Part 8 (1/2)
Annja flew from Istanbul to Bangkok. Have I let the little murderess get too big a lead on me? she could not stop thinking. If only I hadn't wasted the afternoon and evening playing tourist with Giancarlo.
She also flew in a state of increasing stiffness. She'd been able to get an early-morning flight out of Istanbul on Turkish Airlines. Unfortunately that went no farther than the capital, Ankara; it seemed no flights left the country from Istanbul. Then for some reason the only way to Bangkok was through Germany, far to the north-west-the opposite direction from where she wanted to go. She flew to Frankfurt, where she had to hustle to catch a Royal Brunei flight leaving for Bangkok little more than an hour later. She considered herself quite fortunate to have snagged a desirable window seat directly aft of the jumbo jet's mids.h.i.+p exit, where she could stretch her long legs instead of riding with her knees up under her chin, as she so often found herself doing.
The bad news was that she'd be in the seat for eleven hours.
She touched down just before seven the next morning. Customs was the usual drag, but no worse than what you went through anywhere in a terrorism-obsessed world. The most significant difference was that the Thai customs officers tended to treat foreign tourists with less rudeness than their English or American counterparts.
She left everything but a light daypack in a locker at the airport. A taxi to the riverfront was pricey, but nothing compared to the cost of the short-notice plane ticket. She could have bought the taxi for that. She could hear Roux complaining. They were really going to need the commission the mysterious collector was willing to pay.
But for Annja it was no longer about the money. If indeed it ever had been.
Bangkok was called ”the Venice of Asia,” along with a lot of less complimentary names. It was veined with ca.n.a.ls and its whole existence centered on Chao Phraya, the great green waterway that ran through the middle of the country. Annja had the driver let her off at an open-air market a few blocks from the waterfront so she could buy some fruit and packaged snacks. She was blessed with a ferocious immune system, a vital attribute for anyone who did extensive fieldwork around the globe. But she didn't want to press her luck; getting laid out with dysentery or some kind of awful amoeba would allow her deadly rival the lat.i.tude to rob the Temple of the Elephant of whatever artifacts it held. And quite possibly she would leave more dead bodies in her wake.
The fruit was protected with rinds Annja could peel; the snacks had their plastic wrappers. Annja couldn't answer absolutely for the cleanliness of the plants where they'd been packaged, but knew standards were likely to be higher than for random street vendors. Several bottles of water also went into the pack to sustain her.
Then she found a riverboat, basically an outsized canoe with a rounded roof and an engine, and engaged pa.s.sage upriver to Nakhon Sawan. The railroad had run that way for over a century, and reasonably modern highways connected the city to the national capital. But even though central Thailand was flat, Annja didn't care to trust her life to the buses any more than necessity required, which was hair-raisingly often enough. She knew the trains were likely to be overcrowded and stifling. Water travel was quicker-especially since Annja would bet both the trains and the buses stopped frequently and often at random-and were the least uncomfortable option.
Slipping under the shade of the low rounded roof, Annja slid her pack under the bench and settled against the gunwale amid a haze of smells of the river water, commingled with raw sewage. The boatman shouted, the engine snarled and the craft set out into the great sluggish flow, wallowing slightly in waves reflected from the bank. Once it got out in the stream and under way for true, the water's slow rhythms were soporific and the engine noise became white noise blocking out other sounds. Annja had slept on the flight, but that never seemed to rest her. Little bothered by the relative discomfort, she huddled in upon herself and fell sound asleep.
By midafternoon they reached their destination. The city of Nakhon Sawan, capital of the province of the same name, lay near where the rivers Nan and Ping converged to form the arterial Chao Phraya. It was a lot less modern and glossy than Bangkok-the modern and glossy parts of it, anyway. The riverfront gave her mostly the impression of stacks of huge teak logs, the region's main resource, lying or being loaded onto barges.
Shopping around, Annja found a cabbie who demonstrated some grasp of English, and hired him as guide, as well as driver. She herself couldn't understand a word of the local language.
The guide's name was Phran. He knew about the Red Monastery. He drove Annja out of town through country not a lot different from that around New Orleans to a graveled lot in the midst of a stand of tall hardwoods he told her weren't teak. He was a skinny, middle-aged man without much of a chin and a sort of loose-jointed look. He seemed cheerful but did not, blessedly, insist on chattering. He answered her questions readily enough. Mostly he seemed to go along in his own little world. Fortunately he was not so immersed in it that he drove alarmingly.
