Thai Horse (43 page)

But Hatcher’s greatest fear concerned Cody himself. What was he doing here, and why had he kept his identity a secret all these years? Was he a collaborator? A junkie? A drug smuggler? If he was smuggling drugs, was he tied in with Tollie Fong and the Chiu Chao triads? Or was there some even darker secret that Hatcher could not imagine?

Was Cody actually dead? Even if he had escaped the plane crash fifteen years ago, Cody could have died in the prison camp or in any of a dozen other ways. Fifteen years was a long time.

Hatcher also remembered that there was no such thing as a fact in Thailand. Truth was a crucible for what was real and what was imagined, what was veritable and what was spiritual. At best, a fact in Bangkok was an abstraction of reality, a perception of the individual. Truth was often an illusion and things were never what they appeared to be.

Yet try as he might, Hatcher could not come up with a single positive reason for Cody to remain in hiding.

Finally there was the most gnawing question of all: if Cody was involved in some dark scheme, what would he, Hatcher, do about it? Ignore it and go home? Try to set up the meet with his father anyway? Perhaps Cohen’s advice was the best advice of all
—
turn his back on the whole thing and go home.

That was not a viable option for Hatcher.

He had an obligation to Buffalo Bill Cody. He had made a promise and he meant to keep it.

Anyway, he was hooked, he had to play the hand out, no matter what the outcome.

He cleared customs without incident and found a taxi. The trip to town was a surreal fantasy, a wondrous journey through a dazzling array of cultures, sounds and sights that might have hypnotized Sinbad. The city’s beauty had always fascinated Hatcher, and now, coming back after five years, he was stunned again by its veiled mysteries and hidden promises.

The twenty-mile trip to town passed quickly, and the lush green fields of the countryside surrendered abruptly to the city as they passed the spectacular Chitrala
d
a Palace, the residence of King Bhumibol, the benevolent and well-loved
ruler,
whose great-great-grandfather, Rama IV, better known as King Mongkut, brought the English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens to Siam in the 1860s to enlighten his children. Although her autobiography,
The King and I,
and the play and movie based on it, had brought fame to Thailand, they were banned as inaccurate.

The taxi passed the Royal Turf Club racetrack, past fields where daily kite fights were a prelude to dusk and over Phadung K
l
ong, the main canal of the city. In two hours the boulevard would be gutter-to-gutter cars, sputtering motorized pedicabs called
samlors,
and
tuk
-
tuks,
the strange three-wheel two-seaters that weave in and out of the traffic and drive everyone mad and whose name describes the sound of their small motors.

But in the early light of day, the city was as it might have been a century before. They drove down an almost deserted Bamrung Muang Road, where orchids, jasmine and roses cascaded over fences, past estates where young women in embroidered costumes practiced ceremonial dances and flirted with the long shadows of daylight on lawns of emerald velvet. The cool morning breeze sifted through the open windows of the taxi, carrying with it the constant tinkle of temple bells from the wats, the Buddhist temples that were everywhere, their rooftops a delicate mosaic of colored spirals and gold-tiled domes, their eaves adorned with curling yellow finials called
chofas.

A Thai businesswoman in
w
estern dress, her Mercedes parked by the curb, placed a wreath of jasmine on a miniature but elaborate spirit house and clasped her hands in a
wai,
possibly asking the spirits for a successful day. The tiny temples were everywhere, looking like cluttered, gloriously painted dol
l
houses mounted on posts. They were always decked with offerings: hand-painted vases filled with roses, smoking joss sticks, necklaces of orchids, notes to the spirits, brightly dyed strips of silk, even food. Seeing the little
t
emples, Hatcher remembered a mercenary named sickle Knowles, who always offered a bullet to the
s
pirits before a job.

