“I’m going to get help,” I said. “Don’t move.”
He grasped my hand as I tried to stand up. “I think we need to talk to my mother,” he said. “The spirit house.”
Then he passed out.
It was much later in the day when I went to see Bent Rowland. I was dreading seeing the odious man again, but there was nothing more I could do for Fitzgerald. The doctors at the hospital told me he had a severe concussion and was in serious condition. The police had been called. They said they’d try to find his mother. Robbery was their official position.
The stairs up to Rowland’s office were dark and smelly. Rowland was sitting in his chair with his back to the door, looking out the small window on to the alleyway just as he had done when he’d contemplated the masterpiece I was writing. The smell in the room was even worse than the last time, the pungent reek of perspiration rather sickening. Rowland had been suffering from the heat and something more, some stronger emotion like fear. There was some other smell there, too, which I thought I might identify if I had time to think about it. However, I had questions for Bent Rowland. I’d ask them as fast as I could and get out of there.
“Mr. Rowland,” I said. “I’ve come to talk to you about my manuscript. This time I’d prefer truth to fantasy.”
Rowland didn’t move. I thought perhaps he’d fallen asleep, and then, given his lack of response that, overweight as he was, he’d had a heart attack in the heat. I suppose in a way he had. The knife through his heart would have done that, no doubt.
Chapter 9
I see now, looking back, the signs that should have warned me that danger lurked in the palace. Soon after Yot Fa was anointed king and his mother queen regent, as I have already recounted, an earthquake rocked the city. If that in itself was not sign enough, later a truly terrible event occurred. King Yot Fa was entertained by spectacle of various kinds, and shortly after he became king, declared that the chief royal elephant would engage in a duel with another. Many, including me, accompanied the king in the procession to the elephant kraal for the fight.
A gasp went up from the crowd when the second elephant’s tusk was broken in three pieces. Even more horrifying, later that night, the royal elephant mourned, making the sound of human crying, and one of the city gates groaned in sympathy. It was a bad omen indeed and perhaps signaled the events that were to follow. But I was distracted and perhaps did not fully understand the significance of the events around me.
It was about this time that a very pretty young woman of the court, a servant to Lady Si Sudachan, caught my attention. I should confess that I was by then well past the age that I should have taken a wife or two, but perhaps because of my close attachment to my mother or the precariousness of my position, I had not done so.
Now I was smitten. I found the young woman’s dark eyes mesmerizing. Everything about her, even the rustle of her garments as she walked made me feverish. To my surprise, she made it clear that she, too, was interested in me. I was flattered beyond all reason. She was the most desirable creature, and I was almost delirious with her attentions.
I will not reveal to you the delights we shared, except to say that for a period of many weeks I was distracted by her presence. I saw less and less of the young king, and the two of us became rather distant. I had hoped he would share my joy in the relationship, but he did not and in fact was quite petulant about it, perhaps because his mother was so obviously besotted by the object of her affections at the same time I was with mine.
If anyone lived the life I had imagined for Will Beauchamp when I’d first heard about his disappearance—it seemed so long ago—it was Bent Rowland. His home was a small but pretty little house with a pleasant neglected garden in a reasonably decent neighborhood, according to David Ferguson, who took me there.
The door was opened by a girl I at first thought must be Rowland’s daughter, given she couldn’t have been a day over fifteen, but I soon realized was his lover. And not just that, but the mother of the sweetest little baby tucked into a bassinette in one corner of the kitchen. The girl, whose name, apparently, was Parichat, wore the shortest of shorts and a tight cotton T-shirt, her long, skinny legs thrust into very high-heeled sandals. She looked terribly young and vulnerable. There are those who have said with some cynicism that the pudgy foreigner and the small-boned Thai woman with delicate features are the quintessential couple of Thailand, but the thought of her and Bent Rowland together made me nauseous.
As she and David spoke, I looked around. The kitchen, while small, had every conceivable gadget and appliance, from a refrigerator with icemaker, to a microwave, to a very trendy looking blender. Everything looked absolutely brand-new. The living room furnishings, while chosen with questionable taste, were also spanking new. A pile of boxes was stacked in one corner of the room.
“Is she moving already?” I asked David, in a lull in the conversation, as she went to tend to the infant who had begun to wail.
He asked her the question. “No, just moved in a couple of months ago. With the birth of the baby, she hasn’t had time to unpack everything. The usual story,” he added in a quieter tone. “She’s from a village up north. Came to the big city to make her fortune. Ended up in prostitution. Met Rowland in a bar. He bought her from her pimp. Lovely story, isn’t it? This is the dark side of Bangkok. Her parents think she’s working in a store and is engaged to a nice Thai boy. There are way too many stories like hers, unfortunately. She thinks she’s got it made here, though, and it’s not a bad spot. Apparently they were living in a tiny little apartment until recently. Rowland must have been a successful literary agent, even if I’d never heard of him.”
“Not judging from his office,” I said. “Nor his attitude. He oozed failure from every pore.”
“According to police, he’s been depositing rather large sums of money every week since the spring sometime, five thousand dollars, always in cash,” David said. “The deposits add up to about eighty thousand. The last one was a week before he died. He was getting money somewhere. I suppose it’s possible he got a big advance for Will’s book and only gave him two thousand dollars of it, and hasn’t been paying him his royalties either, although one could argue that’s because he couldn’t find him.”
“Have you read any good books about Helen Ford lately?” I said.
“What? Oh, I see what you mean. No book, no royalties.”
“Exactly. Looks to me as if he was being paid for something else. His silence, for example.”
“Blackmail? You didn’t take to this guy, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. I thought right from the start he was a sleaze and a con artist. Nothing I’ve seen here today has changed my mind. The timing’s right. Will finished his book on Helen Ford in the spring and gave it to Rowland, who presumably read the whole manuscript. Then he told Will he’d find a publisher, which he hadn’t, at least not the one he told Will about. And suddenly a guy who has been eking out his existence as a literary agent is depositing rather a lot of cash. What if somebody was paying Rowland to keep Will’s book from getting published? Then when Will disappeared, died, whatever, Rowland was suddenly dispensable, too.”
“Are you angling around to saying there’s an eighty-year-old axe murderer out there somewhere still chopping up her victims?”
“I know it sounds ridiculous. I don’t suppose you could just do a little checking of Embassy records, though, to see if there’s anything on what happened to Ford? She was an American.”