The Secret Agent (12 page)

F
elix Strangholm was a rotund man with a bald head and penetrating green eyes. His plump lips were pursed contemplatively, as though he teetered perpetually on the brink of revelation. He was chary with words, which caused his colleagues to hang on his every syllable. When he entered a room, he commanded the most intense absorption—from his associate director down to the woman who cleaned his toilets. He wore a doctor’s white lab coat over a cashmere polo and a pair of riding jodhpurs. He moved through the hallways in stockinged feet, the legacy of a period of Zen meditation. He was unfailingly polite. His appearance gave next-of-kin the flicker of hope that what was eccentric might indeed be lifesaving. At the very least, they assumed from his expression of acute attention that he listened when they spoke; they found this novel and comforting.

On the periphery of her mind, Stefani recorded these details of the man who now governed Max’s future.

She had arrived in Paris eight hours after the medical helicopter landed on the roof of the Clinique St. Eustache. By the time she had checked into the hotel Oliver had booked for her on the Place Vendôme and taxied to the Rue Carnavalet, Max was already in fiber-optic surgery. Strangholm was
désolé,
the surgeon assured her three hours later, to find that the fragments of bone in Monsieur Roderick’s neck had been allowed to exert pressure on his spinal nerve for more than a day. He had halted the internal bleeding, fused the fractured vertebrae, and prescribed massive steroids for swelling in the spinal column that he believed was responsible for part of Max’s paresis. But even with the most assiduous intervention, Max’s future was cloudy. Strangholm would do what he could, but those
imbéciles
in the Haute Savoie …

Strangholm furrowed his brow, pursed his lips and smoothed his palm across the polished surface of his granite desk. In perhaps eight hours—six, even—they should know a great deal more. Madame might hope to speak to monsieur after the doctor’s rounds—at eight-thirty tomorrow morning, yes?

Stefani agreed. Her heart was suddenly pounding. She had not spoken a word to Max in two days.

The traction was
gone. He wore a plastic vest, reminiscent of a full body cast, that supported the lower edge of the halo. A nurse had placed a cushion beneath his neck to ease the ache of his rigid muscles; but for the moment, he remained supine, staring only at the ceiling, unable to move his head. An IV feed was taped to one wrist; electrodes were gelled to his chest; socks cloaked his feet
below the hospital gown. His legs looked chill and gray— the skin of a dead man. But the ventilator, she noted with a catch at her heart, was gone. This morning, Max breathed on his own.

If he heard her as she entered the room, he was unable to communicate it. “Max. Oh, Max—”

“Stef.” The word seemed to cost all the breath he had. She reached out and gripped his arm.

“Ms. Fogg.”

Strangholm was frowning at a series of magnetic resonance images clipped to a light screen. “In my office, please.”

She followed him from the room.

“The news is both good and bad,” he said without preamble. “The extreme paresis begins to recede. You will observe that Monsieur Roderick is able to breathe on his own, and that he has recovered enough strength to speak. Both functions tire him enormously, but with therapeutic practice he should manage them to admiration. Already when the skin of his back is pinched, he registers sensation. I expect him to recover feeling in his fingertips by the end of the week, and perhaps—with time—the use of his arms and hands. I believe that we have been able to halt the damage to the spinal cord occasioned by the fracture in his neck.”

“That’s … but that’s
wonderful
news …”

Strangholm reached for his pipe and tamped its bowl thoughtfully. “However, I cannot hold out hope for a complete recovery. The time elapsed between injury and surgery was too long. We shall pursue an aggressive regime of therapy. Monsieur Roderick will remain in his halo for eight to twelve weeks, during which time he will be trained to use a wheelchair and, perhaps, a walker. But I cannot promise that he will ever regain the use of his lower limbs.”

“There are worse things, I suppose. Does he know the odds?”

“It is utterly inadvisable to talk of permanent loss at so early a juncture. We must give him something to hope for, and he may, eventually, achieve a miracle. Let him grow used to his limitations only when he has no alternative. Until then—”

“I’m deeply grateful for all you’ve done,” Stefani said.

