The Thai Amulet

Chapter 11

It is a solemn but also a joyous occasion when one is admitted to the monkhood. Once across the river, Yot Fa was carried on the shoulders of two courtiers to the Khok Phraya Monastery, to the sound of drums and gongs, and accompanied by his friends, including me. There the head abbot directed the young king to kneel, and after prayers, cut a lock of the young man’s hair. Then his head and eyebrows were shaved, he was undressed and wrapped in the simple robe of the monk, then water was poured over him to wash away the world. As I watched him rub his bare head and smile, I thought how both prince and poor man were alike, somehow, in the robe of the monk. Like the others, Yot Fa would go out at dawn to beg for food, would spend his days in contemplation and prayer. It was an unsettling experience for me. As I looked at him, I felt the world shift beneath my feet. “You can join me as a monk,” he said to me, but I could see nothing but my beloved’s face and turned back to the city. It was a terrible mistake.

One night, shortly after Yot Fa had entered the monastery, I awoke from a terrible dream. I heard footsteps running, and a courtier was soon shaking me. “Come,” he said. “Quickly. The young king asks for you.” The man was shaking so much he could hardly speak.

It was a long trip across the river in the dark, to Khbk Phraya. The courtier would tell me nothing. Part of me thought the young king was just being, well, kingly, and wanted his friend with him. The other trembled at the thought that something terrible had happened. By the time I had arrived, however, I had persuaded myself it was the former and was annoyed with the young man for not having the fortitude for the monastic life and for disturbing my sleep.

A monk met me at the gates of the temple. “I fear you are too late,” he said. I did not comprehend what he was saying, did not do so, until I entered the tiny cell where the Prince slept. He was dead, his face and body contorted, still, in agony. On the floor beside the humble cot a wooden cup lay empty. The monk who had greeted me picked it up and sniffed it. “Poison,” he said. I fled.

By morning, Chat was dead.

What I remember most is the wrenching cry of pain from Jennifer when she found him, not so much a scream as a primitive groan of grief. It will stay with me forever, even more than the sight of his body, curled up like a baby, except for the head that was thrown back in a horrible grimace of agony.

I also remember Wongvipa, standing over the body of her dead son, looking from him to Yutai, who stood in the doorway. On her face was an expression of what? Surprise? Complicity? I couldn’t tell. I tried to comfort Jennifer, but the words wouldn’t come.

“She’s asleep now,” Praneet said. She looked exhausted, but more than that, older, as if she’d aged overnight. Maybe she had. Maybe we all had. “I have given her something. She shouldn’t wake for at least eight or ten hours. I’m so sorry,” she said, touching my shoulder. “Try to remember she’s young, she’s resilient. She’ll get over this eventually. Have you called her father?”

I nodded.

“Would you like me to give you something to help you sleep as well?”

“No,” I said. “I want to feel every bit of this. I want it to hurt very much. This is my fault. It happened because I wasn’t paying attention.”

“No, please, Lara,” she said. “Don’t do this to yourself. As painful as it may be to realize this, Chat took street drugs. I know you liked him, Lara,” she said. “We all did. And you want to think the best of him. But he took recreational drugs. Crystal meth, ice. It is horribly addictive. If Jennifer didn’t notice, how could you?”

“He doesn’t do drugs,” I said. “Jennifer said so. I don’t care what you say, she would know. I’m sure he thought he was taking painkillers.” Inside my head a voice was screaming and screaming and wouldn’t stop. Somebody had killed Chat. I knew it was Yutai, maybe with the tacit approval of Chat’s mother. Yes, I was accusing Wongvipa of the worst crime a woman could commit, that of killing her child. Worse still, I knew I would never be able to prove it.

“Thank you for everything you’ve done,” I said to Praneet in as normal a voice as I could muster.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she said as she left.

