The apartment was nothing but a single room on the third floor facing the back of the building. It probably had never been much to look at. It certainly wasn’t now.
“My God,” Tay said. “What was an American ambassador doing in a place like this?”
When Cally didn’t answer, Tay glanced over at her and she shrugged again. That was rapidly becoming the gesture of the day, he noticed.
A brown sofa bed was just opposite the door. It was half open and its cushions had been pulled off and dumped haphazardly on the floor. A motley assortment of beaten up chairs and tables had been pushed over to the same side of the room. The carpet was green and thin. It had been partially peeled up and lay rolled back against the front of the sofa bed, leaving the grimy concrete floor underneath it exposed. The windows on the right side of the room were covered with a set of dirty, crooked blinds and a snarl of cords trailed onto the floor. On the left, a door led to what Tay assumed was a bathroom. He was afraid to look in there.
“The body was on the sofa bed?” Tay made half a question out of the phrase, but he had seen the pictures Cally took of the crime scene and he already knew it was.
“Yes.”
“But it was open when you took the pictures, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was.”
“The bed was stripped?”
“Yes. Just like in Singapore.”
“No clothes? No jewelry?”
“Nothing.”
“So the killer cleaned up after himself again.”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“Did the killer do this?” Tay asked, waving a hand at the destruction in the room.
Cally hesitated. It was for only a moment, but it was long enough for Tay to notice and shift his eyes to her.
“No,” she said when she realized he was looking at her. “The room wasn’t like this when I was here.”
“Then how was it?”
Cally took a couple of steps forward and folded her arms.
“The sofa bed was pretty much where it is now, but it was open and the ambassador’s body was on it, of course. The chairs and tables were…”
She unfolded her arms as if she was about to point out where they were, but she didn’t.
“Oh, I don’t know. It just looked like a normal room.”
“Except for the dead body in it, of course,” Tay said.
“Yes, except for that.”
Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything else. He thought Cally might, so he waited. She didn’t. When he got tired of waiting, he took a deep breath and walked over and opened the door opposite the windows. Sure enough it led to a tiny bathroom which was very dirty but otherwise entirely unremarkable.
He closed the door again and went to the windows. Pushing the blinds aside he looked out and saw they were right above where Cally had parked the Volvo. Tired-looking air conditioning units and flapping laundry crowded the balconies of another building opposite the windows and unidentifiable trash was piled up down in the alleyway. Other than that, there wasn’t much to see.
Tay let the blinds drop.
“What’s going on here?” he asked. “Somebody was looking for something. What was it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Tay thought Cally probably did know, but he also thought that this wasn’t the right time to argue the point. Instead, he stood quietly waiting to see if more silence might finally draw something out of her. It didn’t.
Maybe he was wrong, he mused. Maybe the neighbors looted the place after the police left. That would hardly have been surprising in Thailand. On the other hand, maybe someone had come back and trashed the scene to make it harder for them to make any sense out of it. The more Tay thought about it, the less sure he was of anything.
“Then I guess we’re done here,” he said.
Cally nodded and they left. She shut the door behind them. Tay noticed she didn’t bother to lock it.
Downstairs Cally started toward the car, but Tay put a hand on her arm.
“Let’s walk around a little before we leave,” he said.
“What for?”
“I don’t know, but we’re here. Why not?”
There were only three cars in the parking lot. A nondescript gray Toyota, a blue pickup truck of some make Tay didn’t recognize, and a new-looking black Mercedes. Tay shook out a Marlboro as they walked across the lot to the street. When they stopped just opposite the grocery store, he lit it, and then he turned around and looked up at the front of the apartment building. Tay had no idea what he was looking for, none at all; but he stood quietly and smoked and looked the building over with as much care as if he did. The truth, he supposed, was that he just wasn’t ready yet to leave.
There was a taste to the air in Bangkok that was foreign to him. He had noticed it from the moment they left the air-conditioned cocoon of the Volvo, but he hadn’t yet been able to put a name to it. Now it dawned on him what it was and it was a flavor he wanted to savor.
The air in Singapore was different. It was dank and humid, too, but it was scrawny and homogenized. The air in Bangkok was a thick, rich stew of potential, prospect, and promise laced with a whiff of the illicit and a hint of the forbidden. It seemed to contain everything that he had ever imagined all at once: all the things that he had ever been curious about, all of the things he had been warned about, all of the things that he had been told would lead him to ruin. It tasted, Tay thought, exactly as the apple in the Garden of Eden must have tasted to Eve.
