The Thai Amulet (21 page)

“First, we read them,” I said, taking them out of his hands and slapping them into my bag. “Let’s get out of here.” What I wanted to do, indeed what I would have done if I’d been there by myself, was to sit down and read through them on the spot. I knew, though, that with David there that was impossible.

Difficult as it might be to think that a crime that had taken place fifty years earlier had anything in particular to do with the present time, the inescapable conclusion now seemed to be that Will Beauchamp’s disappearance was definitely connected with the book he was writing on Helen Ford. Anybody who knew anything about the book he was supposed to have written had had something very bad happen to them, from threats to injury to murder. The only course of action it now seemed logical to pursue was to find out more about Helen Ford.

But for a while, I didn’t, distracted as I was by a visit from Chat. “What are you doing in this room?” Chat said that evening when I opened the door to his knock.

“This is the room I was assigned,” I said. “It’s very cozy.”

“But you are supposed to be in the gold room,” Chat said.

“I believe Yutai is now in the gold room,” I said.

“Yutai!” he exclaimed. “On whose authority?”

“I expect it’s your mother’s.”

“I will see to this,” he said. “But I have a favor to ask of you, Aunt Lara. I am wondering if you can help me with a business matter. I am not, as Jen has probably told you, very inclined to business. I do not have a head for it. I have no wish to manage my father’s company, but I realize in the short term it is necessary for me to do so. You know about business,” he said. “And I am hoping you will give me some advice.”

“Chat, I will help you any way I can, but I own a little antique store. I know nothing about big business like Ayutthaya.”

“But you can read financial statements, can’t you?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “But…”

“You know so much more than I do,” he said. “I studied the arts, political science. I did not take commerce or finance.”

“I didn’t either,” I said.

“Please,” he said.

“Okay,” I replied. “Is there something you want me to read?”

“I would like you to come to the offices on the main floor,” he said.

“Now?”

“No. Tonight. Late. When everyone has gone home. Perhaps midnight?”

Midnight?
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the glass doors at midnight.”

Chat was waiting for me when I arrived, having just finished moving back into the gold room. I was once again living in luxury, while Yutai, now my bitter enemy, I was sure, was elsewhere.

I smiled as pleasantly as possible at the chauffeur who was doubling as a security guard in the lobby, and went in. Chat might be trying to do this secretly, but I didn’t think much went unreported in that place.

We sat down at a computer, Chat pulled up some financial charts, and asked me to have a look through.

“The spreadsheets are in English,” I said. “But you may have to translate some of the notes.”

“I will,” he said.

“So what do you think?” he said, after awhile.

“I think Ayutthaya acquired a new partner last spring sometime.”

“Busakorn Shipping,” Chat said. “Blue Lotus, in English.”

“Khun Wichai’s company?”

“Yes,” Chat said. “It is Khun Wichai’s company. He named it after his daughter. His wife is dead. His daughter is everything he has.”

“Then you have a new partner in the form of Khun Wichai.”

“I’m not sure this is something I would want. Khun Wichai is… I’m not sure about him. I’ve always had a sense he was in businesses one is better off not to ask about. I told my father that, and we had a fight. He said I’m not very practical, not very skilled in the ways of the world. I told him he was exploiting people. I am very sorry about that now, as you can imagine, but I remain convinced Khun Wichai is not the kind of man we want to be in business with.”

“It looks to me as if this is now academic,” I said. “I think he’s a partner, or at least a minority shareholder, already. What else have you got there?”

“Figures for my mother’s business,” he said.

“She’s doing awfully well, isn’t she?” I said. “Good for her. She’s in partnership with Busakorn again.”

“Now take a look at these,” he said.

“These are financials for…” I didn’t know what to say.

“Tell me,” he said.

“They are financials for the same company, but they’re different. In this second set… where did you find these?”

“Dusk found them. He was just fooling around. My little brother is rather good with computers. Now tell me.”

