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FIVE: WHAT A MURDER MEANS

THE VICTIM’S FAMILY was easy to track down: everyone in Chiang Mai seemed to know them.

Waiting for Rachel to finish class one afternoon, I mentioned the Walkers to Mr. Tim, the headmaster at the school. Mr. Tim was a fat Canadian with a straggly beard and a nervous, high-pitched laugh who had come to Chiang Mai after leaving his wife and the walk-in closet in which he had been encaged; every morning over coffee during second-period break, he recounted to the teachers the passionate details of his love affair with a stunningly lovely but stormy transvestite accountant named Saroi. I don’t know precisely the attraction to a homosexual of a man who looks like a woman, even a beautiful woman. Come to think of it, I’m not sure why a beautiful transvestite would be attracted to an obese Canadian either. In any case, Mr. Tim was a favorite of students and staff alike: kids sent to his office for discipline were allowed to help themselves from a sack of lemon candy that Mr. Tim kept in his desk; no teacher ever complained that Mr. Tim was overzealous in the examination of curricula or student progress.

“Interesting people,” he said. He didn’t know the Walkers himself, but his counterpart at Chiang Mai’s other, better, international school, with whom he maintained a collegial contact, did. Mary Walker, a grandchild of the Walker clan, had been in the fourth grade there several years earlier. The poor child stuttered, and her folks were in his office all the time. They struck him as nice quiet people. At Thanksgiving they made him a sweet potato pie—“Heaven knows where they found sweet potato here!”—and that little girl, he said she was just lovely to look at. The other kids were so mean to her on account of her stutter. But there was something not right with the parents. They were very serious people. Mr. Tim’s voice grew low and conspiratorial. He didn’t believe that they were missionaries at all. “Somebody told me that the family actually worked for the CIA—and I believe it.”

“Really!” I exclaimed.

“Oh yes!” said Mr. Tim. “Now, I don’t know all the details of the story, but once, Mary got into a fight with another girl, whose father was—Persian? I think her mother was—Norwegian? Strange couple. NGO people. In any case, Mary walloped the other girl but good. The other girl deserved it. The father, this Persian man, he came into the school furious, and made some kind of silly, hot-blooded remark about Americans, and somehow this got back to the Walkers. One week later, the Thai authorities deported him. And then Mary stopped coming to class, and her parents sent the school a note saying that they had decided that Mary would do better at home. Then somebody told me that the Walkers were the last Americans to leave China after the revolution, and somebody else told me that they used to live in Burma, and, well, it just all made sense to me.”

It made sense to me too.

Gunther the yoga teacher knew all about the Walkers: he, too, had heard stories. Sometimes at the end of a yoga session, Gunther’s wife would bring out cups of hot ginger tea and we would sit in the gazebo, gossiping. On hearing the Walker name, he stiffened. “I haff never met them,” Gunther said. “But I hear so many things. I do not like this kind of Christian who liff in a big house with so many servants, and then tell the people how they must liff. Is that for you to be Christian?” Gunther looked at me severely. I shook my head. Gunther himself lived in a big house with many servants and told many people how they must live, but it did not seem the right moment to mention that. He breathed deeply to a chakra three fingers below his belly button and continued: an Episcopalian pastor from Delaware with a bad back several years earlier had taken one of his classes, and this man, Gunther said, had known someone who had known the Walkers very well indeed. “He tells me that the Walkers give the Christians money and medicine but let the people who are not Christian alone. I do not like this spirit so much at all. I teach yoga, luff, and compassion to everyone who come here.” Gunther looked at me again. “So you still like the Walkers so much?” he said. I sipped my tea and protested meekly that I had never even met them.

From Thai and farang alike I heard stories, often improbable and sometimes mutually impossible. Our landlady, an elderly Thai who stopped by weekly to oversee the gardener, told me in a hushed whisper that she had heard that an earlier generation of Walkers had once commanded a guerrilla army of anti-Communist Christian converts in southern China: she used an unfamiliar Thai word to describe the Walkers, which, when I looked it up in the dictionary, I found meant warlord, or anyone resistant to the rule of the king, and hence outside the boundaries of civilization itself. A parent at the school had heard that they were the most generous philanthropists in the north of Thailand. According to a development worker I met by chance in a bar, they lived in ostentatious wealth offered up by pious contributors in humble clapboard churches across the Midwest. All my informants agreed that the Walkers had been in Asia a very long time, but details varied: the Walkers had lived, some said, in China; others said in Burma, in Laos, in Thailand. Nobody knew the details. Everyone seemed to have met or heard a story about a different Walker, and I couldn’t keep the names straight. I was told that the Walkers were the nicest people you could hope to meet, the real salt of the earth, doing God’s work; I was also told that the Walkers were opportunistic, fanatical, power-mad neocolonialists. They were at once a huge family riven by dissension, and they were close-knit. All I knew was that Martiya van der Leun shot the scion of the family two times in the back with a hunting rifle.