“Yes,” I said. But I wasn’t. I was convinced this was my fault, and nothing anyone could say would make me feel better. I had spent my time looking for someone I knew only casually, while evil was swirling right under my nose. Will Beauchamp’s wife and daughter were worthy of some effort, yes, but not at the expense of Chat and most especially my Jennifer. I was responsible in some very fundamental way for her happiness, and I had failed her. Chat had seen something bad happening at Ayutthaya, and he’d come to me for advice. And what had I done? I’d gone off to read some diaries of a dead painter! I hadn’t been paying attention to what mattered most.

I was so angry at myself I thought I’d lose my mind. I grabbed Will’s bubble envelope full of junk and dumped it on the desk. I tore the clipping and the letter from Prasit into a million little pieces. Then I took one of the unbroken amulets and smashed it against the side of the desk. When that didn’t work, I dropped it on the floor and stomped on it. Then I took the portrait and shook it. I wanted to cut it to shreds, but I couldn’t think what I had that would do that. Then I remembered the sword and went for that.

I was poised to slash the painting when I noticed a computer floppy disk that must have fallen out of the back of the painting when I’d shaken it. I was about to grind that beneath my heel when I saw something else: a red eye winking at me from the dust that had been the amulet. I knelt down and found six rubies, beautiful ones, stunningly perfect, in the remains. I took the second amulet and broke it, to find six blue sapphires in the dust. And I realized then that the carefully wrapped pieces of broken amulet in the envelope were a message from Will. He was telling Natalie that a broken amulet meant something. No wonder the horrible man in the amulet market had wanted them back and someone had been searching my luggage. And didn’t it just explain why someone had risked trying to snatch my purse in a crowded marketplace! The computer disk, too, was a message from Will. I picked it up, went downstairs and through the etched glass doors of Ayutthaya Trading, and spoke to the first person I came to. He introduced himself as Eakrit, the new CFO. I told the little worm I wanted a computer with a printer with lots of paper in it, and I wanted it right now.

Paradise Lost

The Untold Story of Helen Ford

Copyright William Beauchamp

CIO The Bent Rowland Agency, Bangkok, Thailand

InNovember of 1949, as Loi Krathong celebrations to mark the end of the rainy season got under way, revelers floating their lotus flower-shaped boats on the Chao Phyrajust north of Bangkok made a grisly discovery. The torso of a farang, a white foreigner, was found near the edge of the river. With no head nor limbs to help with identification, it seemed the murder, which clearly it was, would go unsolved.

But within weeks, through a fortuitous discovery of bone fragments and teeth in the ashes of a large fire, the body was identified as that of Thomas “Tex” Ford, an appliance salesman from the U.S. living in Bangkok. Shortly thereafter, in February of 1950, his widow, Helen Ford, was charged with his murder.

The lurid case caused a sensation in the expatriate community in Bangkok. The beautiful Mrs. Ford had been a fixture on the social scene, and many hearts had been broken when she married Ford. Some said a jealous former suitor had murdered him in the hope of marrying his widow. Others said Tex Ford had gotten involved in some shady business dealings with Thai traders and had paid with his life. Helen Ford herself said that she had thought that Ford, whom she claimed had been abusive, had deserted her, taking with him their young son. His death, she claimed, had come as a complete surprise to her.

It was clear to everyone that love, if there had ever been any between Tex and Helen, was long gone by the time he died, just over a year after they married, and four months after the birth of their son. Helen had resumed her social schedule almost immediately, and if she mourned the loss of either her husband or her child, she didn’t show it. She told everyone she planned to return to the U.S. as soon as she was permitted to do so, to start her life over.

But before she could do that, she was charged with murder and sentenced to die.

This is Helen Ford’s story. It is a tale of passion, lust, and greed. It is the story of justice perverted, of love poisoned by prejudice, of the dark side of high society.

This is the story they didn’t want you to know.

