There was a small hole in the center of the floor through which a bowl of wormy rice was passed to me twice a day if they remembered. Now and then someone would also pass me a cup of greasy water, and now and then I would void whatever had to be voided through the same aperture.

  It might not have been so bad if I could have slept. But when I was eighteen years old, a piece of North Korean shrapnel had been rudely deposited in my brain, and in the course of this, something called my sleep center had been destroyed. I have not slept in seventeen years.

  During the first day in my cage, I tried to attract attention by making noise. I called out now and then in Siamese, which I speak moderately well, and in Khmer, which I don’t. No one ever went so far as to answer me, but whenever I made any noise, someone came over and raised one side of the cage, sending me sprawling over to the other side. I learned my lesson. I stopped talking.

  My silence was met by silence, with no interrogation whatsoever. I had decided at first to try convincing them that I was not an American agent named Evan Michael Tanner and then I decided to convince them that I was. Both of these decisions were quite irrelevant. No one asked me anything, not name or rank or serial number, nothing at all. I stayed where I was and waited for something to happen, but it didn’t.

  Until late one afternoon someone finally spoke to me. A hand poked a rice bowl through the central hole in the bottom of the cage. I sent the bowl back empty, received a cup of tepid water in return, drank the water, returned the cup, and a soft, sad voice said, “Tomorrow.”

  Or perhaps the voice said, “Morning.” Siamese, like so many other languages, makes no distinction between the two concepts.

  So I said, “Tomorrow? Or Morning?” In any case I repeated the word.

  “Upon the rising of the sun.” Well, that cleared things up.

  “What will happen then?”

  “Upon the rising of the sun,” he said mournfully, “they will kill you.”

  His words filled me with hope.

  Not, let me add, because I thought he was right and hoped for death as a respite from life in a cage. Consider: not We will kill you but They will kill you. Thus implicitly disassociating himself from any personal involvement in the act, either active or passive.

  “They will kill you at sunrise,” he said again. “There was talk of getting you a woman,” he went on mournfully. “Usually when a man is condemned to die, he is first given a woman. It is the custom.

  “But,” he continued, “there will not be a woman for you. It was decided that you are a capitalist imperialist dog and a white devil, and that your seed must not be mingled with the love juices of our women. It is what they decided.”

  They again.

  “I have never had a woman,” he said.

  “Never?”

  “Never in all my days. I have, however, spent many hours thinking about such a thing.”

  “I can imagine.” It gave me an idea.

  “There is nothing on earth to match the embrace of a woman,” I said. “No other sensation is its equivalent. The soft, sweet texture of female flesh, of hungry lips. The taste of a woman, the subtle but pungent aroma of a woman…”

  I went on in this vein for quite a while. It had the desired effect.

  “Stop,” he said at last. “Please stop.”

  “It is unfair that you have never known such joy. If only I were free, I would do something about it.”

  “What would you do?”

  “I would help you find a woman.”

  “You could do this?”

  “With ease and with pleasure.”

  He hesitated for a moment. “It is a trick,” he said suddenly. “It is a capitalist imperialist trick, a trick.”

  And he went away.

  I slapped a mosquito and said something obscene in Siamese. At sunrise they were going to kill me. I had to get away, and they were not going to let me get away, and my little virginal friend had decided that he did not trust me.

  “You would really get me a woman?”

  He had returned. It was darker now, and his voice was more urgent now, and I could guess what he had been spending his time thinking about. Capitalist imperialist trick or no, I was his one chance, just as he was mine.

  “I will.”

  “I have decided to trust you, my friend.”

  “Good.”

  “I shall help you. We will escape.”

  “Good.”

  “I go now. When the camp sleeps, I shall return. I go now, my friend, my good friend.”

  I celebrated by slapping another mosquito.

  I wondered if my little friend would come back and whether his help would make much difference one way or the other. The cage could only be opened by lowering it to the ground, which in turn could not be done without making a hell of a racket and waking the entire camp.

  I wondered if the Land Rover still worked. But even if it were still operable, which was doubtful, I couldn’t count on it to take me anywhere.

  Was there anything of value in the car? Nothing much, really. The extra clothing I had brought would have been appropriated by the guerrillas. They probably would have left the butterfly-collecting equipment alone. The spreading board, the killing jar, the butterfly net, designed to cover my presence in the jungles and rubber plantations of Thailand, and all quite wasted now.

  I closed my eyes and cursed. Then I stopped cursing and started thinking. Of the two thinking turned out to be the more productive. By the time night had fallen and my little Thai friend had crept soundlessly to my cage and whispered his presence, I had it all figured out…

  MY FIRST meeting with Tuppence—Miss T’pani Ngawa—took place at a PAUL meeting held on a rainy Thursday night in a storefront church on Lenox Avenue at 138th Street.

  PAUL is the Pan-African Unity League. That night there was a brief report on the slaughter of Ibos in Nigeria, a somewhat more extended lecture on conditions in the Congo, and, finally, a report by Miss Ngawa on social and economic progress in Kenya.