I had never met a missionary before, and so contradictory was the impression produced by all these stories that I had little idea what to expect. I had grown up in Manhattan. The only serious Christian I had ever met was my co-op’s handyman, a black man named Leon who was born again when I was about eleven after he went to a revival meeting in New Jersey. The phrase “born again” had confused me considerably at the time, and played on my imagination in horrific ways. All through my childhood and adolescence, Leon and I were friends, and I recall that once, after Kristin Skamanga dumped me, he told me in a serious voice, “It don’t matter about that little girl, ’cause Jesus loves you—you know? He loves you with all His heart.”

Beyond Leon, I knew no Christians who took their faith seriously. The missionary himself was a figure only from the short stories of Somerset Maugham, and I had imagined that the missionaries were faded relics of an earlier time, like Maugham’s colonial administrators who drank gin slings on the veranda overlooking the jungle at the Club. An appointment to meet real missionaries like the Walkers thus struck me as intensely exotic, as if I had been invited to visit Bhutan. The stories about the Walkers, like the stories about Martiya, thrilled me: I hoped that they were all true.

Later, when I came to know the Walkers well, I decided that they were stranger, far stranger, than those who had traded rumors and spun idle gossip imagined.

Asking a mother about her murdered son is a delicate operation, like removing a stray lash from a child’s eye. I had Mrs. Walker on the phone and was just starting to probe gently when she cut me off. “Oh, honey, you’re here in Chiang Mai?” she asked. “Then you just come by the Mission one of these days and we’ll talk. There’ll be someone around. There always is.”

Norma Walker said to drive north along the palm-fringed winding river road, past the Baptist church, then to take a right at the bar called Brasserie. “Do you know the place?” I certainly did: Rachel and I drank tequila there sometimes on Thursday nights when a long-haired guitarist named Tuk played note-perfect Jimi Hendrix and Santana covers with his backup band, the Tukables. I didn’t mention the tequila on the phone. Norma Walker said that not long past the bar there would be a noodle stand on the left and another on the right. The compound was down the red dirt road just past the second noodle stand. I said that I’d be there the next day at one.

I arrived early. The cement wall surrounding the Walker compound was topped with broken glass; a discreet brass placard beside the closed gate read: south china christian mission. At the end of the alley, a tuktuk driver had parked his rickshaw under the shade of a banyan tree and was asleep, sprawled in the back of his carriage. I could hear his snores.

From the outside, the compound had looked huge. But when I rolled back the front gate of the compound along its rusted track and stepped inside, the place was disappointingly gray and dusty, almost dingy. A pair of trailers sat on cement blocks along one wall; and along the other wall there was a large concrete house painted a pale chewing-gum pink. An exterior staircase led to the house’s second story, and then to its third— but the third story did not yet exist. Sturdy metal poles sprouted from the flat roof like antennae. The staircase simply wandered heavenward. Only a flowering jacaranda relieved the melancholy hot-season severity of the place, and snow-white blossoms drifted limply over the dead grass and dried mud. On the front stoop of the house, a small black cat with yellow eyes was licking her paws. I knocked on the door and wiped my forehead with my sleeve. I waited a moment and knocked again.

A voice sang out from the other side of the door, “Oh, Tom, just let yourself in.” It was Mrs. Walker’s voice.

Tom, Mischa—close enough. I slipped off my sandals and arranged them neatly beside the other shoes: the rubber sandals, the tennis shoes, the mud-caked leather work boots, the worn-down flip-flops, and the knee-high galoshes. I opened the unlocked door and stepped into the house.