There was more, of course, 267 pages of it, to be precise. Even discounting a rather derivative title and the supermarket tabloid elements, it was a riveting tale. Helen Ford, nee Helen Fitzgerald, and her brother Robert had come to Bangkok with their parents right after the war. The father, who had been a member of U.S. special forces, had been stationed in Bangkok during the war, and succumbing to the lure of the East, moved his family there. He died shortly after, however, of wounds he had received in combat in the Pacific. The mother, too, died not much later.

There had been some money in the family, although not a lot of it, and it was important that Helen marry well. She was seen at all the best parties and apparently had a succession of suitors. But she loved someone else, someone unsuitable. In the mid-1940s, she began a liaison with a young Thai from a well-to-do family. They met clandestinely for at least two years. In a remarkable twist, given the times, it was not Helen’s family who objected to the relationship. It was his.

At some point, the man told his family he was going to marry Helen. They were horrified and would have none of it, considering Helen to be after his money. The family tried to pay Helen off, and needing money and perhaps seeing the hopelessness of her situation, she apparently accepted. The young man’s engagement to a Thai woman was announced a few months later. Shortly after that, Helen married Tom Ford. It was clearly a marriage of convenience. They had a son born eight months after the wedding. Ford was a drunk and a philanderer, according to Will. He may also have been a wife beater.

What seems clear is that Helen and her Thai lover continued to see each other. Will’s hypothesis was that Tom Ford caught them in their little love nest, a tree house in Bangkok that belonged to her brother, or that the Thai came upon Tom beating Helen. Whatever the reason for the meeting, at the end of it, Helen’s lover lay mortally wounded. He died from a stab wound before Helen could get help.

After that, Will’s story sinks into speculation. According to his account, Helen went berserk and did, indeed, stab her husband. Then, in an effort to ensure his body couldn’t be identified, probably with the help of her brother Robert, she hacked the body to pieces. She then killed her infant son. That body has never been found.

The story then enters the realm of public knowledge. Helen was tried, convicted, sentenced to die, appealed, won, and was instead jailed for about six years. She then disappeared from public view. It was a fascinating story at any time, but for me, at that moment it was a revelation. Because while at no time in the public record was either her lover nor, indeed, any other member of his family mentioned, Will Beauchamp felt no such compunction, naming Virat Chaiwong, Thaksin’s brother, the second young man in the family portrait, as the lover. Even then, the Chaiwong family’s power and influence must have been insurmountable. If the murder of Virat had been part of Helen’s defense, she might have gotten off with the lesser sentence right away, the justifiable homicide idea. But Will had combed the records, what there were, anyway, and could find nothing.

So there it was. If I’d thought that finding Will was a separate issue from Jennifer and the Chaiwongs, then clearly I’d been wrong. But what did it mean? The picture of Will that was emerging was contradictory at best. He had been in business with Wongvipa, a business that required two sets of financial statements for some reason, and it couldn’t be good. At the same time, or at least soon after, he wrote a book that was a damning indictment of Wongvipa’s family. The obvious conclusion was the Chaiwongs were trying to stop publication of the book and were prepared to murder Will to do it. But what about Chat? Was Helen Ford still out there somewhere, determined to take her revenge on the family through the next generation?

I went back to look at the portrait. I swear I stared at it for an hour: Helen Ford in her lovely celery suit standing behind a table on which was placed a stone Buddha, her hand seeming to reach out for it. She stared directly at me. Then I tried not looking at her, but my eyes kept coming back, not to her, but to the Buddha on the table.

“There’s something wrong with this painting,” I said aloud. It was something about the hands. She looked a bit as if she was reaching for the Buddha image, but the hands were not quite right if that was what she was doing. To me it looked more like a protective gesture of some kind, but why protect the Buddha? I picked up the phone and called David Ferguson.

“I heard about Chat,” he said. “What a terrible thing to happen. Is Jennifer all right?”

“She will be with time,” I said.

“And her dad? Have you talked to him? And you? What happened?”

“Drugs,” I said. “There must have been some mix-up. He thought he was taking painkillers for his headache.” I could almost hear his brain ticking over. He was thinking what everybody else was thinking, that Chat was a drug addict. It seemed Jennifer and I were in a very exclusive group that saw it differently. And I had no way of proving otherwise, not yet anyway.

