Secret Agent

Chapter 1 The Oriental Hotel in the heart of Bangkok is a name to conjure history. It recalls a time when tourists were travelers, when steamer trunks came by long-tail boat up the Chao Phraya, the River of Kings; when stoic male writers and legends of the Asian bush crawled out of the jungle to swap stories in the Bamboo Bar. Somerset Maugham almost died of fever there, in the 1920s, and Joseph Conrad tossed sleepless on a sweat-soaked cot; Hemingway ought to have seduced a legion of hard-drinking women behind the swinging shuttered doors, but apparently never did. During the Second World War the natives of Bangkok edged warily around the hotel, which had become an object of fear under the Japanese; and when Thailand capitulated to the Allies in September 1945, the Oriental turned hostel for U.S. and British officers. They must have felt right at home, those Allied soldiers, between the French doors and the lawns running down to the swollen brown river. Orchids bloomed as profusely as English violets at the foot of the towering palms, and the whistles of the boatmen flew over the water like lark song. Under the drift of electric fans the officers drank deep of gin and Pimms, composing letters to women they hadn't seen in years. They imagined themselves conquerors, without having fired a shot. This is the sorcery of Thailand, and of the Oriental Hotel: to make a guest feel at home without ever implying he is anything but a guest. But like all great hotels, the Oriental is a stage for public drama: it demands a decent performance from the people who walk through its doors. The right to enter history comes at considerable cost, and style is the preferred form of currency. Shorts and backpacks-those hallmarks of the indigent tourist desperate for an hour of quiet and air conditioning-are strictly forbidden in the Oriental's main lobby. Stefani Fogg had stayed at the hotel before. She had read the dress-code notice etched politely near the revolving front door. But she was a woman who rarely apologized, particularly to the hired help. And so this morning she hitched her backpack higher on her shoulder and swung her long, bare legs out of the taxi. "Welcome back to the Oriental, Ms. Fogg," the doorman said, and bowed low over his steepled hands. She took the spray of jasmine he offered her and raised it to her face. The scent was elusive-the essence of untimely death. She nodded to the doorman, paid off the taxi, and stalked inside. She may have been conscious of the eyes that followed her as she crossed the spotless carpet. If so, she ignored them. She ignored, too, the soaring windows, the chairs swathed in silk, the towering arrangements of lilies, the four employees who bowed in succession as she passed. She ignored the powerfully built man with the gleaming black hair, who sedulously scanned his newspaper at a desk opposite the magazine kiosk, although he was the only person in the room pretending to ignore her and thus ought to have been alarming. Stefani was too tired to care. The rigid set of her shoulders and the thin line of her mouth screamed exhaustion. During the past week she had slept badly and in the previous twenty-seven hours, not at all. "Mr. Rewadee," she said by way of greeting to the Manager of Customer Relations. Her voice was as frayed as a hank of old rope. The backpack slid from her shoulder to the plush carpet at her feet. "Ms. Fogg! Welcome back to the Oriental!" This phrase-or variations on the theme-was a gamut she was forced to run every time she reappeared on the banks of the Chao Phraya. But she liked Rewadee, with his correct navy suit and his beautiful silk tie, his smooth, tapering fingers; so she stifled her annoyance and forced a smile, as though her clothes did not stink of mildew or her feet require washing. The manager'sMathews, Francine is the author of 'Secret Agent' with ISBN 9780553581539 and ISBN 0553581538.