Sarah had left her apartment at the Paris Building as it was, with no sign of any intention not to return, nor did she steal anything directly from Laverty herself. She slipped away, and nothing more.
It was the first international flight she had ever taken. In Hong Kong, a place she knew nothing about, on a continent she had never visited, she checked into the Upper House on Pacific Place in Wan Chai, where Chan had arranged her accommodation. For three days she stayed inside the hotel at night, staring out at mountains as green as those of Bolivia in her imagination. Everything about it was unsettling. The thin and rakish towers, the basketball courts embedded into the hillsides, and the winding roads glistening with typhoon rain. She thought about Laverty, and even called her on her first night there, afflicted with misgivings about the sleight of hand she was about to execute. But Laverty herself merely asked where she was, clearly unaware that she was no longer in New York. The old grandee was sliding into dementia. When Sarah went to Chan’s office on Pacific Place, she had been surprised to find a man much younger than she had imagined. He had offered her a proper drink, a “house cocktail,” and offered her the seat opposite his desk.
“So you came all the way from New York to deliver the papers,” he said, then asked what she thought of his view, the green tumbledown mountains behind Wan Chai. “It was very gracious of you to make such an effort.”
The cash was prepared in a suitcase and handed to her without any further questions. There was concern about her handling such a large sum by herself, and an escort to her hotel was offered. She accepted it. She told them she would be depositing it herself at HSBC the following day. It was an odd arrangement, but Laverty was known to be on the eccentric side when it came to money matters. The writer kept an offshore account in Hong Kong for tax reasons, which she’d had for many years—plenty of writers quietly did the same. Martini socialists who discreetly paid less taxes than little Sarah Mullins. She would transfer the sums that Chan had paid for the real letters openly to this account and there would be nothing irregular about the deposit apart from its large size. After this it was only the money paid for the forgeries that Sarah would keep for herself: a figure close to $200,000.
She walked out into the Hong Kong heat and took a taxi with the escort back to the Upper House. She left the suitcase of money in the room during her stay, a five-star hotel not being a risk, and spent two days dining out on the Laverty dime. Transaction completed. It was a question of how long it would take for Chan and the estate to compare notes. There was no obvious reason for them to do so, though it was normal procedure to double-check. But with Laverty’s decline the estate was in disorder and it was possible the sale would go overlooked for some time. How long—a week, two weeks? She didn’t know. For two days, however, she decided to keep up appearances and show herself at the Café Gray Deluxe on the top floor of the hotel, perching herself for dinner at a table for one next to the windows that overlooked Victoria Harbour and the fairground lights of Tsim Sha Tsui. For the first time in her life she felt in control of her world. Anonymous, professionally dressed, with money at hand: a forger with a future price on her head.
The morning after she had deposited the fee to the estate she walked down Causeway Bay and found a hairdresser she had researched online. It was a small salon on Paterson Street opposite the Kam Lun Dispensary and a Fossil store, specializing in turning even the darkest manes of Chinese hair to the lightest shades of blond. The small white-brick place was lined with glamour photos of Caucasian heads sporting heads of platinum-blond hair. There she asked to go down to the palest blond they could possibly muster, and even had the hairdresser cut her some bangs, which framed her face and made it look narrower. She was sure, meanwhile, that no one there would remember her.
Back at the hotel she inspected her new look, adjusting the bangs slightly with a pair of scissors. That evening, as she passed the receptionists on the ground floor of the Upper House, whose real lobby was higher up, they did not appear to recognize her. The disguise was effectively simple. By the time she crossed passport control in whatever city she chose to run to, she would have assumed a different name. She decided she would pack the money from her forgeries in her checked luggage—a dangerous gamble, but less dangerous than having it on her person. It was the one risk she was forced to take.
She had chosen Bangkok for muddled and emotional reasons. The city conformed to her idea of a lawless and chaotic environment in which it would be remarkably easy to slip into anonymity. It would be like a slipstream that carried one along. There would be no surveillance of the serious kind, only the incompetent kind. The police would be porous and ambiguous and remarkably laissez-faire, and the large population of dubious whites would enable her to go unnoticed—more than anywhere else in the region, perhaps even the world. It seemed from a distance to be a perfect refuge.
When she arrived there, she took a room at a hotel called Two Three in the Asoke area and went on visits with real estate agents for a week. As soon as she saw the Kingdom’s shabby exterior, she knew it was the right place for her to go to ground. It was set back from any major streets and possessed an air of decaying reserve. She had also liked the neighborhood itself. There were yoga studios and espresso bars, restaurants open late and Japanese cocktail joints, dry cleaners and health-food stores. The paraphernalia of the hipster age. It was convenient and secluded. It had an air of affable stability. It was here that she would wait and see what happened in New York, but her assumption was that the estate would send a private investigator to find her, and it was only surprising that he had so far failed to show up.
To herself, she considered the money well earned. She had already jumped the low hurdle of her own guilt, and in her own eyes it was no more of an immorality than telling Laverty that her father was a preacher. What did it matter? It was a war between herself and the moneyed classes, and in that war all ruses were legitimate, all feints justified.
TWO
The girl who opened the door of Unit 94 on Tuesday night was dressed in yoga pants and a chef’s white jacket with her name monogrammed onto the chest pocket. Ximena Hernandez. Her narrow face, covered with freckles, reached its greatest intensity in the eyes, which were the color of damp moss. She was about thirty, Sarah would have said, thirty and full of life, as opposed to thirty and on the edge of the precipice.
“Ximena,” the girl said, taking Sarah’s hand for a moment and searching her out with her eyes. “You’re Sarah?”
It was obvious to the American that Mali had already described her to Ximena, and that she had already formed opinions about her. Sarah was already nervous, therefore, and after kicking off her flip-flops, hesitated before entering Ximena’s apartment. It was differently laid out from her own. The Thai owners all had wildly varying tastes and configured their units accordingly. Ximena led her into a large front room decorated with Tibetan and Thai Buddhist paintings. The gold apsaras of weekend markets and airport lounges. There were no sofas or chairs, just large cushions on the floor. The deck was lit up with tea lights, and because the apartment faced east the view was also different from Sarah’s: overlooking the Avani Atrium Hotel that stood opposite, tumultuous freeways and yellow cranes, and the gorfas of a small tiled temple. The other two had not yet arrived there, but Sarah had her votive bottle of Yamazaki, which she set down on the coffee table.