The doctor inclined his head. “Monsieur Roderick may expect to remain in treatment for at least six months. You will wish to know what he will face in coming weeks, I am sure, and you will wish to make financial arrangements. I assume you will be able to conclude all this today, madame?”

“After I speak to Max.”

They had rotated
his bed, to prevent the accumulation of fluid in his limbs and to thwart the onset of pneumonia. His breath wheezed raggedly through his parted lips. Stefani walked toward him, wishing his eyes could focus on her instead of the ceiling.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said. “And you’ve got sensation in your back. That’s marvelous.”

“I would rather be dead.”

“Don’t say that.”

A flicker of the eyelids that might have been anger. “That binding—”

She moved so close that his gown grazed her cheek. “The binding was screwed,” she told him softly. “Someone got to your skis. This wasn’t your fault, Max.”

His eyelids closed. An expression of immense relief flooded his gaunt face. It was replaced swiftly by rage. A groan broke from his lips.

“Don’t,” she protested, anguished.

“Don’t
feel?”
A harsh sound, bitter, like laughter. His eyes remained closed. She wanted to touch his mouth, his cheek, his temple—but the halo’s bars kept her at arm’s length.

“I’ll never ski again.”

“Yes, you will.”

“Liar.”

It was becoming his pet name for her. But, she reflected, hadn’t she earned it? “Your surgery was successful. Your chances for recovery are good. You need extensive therapy—”

“Leave me.”

“Strangholm is optimistic, Max. He says—”

“You’ve got to leave me. Now.”

She drew a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll be back in a few hours, after you’ve rested.”

“Don’t.” The green eyes opened wide and fixed implacably on her face.

“Max—”

“A cripple. I won’t let you. Throw yourself away.”

“That’s absurd. I’m here because I want to be.”

“That won’t last,” he said clearly—the first few words he’d managed with force. “Go now. Before I hate you for leaving.”

She returned to
the clinic every morning and afternoon over the next four days. But each time she asked to see Max, she was told he refused to admit her.

“It is a natural depression,” Felix Strangholm explained with awkward kindness. “He is at war with his body. As who would not be, who has dared what he has in life? He believes he is better off dead. And he does not wish to find you here out of pity. I would guess, madame,
that as his strength and feeling return, so will his courage. You must allow him this period of selfish grief. Do not reproach him—even in your heart,
hein?”

On the fifth day she found a familiar face outside the door of his private room. “Mr. Knetsch. Back from New York?”

“I wasn’t really needed at the firm anyway.”

“How sad. You like to be needed, I know.” Stefani kept her voice carefully neutral.

“They seem to have done a lot for Max here.” Knetsch said it grudgingly. “Nothing, probably, that they wouldn’t have done at the General Hospital.”

“I hope they’ll be able to do much more, in time.”

“I’ve been told to thank you,” he added more briskly, “for … services rendered. And to say that Max hopes you’ll have a safe trip back to New York.”

“I’m not going back to New York.”

“Why not?” He glanced suggestively at her crotch. “There’s nothing for you here.”

“Fuck off, Knetsch.”

He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. “Here’s a copy of the letter I faxed this morning to Oliver Krane, terminating Max’s retention of his firm. Max is abandoning the Thai mess, for obvious reasons. You aren’t needed anymore.”

Stefani scanned the single sheet of paper, feeling her anger mount. “This was drafted by you, Jeff. Not Max.”

“I’ve also revised the arrangements you made for payment to this facility. Max is fully capable of footing his own bills.”

“Max told you to do all this?”

“Max trusts my judgment. I’ve known him all my life.”

“And I’ve only known him a week.” Stefani crumpled the letter in her hand. “I want to see him.”

“That won’t be possible.”

“You can’t keep me out of that room!”

“I’m afraid I can.” He thrust his back against the door and smiled at her faintly. “I now have Max’s power of attorney. He gave it to me this morning, when he told me to fire your sorry ass.”

S
he flew out of Paris that evening hating all men with a vengeance, and especially their lawyers.