An old woman looked up at me from a couch set at an angle to the front door. She was fleshy, and just slightly more of her pink-gray skin slipped out from under her faded blue housedress than I was meant to see: hints of puffy knees expanded to puffy calves lined with varicose trails leading down to puffy ankles. A puffy face rested on a puffy neck. Only her pale-green eyes were sharp, but they were very sharp, and they looked me up and down critically. “Oh, you are not Tom Riley at all,” she concluded, after a considerable period of judgment.

“No,” I admitted, and to cover the silence which fell over the room, I added, idiotically, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” the woman replied evenly. “I’m not Tom Riley either, after all.”

Having established to our mutual satisfaction that my failure to be Tom Riley implied no moral fault, she paid me no further mind, as if expecting that I knew the routine around here.

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” I finally said. “But I called yesterday. I’m Mischa Berlinski. And you must be Mrs. Walker.”

“I am,” the woman said. “Only, you can call me Nomie. Everyone does.”

“Okay, Nomie,” I obliged. I was still standing in the doorway, so I added, “I was going to come at one.”

“Then you’re right on time,” Nomie said. “Don’t mind me if I don’t get up. Mr. Walker will be with you in a moment. You just make yourself comfortable right there.”

She gestured to a couch opposite her own, and closing the door behind me, I took my place. On the phone the day before, I had indicated no preference as to which of the Walkers received me.

On the couch beside Nomie there was a ball of bright-blue yarn, which the old woman began to play with, spooling out several inches of thread, wrapping it around her thick fingers, and then rolling the yarn back onto the skein. She was not a woman to whom I would have otherwise applied the adjective “kittenish.” She seemed absorbed in the operation, but she must have noticed me staring at the ball, because she said, “The doctor told me this would be good for the arthritis.”

“Does it help?”

“I’m not sure just yet, but I do pray for some relief.”

There were no portraits of family, no bookshelves on the whitewashed walls. The only furniture was the fake-leather couch where Nomie sat, the fake-leather couch on which I had installed myself, and a wooden rocking chair. In the far corner there was an upright piano, its closed lid supporting a small tank in which three large goldfish swam frantic laps, like athletes in training for a goldfish Olympiad.

“Can I offer you a cool glass of orange Tang?” Nomie asked.

For the first and only time in my adult life, I was seized by the desire for a cool glass of orange Tang. I was aware suddenly that my throat was desperately parched, and I didn’t just want but needed a cool glass of orange Tang. “That would absolutely hit the spot,” I said.

Nomie looked down at the ball of yarn in her hand, which she continued to knead. Then she spoke very loudly in an utterly foreign language. It was a language with sounds I had never heard before, like whale song, or Martian. Her voice swooped and glided, and she inserted vowels and diphthongs which seemed to come from the deepest recesses of her gullet. The only word I understood was “Tang,” pronounced like the Chinese dynasty.

There was a pause and then a sympathetic feminine voice shouted out, “Okey-dokey, Grandma.” A few seconds later, a young woman entered the room, carrying a tray of glasses and a tall glass pitcher beaded with perspiration. She set the tray down on the coffee table. “Cool Tang!” she said.

The young woman poured me a glass of orange Tang from the pitcher. “Thank you,” I said. I took a sip, and for a second my mouth was flooded with long-forgotten memories of kindergarten. “You know, I had forgotten how much I like Tang.”

“I’m so glad! We like it too” she said with a giddy, musical laugh. She had the kind of face one finds smoothing out the virgin sheets of an unruffled bed in an Ikea catalogue, unthreatening to women but nevertheless appealing to men, with short dark hair sensibly cut and light-blue eyes. She sat down on the far couch, then turned toward Nomie. “Grandma, have you seen Tom Riley lately?” she asked.

“I thought he was Tom Riley, at first.”

“He was supposed to be here ages ago. We were talking about going to the zoo. I wanted to see the monkeys.” The young woman turned back to me. “I forgot my manners! Grandpa says I should just put them on a little chain. I’m Judith.”

The couches were close enough that by standing up and leaning far forward we could shake hands. Nomie explained that I was there to meet with Mr. Walker.

“But didn’t Grandpa go to Burma this morning?” Judith asked.

“No, he’s going to Mandalay tomorrow, so it’s lucky that you came today,” Nomie said. “But you can’t keep Mr. Walker too long because he needs a rest in the afternoons.”