  When the meeting ended, she and I went out for coffee. We had an immediate common bond. I was the only Caucasian at the meeting, and she was the only African. All the others in attendance were American Negroes.

  “The Back-to-Africa bit,” she said. “Bwana and simba and the bloody drums in the bloody jungle, like it is all something else, you dig?”

  Tuppence, being a highly unorthodox combination of things, spoke an English all her own. She was the only child of a Kenyan mother and an American father. Her father, one Willie Jackson, had been an African Nationalist. The Army sent him to North Africa during the Second World War, where he rather promptly deserted and headed south. He changed his name to Willie Ngawa, married Tuppence’s mother, and conceived Tuppence.

  Tuppence grew up learning English and Swahili and sang the folk songs of Kenya. She went to college in London, began singing with a jazz group there, and ultimately came to New York, where she got a more or less steady gig with a local jazz quartet, and concurrently developed a reputation as an African folk singer

  I received Tuppence’s history a little at a time over a period of several hours after leaving the PAUL meeting. We drank several cups of coffee in a chrome-and-formica diner on 125th Street, and wound up, happily enough, at my apartment on 107th Street. We sat on my couch drinking a Yugoslav white wine.

  We finished one bottle and got most of the way through a second, when Tuppence said, “You dig baby, Bwana Evan? Do you now?”

  “Ah, the natives are restless.”

  “They are indeed. Do you think you might extinguish that barbaric cacophony”—we had been listening to a Miles Davis record—“and put on something tribal?”

  I changed the jazz record for a Folkways recording of Kenyan and Ugandan chants, dances, and work songs. Tuppence bounced off the couch, kicked off her shoes and began to dance.

  “Native girl dance for you, Bwana Evan.” Her white eyes rolled in her dark face. “Native girl make you hot with passion, wild with lust. Native girl turn you on, baby. You better believe it.”

  I don’t know whether or not her dance was an authentic example of Kenyan tribal folk-dancing. I rather think not. It seemed a combination of African dance and current American styles, with the limbs loose, the hips shaking, the buttocks twitching. Through it all Tuppence’s lips showed a smile of eternal female knowledge, and her huge eyes twinkled.

  So she danced, and we looked at each other, and something clicked neatly and finally into place, and we both knew that the evening was going to end properly. Because the special magic was there. It is not often present, and without it there is really no reason on earth why a man and woman should bother having anything to do with one another.

  The record went on, and Tuppence went on dancing, and I moved around the room turning off lights until only the shallow glow of one small lamp illuminated the room. My couch is one of those clever contrivances that turns into a bed when the occasion demands it. The occasion demanded it, so I pulled the proper levers. Then Miss T’pani Ngawa changed the leitmotif of the dance slightly, incorporating within the structure of basic African tribal rhythms certain dance patterns generally associated in times past with Union City, New Jersey.

  Which is to say that she took off all her clothes.

  “Bwana approve?”

  “Bwana approve.”

  “Ah! What Bwana doing?”

  “Bwana going to integrate you,” I said.

  “Oh, wow—”

  THAT WAS how it began. A month went by as months usually go by, and then Tuppence dropped in one afternoon and told me she was leaving the country.

  “A State Department tour,” she said. “Deluxe treatment all the way. Manila, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. This chick is going a long way from Nairobi, baby.”

  “It sounds good. When do you leave?”

  “Four days from tomorrow. We’re supposed to have a command performance for the King of Thailand. The word is that he’s a swinger. He plays the clarinet or some such. Can you feature the king himself sitting in and wailing, and this little girl vocalizing? A long long way from Nairobi. Wow!”

  I saw her plane off at Kennedy Airport.

  There was a postcard from Manila, another from Tokyo, and a third letter from Bangkok:

  Bwana Evan:

  Bangkok is a gas but the bread is running low. It looks as though I’ll maybe have to sell my jewelry. As you know I have a very valuable collection. Do you have contacts that will prove helpful? Please let me know.

  My first reaction—that Tuppence had lost her mind somewhere between New York and Bangkok—gave way to a feeling of general bewilderment. When one lives in a world of secret societies and underground political movements, and does odd jobs for a nameless US undercover agency, one becomes accustomed to finding meanings in apparently meaningless messages. I read her letter over and over and decided that, if there was any hidden kernel of sense to it, I couldn’t spot it for the time being. Tuppence had a pair of long gold hoop earrings, and as far as I knew, that was the extent of her jewelry. I stopped thinking about it.

  Until two days later The Times ran a story on page five that stated that the Royal Gem Collection of Thailand had been stolen in its entirety, that the thief or thieves had made good their escape, that it may or may not have been an inside job.

  And a day after that, while I was still recovering from that one, Tuppence and the quartet made the front page of The Times.

  Thai Communists Kidnap American Jazz Quartet, Kenyan Singer, said the headline, and the body copy went on to elaborate. The Kendall Bayard Quartet and Miss T’pani Ngawa, in Bangkok for a command performance before His Majesty the King of Thailand, had been snatched from the Hotel Orient. The kidnapping appeared to be the work of Communist guerrillas based in Northern Thailand.