“Look, David, I can’t talk long, and I’m nervous about using the telephone here, and yes, this is an unusual request under the circumstances, but I must know what the stuff on Will Beauchamp’s wall was. The stuff we thought might be blood. Someone must know.”

“Lara, why are you worrying about this now? You must be in shock or something.”

“Please, David,” I said.

“I’ll call you back,” he replied.

* * *

“Oil paint,” he said about an hour later. “The kind artists use. There’s some red pigment as well, and a thinner. The lab guy said he might have been cleaning brushes and managed to spatter it on the wall. That mean anything to you?”

“It does,” I said. “Thanks.” I grabbed the painting, had the security man call me a car, and headed into Bangkok.

“Oh, it’s you,” Robert Fitzgerald said, peering over the top of the railing. He was very pale, and his head was still bandaged, but he was home. “Come up,” he said. “I see you’ve found the painting.”

“Do you feel up to a little project?” I said.

“I think so,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t require running a marathon or anything.”

“I want to clean this area of the painting,” I said.

“The whole painting could use a little cleaning.”

“I want you to remove the Buddha,” I said, pointing. “Start right about here.”

“I don’t know that I should do that,” he said. “It’s a wonderful painting, and the artist is, after all, my father.”

“Just look at that painting for a minute,” I said. “Your father was an exceptional craftsman. His perspective was perfect. This is not perfect. Someone, maybe him, maybe somebody else, has changed this painting. Will Beauchamp thought so, too. He was starting to clean it when he was killed. See, if you look closely, you can see where he started.”

“Killed!” he said. “You didn’t say anything about him being killed. I know who Helen Ford is, by the way. I looked her up. A murderess. Why would I want to get involved in this?”

“How about because she was your father’s sister?” I said.

“What!” he exclaimed. His pallor grew more noticeable, and he lurched back on the sofa. He seemed to be wheezing. I didn’t care.

“I’m afraid so. Now, about the painting—”

“Oh my,” he said. I suddenly realized that for all his bluster, Fitzgerald at the best of times was a rather fragile individual, and these were hardly the best of times. “Could you hand me that puffer?” he said, gesturing weakly to the device on the table. “My asthma—”

“Robert,” I said, handing him the puffer but not waiting until he inhaled the medication. “This is really important, or I wouldn’t be here. I’ll explain about your aunt as we go, but you have got to get going on this.”

Breathing restored, he peered at the portrait carefully for a few minutes. “You may be right,” he conceded. “It could well be that someone painted over the original.”

“Can you do it?” I asked.

“I think so. Just give me a minute to get some materials.” He limped to the back while I sat in an agony of anticipation.

The face emerged slowly over the next several hours: dark hair, almond-colored eyes, tawny skin, and a gaze that matched that of the women whose hand was stretched out protectively toward it. “My God,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s a child, and it has to be hers.”

“Is your mother still in town?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Let’s go and see her,” I said.

“Can you do that without me?” he said. “I’m feeling rather strange.” He didn’t look well at all. The pallor he’d exhibited when I’d arrived had in the meantime acquired a tinge of green.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is too much when you’re not well. Just point me in the right direction.”

* * *

“Hello, dear,” Edna Thomas said. She was a tidy little woman with gray hair and blue eyes. Her hands were gnarled with arthritis. “You’re the nice girl who found Bobby and got the doctor, aren’t you?” she said. “Of course I will help you any way I can.” She spoke with that rather indeterminate accent many Americans acquire after they’ve spent many years in England. I found her in what could charitably be called a tourist-class hotel. The room was clean but rather depressingly spare. If her former husband had made money with his paintings, she did not appear to have benefited from them.

“I need to know about Helen Ford. Specifically, I need to know about her children.”

“Mercy!” she exclaimed. “I’m not sure… what children?”

