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 alclass="underline" 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 Chitralada 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 Klong, 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 western 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 dollhouses 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 temples, Hatcher remembered a mercenary named sickle Knowles, who always offered a bullet to the spirits 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 copper lamps.
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 Oriental.
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. Harry 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?’