“Knetsch has a point, ducks,” Oliver had said from the other side of the Atlantic as he consumed his breakfast. “Max hasn’t welcomed you with open arms. He’s been through a good deal, and has worse yet to face. For now, you must come home. As Strangholm said, it’s possible that his feelings will change with time.”

“I don’t give second chances, Oliver,” she raged. “Max has slammed the door. He’s on his own.”

“Second chances are merely a means of forgiveness, old thing,” he warned her. “Fail to forgive, and you hurt only yourself.”

She had considered those words during the sleepless seven hours of her westward journey, a period of extreme turbulence over the North Atlantic when even the flight attendants could be heard shrieking in their compartments. Her anger toward Max—toward Jeff Knetsch—even,
absurdly, toward Oliver Krane—hardened into self-hatred.
I’m not a woman who’s capable of sustaining life.
It was she, after all, who had given up: who had packed her bags and abandoned the man she believed she loved to face his hell alone. She who admitted to being shallow and avoiding pain. To pursuing frivolity rather than truth. Was it any wonder Max had told her to go?

She was still sleepless when the plane touched down. Oliver Krane, uncharacteristically silent, awaited her beyond the international arrivals gate. He bundled her into a sleek black car with a faceless driver, her luggage already stowed; threw a blanket over her legs; made soothing noises all the way into the city; and deposited her at her door without a word of commiseration.

She slept for eleven hours. As she stood once more before the wide glass doors that led to her co-op terrace, dusk fell over Manhattan. She cursed its beauty and heartlessness in fluent Italian just for the hell of it, then turned her back on Gotham.

She lay in bed, staring sightlessly at the ceiling or the heavily draped window, for three days. The phone rang periodically; she ignored it. Oliver left thirteen messages on her answering machine. She caught the note of worry in his tone; but she knew he was surveilling her apartment, and would know that she had not yet left the building. She had ordered no food, collected no mail.
I’m not a woman who’s capable of sustaining life.

When at last he threatened to blast her door open with a bit of wire and plastic explosive, she reluctantly picked up the phone.

“You need a sense of purpose, heart,” Oliver said gently. “As a trial run at risk management, Courchevel was a bloody disaster. But I know your talents. You cannot return to FundMarket or any of its competitors. You’re made for better stuff.”

“Such as?”

She was established now in her living room, suddenly ravenous, with cartons of take-out Chinese spread about the floor.

“You might wet your feet in the intelligence pool,” he mused. “Jaunt around the various continents with your head into the wind. Send back reports of an enticing nature. Krane publishes a weekly newsletter, you know, for select clients about the globe. Privileged information, for those who understand what it costs.”

“I can’t stay in the United States,” she said flatly, “and Europe’s out.”

“Chile? Argentina?”

“Possible. Brazil is hopeless, of course.”

“A carnival of thieves,” he agreed. “I once tracked down the Brazilian treasury, you know, which had somehow ended up in its president’s pocket. What about Australia?”

“I’ve never been there.” Stefani’s chopsticks hovered in midair. “What’s in Australia?”

“Nice, safe telecommunications markets. Internet heists. A considerable number of tanned bodies. The food industry. Pharmaceutical supplies. You could mingle with the best set and keep your ears to the ground. And it’s an excellent drop-off point for Asia—”

She stiffened. “Oliver—”

“The Indonesian political system is due to totter at any moment. And there’s always Burma, of course, which must be monitored in the event it decides to join the twentieth century. It will never join the twenty-first.”

“What has happened to your Thai clients, Oliver?”

“Made a noise like a hoop and rolled away,” he answered. “Round about the time friend Max took his tumble. They left a great deal of hard currency in their
wake, of course. Harry would be gratified to know that he died for the sake of my net worth.”

The bitterness only thinly veiled.

“And you’re willing to let Harry’s death rest?” she asked him.

“For the moment, I regard myself as having no choice. But I am a quite patient man. I shall deal with Harry’s killers in my own time and way.”

“Asia,” she murmured. “Not safe at all, is it?”

“Not so’s you’d notice. I believe you’re recovering apace, darling,” he said.

