Excerpt from the Book

The tapes had all run out. Seven tapes, on seven machines, whirled endlessly on their empty reels in the hot, dusty room. This had never happened before, even on busy weekends-like last year's Cuban missile crisis when the Soviet embassy was alive with activity-meeting its couriers traveling to Phnom Penh and Jakarta to the east, and Rangoon and Delhi to the west.

I punched the stop button on each recorder and killed the clacking and slapping noises. The room plunged in silence. I felt insulated from the clangor of the crowds on the street outside. The air-conditioning had stopped, and so my sweating hands left sticky tracks on the telephone tap equipment. I slumped in a chair, weary from being up half the night drinking brandy with Radha of Air India. The cloying heat accentuated the heavy institutional odors that haunted the Meridian Company: chalk dust and floor wax, calcimine and plaster, cheap shellac, camphor wood and ammonia.

I fondled the tape reels and then carefully rewound them to listen: Soviet embassy, TASS, the Khvostenko house, and the public telephone booth in Pratunam Market. These were "bilateral" tapes, the product to be shared with the Thai security police. I took care not to mix them with the "unilateral" tapes: the Charoen Company, Boonchu's house, Armand's antique shop. These were intended for Americans only.

Fresh tape, glossy and brown, were needed for all the machines. I turned on the monitor switch and felt once again the pulse of the city. I could eavesdrop on its more interesting conversations while sipping a chilled o-liang. The thick, too-sweet coffee concoction did nothing to alleviate last night's hangover. The murky ice turned pale as my straw slurped out the last dregs in the glass, dripping onto my wrinkled white linen suit.

I opened the combination safe and took out a few hangings to adorn the bare walls. A marked-up calendar from the mysterious Charern Company, printed in Chinese, Thai, and English. Then a map of the city, Krung Thep the blessed-Bangkok, City of Angels and innocence. I unrolled the map and pinned it with thumbtacks to the composition- board wall, deriving a particular satisfaction from pushing colored pressure pins into the various targets of the telephone taps. Here, and there, and over there: boils to be lanced or bled. A remedial acupuncture for the pressure points of the body politic. If I could, I would take a Kirlian photograph of the city, matching each of these seven points with the sources of its arcane energies.

How much, I wondered, had been missed after the tapes ran out? The telephone number recorder would offer a clue. It sat on a low table, its mechanical pencil poised over the paper tape, like a cobra eyeing a mongoose. The floor around it was littered with ticker tape. Next to it rested a fat computer printout that listed every telephone in Bangkok in conveniently numerical order.

Somebody was walking in the hallway. They were light steps-certainly not Zack, who was charge of quarters today, responsible for the building's security. And it couldn't be fancy boy Krasin or any of the other Thai employees, since they weren't allowed on the restricted and sensitive fourth floor.

It had to be Julia. Neither fire nor rain could keep her from her appointed rounds, even on a Sunday morning. She was always around, my counterespionage assistant, complicating my life and weaving her complex and compulsive theories.

"Corby, you need more light!" she yelled, barging into the room and reaching for the light switch. Then she screamed. A rubbery chinchuk lizard had been snoozing on the panel, and she had touched its clammy body instead of the switch. Her left hand rose protectively to midbosom.

"You're frightening the chinchuks! The people down on the street will think we're torturing people up here."

Julia crossed her arms and hovered. Her auburn hair, neatly parted in the middle, was pulled back into a tight bun at the nape of the neck. She looked, with her pursed lips, like Emily Dickinson. Her neck looked as stretched and taut as her forehead, which was unwrinkled, I assumed, because she never had any doubts. Life was simple. She was a Manichean: us and them, with us or against us, holy water or hellfire.

"This office is so messy you have to kick the dust balls aside while you walk across the floor. Why don't you give me a key to the place, and I'll tidy up from time to time?"

"Too menial for a lady of your talents. Not in your job description. I'll get a hand vacuum. Mai pen rai-as the locals never tire of saying- don't worry about it. It's nothing."

"I know what it means! I hear it often enough. Everything's mai pen rai to you."

Her face, set in gelatin, began to quiver.

"Suppose I work on the French and English tapes from Armand's shop, and extract the Chinese to send over to the embassy."

I gulped down the last of the watered-down o-liang.

"That would give you more time for the Russian and Thai conversations."

I leaned on one elbow and looked up at her. How does she manage to look so damned tweedy in the tropics? Maybe it's the facial expression- unused muscles. Or a skewed sphincter. You shouldn't tote the Protestant work ethic, after all, this far south of the Tropic of Cancer. Get out of your whalebone corset, Miss Endicott, and flow with the tide. That's the way of the Tao, and the Tao is wisdom.