I was alone in Thailand, stranded, no jewels, no Tuppence, and cornered by a rabid skunk from the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America.

His name was Barclay Houghton Hewlitt, and his mother must have given him three last names with clairvoyant assurance that no one would ever want to call him by a first name. He told me to call him Barclay. I didn’t want to call him anything and I wished someone would call him off.

He met my plane in Bangkok, the idiot. We landed in midmorning, Thai time. I had been too long in the air and had seen the insides of too many airports to know what time it might be in New York or just how much of my life I had devoted to the process of getting from hither to yon. Somewhere along the way we had crossed the International Date Line, a concept I understand hazily in the abstract and not at all in the concrete, so it was possible, I suppose, that I had arrived in Bangkok before I left New York, and that if I continued around the world fast enough, I could get back to New York in time to meet the Chief again in the washroom. I didn’t really want to think about this and I didn’t have to, because Barclay Houghton Hewlitt picked me up as I came down the ramp. He spoke my last name, and smiled, and spoke all three of his own names, followed by his organization’s three initials, and told me to call him by his first name, and thrust out his hand, which I shook. A reflex, like answering telephones.

“You’ll want to stay at the Orient, of course. I’ve booked a room for you, took the liberty. Private bath, tub and shower, fully air-conditioned, quite nicely furnished. Tenth floor, so you’ll have a splendid view. Give you some perspective on the situation here, ha ha.”

He was small and pink. He would have looked quite pink anywhere and in Bangkok he glowed like a sore thumb. He told me that one of the boys would see to my bags, ha ha, and I said that I would just as soon see to my own bags, ha ha.

“Oh, ho, ho, I guess you would. Top secret and all that, eh? You haff zee documents, ha ha?”

They unloaded the airplane, and I collected my baggage and followed it through Customs. A narrow, bespectacled Thai asked me to open my bags, and Barclay Houghton Hewlitt began waving cards at him, dropping winks at him, and urging him to let me through directly.

The Customs man said he would have to clear this with a superior. People were beginning to pay far too much attention to us. Already, as a result of Barclay Houghton Hewlitt’s greeting, at least half the population of Bangkok knew who I was and what I was supposed to be doing there. Now the fool would only succeed in assuring them that I had something classified in my baggage, with the result that my room would be searched and something, no doubt, stolen.

I opened the suitcases. The Thai, perhaps to save face, went through everything. There was not much beyond clothing and toilet articles. He picked up the flashlight and hefted it.

“Damned silly,” Hewlitt said. “We could have avoided all this, Tanner. Hardly a royal welcome for you, ha ha.”

The Thai unscrewed the back of the flashlight and poured the batteries into his hand. One dropped and bounced on the floor. I closed my eyes briefly. When I opened them, the Thai had recovered the battery from the floor and was replacing it and its fellow in the flashlight. He replaced the cap and flicked the switch. Predictably, nothing happened.

“Must have put the damned things in backwards,” Hewlitt said. “You fouled up the man’s flashlight, son. If you’re bent on wasting everyone’s time, why not waste some of your own and repair the damage? I’m sure it functioned properly before you-”

Barclay Houghton Hewlitt. We got the suitcases repacked and left the Customs shed without further incident. The taxi Hewlitt had waiting was no longer waiting. We got another one, eventually, and proceeded directly to the Hotel Orient. The streets in the central part of the city were crowded, more with bicycles and pedestrians than with cars, and our taxi moved slowly and tentatively through the maze.

I had never been to the Far East before. I could speak and understand the language, but I had never before heard it as a city’s background music, humming around me as verbal white noise. Every city has its own music and its own smells, and I would have to get the feel of this one if I was to accomplish anything in it. I rolled down my window and looked and listened, and BHH of CIA did what he could to spoil it by supplying a running commentary “Just to help you get your bearings locally – ha ha.”

The Hotel Orient was steel and glass on the outside, nylon and plastic within. The entire staff and most of the guests spoke English. My room had a thick carpet, a huge bed, and an air-conditioning unit that had rendered it uncomfortably cold. I turned it off and opened the window, and Hewlitt looked at me as though I had left my mind somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

While I unpacked my suitcases and put things away Hewlitt babbled. He was personally so pleased I had come. The situation in Thailand was crucial, no doubt about it. A good government, a good solid government, but one had to keep on one’s toes, ha ha. Of course the Agency kept close tabs on everything. The Agency liked to maintain a position of dominance in Thailand. This was Marlboro country, ha ha. Good, though, that I was coming around to dig up data and present an impartial report. And of course they would be glad to ease the way for me, make sure I saw the right people and had easy access to the right data. The correct data, that was to say, ha ha. There would be a car and a driver at my disposal, needless to say, and if I wanted appointments with any officials in the Thai government, why, I need only ask, and in fact they had taken the liberty of arranging a luncheon with…

I suddenly saw how I had been cast. I was the Junketing Congressman, out to have a Good Time and get the Big Picture, and to be Handled with Kid Gloves, and Supervised to Death. The cover that had been provided for me was grand protection; it fit me like a noose. I had been ostensibly dispatched to study a CIA operation and return with conclusions that would either confirm or conflict with their own, and the chances of their leaving me alone were about as good as the chance of Barclay Houghton Hewlitt ending a sentence without a nervous little laugh.

I had to get the clown off my back.

“I’ve spent too much time on planes,” I told him, cutting in between one ha and another, “I need a shower and a shave and a good ten hours of sleep. Leave a number where I can reach you.”

I had evidently hit the right tone. He scampered. That was just what he did. He left his card and he started to say something but stopped, and then he scampered.

I had the shower and the shave, but instead of the ten hours of sleep I’d mentioned to Hewlitt, I stretched out on the bed and watched the ceiling for twenty minutes. I needed a place to start, and Abel Vaudois seemed promising. He was a Swiss who divided his time between Bangkok and Macao, buying and selling almost anything. We had corresponded a few years earlier when I had written him on behalf of the Latvian Army-in-Exile to inquire into the possibility of running guns into the Baltic States. Vaudois had been very cooperative, and seemed delighted to know of the existence of the Latvian Army-in-Exile, an organization hitherto unknown to him. Since then we had exchanged perhaps half a dozen letters, and although I had serious doubts that we would ever launch a revolution in Latvia, I felt I could call on him for information. If anything valuable was stolen anywhere in the Orient, there was a fair chance that he would know something about it.

I put on clean clothes and rode the elevator downstairs to the lobby. Hewlitt was sitting on a lounge chair with the Far East edition of Time on his lap. I got back into the elevator and went back to my room.