“It just looks as if there are two sets of books for your mother’s business,” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Would there be a good reason for that?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, but I was thinking,
Not likely.
I couldn’t imagine what a reason might be, at least not one either Chat or I wanted to hear. “And by the way, a couple of others have or have had a small share in the company as well.”

“I noticed. William Beauchamp is one,” he said.

“Could I help you, Mr. Chat?” a voice said.

“And here is the other,” he murmured. “I was just showing Ms. Lara our computers,” Chat said aloud. I gave him a questioning look, and he nodded. Yutai, apparently, was the shareholder in question.

“I’m very impressed,” I said. “By your computers, I mean.”

Yutai looked at his watch. “It is very late,” he said.

“We didn’t want to bother people when they were hard at work,” I said.

Chat said something to Yutai in Thai, and after a very slight hesitation, the man turned and left. “We’d better go,” I said. “Let’s just print a copy of these financial statements, and I’ll have a closer look at the numbers,” I said.

“Thank you. I believe I may have to go to Chiang Mai and pay a visit to my proposed father-in-law.”

“I know I shouldn’t ask,” I said. “But what are you planning to do about that? I’d prefer you not string Jennifer along if you have other plans.”

“I would not do that, Aunt Lara,” he said, looking wounded.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that…”

“You love her,” he said. “I do, too.”

The next morning I looked at the two diaries, and then at the pile of financial statements, trying to decide where to start. “Diaries or numbers,” I muttered to myself. My hand hovered over first one, then the other. In the end, Will Beau-champ won. Why did I, after all, have to be the one to tell Chat his mother was cooking the books, no doubt with the help of her lover, the guy Chat thought was a secretary? It wasn’t going to help his relationship with Jennifer if I was the one to bring some unsavory facts to his attention. Praise be to whatever guardian spirit was looking out for me that I had not agreed to do business with that woman, only to make enquiries.

If my views on Wongvipa and company were crystallizing, my image of Will was not. He remained an enigma to me, a man who had deserted his wife and child, but had not succumbed, like Bent Rowland, to the sensual enticements of Bangkok. He’d started a business much like the one he had at home, lived what seemed to be a relatively quiet life in a nice but not luxurious apartment, was a pleasant enough neighbor, held a party every now and then and went to bars on occasion, but didn’t seem to have done anything too awful. Perhaps, as Praneet had suggested, he hadn’t been able to handle the pressure of a disabled child anymore and just flipped out temporarily. Maybe all it would have taken was one phone call from his wife to have him fly back home, but it never came. It was sad to think of Natalie and Will as two lonely people who loved each other, thousands of miles apart and both unable to make the smallest of gestures toward the other.

Presumably too, if Will had asked the mysterious Mr. Prasit to send that envelope to Natalie when he hadn’t heard from him in awhile, worthless though the contents might be, he must have had an intimation of his own mortality. The note he’d sent to Natalie personally could be said to have an impending sense of doom. Perhaps Will thought writing about Helen Ford was a dangerous thing to do. Maybe it was.

I turned back to the diaries. They were written in a small, tight script. I figured it would take days to work my way through them, even if I worked steadily, but I started into them anyway, and soon I was hooked.

They were a fascinating account of life in Bangkok after the war, but they were also personal, Fitzgerald writing about his painting, the people he met, the meals he had eaten. It was during this period that he had begun to build the tree house studio and to work there. Two of the first people to sit for their portraits were Mr. Thaksin and Mr. Virat, obviously the two Chaiwong brothers of the portrait in the living room. According to this account, the two men had come to see Fitzgerald Senior, but he had gone to Thaksin’s home to do the portrait of Thaksin’s first wife, Somchai, and little Sompom. While these four names were quite clear, some of the people referred to were only initials. I had no way to be certain why that would be. Perhaps it was for reasons of discretion, if not secrecy, or it was simply that these were people he knew very well and therefore did not need to write out their names.