  The Times made no connection between the disappearance of Tuppence and the quartet and the theft of the royal gem collection. But I did. I got out my passport…

  I went to the Thai consulate to have my passport stamped with a visa. I went to Air India and booked a flight to Bangkok. At Deak and Company on Times Square I turned some American money into Siamese bahts. The baht was holding firm at 4.78 US cents, the clerk told me. On West 45th Street I visited a rare coin dealer and bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of common gold coins, mostly British sovereigns. Bangkok is a center for the illicit trade in precious metals. Gold or silver may be exchanged there for anything—teen-age concubines, opium, guns, anything.

  At my apartment I tucked the cash into a flat nylon money belt and fastened it around my waist. The gold pieces, twenty-two of them, fit into the casing of a flashlight battery with just a little room left. I added cotton to fill and put the battery back in the flashlight.

  My flight was scheduled to leave Kennedy Airport at 11:35. I took a taxi to the airport…

  THE HOTEL Orient in Bangkok was steel and glass on the outside, nylon and plastic within.

  I unpacked, had a shower and shaved and 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. 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. Outside on the street I hailed a cruising cab and gave the driver Abel Vaudois’ address…

  Abel Vaudois was an excellent host. We sat in the comfortable library of his immense estate and drank what was easily the best cognac I had ever tasted. He insisted on my staying with him and sent one of his men over to the Orient to get my bags.

  I had told him virtually everything I knew about Tuppence and the jewels. He in turn had known only a little more than I. From what he had heard so far, Tuppence and the musicians were not suspected of being involved in the theft of the gems.

  “I had suspected the gems might be offered to me,” Vaudois said. “It would have been the sort of proposition that might have tempted me.”

  He rang a bell, and a servant entered silently. “I am sure you will be comfortable here,” he said, “and tomorrow will be time enough to see what can be learned about your friends. And the King’s gems.”

  I breakfasted alone the next morning. I was on my third cup of coffee when Vaudois entered the room.

  “You had a good night? Good. The breakfast was satisfactory?”

  “Very.”

  “I am glad. And now as to the jewels and your girl friend. I have made enquiries. Not productive, but not entirely fruitless either. First, the gems. The business of the theft, as you may have gathered last night, was carried out in a genuinely professional manner. And yet no local professionals in that line of work seem to have been involved. Nor have any known professional jewel thieves from outside been recognized in Bangkok of late.

  “Now, as to the musicians—it does seem very likely that they were taken away to the north. No one to whom I spoke has heard anything about their having been taken out of the country, and my contacts might well have heard of it had it happened. There have been no ransom attempts either.

  “So I wonder immediately why anyone might kidnap them, eh? Perhaps they stole the jewels, and the kidnappers then stole them and the jewels. But I do not think so. Or perhaps they were kidnapped for political reasons, eh? I would not attempt to guess those reasons, but in the realm of world politics I have found it to be true that anything is possible, anything at all. As long as the motive of financial profit dominates, then a degree of logic prevails. But once political considerations are involved, ah, then lunacy and chaos enter in.” He shook his head.

  I told Vaudois the plan I’d devised for getting into the north. Obviously I needed a cover. I would not be particularly welcome as an American agent. But throughout the remote areas of the world the natives had grown accustomed to the periodic invasions of American scientists, especially of the simpler sort. With just the most rudimentary sort of equipment I could easily pass as an itinerant lepidopterist, chasing net in hand over the rice paddies of Thailand in a madcap hunt for elusive butterflies and moths.

  I wouldn’t even have to pursue any winged creatures. I could insist that I was only interested in the Bat-Winged Gobbletail or some such, and leave inferior species alone. And, with that sort of cover, I could visit remote villages and mingle innocently with the people, asking all sorts of irrelevant questions

  “It is not impossible,” Abel Vaudois admitted. “You may make a list of the various articles you require, and I will have them purchased for you. And of course, you will need a car.”

  I left two days later long before dawn, picking up the main highway north from Bangkok. The first stretch of road was broad and flat, with endless stretches of rice fields on either side. The road was built up high because during the rainy season the lands were frequently under water.

  When the road got worse, I began to go into my act. I stopped in the small villages and bought my meals from the people. My equipment drew considerable interest, and the villagers were amused that someone would be foolish enough to spend time and money pursuing the pretty little butterflies. I redeemed myself in their eyes by explaining that I sold the insects at a handsome profit to rich collectors—thus it was these rich collectors who were the fools, and I was merely a shrewd tradesman.

  It was at one of these villages, far north of Bangkok, where the rice fields were more and more frequently giving way to stretches of bamboo forest and stands of teak, that I had my first word of Tuppence. Why, yes, an old woman told me, she had seen some people with black skins, a woman and some men as well. It was remarkable—she had not known there were persons in the world of such a color. They had passed through the village a day after Prang’s buffalo had calved, just nine days ago.

  THEY WERE with the bandits, a man added. They were with the bandits, a man added. But he did not think they were of the bandits but were perhaps their prisoners.

  “Bandits? Were they Communists?”

  “What are Communists?”