“Cally, girl!”
The voice was high-pitched, the squeal of a teen-aged schoolgirl.
Tay looked over his shoulder and was startled to see a middle-aged man hurrying toward them. The man was slim and neatly dressed, his light brown hair cut close to his head in a style that looked military, and his eyes so blue that they made Tay think of a David Hockney painting.
“What are you doing, girl? And what in the world are you doing in this neighborhood?”
“I could ask you the same thing, Jack,” Cally said to the man with a small smile, “but I’m not really sure I want to know.”
“Just doing my shopping, girl. A boy’s got to eat.”
The man lifted up the white plastic bag he was carrying in his left hand and wiggled it. Tay could see what looked liked a bunch of carrots and a head of lettuce bouncing around at the top.
“This store is a real dump,” he said as he put his free arm around Cally and gave her a hug, “but it’s on my way home and I’m just too darned lazy to go anywhere else.”
“Sam,” she said when the hug ended, “this is Jack Tanner. He works in the embassy.”
Tay offered his hand and received a rather limp and moist one in return. He studied Tanner as they shook. Since Tanner had found them standing in front of the building where Ambassador Rooney’s body had been discovered the day before and made no reference at all to it, either the murder wasn’t common knowledge yet or Tanner was being very discreet.
“Sam is over from Singapore with me for a couple of days,” Cally said to Tanner, but that was all she said.
“So…” Tanner said, giving Sam a thorough looking over. “This is the new boyfriend, huh?”
Sam could have sworn Cally blushed faintly.
“No, Jack, nothing like that. We’re here on business.”
“Yeah,” Tanner said. “Sure.”
Then he winked. Winked. Tay didn’t know people actually did that anymore.
“Monkey business maybe,” he said. “Anything to get away from Singabore, huh?”
“Get out of here, Jack.” Cally waved one hand at Tanner and with her other gave Tay a nudge toward the Volvo. “Not everyone has your appetites.”
“Oh, girl! You’d be surprised how many people do. I’ll bet you really would.”
Cally waved again. “So long, Jack.”
“Now don’t be a stranger, girl!” Tanner waved back. “And you either, Sam. Drop by the embassy anytime and say hello. You hear?”
Tay and Cally circled the building in silence and got into the Volvo.
“You seem to have friends everywhere,” Tay said.
“I have acquaintances everywhere,” Cally said. “When you work for the State Department it goes with the territory. Whether it’s a blessing or a curse I haven’t yet decided.”
“Do you figure this guy knows what happened here yesterday?”
“Yes, of course, he knows.”
“Then why didn’t he mention it? Was he just being discreet in front of me?”
Cally shrugged as she started the engine.
Well, Tay thought, so they were back to that again.
“Anywhere else you want to go?” Cally asked.
Tay looked around. From where they sat he could see nothing but an unbroken vista of decaying buildings and mounds of trash. The alleyway looked as though a pack of wild animals, crazed with hunger, had dragged all the garbage in the neighborhood there and scattered it around in a desperate hunt for scraps of food. It also looked like nobody cared.
He had never really thought much before about how green and luxuriant Singapore was. The rows of trees lining wide, clean streets; the banks of carefully tended flowers; the landscaped and tightly mowed vacant lots. He had almost forgotten that every city didn’t look more or less the same. Bangkok certainly didn’t look the same. It was dirty and ugly.
Tay shook his head and glanced at his watch.
“No, I’ve had enough. I want to take a shower. I want to change clothes. I want a drink. Any suggestions on finding a hotel before it gets any later?”
Cally hesitated. “I’m staying at the Marriott.”
“What is it with you people and Marriotts?”
“A lot of government people stay in Marriotts. Why shouldn’t we?”
“Why should you?”
“They give us a good rate.”
Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
“The Bangkok Marriott is a really classy place,” Cally prompted. “You’d probably like it a lot.”
Tay was pretty certain there was a compliment in there, but he was too tired to tease it out.
“Then take me to the Marriott, driver,” Tay said, leaning back in the seat. “I place myself entirely in your hands.”
A few days before, Tay would have cheerfully bet his life he would never spend a single night in any Marriott hotel anywhere, ever. Now he was about to spend his second in two days.
Wasn’t it extraordinary what a mess of a man’s principles the intrusion of a beautiful woman could make?