“Mrs. Thomas, please,” I said. “People are dying over this. Your son could have been one of them if I hadn’t found him. This is what I know.” I told her everything I’d read in Will’s manuscript, and then I told her about the painting.

“He should have destroyed it,” she said. “I told him to. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, though. That painting was all he had left of his sister, whom he adored. In order to be able to keep it, he painted over the child with that Buddha.”

“The children,” I repeated. “I must know about them.”

“There were two,” she said. “One by her husband, one by Virat Chaiwong. She was single, of course, when she got pregnant the first time. Both times, come to think about it. That first time, she was sent off to Singapore. That’s what girls did then. They just said they were going back to the States or whatever for a few months. Then they came back looking much like before. Most of them came back empty-handed. Not Helen, although I didn’t know it at first. Robert knew, but he didn’t tell me right away. I confess I was shocked when I saw him. I know I shouldn’t say this, but you have to think of the times. I was horrified. His father was obviously Thai. They are beautiful, though, the children of mixed race. The boy was one of the most beautiful children I have ever seen. It didn’t matter what I thought, of course. This was her love child, and she wasn’t giving him up. She was a stubborn one. She didn’t give two hoots what people thought. The child was cared for by a Thai family. They knew the child was Helen’s but not who the father was. She visited the child every day. There weren’t many places she could meet with the boy, other than the home she’d placed him in. She used to take him to Robert’s studio. They’d sometimes meet Virat there.

“When she killed her husband—and she did, believe me: it was shortly after the birth of Bobby, and I’ve often wondered if it was a really severe postpartum depression. These days she might have got off, with a good lawyer…” She seemed to be fading a little.

“Did she kill the children?” I said, rather brusquely, I’m afraid. I felt I had to keep her focused, or I wasn’t going to find out what I needed. “I must know whether or not she murdered her children.”

“Of course not! How could anybody think that a mother would do such a thing. She told Robert and me to get the children away, that nobody was to know where they were, and no one was to know that Virat’s boy even existed. That’s why Robert painted him out of the portrait. I took the other boy to England. You won’t tell Bobby, will you? I have brought him up as my own son, loved him as my own son.”

“I won’t. If you think he should know, I’ll leave that to you, I promise.” It was tempting to tell her that a large part of Robert Junior’s problem was due to the feeling that he would never be as good an artist as his father, and that he might well feel better knowing he wasn’t the great painter’s son. But this was not the time for that.

“I’ll never tell him,” she said. “He’s rather gruff, but he’s a sensitive soul underneath. This would be too difficult for him. He had a nervous breakdown a year ago. I sometimes wonder if he takes after his mother way too much. She was always what we used to call high strung.”

“And the other child?”

“Thaksin Chaiwong found out about the relationship between Helen and Virat—I don’t know how—and that was the end of it. He was furious. Thaksin was the younger brother, but he took the part of family leader pretty quickly when he found out. He was already settled at that time, with a wife and small child of his own. He demanded that Virat cut all ties with Helen, and for a while, at least, he did. Helen was heartbroken, but she didn’t abandon the child, and as far as I know, Thaksin never knew about the child, couldn’t have known. Virat’s engagement to a Thai girl was announced, and Helen married that dreadful fellow Tom Ford—I could never bring myself to call him Tex— just as you said. It was doomed right from the start. She was pregnant again, and I guess she saw no option this time. Then I think that Helen and Virat started seeing each other again.

“I’m not exactly sure what happened the night Virat was killed, although I do know that it was Tom who killed him. It’s what happened to Ford after that I’m not certain about. But we knew what we had to do to protect the children. Robert, my husband then, sent the Thai family who were looking after the Chaiwong boy, who was about five, to Chiang Mai. We gave them as much money as we could so they could look after him. We didn’t have a lot. We were sure that the Chaiwongs would kill the boy if they found him. They were awful people. At least Helen thought so. They weren’t for having complications where inheritance and such were concerned.”

