“Rent one for the weekend?” I said.
“I’d have preferred ‘play the field.” But there is no question that it’s a great place for an unattached guy.“
“Except he wasn’t unattached,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I see. I’m not attached. Not anymore, anyway. Are you?”
“Yes, I am, and I don’t forget it just because I’m in Thailand,” I said rather primly. I couldn’t believe my school-marmish tone. Maybe Clive was right. I was turning into an old prune in my dotage.
“Ooooo-kay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Back to the apartment,” he said. “You see, once you get our attention, we get right down to work. Do you have a rental car?”
“Are you kidding? Drive in this traffic?”
He laughed. “Are you prepared to risk coming with me?”
“I guess,” I said.
“Well, here we are,” he said about an hour later. “You can loosen your death grip on the armrest now. We could have done it in about a third the time if we’d taken the ferry, but I just like to prove I can drive in Bangkok.”
“You’re a brave and possibly foolhardy man,” I said.
The heat made me gasp as I got out of the air-conditioned car, and my sunglasses fogged over instantly. Ferguson repeated my door knocking of earlier that day and then said, “Wait here,” before disappearing down the stairs. He returned a few minutes later with a man introduced to me as Mr. Poon, the building superintendent.
“Mr. Poon here has informed me, several times, in fact, that he is unable to let us into the apartment. However, he has been persuaded for a small monetary consideration.”
I looked over at Mr. Poon.
“It’s all right,” Ferguson went on. “He doesn’t speak English. He has been persuaded to open the door and let us look in from the hallway.”
Mr. Poon turned out to be one of those people for whom even the smallest task is an effort. He fussed around with the keys, decided he had the wrong ones, went away for what seemed a long time, and fussed again on his return, trying first one key, then another.
“I’m starting to feel like Howard Carter waiting for his workers to break through into what was to be King Tut’s tomb.” I whispered. “Sorry. That was a poor choice of metaphor.”
Ferguson laughed. “Let’s not rush to conclusions,” he said. “Here we go.” Poon turned the key at last, and the door swung open.
I was surprised how quiet it was in the apartment. Outside there was the sound of traffic, the boats on the river, the din of a large city. Inside, the place had an airless quality to it, along with a certain dankness, like a summer home that’s been abandoned all winter, closed and silent. “I’m going in,” I said.
“I’m right behind you,” Ferguson said, as Poon started to protest. “I’ll claim diplomatic immunity for us both.”
It was, as Ferguson had said, a lovely apartment. The orchids on the balcony had definitely seen better days, but the view was fabulous, as were the furniture and the art. The teak dining room table was all that Ferguson had said it was, and the Jataka paintings were really lovely.
“Does it look to you as if some amulets are missing?” I said, pointing to the display beneath the glass coffee table top. “There are some spaces. It doesn’t look symmetrical somehow.”
“I think you’re right,” he said. “I can’t recall exactly.”
“I wonder if they’re the ones he sent Natalie,” I said.
“Could be.”
“Kitchen next,” I said. The kitchen, off the dining area was spotless, with not so much as a crumb on the counter or the floor. I opened a couple of cupboards. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Ferguson had a look in a small pantry, and shrugged. We both eyed the refrigerator. “Women’s work,” he said, pointing to it.
I opened it carefully. “Yuck,” I said as the odor of rotting food reached me. “Green slime and sour milk,” I said, closing it firmly.
This way,“ he said, gesturing down a short hall. Mr. Poon followed us, jabbering away. There was a bathroom at the end of it, spotlessly clean, towels folded and hung just so, medicine cabinet filled with perfectly normal stuff.
“That’s the bedroom,” Ferguson said, pointing to a closed door.
“Your turn,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said. He put his hand on the door handle and paused for a second. Then, giving me a mock terrified expression, he pushed the door open and peered inside. “I think it’s okay,” he said.
The bed was neatly made. I opened a couple of drawers. Will Beauchamp was a meticulous man. His socks and underwear were sorted by color and carefully folded. The only thing in the room that wasn’t just so was the closet, the door having been left open. Inside, though, shoes lined up nicely and there were a couple of suits and carefully ironed shirts and jeans all in a row.
“Hmmm,” Ferguson said.
“Yes?” I said.
“Well he’s certainly not here.”
“No.”
“Neither is the painting,” he added. “The one with the eyes that follow you. You can see the mark on the wall. A couple of missing amulets, no painting. Other than that, everything is as I remember it. What do you figure this means?”
“I don’t know. My theory all along has been that he is hiding out from Natalie and her lawyers. I guess the question is, if that’s what you’re doing, would you take all your stuff with you, or, for that matter, clean out the refrigerator before you left?”
“Maybe he just couldn’t pay the rent here either, and was clearing out before the landlord caught up to him,” Ferguson speculated. He said something to Mr. Poon, and the man replied.
“I’m wrong on that score. The rent is paid up until the end of the year, and Poon had no idea Beauchamp was gone,” Ferguson said. “Well, I guess we might as well be going. There isn’t much to learn here, I’m afraid. I’ll drop you off at the Sky train station.”
And then I made one of those unconscious gestures we train ourselves to do, like turning off the lights when we leave a room, or giving the door handle one more turn, just to be sure, after we’ve locked it. Without much thinking about it, I closed the closet door.
A splatter of dark reddish brown droplets, now dry, speckled the wall behind the door. We both looked at it in silence for a moment of two. “I suppose it could be tomato sauce or red curry paste,” I said finally.
“In the bedroom?” Ferguson said. “I think it’s time we called the police, don’t you?”
Chapter 3
I should begin with an explanation of how I, son of a rather minor court official, should come to play a role in the political affairs of the royal court of Ayutthaya. It is because my mother was appointed wet nurse to Prince Yot Fa, son of King Chairacha by the royal concubine Lady Si Sudachan. The lady, who had not a drop of motherly love in her, as her consequent actions make clear, had no interest in the nurturing of her child.
That role fell to my mother, whose loss of a daughter, my only sister, when the baby was three days old, made her an excellent candidate for the position. She lavished the love for her lost child on the little prince.
I was six years old at the time and can recall my fierce jealousy of the child I saw as a rival for my mother’s affection. In time though, I came to love Yot Fa as a younger brother. He was a melancholy child, a worry for his father, and everyone was pleased that I took the boy under my wing. For me it meant the run of the inner palace, the finest of food and clothing, and an education way beyond my station. I began to take on the swagger of a prince, to imagine that somehow I had been switched at birth. My mother scolded me for putting on airs, but she, too, was happy that we were so close, that I, unlike others, could make Yot Fa laugh.