As for the Kingdom itself, its portcullis-style gate and the moat that surrounded it revealed an ancestry distantly rooted in the Disney castles of the 1940s. Its pointed blue roofs rose above a labyrinth of old lanes filled with tin shacks and old condo buildings that spilled down toward the Khlong Saen Saep, an artery that cut through the city with a trade in water taxis. But equally close to it were other winding alleys where, as she had noted, the rich hid their villas. These two worlds almost touched. The land around the Kingdom had tripled in value since it was built in the 1990s. And as more modern towers had risen around it, its themes now seemed out of place at the end of Soi Sawatdi, which ran along one edge of the Srinakharinwirot University campus, filled with towering fig trees. The portcullis gate was the only entrance to the darkened interior, and its guard post was staffed by thin men from the slums in pale cappuccino uniforms who wore their Buddhist talismans discreetly.
The alley outside housed student dormitories. When Sarah walked along it, the students were usually at the cafés in their pressed white shirts. The girls looked at her with an imperious cool; the boys had a half-smile for her. The Kingdom was known in the neighborhood for its foreign inhabitants and for the high-society families who had snapped up the grand apartments when they had first come on the market.
In May, with the start of the monsoon, the street flowed with water every afternoon, and the cicadas were roused by the electricity in the air as the lightning began, roaring in the high trees. Even from inside the Kingdom, in the long and dark parking lot that led from the portcullis to the reception lobby, she could hear them rasping in the tall grass and the dipterocarpus trees nearby. Instantly familiar with her from day one, the guards in their peaked caps saluted Sarah and asked her how she found the weather. Too hot, mai? But the lobby was always cool. It rose into a twenty-four-story atrium in the John Portman style and winds rushed through it, scattering dust and pieces of paper that the staff chased with useless brooms. Undoubtedly it would have been chic thirty years earlier. Loftily imposing, it sucked up all the surrounding noise and turned it into murmurs and echoes. Gold-painted Egyptian lotus cornices decorated its four corners while a dim glass roof with patterns of emerald peacocks covered its summit.
On the nights of violent weather, you could hear the glass being battered by the rain, the echoes spiraling downward back to the lobby. During the nights of paa yuu, the monsoon storms, even the old hands who had been there since the building was first built felt unease and a touch of fear. The staff, too, became subdued. In the lobby, there were long silk-upholstered sofas with traditional cushions, a glass table with an urn for flowers, and the four doors—locked to visitors—that led to the elevators of the four towers. When Sarah came in with her soaked umbrella, they bowed to her, but their eyes didn’t connect with hers. Perhaps it was what the tenants wanted: a feeling of discretion and avoidance. Higher up, the corridors that connected the four towers were open to the air, and charged with an atmosphere of secrecy. They ran past the inner windows of all the apartments, and yet the tenants didn’t seem to care about being observed. Most of them didn’t even have blinds. Walking along her corridor on the fifteenth floor as she took out the trash, Sarah couldn’t help looking through these portals into other people’s lives. She peered into kitchens and bedrooms and front rooms filled with cheap Buddhas and candlelit shrines with flowerpots. There were hundreds of tenants in the Kingdom, and the building itself connected them in unexpected ways, but that didn’t mean they knew one another by sight. Although Sarah didn’t yet know it, this honeycomb was ruled by a rigid order that no one needed to articulate because it was so pervasive: it subdued every mind and made them bearable to others.
Even so, soon after she had moved in, she could no longer remember why she had chosen the Kingdom in the first place. She had gone to see five other apartments in the same area, but none of them had struck her as homely or quirky enough. They were too modern, too designed, and the rooms were too small. None had the old sense of comfortable family living, of large spaces and multiple rooms, but also of secrecy and abandon. The Kingdom came from a different age, and that was what she liked—the small signs of decay everywhere reassured her that here she would be removed from the world’s radar. The entire city was filled with these tower blocks slowly sinking into their own twilight.
* * *
—
One of the freedoms of New York was that you were allowed to be evasive. A week earlier she had left the city without anyone noticing, as subtle in her absence as she had been in her presence. The small Air Force town in the California desert where she was born had never been explained to anyone; but then no one had ever asked about it. You didn’t move to New York to talk about your past. You went there to shed it. Even during those years when she was working as a personal assistant to a famous novelist, nobody she knew ever suspected that she had grown up near a base north of El Centro. The Mexican border was somewhere that became material only in photographs published in The New York Times. The military personnel, the migrant workers, the mixed-race farmers of Imperial Valley with their lettuce businesses and their strawberry profits, the owners of the saltworks out in the desert: how could they be of interest?
Sarah Mullins was strikingly dark, somber in character, enigmatic enough to intrigue people even from afar. She had completed three years at San Diego State, where she majored in English, after which she was almost entirely adrift in a landscape that she had known since childhood. Her father had given her a dusty, secondhand Toyota, and she drove home to El Centro every weekend. She made no friends, reading around the clock until she found the heroes she craved.
One of them was April Laverty, a novelist of the 1970s whose books described the struggles of provincial women: women whose backgrounds very much resembled Sarah’s. For an impoverished girl from a broken home living in a run-down room in Mission Hills like herself, Laverty’s books became a refuge, a safe haven. From a distance she followed the eighty-five-year-old Manhattan writer’s career in literary magazines and online gossip, learning minute details about her with a careful eye to meeting her one day, if circumstances ever permitted. It was a one-sided voyeurism she felt gave her an advantage. Armed with expertise in such a singular subject, Sarah was never entirely conscious as to why she had given herself such an obscure mission.
In her summers, meanwhile, she worked in El Centro bars and saved up for her graduation, after which she planned to leave for New York and look for work. Her move was meticulously planned, each step thought out over months so that real events would follow a logical sequence: a job, a small studio in Queens, the patient saving week by week until she could move on to the next step. Within a year she had rented a room in the Paris Building on West End Avenue, a short walk from where Laverty lived on Riverside Drive. She already knew that Laverty, still able to walk vigorously with a cane, liked to slog her way up West Ninety-Fifth Street to either the Broadway Diner or a place called La Nueva Victoria, where she liked to work alone with gallons of iced tea. In her purpled hair and button boots, she was a known entity to the staff, and therefore to Sarah Mullins. It was there that Sarah ran into April Laverty, in a meeting that was as carefully staged as an event in a Kabuki play.