“Will Beauchamp thought she’d used an antique sword that belonged to the Chaiwongs to do the, you know, chopping,” I said.

“That’s a silly notion. The sword was my husband’s, not Virat’s. Robert acquired a lot of interesting things to use as props: that sword, the stone head of Buddha in Helen’s portrait. You could find things like that in those days, buy them for next to nothing. He used to let his subjects choose a prop for their portrait if they wished. He said it relaxed them, but that it also told him something about them. That’s a laugh, isn’t it? Virat Chaiwong, the swordsman. A rather poor joke, I suppose. I have no idea what she used that night or what weapon killed Virat. But the sword was in my possession that night.

“It ended our marriage, you know. Robert and I went to England, but he had to come back here. I wouldn’t go. It had all been too much, and I was afraid they’d take Bobby away from me. We divorced a few years later. My second husband, Ed, was such a fine man. He adored Bobby. He, too, thought he was my son. Bobby took after his mother’s side of the family, and therefore he looked like Robert. He has his uncle’s hands and talent. No one thought anything of it. You could get away with those kinds of things if you knew the right people in Bangkok in those days. I left with papers that said he was my son.

“I’ve worried about the other boy, you know, over the years. Robert sent money when he could. He stopped painting for a while, though, so it was tight. He didn’t start again for ten years, and then he painted those awful things—grotesque, I thought they were. But at least he started to make money again. There are people who like to have horrifying art in their living rooms, I suppose. Perhaps it’s the shock value. Who knows? My interpretation of them was that Robert had something to do with what happened to Ford, the body being carved up and everything, although if he did, he never told me about it.

“I don’t know if Robert continued to send money to the family in Chiang Mai. By this time, we were divorced, I’d remarried, and in addition to Bobby had a little girl. I live with my daughter and her family now. I see I needn’t have worried about the boy, though. He seems to be doing just fine. The Chaiwong talent for making money, I expect, runs in his veins.”

“How do you know this?” I said.

“I saw him in the paper, didn’t I? The Bangkok Herald. Christening some big ship or other. Wichai Promthip,” she said. “That’s his name now.”

My God, I thought. “And Helen?” I said. “Do you know what became of her?”

“She changed her name, her identity, and went back to the States,” she said. “She vowed never to see the children again. She thought to do so might put them at risk, and anyway, how could she ever explain what happened? She created some kind of life for herself. She was that kind of determined, but I’m not sure she was ever really happy.”

“How did she avoid being—”

“Executed? I’m not sure. She appealed, of course. I’m sure Thaksin and the rest of the Chaiwongs would have been thrilled if she’d died, but she hired a very aggressive lawyer for her appeal, and I expect she made sure the Chaiwongs knew that she’d drag the family down with her if she didn’t get off. Thaksin thought it was better just to get her out of the country. I have often wondered if in the end he helped her get a reduced sentence and then disappear. She was the kind of person who would have demanded it. In many ways she was fearless. Perhaps this was the price of her silence, I don’t know. I hear Thaksin has died. I suppose we’ll never know. She did spend time in jail, and it was horrible, I’m sure, but I’d left by this time. All I know is that there was a lot going on behind the scenes.”

“Are you going to tell me where she is and what her new name is?”

“No,” she said.

“Please,” I said. “Chat Chaiwong has been murdered. He was a very good person, and engaged to my niece. I keep wondering if it has something to do with this.”

“If you’re thinking she did it, taking revenge on the Chaiwongs, then you’ll have to think again. I’m not saying she wouldn’t be capable of it. Maybe she was, and maybe she wasn’t. But she’s dead. I think it should all die with her.”

“Would you tell me she was dead even if she wasn’t?”

“Yes, I would,” she said. “There have been a lot of people looking for her over the years, reporters and the like. Even that man William Beauchamp. He had the details, everything except the children, but I wasn’t helping with that. He just wanted to know where Helen went. I didn’t tell him, and I won’t tell you. In over fifty years, I’ve never told anyone where she went. I’m not about to start now.”