“You’ve been very generous with your time,” I said, writing down the hotel number. “I’m quite envious of your home, and I loved seeing it. Thanks for the scotch and for showing it to me.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You can come again, if you like. I’ll help you down.”
“One more question,” I said. “You said your father captured the essence of a person in his portraits. What was your impression of the essence of Helen Ford?”
“Interesting question,” he said. “What would I say?” He hesitated for a moment. “Defiant,” he said. “That’s the best word I can think of for her.”
I climbed down out of the tree rather depressed by my visit. Once again I hadn’t learned much except that Robert Fitzgerald Junior was a man who lived in the shadow of a talented father he barely knew. I had to wonder why he’d come back to Bangkok in the first place, and even more why he’d choose to live in the studio of the man he envied so profoundly. I didn’t think that there was anything I or anyone else could say that would make him feel the equal of his father.
Did Chat, I wondered, feel that way about his father, the hugely successful businessman? I knew Chat as a pleasant young man to meet and talk to, respectful of Jennifer, Rob, and me. From Jennifer I knew him to be solid, quiet, with a touch of gravitas, yet determined, with a very firm sense of what was right. Did he envy his father’s success? Would Fatty, for that matter, grow up feeling inadequate because her mother was so extraordinarily accomplished?
And how, when it came right down to it, would Natalie cope with her daughter, Caitlin, never growing up at all? It was a thought that brought me to the most depressing fact of all. Despite all the buzzing around I was doing, I was nowhere nearer to finding Caitlin’s dad.
When I got back to the hotel, there was another voice mail from Jennifer. “We’re on our way back to Bangkok, apparently,” she said. “I gather it’s been a rather unsuccessful trip, although nobody is saying much. See you tomorrow.”
Chapter 6
If defeat in our attempts to subdue Chiang Mai and Setthathirat was unfortunate, it was nothing compared to what was to follow.
I remember very well the fateful day on which everything in my life changed. While it ended most horribly, I recall the early hours with pleasure, as perhaps the last carefree day of my life.
That day, as we waited for the return of the king, I had taken Yot Fa and his younger brother, Si Sin, to see the royal elephants in their enclosure. They are magnificent beasts, elephants. I have always had a fondness for them. The light that day was preter-naturally clear. There were storm clouds on the horizon, yet for us the sun shone.
“Soon I will ride with my father into battle on one of these elephants,” Yot Fa said. “And you will be with me. I will be a great soldier, just like the king.”
“You must learn to be more than a soldier,” I told him, “if you are to follow in your father’s footsteps.”
We made our way back to the palace slowly, as boys that age do, generally making a nuisance of ourselves wherever we went. After the noise and heat of the elephant compound, the palace was strangely silent on our return. I heard, though, an ominous sound, what I took to be a distant wailing of women.
My mother rushed to greet us at the outer gate. “The king is dead,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “What will become of us?”
I cannot recall the exact moment I became convinced Will Beauchamp was dead. And not merely dead, if one can use the word mere under the circumstances, but dispatched from this world by an unseen and malign hand. Certainly there was no blinding flash, no stunning revelation. Rather there was a growing sense that no matter who I talked to and what I asked, the answer was always the same. It was as if Will had held a Fourth of July party and then walked to the edge of a cliff, watched by numerous people who turned away the second before he went over the side. Except one of them had to have seen, had to have been complicit.
Perhaps the reason it took me so long to reach the inevitable conclusion was that I was two people while I was in Bangkok. As one, I was an antique dealer trying to find a fellow shopkeeper who’d decided to disappear. As the other, I was struggling to redefine my role in Jennifer’s life, as someone who was perhaps a parental substitute. Unfortunately, I succeeded at neither. It was as if my right brain and left had been severed somehow, so that I was trying to be too rational on the one hand, too emotional on the other.
Both sides of the brain were functioning. The connections were not being made.
“Hi,” a voice above me said. I turned down my newspaper. “It’s me,” Jennifer said quite unnecessarily. “I’ve come to help you find William Beauchamp.”
Her nose was a little pink and her eyes rather puffy. “Have you had breakfast?” I said, signaling the waiter.
“I’m not very hungry,” she said.
“You’d better eat anyway,” I said. “Finding Will Beau-champ requires stamina. You have to climb trees and everything.”
“What!” she said.
I told her about my visit with Robert Fitzgerald, and finally she smiled.
“Get something from the buffet and then tell me what happened,” I said.
“Chat and I had a fight,” she said. “A big fight. He isn’t the same person when he’s at home.”
“Few of us are,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that I revert to being a little girl when I spend a lot of time with Dad. But there is something funny going on in that family. There is so much tension it gives me a headache, and I don’t know why. You’re going to tell me I’m crazy.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not. But what did you and Chat fight about? If you want to tell me, that is.”
“I’d tell you if I knew, but it was one of those stupid things that aren’t worth fighting over. He wanted to do one thing; I wanted to do another. We’ve always managed to work these things out before. But this time, it just blew up into a big argument, and I said something I shouldn’t have. We all flew back to Bangkok first thing this morning. The rest of them have gone back to Ayutthaya. I came here. I hope that’s okay.” She looked as if she was going to cry again.
“Of course it is,” I said in a soothing tone.
“I’m sure I wasn’t being fair to Chat,” she said. “There seems to be some big problem with one of the family businesses. Everyone was in a really foul mood. And Yutai! He tries to boss me around, tell me where to go, when to go. I’m not Fatty, you know. He can’t run my life. He acts as if he owns the place. I really think there’s something going on between Wongvipa and Yutai. Funny business, you know? I wasn’t planning on mentioning it to Chat, but when we started arguing, I did. I shouldn’t have. He got so mad. It was stupid of me to say that. It’s his mother, after all. I must have been imagining it, mustn’t I?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. Of course she hadn’t, but I didn’t think it politic to say so.
“It doesn’t much matter either way,” she said. “I don’t think I can go back.”
“You haven’t spent much time in Bangkok, have you?” I said.
“None,” she said. “Chat and I were planning to do some sight-seeing, but with the trip to Chiang Mai, we never got around to it.”