The 9th Directive

Adam Hall THE 9TH DIRECTIVE

1 The Bloodstone

The place was halfway along Soi Suek 3 and I walked there from the main road where the trishaw had dropped me. It was a narrow street of shop-houses, roofed at this moment by the twilight.

There was no one in the gem shop except the small old Thai at the workbench behind the counter; he did not hear me come in because of the noise of the gem tumbler that churned at the back of the shop. There was no air conditioner and the heat was as bad as in the street. From a room above came the weird notes of a pinai.

I stood watching the old man. He was making a ring, setting an opal in gold. It was a cabochon stone and the blade of his burnisher closed the bezel deftly. The light of the hooded lamp reflected the gold and struck fire in the gem. When the bezel was pressed home he turned to look at his work under the lamp and saw me. I said at once: 'Mr Varaphan?'

He put the ring down onto the black cloth and made me the wai greeting with his hands, gently as a priest.

I asked: 'Is the bloodstone ready?'

'It has been lost,' he said.

'But it was worth more than a million pounds.'

'Much more, yes.'

Then you must pay me.'

'I am a poor man,' he said. 'You cannot get blood out of a stone, even a bloodstone.'

Then give me my pound of flesh.'

He bowed slightly in passing me and went to the open doorway, watching the street, his head turning from left to right. I waited, listening to one stone, heavier than the others, falling against the side of the tumbler as it went on turning slowly like a miniature concrete mixer.

Mr Varaphan came away from the doorway. 'If you will be so kind…' I followed him through the back of the shop, passing some steps in the center of the house. The piping of the pinai became louder from above, then faded as we came to the other room. Much of it was taken up with cabinets and safes but there were some rattan chairs and a table. The walls were timbered and there was the smell of sandalwood. The bleakness of the fluorescent tubes took half the value from a rosewood Buddha in the corner but at least you could see where you were. In strange places I hate not being able to see things.

'Your presence in my house does me great honor,' said Mr Varaphan.

'You are most hospitable.' The Westerner suspects the extravagant courtesies of the East and I~am always constrained. I added a bit in his own language to please him.

When he left me I noticed three things: a telephone was in this room; you could make an exit through a second door near the rosewood Buddha; and you could still hear quite distinctly the pebbly sound of the gem tumbler in the shop.

It had been a long trip and I hadn't liked being shot out here without any notice, so I tried to relax by looking at the display case on top of one of the safes. It was decent-enough stuff: lapis lazuli, obsidian, rase quartz, a few gem-quality microlines and a very hypnotic moonstone. This place was obviously a lapidary, not just a front.

Loman arrived in ten minutes, punctually. He came in by the second door near the Buddha and asked at once:

'When did you get here?'

'A few minutes ago.' We shook hands as perfunctorily as boxers.

'I mean when did you get into Bangkok?'

This evening at 1805. Air France Paris-Tokyo--'

'But what were you doing in Paris?'

'Oh my God, is it important?'

'I thought you were still in London when we put out the call for you.' He turned away and turned back, his small feet nervous. 'Everything is important. Very.'

'I hope that includes the fact that I'm here at rendezvous dead on time as per signal because I'm fed up with bloody airplanes--'

'Of course. Of course.' He managed to stand still. There were beads of sweat on his face. 'There was one thing they didn't tell me about this place – there's no air conditioning.' He was wearing gray alpaca and a spotted bow tie.

I have a dislike for men with small feet and bow ties and a dislike anyway for Loman. It has been mutual for years but has never affected our work, so that neither considers it important except when we find ourselves shut up together in the confines of a non-air-conditioned lapidarist's back room in Bangkok and similar places where it is barely possible to breathe. Loman is like that room in London with the Lowry on the wall; he smells of polish. His shoes and nails and nose shine brightly, and even his manners take on a spurious polish when he has time to rub them up. Just now he was too busy with his nerves.

I was beginning to feel better; seeing him so worried was doing me good. I said, 'Why couldn't they have told me where this door was instead of sending me through the shop?'

'You had to introduce yourself to Varaphan, of course.'

'With that rigmarole?'

'He isn't a contact. We couldn't use established technique.' He was looking around the room, his bright eyes ferreting out the details. 'This is our safehouse for the present. Sometimes we shall meet at the British Embassy but the most important business will take place here. Let us sit down. We will ask for something to be sent in. There is no need for any rush, none at all.'

The rattan creaked under his slight weight and now he was completely relaxed and looking' up at me as if it were I whose nerves had been showing.

'Just tell me one thing,' I said. 'Is this a mission or has something come unstuck?'

He tapped the little brass bell on the table.

'It's a mission. And nothing must come unstuck.'

I didn't sit down yet because I was too uneasy with the whole thing. Loman was very high up in the Bureau echelon and he rarely left London to direct an operator in the field. He had never personally directed me before and it wasn't going to be any picnic. I said uncivilly:

'I've just flown seven thousand miles at the drop of a hat and you say there's no rush.'

'Not now that you're here.'

It might have been Varaphan's daughter who came in to answer the bell, a willowy child with a mane of black hair. Loman said to me, 'I haven't very much grasp.'

I told her in English, 'We'd like something to drink, is that possible? Scotch, soda, lime juice and ice.'

'I will bring, yes.'

'You play the pinai beautifully.'

She denied it in delight and left us.

'It's the lingua franca,' I told Loman.

'Well, you'd better give yourself a crash refresher course in Thai. You'll be meeting people who don't speak anything else. Also you will want to be able to hear things. How proficient are you?'

'I'm all right outside esoteric terms.'

He got up, feeling restless again. 'What I meant when I said that there was no rush now that you're here is that if you'd been too long delayed we should have had to pull Styles out of Java, and he's very busy there. You know Bangkok as well as he does and you're between missions.'

'Or I was.'

'That's right.'

'It's nearly two years since I was here.'

There is a simple tradition in the Bureau that protects any given operation from failure. We can refuse a mission. There has to be a reason and we have to give it and it has to be a good one but in the final analysis we have a get-out if we want it. This is intelligent because it means that nobody is ever sent into the field with misgivings. Any operator taking up a mission has therefore a positive approach and is self-orientated toward success. There is only one thing London Control can do when a man wants to opt out; they have to give him an incentive that will make him opt in again. They tried this on me once in Berlin and it worked: they gave me a man to go after, a man I could hate. Talking now to Loman I was already putting up the odd objection, rationalizing the situation to cover the one main misgiving which was simply that we didn't like each other. The work we had done together in the past was Bureau stuff: intelligence breakdown, communications, liaison, so forth. But now he was going to be my director in the field and that was different because the success of a mission and even your life could sometimes depend on whether you got on well with your director. You had to like him, trust him, respect him and live with him. My opinion of Loman, despite his brilliance and his record, was that he was a well-polished little pimp. It didn't help that he looked on me as a rough-haired sheepdog with more guts than gumption and a chip on each shoulder and one on the wick.