Stepping out into the slanting, mellowing light of late afternoon, Annja was once again struck by the difference even the wind of pa.s.sage through the car's open windows made. Walking resembled wading through a swimming pool, but with more bugs. She scarcely felt the lack of a shower after her flight anymore; she couldn't be any more sweat-drenched and grubby, and was hardly more so than if she'd arrived in fresh-laundered clothes.
Phran followed her to the monastery doors with a head-bobbing gait like a species of wading bird. Annja saw little mystery to why this was called the Red Monastery. Rather than the ma.s.sive stone piles she usually saw in pictures or doc.u.mentaries about Southeast Asian temples, this place had been built out of native hardwoods. It was enameled in a scarlet that was as bright and startling as fresh blood even in light well diluted by angle and long tree shadows. Where it wasn't red it was gilded, like the heads of ceremonial guardian dragons carved into the beam ends.
The doors opened at their approach. A large-bellied monk in a scarlet robe over a saffron unders.h.i.+rt stood with sandaled feet splayed far apart. A gaggle of younger, thinner monks wearing yellow robes hung behind him. They gazed in seeming amazement at the tall foreign woman.
But the head monk, or at least senior monk on duty, wasn't impressed. His scowl and head shake were universal language.
”Am I too late?” Annja said. She wasn't thinking as clearly as she should, with stress and travel. It had slipped her mind that the monastery might reasonably impose visiting hours.
”Tell him I'm not just a tourist,” she said. ”I'm an archaeologist-a scientist. I'd like to spend a few minutes examining some of their relics. I'll be no trouble.” She began fumbling in her pack. She had come well credentialed with a letter of introduction from a prominent Columbia University professor and various doc.u.ments attesting to her status as an archaeologist in good standing.
For once Phran's sunny disposition clouded. ”Is not that,” he said sadly, after listening to a string of grumpy grunts Annja was surprised amounted to intelligible speech.
”Please tell him I'm a consultant for Chasing History's Monsters, Chasing History's Monsters,” she said. ”The American television show.”
To her amazement Phran shook his head. ”No, missy,” he said. ”Problem is, no women allowed. This monastery. You see?”
Whether she did or not, she couldn't misunderstand the heavy door slammed in her face.
Annja stood before the blazing-red door with a smiling Buddha and sinuous Thai characters embossed on it in gold, feeling foolish. ”Oh,” she said.
She felt no outrage. Although like most modern nations Thailand made a great show of celebrating women's rights, Asia remained thoroughly patriarchal. Which, in Annja's observation and research, meant that in reality the women ran everything, albeit behind the scenes, without official or acknowledged power. Lording it over women in petty ways was the men's way of getting some of their own back.
And Annja was a foreign woman. If she stormed into town and complained to the authorities, they'd hear her out, smiling and nodding. Then they'd do nothing.
In fact Annja was scarcely even surprised, after the initial shock of having the door slammed on her. It was a monastery, after all. She'd been raised in an environment from which all males were scrupulously excluded, except the occasional visiting priest, and maintenance and repairmen squired as closely by the sisters as weasels touring a hatchery. She hadn't enjoyed it that much. But she came out of it with a conviction that people ought to be able to hang out with whomever they liked and exclude whomever they liked.
She stood a moment to take careful stock of her surroundings. This wasn't triple-canopy rainforest. The tall, thick-boled trees stood widely s.p.a.ced, with plenty of undergrowth between, and they grew close by the great weeping-eaved structure.
”All right, then, Phran,” she said to her guide, who stood by looking as if his pet guppy had just died. ”Surely they can't object if I take some photos of the outside of their monastery with my digital camera.”
Phran seemed to reinflate, his skinny shoulders rising and squaring. ”No,” he said slowly and guardedly. Apparently he'd had some experience with Westerners who had an exaggerated sense of their own importance.
Annja smiled encouragingly. ”So now I'm going to wander around outside and snap some shots. Then do you think you can find me a nice hotel in town?”
His expression brightened. ”Oh yes, Miss Annja!” he said. ”For you, double nice.”
CLAD HEAD TO FOOT in the darkest long clothing she'd packed, Annja lurked in the bushes forty yards from the Red Monastery. Night was in full effect. That meant prime time for the loudest, most aggressively hungry creatures, especially bugs. She particularly noticed the bugs because they acted out their aggressive hungers on her, notwithstanding the long sleeves and pants. Although she had to give some credit to the tree frogs yammering raucously as d.a.m.ned souls above her head and from all the trees around.
