The Thai Amulet

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.”

“I did already. I confess you got me curious. There’s nothing that I could find. Sorry.”

“Too bad. What’s going to happen to this girl?” I said. The girl in question returned to the room, still holding the child, and started speaking quickly and in a heated manner to David, who kept shaking his head.

When she hesitated for a moment, I said, “Ask her, will you, when you get a chance, if she knows Will?”

He did, and said, “She says she met Will. He once visited them at their former home. She said her husband was representing Will, and had sold his book for a lot of money last spring. Maybe I’m right about Rowland keeping the money. Anyway, let’s get out of here. There’s only so much of this kind of situation I can stand.”

“You didn’t answer my question about what will happen to her,” I said as we drove away.

“I went to discuss with her the fact that Rowland’s sister in Atlanta wants us to help with the formalities of having his body shipped back to the States. That’s what started that tirade. Parichat wants to go to the States. She says she married an American, her kid is American—the kid’s name is Bent Rowland Junior, poor little tyke—and she thinks she’s entitled to citizenship.”

“And is she?”

“I doubt she’s really married to him,” he said. “Let’s just say that complicates matters. And he is dead now, after all. I’ll see what I can do about the kid. I sure hope she has some of that cash still stashed somewhere.”

“Why?”

“Because he left all his money, everything he has, to his sister,” David said.

“Oh no!” I said.

“Exactly. She’ll be back on the street in no time. Some days I really hate my job,” he added. “So where do you want to go now?”

“I need to go and pick up something,” I said. “Robert Fitzgerald suggested I get it.” That was more or less true, although, granted, the man had barely been conscious when he’d said it.

“You mean you want to go now?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. “Before others get there.”

“What others?”

“I wish I knew. It’s at his house, whatever it is.”

“Neat place,” he said as he looked around the tree house. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Look at these chess pieces, will you? They’re fabulous. Now, what are we looking for here?”

“I don’t know. Fitzgerald told me they, whoever they are, and I assumed it was the people who bashed him and made such a mess of this place, didn’t get what they wanted. He also said we had to go and see his mother. Maybe you could help me find her. Now, what does this look like to you?” I said, gesturing about the place.

“Other than a mess, you mean? People were looking for something, obviously. I have no idea what, but, come to think about it, these shelves are interesting. One of them has been emptied, the others not even touched. Do we know what was on this one shelf?

“Diaries,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said. “In that case, they were looking for diaries for the years between about 1945 and I960. The others aren’t touched. If that is the case, they didn’t find what they wanted, because they went on to go through all the drawers, check under the bed, searching through the kitchen cupboards, that sort of thing, or maybe it was some­thing else they wanted. This is right off the top of my head, but that’s what it looks like to me.”

“Me, too, and some of those dates are about right,” I said.

“For what?”

“The murder Will Beauchamp was writing about.”

“The fifty-year-old crime again: Helen Ford,” he said. “So you really don’t think Rowland got the money from the publisher? That’s how it works, doesn’t it? The publisher pays the agent who takes his commission and passes the rest of the money along to the author?”

“I think so,” I said.

“There are other options here, you know. Didn’t you say Bent gave Will a couple of thousand dollars as an advance? Maybe Rowland did manage to get Will a small advance, took his cut, and passed the rest along, and the money he’s been depositing is from some other source. I suppose the trouble with that is, why lie about the publisher if there really is one? So, maybe you’re right and he’s dishonest, got a lot of money from some other publisher, and didn’t pay Will. Or he just gave Will a couple of thousand of his own money to give the impression that he had sold the book. Maybe the guy was just an abject loser who was trying to play in the big leagues, or at least give the impression he was.”

“You’re right. It could be any of the above. But it is still possible somebody paid him not to find a publisher, and he was just playing for time with Will.”

“Why wouldn’t he just tell Will he couldn’t find a publisher for it?”

“Because Will would get himself another agent. End of payments for Rowland.”

“Will was bound to find out—did find out, as a matter of fact. This ploy was only a temporary solution.”

“My point exactly.”

“You’re saying that Will is dead, and not just dead, but murdered.”

“I’m coming to believe this is the only possible conclusion.”

“Realistically, who would kill over a book?

“If I had the book, I might know the answer to that question. But it wasn’t in Will’s apartment. I looked. I doubt it will be in Rowland’s office, either. Now let’s keep looking here for whatever I’m supposed to find. Fitzgerald said ‘spirit house.” There was one he was working on in the living room, and another, the one protecting the house, is outside.“

“It didn’t do a very good job, did it?” David said. “Protecting the place, or him, I mean. I’ll go check the spirit houses. This one looks perfectly normal,” he said.

“I’ll go down and check the one outside. I’m hoping not to disturb whoever it is lives in these things.”

“I’m sure they’ll forgive us,” I said.

He returned in a minute or two. “Nothing again, I’m afraid.”

“There has to be something,” I said. I picked up the unfinished spirit house, the one I’d promised to buy for my store, and turned it over carefully. I could see where one piece of its floor was not perfectly fitted together, not up to the standard of the rest of Fitzgerald’s work. I gave it a careful tug, then a harder one, and the floor came away to reveal a hollow in which was stuffed two slim leather diaries. “Got it,” I said.

“Good for you,” he said. “Let’s see? Diaries for 1948 and ‘49- We should turn them over to the police,” he said. “They might be relevant.”

“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?”

“Where will I begin?” David said. “He gets mixed reviews. He’s smart, can be very charming, obviously good at business—he’s rich. He’s a poor boy from the boonies, in this case Chiang Mai, who has made good. For a guy who started out with a couple of rice barges, he’s built quite a transportation empire. He ships all over the world. Companies line up to do business with him. He is rich, but he isn’t part of the upper crust, if you understand me. He probably lacks a little finesse, that’s all.”

“He wants his daughter to marry Chat,” I said.

“That would take care of the social standing, wouldn’t it? That’s unlikely I think. Isn’t Chat sweet on Jennifer still, or again, whichever it is? They’d just had a fight when I met her.”

“They’re back together, and yes, he is sweet on her. But you said Khun Wichai gets mixed reviews. Is just his social standing on the downside? Chat seemed a little nervous about him, or at least about doing business with him.”

“There are rumors,” he said. “Nothing substantiated. In a word, drugs.”

“He uses them, or he ships them?”

“Maybe both. I repeat there is absolutely no proof. When any of his ships are searched, they’re clean as a whistle. The authorities do search boats at sea and find them loaded with drugs—there was one a couple of years ago, boarded in the Andaman Sea between Thailand and Myanmar, Burma, just loaded with the stuff. Heroin and crystal meth. You might know that as ice. Millions of tablets and bags of the other stuff. But are these boats ever linked in any way to Wichai? Absolutely not. He sits up there in Chiang Mai looking much like a warlord, with his cadre of followers who are intensely loyal. But there’s nothing anyone can prove against him.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s a sense that his opposition tends to disappear.”

“Disappear?”

“As in disappear like our friend Will Beauchamp. They’re never heard from again.”