: one insignificant American tourist among thousands, who’d ridden down in the lift with him, bumped into him by the bar, and had caught a taxi outside the hotel. Only his taxi wasn’t moving.
He looked away again, ahead, where another taxi — what looked like a Chevrolet — had just drawn up outside the hotel. A moment later Pol came limping out under an umbrella held for him by one of the doormen, carrying his attaché case in one hand and a rolled raincoat in the other. He hauled himself in with a great alacrity, while his two white cases were stowed in the boot. The Thai doorman took his tip through the window, stood back and bowed low, and Murray let out the clutch.
A big sedan screeched to a standstill a few inches from the Volkswagen’s left bumper, but the driver seemed totally undismayed. Murray did a swift slalom between two more cars, stopping several cyclists dead in their tracks, keeping his eye on the mirror. He had lost the Toyota in a mass of swerving bumpers warped by the dense rain. He let the Chevrolet pull ahead, positioning himself near the middle of the stream of traffic where it would be difficult for anyone to pass.
Then he saw him again, about five cars back, keeping steadily to the inside lane. A lone middle-aged American tourist in the back of a taxi, among a scrum of taxis. He wondered if this might be a deliberate diversion. Pol had said there might have been more than one. A subtler sleuth, he realised, would have tried some back-tracking tactic, cutting in at a crossing further ahead — even varying the pursuit by following in front of the Chevrolet. The Toyota was just following the traffic. And Murray’s job, according to Pol’s briefing, was more or less the same. He was under no obligation to take risks; just a dependable chauffeur, a pick-up man scheduled to arrive after the lead began to fly. He wondered what Pol was carrying inside that rolled-up raincoat.
The rain was now slamming down in solid gusts of water, washed blindly back and forth by the windshield wipers. But the pace of the traffic only seemed to increase, all throttle and no brakes now, with the egregious cyclists dodging spiderlike between the cars, drenched to the skin and apparently impervious to all danger.
Murray began to watch these cyclists more carefully: mostly young men, lithe and sinewy in white shirts, jeans, the occasional solar topee. A few girls riding under umbrellas with children strapped to the pillion. And he remembered how it was a favourite trick in Saigon — rush-hour traffic in the rain, the terrorist flicking between the cars, the grenade tossed casually through an open window as the cycle vanished among fifty other cycles, forgotten in the chaos of the explosion.
He wondered whether Pol had the nous to keep his windows shut. And suddenly both Chevrolet and Toyota were lost: the traffic funnelled into a neck of road between cranes and cement-mixers, the dull crack of a steam-hammer even above the gravel-roar of the rain — boom CRACK! — the traffic slowing through a deep trough of water, almost to a standstill now. Then he glimpsed what he thought was the Chevrolet again, about a hundred yards ahead, as they speeded up towards a roundabout — gimcrack hoardings looming above the shanty-shops, giant skeleton beer bottles and Western sewing machines, Chinese film posters dripping blood from Mandarin hands and dragons’ teeth (oh subtle mysteries of the Orient!), shops brilliant with raw silk, emerald-green and crimson and deep indigo and saffron. But still no sign of the little cream Toyota.
The road had widened now, the cars skimming the surface like motorboats. Seventy, eighty kilometres an hour — the Chevrolet pulling away in a heavy wake of water, with Murray straining forward in his seat, sore-eyed, sweating with the slow crawl of fear as he watched the Chevrolet disappear. And now he caught the flash of headlamps in his mirror, as the little cream Toyota pulled out suddenly from behind and slid past on the inside lane.
Porkpie-hat was sitting back, eyes front. Not even a sideward glimpse at the Volkswagen. So perhaps Pol’s ruse of using two cars had some point. Yet the little Japanese taxi was obviously supercharged; Murray had his foot down flat on the floor, the Volkswagen straining up to a hundred-and-ten km/h, while the tail of the Toyota veered off into a fine after spray from its wheels. Other cars flicked by, travelling
