Assignment Bangkok Read Online Free

Bangkok and the delta.
    “All right,” he said. “Get going.”
    “My friend—in the canal—”
    “Tell Mr. Chuk I’m coming to see him.”
    The Chinese wiped his bloody mouth with the back ol his hand and sat up, wriggling away from Durell. He rubbed his throat. “Yankee imperialist spy, you die, you stay Bangkok.”
    “I won’t die alone,” Durell promised.
    Voices rang up and down the mirrored ribbon of the klong . Lights went on here and there. A royal police siren hooted, far away. The Chinese got on all fours, staggered to his feet, then stumbled up the lane and vanished into the larger alley beyond. Durell walked to the stone embankment of the canal. A man in a coolie hat on one of the moored sampans at the water gate called to him in an agitated voice. Durell stood in the shadow of a leaning palm and looked over the wall. The water was black and oily, speckled with refuse. A thin piling and sturdy bamboo stakes stood up from the surface, and one of the stakes was topped by a large, black sagging object like a giant insect skewered on a massive pin.
    It was the body of the first kamoy who had gone headlong over the wall. Durell watched it for a moment. The only movement was a faint swaying of the legs, hanging in the water up to the knees.
    The hooting of the siren came nearer. He sighed and walked back to the alley. Police lights flashed on the bridge. A babble of excited voices filled the night.
    He turned right and walked alongside the canal and came to the house of Uncle Hu, which he had entered almost twenty-four hours before.
3
    The dark house stood a little apart from its neighbors on the crowded embankment. There was a tiny garden and a doll-like replica of the home, mounted on a pole at eye-level, known to Thais as the sal a phra phum, the abode of Chao Thi, who always faced north in his duties as guardian spirit of the house. It was a jewellike structure with a stone platform on which were offerings of tea and nuts and incense sticks to placate the phi spirits. Durell halted in the shadows just inside the low gate, under the straight trunk and fan-shaped top of an areca palm. Two klong jars stood on the porch under the sweeping eaves. The windows were shuttered and dark. A TV antenna marred the exquisite, sweeping lines of the thatched roof.
    The front door, built of studded teak planking, was partly open. Darkness yawned inside. Durell moved silently and quickly, a shadow among the shadows, and stepped in.
    He smelled cooking, spices, flowers, sweat, and agony. He remembered the room in which he had been attacked, off to the right. The floor with the hatch into the cell was there. He stopped and listened, standing among dark Western and Thai furniture. The scent of jasmine touched him, but he sensed something amiss.
    “Uncle Hu?” he whispered.
    Something scuttled softly away from him. He heard a patter of tiny rat’s claws, and let out a thin breath between ' his teeth. In the rafters overhead, he heard a thin rattle of dry reeds where little geckos croaked.
    It was a simple house, but it showed a certain affluence among canalmen. There were empty bottles of Green Spot and Coca Cola and a bowl of somnos , green juicy fruits, on the polished wooden kitchen table. There was a refrigerator of dubious vintage that gasped and wheezed on Bangkok’s erratic current. From the kitchen window, light came from the sampans and barges still moving on the canal.
    The house was empty. He could feel it. But something was here; he was not sure what. He went into the bedroom.
    The woman lay on the bed like a broken doll, her work-worn face suspended in a beam of apologetic light that came between the slats of the shuttered window. It was hot in here. The air smelled. The woman on the bed did not move.
    Her name had been Aparsa. She had been wearing a pasabai, a pink blouse of Thai silk, and above the collar her throat had been cut from ear to ear. The bed was soaked with dry, dark blood. Below the blouse she