Mandalay! I thought about asking if I could go too. “I hope you don’t mind my prying,” I said, “but what is Mr. Walker going to do in Mandalay? Does he go often?”

Nomie stopped kneading the ball of yarn.

“Why, he’s going to preach, of course!” Nomie said, in the same voice that she might have used to declare that books have pages—or the universe a Maker. It was almost certainly the first time in my life that I had heard anyone use the word “preach” in a wholly literal sense. It was a pleasant shock to discover that these missionaries were, in fact, missionaries, like the first sight of palm trees in the tropics. “We hold a Bible conference there every few months, and if Mr. Walker didn’t go . . .” Her voice drifted off. “I don’t go on those trips myself anymore because of the arthritis, but Mr. Walker!”

A gentle knock on the front door interrupted Nomie.

“Tom!” Judith said.

Nomie cleared her throat. “Tom Riley, don’t you make me move from this spot one more time,” she said. “You just let yourself in.”

Tom let himself in. He took a step into the room and closed the door behind him.

“Whew!” he said. “It is . . .”—he paused, and we all waited— “. . . hawt out there!”

He was a large man, a very large man, tall, with immensely broad shoulders and thick legs. He would have been big anywhere, but in Thailand he was mammoth.

“But you should be used to it!” protested Judith. “You’re from Tennessee!”

“All I know is that I’m hawt.”

“Have some Tang,” Nomie said.

“I’d love some,” Tom said. He bent over and took a glass of Tang from the tray. He righted himself slowly, and I reckoned to myself that the little glass of Tang was going to do nothing to quench this big man’s big thirst. But he took a sip with the utmost delicacy, licked his lips, and declared, “That’s better.”

Tom now noticed me for the first time. “I’m Tom Riley,” he said.

His hand swallowed up my own in a surprisingly gentle handshake. “It’s really great to meet you,” he said, in a voice as soft as his grasp. He took the seat next to me on the couch, sinking deep into the cushions, and as if he had sat in the prow of a canoe in which I occupied the stern, I felt myself rising up.

“Tom is staying with us a little while,” Nomie explained. “He’s helping Mr. Walker with his Bible.”

“Tom’s a linguist from Tennessee,” Judith added. “He knows more about the Dyalo than pretty much anyone.”

Tom’s huge face reddened. “Don’t believe everything these folks tell you. There’s not a heck of a lot I can tell a Walker about the Dyalo.”

Judith said, “Really, Tom! Just the other day you were telling us about those . . . those agglut . . . aggluttin . . .”

“Agglutinating pronouns.”

“Exactly! They were so interesting. Mischa, you have to ask Tom about them someday. He’ll tell you about them for hours. Hours and hours and hours.”

Tom looked at his very large bare feet. He said, “I’ve come here to learn from the Walkers, not the other way around.”

The modest declaration hung in the air a moment, until Nomie glanced at her watch and cluck-clucked. “Well, you’re surely not going to learn about lunch if we don’t get things moving around here,” she said. “Judith, honey, why don’t you go and hunt down your granddad while we talk? Now that Tom’s here, I have a feeling the boys will be wanting to eat soon.”

Judith got up and scampered away down the hallway. She was humming. Nomie continued to turn the ball of wool in her hands. “Mr. Walker gets to working, he just loses his sense of time,” she said. “And he just loves the Psalms. A peace comes over him when he reads the Psalms.”

“I see it in the work,” Tom said.

“It’s beautiful work,” added Nomie.

“Ah-men,” Tom said.

“But what exactly is Mr. Walker doing with the Psalms?” I asked.

Tom looked at me. “Why, don’t you know?”

“Now, Tom!” Nomie said. “Not everyone is in the Mission Community, not everyone follows the work.” Those people who didn’t, her voice implied, were of distinctly marginal importance.

“I suppose, but . . .”

Nomie looked up from the blue ball of wool. “Mr. Walker is translating the Bible into Dyalo,” she said. “Line by line and word by word. It’s his life’s work. It’s his legacy. His father got it All started, and his brother Samuel did so much of the Work, but they’ve gone Home now, and Mr. Walker is Finishing Up.” I have capitalized at my own discretion, but believe me—she really spoke that way. It was something in the way she looked upward as she spoke that offered the emphasis.

“He’s doing a beautiful job,” Tom added. “He’s an artist.”