Early in the diaries there were several references to Helen. I didn’t know whether this was Helen Ford, of course, but there were at least a dozen references to her sitting for her portrait and of other more domestic activities:
“Helen and I went shopping today to find her a frock. She told me I was the only person in the world who was completely honest with her, and would not let her buy something which made her look like a fat pig. Not that she could ever look that way.”
Or another:
“The rains were terrible today making it almost impossible to go out at all. Helen and I sat and read, but soon Helen was bored, and started inventing word games for us to play. I really just wanted to paint, but I had left all my brushes at the studio, careless man that I am, although all were carefully wrapped against the rain. I decided not to venture forth, as it would be folly to do so. Helen, much braver than I, went visiting. She is not happy anymore, just being with me. I ask her where she goes, but she won’t tell me. Whom does she see? What do they do? I wish to know, but part of me dreads the answer.”

At some point in the narrative
Helen
disappeared, to be replaced with references to merely
H. “H has confided in me. I am horrified by what she has told me, but somehow not surprised. I had thought the trip to Singapore five years ago was the end of it. What will become of her?…

“H was here today with W,”
one entry said.
“She looked so beautiful, radiant really, that my fears for her vanished, if only for an hour or two. I am happy that she has confided in me, but I worry so about what might come of this.”
Or later:
“This cannot end well for H or the other two, but it is H I care about. How I wish I could convince her to take another path.

“H’s marriage is a mistake. What if he finds out about W? I have beseeched her time and time again to go back home and forget all of this. I have told her how much I love her, how I would do anything for her, that she must listen to what I say. She is adamant!”

Toward the end of that diary, there was this terse statement:
“What I most feared for H has happened. I am too much of a coward to help her. I can only help with W and B. I cannot write any more. God help us all.”
The entry was in September of 1949. There were no further entries that year, only blank pages. The newspaper clipping said Helen Ford’s husband’s dismembered body was found in October of that year. If what his son had told me was true, Robert Fitzgerald Senior didn’t write another word in his diaries until I960.

This is just too hard,
I thought, suddenly.
I don’t want to try to figure this out anymore. This was supposed to be a bit of a holiday. I can say in all honesty to Natalie Beauchamp that I tried to find her husband, and I just didn’t succeed. End of story.

I could, though, I thought, call David Ferguson and ask him more about Khun Wichai. There! I’d managed to assuage my guilt at not doing Chat’s financial statements for him. I was doing something for him, anyway. As I reached for the telephone, I noticed the sword was not in the place I thought I’d left it.
How did it get over here, I wonder?
I said to myself.
I’m sure I left it over by the cupboard.
I looked it over carefully but could see absolutely nothing wrong with it.
The lady who cleans,
I thought. There was no harm done. Still, I did continue to have the feeling that someone was going through my belongings.

“Come to think of it,” I said right out loud. “Who told Robert Fitzgerald I was coming to visit?”

Robert Fitzgerald had said I was late. Surely that meant he’d been expecting me. He had a bad concussion, and I suppose one is not expected to be coherent when you’ve been hit on the head. But still, it was something else to think about later. I picked up the phone and dialed.

“I’m glad you called,” David said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’d like to go out to dinner tomorrow night after the performance.”

“Sure,” I said. “But tell me a little about what we’re going to see. I know Sompom is an expert in it, and the performance tomorrow is dedicated to the memory of Thaksin, who was a patron of the theater. I also know Chat would really like us to go, but I’m not entirely sure what to expect.”

“A performance of Khon. It’s a very ancient form of masked dance and theater, brought to Thailand from the Khmer empire in Cambodia, and it tells the story of the Ramayama, or in Thailand, the Ramakien. The Thai version was probably developed in the Royal Palace of Ayutthaya several hundred years ago. It was lost when Ayutthaya fell to the Burmese, but it has been revived since. The National Theater puts on performances of it. To do the whole thing would take weeks of continuous performance, so we’ll just see an episode or two. The costumes are really quite wonderful. I think you’ll enjoy it.”

“I’m sure I will. Now, what can you tell me about Khun Wichai?”