A half-dozen monks in saffron robes rushed out of a nearby wat with their brass alms bowls, seeking their first meal of the day. Two blocks away a country woman, her head wrapped in a brightly jeweled turban and her lips permanently stained brown by the betel nuts she chewed, sat in the middle of the sidewalk stringing jasmine blossoms. And a block farther, a greengrocer was busy arranging his stall with a dazzling array of pineapples, bananas, mangoes and durians, the large, spiky fruit most foreigners hated.

They passed the towering swing of Phatpu, where athletes once swung in giant arcs for the pleasure of the King until the practice was banned as too dangerous, and there the flower-lined streets gave way to the crowded old town. The incongruities continued: a noble but derelict Victorian palace with gingerbread turrets stood behind a cinema; an enormous three-story-high Buddha rested between two glass and concrete office buildings; a group of street urchins dashed along the curb with the grace of ballet dancers, playing soccer with a rattan ball, rousting a flock of migratory swallows that seemed to flutter constantly in search of roosting places among the statues and temples. And there were touches of Thai whimsy: a barbershop called the Darling, a restaurant called the Puberty, a hotel that rented rooms by the hour called Bungalow Home Fun.

The street ended abruptly at Yawaraj Road, which marked the beginning of Yawaraj, or Chinese Town. As the traffic increased khaki-clad traffic cops in gleaming white pith helmets began to appear, and the driver relied more on his horn than on his driving skills to make his way through the choked alleys. Streets funneled, became narrow and claustrophobic, wound uncertainly past ancient and ramshackle wooden buildings wedged against one another. Occasionally an elegant Chinese pagoda roof topped the otherwise undistinctive rows of shops that offered rare foods, aphrodisiacs, Cantonese vitamins and magic herbs. The streets became more constricted, curving through the Nakorn Kasem, the Chinese market known as Thieves’ Market, a misnomer, since most of the shops sold such unromantic articles as toilets, water pumps and light fixtures. The real lure of Yawaraj was the dusty, dimly lit antique shops. Shopkeepers were already busy hauling their clutter of treasures outside, where they spilled over the sidewalks: porcelains, teak furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, rosewood screens, brass and c
o
pper
l
amps.

The driver turned into New Road and headed down the last few blocks to the river at the far edge of Yawaraj and pulled up in front of the Muang House, a middle- class hotel, which Hatcher preferred over the luxury hotels of Bangkok. It was air-conditioned, so mosquitoes would not be a problem. The taxi then went down past the produce market to the Orie
n
tal.

The restaurant was outside at the back of the hotel on a flower-filled terrace above the broad, sweeping Chao Phraya River. Below it, long bats puttered through the morning mist on the way to the floating market while on the far side the spires of a dozen wats pierced the low-lying veil. It was not yet 7
A.M.
The restaurant was deserted except for Sloan, who stood at the railing sipping coffee and staring down at the river. The early morning breeze flapped the jacket of his white raw-silk suit. With his pale blue shirt, he might easily have been mistaken for a salesman or a business executive. He finally took a table near the railing, and with his Ben Franklin glasses perched halfway down his nose, he opened the
Bangkok Post,
one of the country’s three English language newspapers, folding it lengthwise the way subway riders do in New York.

There was another reason for Hatcher’s gnawing anxiety in coming to Bangkok.
H
arry Sloan. Expediency was Harry’s middle name.

Before the mission ended, Hatcher feared, he might have to stand between Murphy Cody and Harry Sloan.

How much should I tell him? Hatcher wondered. Does he need to know anything?

‘Sawat-dii,’
the head waiter said with a bow. ‘Breakfast, please?’

Hatcher pointed toward Sloan and followed the ornately dressed young man to the table. Sloan looked up over his glasses and then down at his watch.

‘Right on time,’ he said. ‘Punctuality, the mark of a dependable man.’

Hatcher ordered fresh orange juice, coffee and an English muffin. When the waiter left the table, he took off his glasses and laid them carefully on a corner of the table.