Nomie’s mouth opened slightly. “Oh no, Tom. He’s Inspired. Like his father and his brother.”

“Yes, but Mr. Walker is a great man, and it takes nothing from the Lord to admit it,” Tom said defiantly. He turned to me. “The Dyalo didn’t even have an alphabet before Mr. Walker’s father gave them one. Can you imagine? Mr. Walker’s father invented an alphabet for the Dyalo. She’s a beauty. Wonderful vowels.”

“Tom should know! Alphabets are Tom’s specialty,” Nomie said.

Tom looked modestly at the ground, and then at his watch. I was on the verge of saying “Oh, really? A specialist in alphabets?” and asking “What brings you here to Thailand?” but was preempted by the strains of “Nearer My God to Thee,” coming from the vicinity of Tom’s groin. It was his cell phone. “Hey, Bill,” he said. Then he stood up from the couch and, covering the mouthpiece, said, “Y’all excuse me? I’ll wash up a little before lunch.” Tom walked slowly down the hall, still talking to Bill on the phone.

As soon as Tom Riley had left the room and his heavy footsteps could be heard ascending a flight of unseen stairs, Nomie looked at me. “Tom’s been with us now, I don’t know how long,” she said in a low, confidential voice. “Maybe five months, even. He came here to make Fellowship with us, and he won’t leave. You can’t believe how much he eats! But we get all types here. He wants to set out on a Mission himself, and he’s been here learning. The man has a wonderful way with the languages, but he’s just so darn big! He frightens the people. You know how the Dyalo are. I told him that he should make a mission to Africa, but he said he had heard about us and he has his heart set on the Dyalo.” She chuckled softly. “But he loves Jesus so much, and he’s got so much good heart, sometimes God chooses the oddest vehicles.”

She paused. I think she expected me to say something like “Amen” or “That He does!” but I stayed silent. Something in my silence encouraged her, and she continued: “The oddest vehicles! Who would have ever thought that He would have chosen me? Why, I remember when I met Mr. Walker for the first time! I was twenty-one years old, and he came to speak in 1956 at the Wheaton Bible College, where I was a student. He was older than me, almost thirty-five, but he was the handsomest man I had ever seen, with the saddest greenest eyes! Mr. Walker started talking about his childhood in Tibet and in China and his family’s work with the Dyalo, and I whispered to my girlfriend Evangeline, who was here to visit just last year, I said to her, ‘Evangeline, that is the man I am going to love and marry.’ I’ll bet half the girls in that auditorium were whispering that, but the Lord heard me, and now he’s mine. One year later there I was in Burma, married to Mr. Walker, with a baby on the way! I must say, it is a very good thing the Lord gives us memory but not foresight, because I really don’t know if I would have become a Walker if I’d known what was in store! When Mr. Walker came to speak that day, I don’t believe that I had ever once thought of spending my life in the Orient and Burma and Thailand and places like that. I had never even heard of the Dyalo. Now here I am in Thailand with five beautiful Dyalo babies, and fifteen Dyalo grandchildren!”

Nomie’s mention of her family reminded me why I was there. I started to construct a sentence around the name “David Walker” and found myself lacking a verb of adequate sensitivity. I debated “murdered,” “killed,” “passed away,” and “died.” Later, I learned that the Walkers preferred to say that he had been “called Home.” I didn’t say anything at all. I imagined Nomie wondered at her unusual guest who had phoned her out of the blue, come to her house, and drunk her Tang in silence! But really, I had no idea at what strange things Nomie wondered: there was some weirdness in the Walker way that made the normal conversational forays seem weak and ineffective, even inappropriate. It was like talking to royalty, or to the very wealthy, or the very beautiful.

The silence was broken by the entrance into the living room of a man who I presumed was Mr. Walker. He was a man of perhaps—who can tell with old people?—eighty?—old, gray, and not entirely steady on his bare feet. Yet tomorrow he was going to Mandalay! He walked slowly to the rocking chair, and with a deliberate motion turned himself in a half circle, gripped the railings of the chair, and hovered himself down. Then, turning to me, he extended his hand across his body, and I rose halfway off the couch to shake it. His large hand was calloused and strong. “Thomas Walker,” he murmured in a low voice.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” I said.

“Glad to have you here,” he replied.