And so had
begun the odyssey of her last six months. Stefani had danced her way through Melbourne, through Adelaide and Perth and the Great Barrier Reef; through Port Arthur and Kuala Lumpur and Seoul. She had descended upon Rangoon at the behest of a furniture designer who had established an empire there, fingered lacquer boxes and wandered through sustainable-growth forests. She researched market conditions in Laos and copyright piracy in Hong Kong and police repression and child labor in the jungles of Malaysia. The substance of what she saw found its way into Oliver Krane’s intelligence reports. After six weeks she began to enjoy herself—to be quickened by novelty, to revel in the warmth of strangers, to be humbled by all that she had to learn.

During her first visit to the ancient Vietnamese capital of Hué—a visit conducted sensibly in the dry season-she made fast friends with a surgeon named Pho, and learned from him that in Vietnam ear surgery was still performed with a hammer and chisel. Coagulant drugs were unknown in the operating room. Eyeglasses were never worn among the burgeoning population—which
no doubt accounted for the hazards of motorcycle traffic in the city’s congested streets. Eyeglasses, Pho explained, had once been deadly. They were worn by the intelligentsia, and thus branded those who must be shot.

But now, Stefani reasoned, with capitalism on the rise and relations normalized, Vietnam should experience an optometry boom. And a rush to surgical drills and pharmaceuticals and all the trappings of Western healthcare. Oliver Krane agreed: and posted the news on his corporate Web site.

From that first visit to Hué in May she traveled on to Saigon and Phnom Penh and Singapore and at last, with a feeling almost of sacrilege, to Bangkok and the Oriental Hotel.

It was there, three months after she had flown out of Courchevel, that she wrote her first letter to Max.

She said nothing of what had been between them. She never mentioned his accident. She wrote instead of river traffic on the Chao Phraya, and the whistles flying back and forth across the swollen water. She wrote of the gnarled hands of the women who sold dogs for dinner on the streets of Hanoi; of the bead maker she had met in Laos and the sweetness of a child’s face turned toward her from the back of his mother’s motor scooter. She wrote of life in all its variety and richness, and to the old stone house in France she sent the pages without a word of love.

Max did not reply.

Stefani kept writing. It was possible that he had never regained the use of his hands, after all; possible that he trusted no one to transcribe a letter for him; possible that he did not know, yet, what he should say or how much could be shared. But the fact that he did not return her letters heartened her immeasurably. He must read her words—and perhaps he found solace in them
She kept writing on stationery headed with the names of the most exotic commercial palaces in the world. And in the end, she knew, she was writing for herself. Forgiveness, as Oliver had said, was a personal journey.

Max wore thin
leather gloves on his hands when he pushed the chair, thrusting hard at the wheels that propelled him forward along the mountain path. He’d refused a motorized version or Sabine’s help once his hands were strong enough to work the wheels. It was an obsession with him, now, this physical training. The first two fingers of his left hand remained numb; and at first, his wrists had been as weak as a baby’s. He spent every spare moment squeezing rubber balls in his palms, or flexing each foot at the ankle with one-pound weights. In the house, where the floors were level, he generally used a walker to navigate the rooms, and was able finally to complete twenty paces on his own—but he could not yet trust his balance or strength to the challenge of the ridgeline.

“You’re getting too fast for me, buddy,” Jeff grumbled, as they reached the head of the ridge.

“You’re out of shape,” Max returned. “We’ve only come about a hundred yards from the house.”

“I know it. Too many power lunches.” He flung himself down beside Max’s wheelchair and stared out over the valley. A stone’s throw from where they sat, the granite alp sheared off a thousand feet or more in jagged folds punctuated by sudden crevasses. A brutal landscape, even when brushed with the color of late September.

Jeff cocked his head and studied Max’s face. “You’ve made a helluva comeback.”

“Thank you,” Max rejoined dryly. “I couldn’t have
done it without my friends. I’m starting to take an interest in everything again.”

“So I gathered.” Jeff looked away. “There’s a guidebook on the kitchen table. For Thailand. You’re not thinking of all that old crap again, are you?”