At least the noise sort of lowers the bar for stealth, she told herself. She could go in wearing wooden clogs and with bells sewn all over her and it was unlikely anybody'd notice for the nocturnal racket. Nature was a wondrous thing sometimes.
Nonetheless, when she slipped from cover she tried to move as noiselessly as possible, if for no other reason than to keep herself in the proper state of mind. There would be no striding boldly around, looking as if she belonged, which was usually less conspicuous than sneaking. She was a tall white woman who spoke not a word of Thai, out here on the verge of a great reeking swamp far away from anything but the forbidden monastery. She might as well sneak, since she was going to be suspicious as h.e.l.l to anyone who spotted her no matter what she did.
With Phran's help she had gotten rapidly ensconced in a reasonably clean and reasonably cheap hotel. Nakhon Sawan lay far off the paths beaten for Thailand's infamous s.e.x trade, and its swamps were not a mad tourist draw even with the monsoon petering out. She showered and changed and treated herself to a very good dinner. Having downloaded her photos of the monastery to her notebook computer and reviewed them while sitting cross-legged on the bed making a token gesture at drying out, by the time dinner was finished she had worked out what she thought was a decent plan of attack.
The doors all looked forbiddingly solid behind their frequently replenished lacquer coats. However, like many Thai roofs, the one on the main temple structure was compound. Between the upper roof, steeply slanted, of red fired-clay tiles, and a second tier ran a row of windows. These looked to be about two feet by three and were clearly opened for ventilation. As far as Annja could tell they weren't screened.
As was to be expected, given its function as a residence, as well as a place of prayer, the monastery comprised a whole cl.u.s.ter of buildings, including dorms and storage structures. Some b.u.t.ted right up against the tall main building.
That made her smile. There's my way in.
Back in her room she dressed in her best stealth outfit, went out and putted away into the hot tropical night on the little Honda scooter she'd rented with the help of a well-tipped hotel clerk after Phran dropped her off. The monastery lay half a mile or so up a dirt turnoff from the river highway. Annja hid her bike in dense undergrowth a hundred yards off the main road and hiked up the dirt path. A fair amount of traffic ran along the main route, noisily enough she felt confident it had covered the sound of her little engine, but n.o.body seemed to be driving up to the Red Monastery after hours. She figured if anyone did turn up the cutoff, between the engine sound and the headlights she should get ample warning.
At first glimpse of the few pale lights from the monastery Annja ditched off into the underbrush. The monastery had been built on a slight rise, probably just high enough to keep it from flooding when the Chao Phraya got frisky. The ground around it was mostly solid. That was a relief-wading through swamps wasn't her favorite thing to do in the world.
Of course, crouching in humid darkness with thorns sticking into her right thigh and something sucking the blood out of her left earlobe, preparing to commit criminal trespa.s.s didn't exactly top her favorites playlist, either.
She drew a deep breath and tried not to notice she'd sucked in at least one unfortunate gnat. If it was just for the commission, she told herself, I wouldn't do this. But it's gone beyond that now. And it's not as if I'm going to steal anything....
”Oh, stop it,” she said softly. ”Quit making excuses and go.”
She went. Bent almost double, she slipped from the saw-edged foliage as quietly as she could. She half ran to a structure protruding from the backside of the main hall like some sort of growth, away from view from the road. Climbing up a tree growing right alongside it, she walked along a big branch, using smaller ones for handholds, right onto the substructure's roof.
Its steeply pitched tiles were glazed ceramic and slick as wet gla.s.s. But their flared, k.n.o.bby ends provided traction of a sort.
From there she proceeded up onto the main roof's lower course and began to work her way gingerly around. She held on to the upper-course tiles, although they provided more the illusion of a purchase than anything that was actually going to stop her from falling a dozen feet onto hard-packed clay if she lost her footing. Thanks to Google she knew the statue she sought stood in a side chamber toward the back, near the main altar with its traditional larger-than-life seated Buddha.
At what she hoped was the right spot she hunkered down and peered inside. She saw a wide s.p.a.ce lit dimly with the wavering yellow glow of oil lamps. She slid inside, being careful to keep her feet on the base of the window frame. Shutters to keep out the rain hung beneath, presumably to be pushed shut with long poles when necessary. The last thing she needed was to put weight on one, have it give way, and have the whole monastery come running to the racket to find her lying on the floor of their sanctum with her leg broken.