Installed comfortably in his rocking chair, Mr. Walker seemed a more solid presence than he was on his feet. His dark-green eyes were the color of drying moss; they flickered alertly behind heavy square-rimmed glasses. His hair was gray but thick, cut short, and held in place with oil. His light-gray skin was very cleanly shaved, and I wondered idly for a second how he shaved the jowls: Did he shave down one side of the jowl, arrive at the cleft, and mount back up the other side, like a mountaineer? Mr. Walker wore a checked buttoned-up shirt and a pair of shiny brown polyester slacks which rode up high on his waist. He had the severe, serious, grave, and melancholy air of the midwestern farming stock from which I later learned he came. He was not a large man, but he dominated the room in a way that big Tom Riley hadn’t.

Mr. Walker began to rock. Nomie placed the ball of wool in her lap. Outside the window, the slow thump of construction began from somewhere far away. From down the hall, I heard the clink of metal pans and the sizzle of something frying. I could think of no way at all to introduce the subject of David Walker and why Martiya might have killed him. I had no excuse for being here except that I was very curious and thought that if the story was good I could sell it: I would summarize their grief in two thousand words, peddle it to the Bangkok Times or Executive, and then the story of their son’s death would line the birdcages of Bangkok’s better families. The Walkers sat implacably, organically, rocking slowly, adjusting themselves, as if my presence there were no more notable than one of the dark, buzzing flies that came in from the garden—until finally Mr. Walker asked his wife if Tom Riley would be at home for lunch.

“I think so. He’s just gone to wash up.”

“And Bill? Did you hear from Bill?”

“He called this morning. He’s busy as a guy can be, and Margaret is sick. But he’s got the hymnals all ready for tomorrow.”

“It’s a good thing Tom decided to go to Burma. Need somebody to carry those boxes!” Mr. Walker said.

Mr. and Mrs. Walker laughed.

“Is Preacher Matthew going to be taking the jeep?” Mrs. Walker asked.

“Why?” said Mr. Walker. “Why should he take the jeep?”

“Well, honey, if he’s going up to Chiang Rai and Dok Rao to witness, he’ll need the jeep.”

“We’ll worry about that when I get back,” said Mr. Walker decisively. He turned to me. “And you, young man, what can we do for you? Can we help you with something?”

It was the most natural question in the world.

I hesitated a moment, then told them why I was there. I confessed everything—about Josh O’Connor and his visit with Martiya van der Leun, how I had spoken subsequently with Martiya’s family and friends. I told the Walkers that I wanted to know the final pieces of Martiya’s story, and I babbled out an apology for the imposition.

When I was done, the room was silent again. Mr. Walker rocked in his chair slowly once or twice. He looked at me, and then at the ground, and then his eyes fell on his wife. Nomie picked up her ball of wool and placed it beside her. Then she stood herself up from the couch.

“We do not say the name of that woman in this house,” she said, and, moving slowly on her puffy legs, left the darkened room.

Mr. Walker insisted that I stay for lunch.

“Nomie’s a fiery woman, but she’d be just crushed if you didn’t eat with us,” Mr. Walker said. “Her bark is worse than her bite.” There was a distinctly doubtful note in his voice.

Mr. Walker led me into the dining room, where Nomie and a slight Asian woman were setting the table. Like the living room, the dining room was austere, bare but for a long table surrounded by high-backed chairs. Nomie smiled at me as I entered, and I did my best to smile back. “Mischa, this is Ah-Mo, our helper,” she said, and turning toward Ah-Mo, she made what I assumed was the inverse introduction in what I assumed was Dyalo.

“Ah-Mo doesn’t speak any English,” Nomie said. I started to speak to Ah-Mo in my clumsy Thai, but Nomie added, “She also hasn’t learned any Thai yet. Ah-Mo is Dyalo. She’s here from Burma. She’s a refugee.”

Ah-Mo was the first Dyalo I had met, and her unusual face held me entranced for a moment. No one knows where the Dyalo come from, but some speculate Tibet—and there was to her face a Tibetan air: she was flat-featured but round-eyed, with thin, elegant lips. I wished I could talk with her: it is always difficult to read very foreign faces, but there was something keen and witty in the way she looked at me, as if she’d have a million good stories about these people, if only we could brew up some barley tea and chat. Judith must have seen me staring at Ah-Mo. Standing beside me, she whispered, “How old do you think Ah-Mo is?”