“I’m always thinking, Jeff. That’s the only way I know I’m alive.”

His friend plucked at a wisp of yellowed grass. “Last I heard, Stefani Fogg was in Asia.”

“In Thailand, in fact.” Max felt the weight of her letter against his chest, where he had tucked it into his polo. She had written from Thailand but was headed for Vietnam, and might be gone for some time.

“Max—” The expression in his friend’s eyes was flat and gray as gunmetal. “You’ve been handed what most men dream of, and never get: a second chance. Don’t blow it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re lucky to be alive. Forget her. Forget Thailand. They’re both deadly.”

“Jeff, how deep are you in debt?”

“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

Max studied him, debating the question. But instead he said merely, “It’s hot out here. I could use a beer.”

“So could I. I’ll get us some.” Jeff pushed himself upright and trudged back down the path.

Jacques Renaudie sat
on the stone terrace of the house, watching his daughter’s dark head as she moved about Max’s kitchen. She had planned this dinner obsessively, the first she would make in Max’s house, dinner for his oldest friends. Max took for granted Sabine’s self-appointed role as nurse; he accepted the books she brought and her bright ceaseless chatter and he patted her head
as though she were a favored dog. It broke Jacques’s heart to see her so blind and so unquestioning, so passionately in love with the wrong man.

“He will never care for you,
chérie,”
he said to his daughter. “He is not capable.”

Her head came up, and she stared at Jacques through the open door of the terrace. “He is the one man I know who is capable of
anything.
He grows stronger every day. It is only a matter of time.”

“He will never love you,
ma pauvre.”

Her eyes flashed hot with malice and anger. “What do you know of love,
hein?
You could not even keep Mama happy, you drove her away with your coldness—”

“I know that Max’s heart is given to another,” Jacques insisted, “and that is all I need to know.”

Sabine froze, her hands suspended over a dish of cassoulet. “What other?” she asked him tremulously.

Jacques moved slowly into the living room; his entire body was weary. “All those letters,” he muttered. “From all over the world. He carries them everywhere. You see,
chérie?”
He turned the girl toward the view from the terrace. Max’s bent head could just be glimpsed around an outcropping of rock in the distance. “He is reading one of them now.”

There are two Bangkoks, one that lives in the caverns between the soaring skyscrapers, breathing smog and noise, and another that moves with the current of the water. By the river and the khlongs are the ghosts of an older Bangkok, one that remembers torches and elephants and the bodies of dancers swaying in the flickering light. I walked alone last night down an alleyway just a block from this hotel, and found the abandoned building of the old French Legation, a marvelous colonial structure of tile roofs and peeling shutters that fronts on the water. The windows are boarded up and the stone is crumbling into dust, but entire families squat in the ramshackle place, and the scents
of lemongrass and fish sauce and garlic and hot oil rise from the braziers in the darkness …

Tomorrow I plan to see your grandfather’s house …

Stefani Fogg stepped
out of her bath in the Oriental Hotel that Tuesday afternoon in early October, and considered the lunch she had ordered.

She was still exhausted, still dreaming with half her mind of the floodwaters of Hué, of Pho’s rooftop and the dead cats swirling by on the current. But the stench of the Perfume River’s mud had been washed from her skin, which now smelled faintly of eucalyptus; the down comforter on her bed was sheathed in Thai silk; and she had scheduled a massage for the afternoon. It was time at last, she thought, to sleep.

The phone rang by her bedside.

“Thank God I’ve reached you, darling,” said Oliver Krane. “You’ve been the very devil to track down. And you’ve done a wretched job, I might add, of keeping in touch.”

“My cell phone got wet in Vietnam,” she told him. “No batteries until Bangkok.”

“Tai fun?”

“At least one. I’ve been sleeping on the roof of a house in Hué for the past five days. Someone could make a fortune in Vietnam by funding a national weather service.”

“I’ll suggest as much to a woman I know. Look, heart—I’ve some rather dreadful news. That’s why I’ve been so desperate to reach you. Max Roderick committed suicide six days ago.”