There was no smile on Sloan’s face, although his voice was as soft as usual. ‘You’ve been having yourself quite a time over in the colony,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

Sloan smiled condescendingly. ‘Just so you understand, I’ve got a fire under my ass in Madrango. I don’t need a shoot-out on Victoria Peak, cops getting blown up, a Goddamn tong war between Cohen and Tollie Fong, a shoot-out upriver with half the Ts’e K’am Men Ti getting knocked off. What I’m saying, all of a sudden the priorities have shifted. Madrango is what’s important right now.’

‘You’re a little confused, Harry,’ Hatcher’s wrecked voice answered just as softly. ‘I didn’t draw a line in the ground and dare them to step over
it.
They were trying to kill
me.
What was I supposed to do, play sitting duck?’

‘Nobody expects that.’

‘Then let me do my job.’

‘You know how important it is to keep the brigade quiet, particularly now. There’s too much at stake. Here, in Central America, in the Middle East. Hell, I’ve got cards all over the table.’

Hatcher stared across the table at Sloan. He shook out his napkin and dropped it on his lap as the waiter brought his coffee.

‘You knew the risk when you brought me into this,’ Hatcher said, doctoring his coffee with generous amounts of cream and sugar. ‘And we both knew I was in trouble the minute that son of a bitch Varney showed up at your door. As you always say, if one person knows, everybody knows. Of course, it didn’t help that the bastard was on Fong’s payroll.’

‘The late bastard, I hear.’ The smile returned, the slick tone of voice was back. ‘Just remember, in the future these things can be negotiated.’

‘There wasn’t time for that. They didn’t ring Cohen’s doorbell and suggest a little pow-wow first
—,
Sloan’s words suddenly sank in and Batcher stopped for a moment, staring at him. ‘What do you mean, they can be negotiated. You can’t negotiate anything with the Chiu Chaos.’

Sloan leaned across the table. ‘I can handle it,’ he said nonchalantly.

‘How?’

‘We do business with these countries. When we need to put the squeeze on assholes like Fong, there are ways of doing it.’

‘Harry, nobody puts the squeeze on assholes like Fong.’

The waiter came with their breakfast. Sloan had ordered eggs, bacon, toast, fruit. Other guests began drifting into the restaurant.

‘What the hell happened upriver?’ Sloan asked as he salt-and-peppered his eggs.

‘I was looking for information,
‘
Hatcher said.

‘I hope what you got was worth the body count.’

‘When did you start worrying about body counts?’ Hatcher said sarcastically.

Sloan leaned across the table. ‘Did you find out anything or not?’ he said.

‘I got some leads.’

‘That’s it? All I get out of this breakfast is that you got some leads.’

‘We’ll talk about it if they pan out.’

Sloan leaned back and sighed. He looked back over the river, arranging his thoughts.

Hatcher said very matter-of-factly, ‘Harry, I came over here to find Murphy Cody and that’s what I’m going to do. And I’m going to do it my way, which doesn’t include giving you progress reports every thirty seconds. I said I’d be alive for breakfast today, and here I am. What the hell do you care whether I get into it with the Ts’e K’am or Fong or anybody else? That’s my problem. I don’t even work for the brigade anymore, I’m just a private citizen looking for an old pal.’

‘I admire your talent at oversimplification,’ Sloan said and then chuckled. ‘Well, I’ve got some bad news for you, and some worse news for you after that. Which would you like first?’

Hatcher sighed. ‘Why do you smile when you say that?’ he asked.

‘I can be just as perverse as you,’ he said. ‘The worse news is that they found Cody’s dog tags on the site of the crash.’

Hatcher scowled at him, letting the information sink

‘When did you hear that?’

‘Last night. They turned up when the site was checked back in ‘76. It wasn’t in the report because he was already declared dead and the government file was closed when they were found.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘You know Flitcraft, he doesn’t miss a base. He sent a routine inquiry to the POW commission and the insurance company after we got Windy’s report. The information on the dog tags was buried in an insurance wrap-up but was never added to the government file. They couldn’t have cared less by then.’