“Maybe thirty?” I whispered back.

“She’s over fifty,” Judith said. “Isn’t that amazing?”

“Wow.”

“It’s because there’s no pollution in the mountains.”

“Do all the Dyalo look like her?”

Judith looked shocked. “Oh my, no,” she said. “Only the Christians.”

I was on the verge of asking from what unpleasantness Ah-Mo had fled when Nomie waved me to a place at the table. When we were all arranged, there were six of us: Mr. and Mrs. Walker, Judith, Tom Riley, who had mysteriously appeared from the stairwell and was greeted with almost rapturous pleasure by the entire Walker family, Ah-Mo, and myself. Mr. Walker asked Judith to say grace, and Judith Walker again spoke in that utterly strange language. Everyone at the table folded their hands in front of their chins and closed their eyes. Judith must have been very grateful for the food because grace went on a very long time. Then Mr. Walker decided he wanted to bless the food, too, because he started talking in Dyalo also. This was the signal that we were all supposed to hold hands. Ah-Mo’s dry little hand reached out for mine on the left, and on the other side I found Tom Riley’s enormous whale fin of a palm. Yet it was Ah-Mo who held my hand tighter.

Conversation over lunch—midwestern with Oriental accents: baby corn fried in a wok with bacon; an omelette served over rice with cheese, chili peppers, and tomatoes—was general: travel plans were made; the health of people whose names I did not recognize discussed—they all seemed to be getting better, thank the Lord (which was not a reflexive phrase at all but an actual opportunity for those seated around the table to bow their heads and murmur for a moment), all except someone named Susie, who apparently was not doing so well; construction would begin soon on the Ministry Center. This was missionary shop talk, and after the first half hour or so, it was boring.

At one point, Judith leaned across the table and touched my forearm.

“Mischa, are you a Christian?” she asked.

“No,” I said. I shifted uncomfortably in place and said that I was Jewish.

All of the Walkers and Tom Riley turned in my direction and stared, as if I had announced that I was pregnant with triplets, all except Ah-Mo, who hadn’t understood a word. She just kept eating.

Finally, Judith said, “How wonderful! We love to meet Jewish people. You know, Jewish people are God’s chosen people.”

Judith stared at me. “No, it’s true,” she insisted, and at that moment, Mr. Walker, who had been momentarily distracted, asked his wife to pass the milk, and the conversation drifted back to the pastor from Terre Haute who would be coming next week to make fellowship.

After Nomie’s explosion, I certainly wasn’t going to be the dang fool who introduced Martiya’s name back into conversation. Lunch had lulled me: the day was warm, my eyes were heavy. I had organized my life around the principle that nothing came between me and my naps—not murderous anthropologists, not fiery-tempered missionaries—and for all of Nomie’s protestations that Mr. Walker liked to take himself a little rest in the afternoons, the man seemed to me altogether too wide awake: these missionaries, I concluded sadly, were not the napping type. They were decidedly of the this-life-is-short-so-let’s-get-something-done type. So it was with excitement and drowsiness mingled in equal measure that I accepted when at the end of the long meal Mr. Walker invited me to join him in his study.

Mr. Walker led me to his study and then left me alone in it for a moment, as he recalled another question for his wife. I am a snoop when it comes to people’s books, and I studied his while I waited. His library wasn’t large, and it was clearly the collection of a man with a narrowly centered but deeply researched set of interests. There were at least a half dozen translations of the Bible into English, from the King James to the New Revised Standard, as well as editions of the Old and New Testament in the original Greek and Hebrew. There were Greek and Hebrew dictionaries and grammars. Every book of the Bible had a thick, leather-bound commentary. These formed an imposing shelf unto themselves. There were books arguing against Darwinian theories of evolution, and a smaller number of books supporting the theory. There was a book entitled Apocalypse Tomorrow, the thickest of a long series of tomes which to judge by their bright-red covers seemed to be arguing that the end was very nigh. There were a few Tom Clancy novels with well-cracked spines.

Mr. Walker returned to the office after a minute and closed the door behind him. He circumnavigated his desk, then sank down with a grunt. He folded his hands into narrow steeples and brought them to rest in front of his mouth. He stared at me very seriously.

“I didn’t want you to leave without an answer to your question,” he said. “It’s just that Nomie, she gets so upset.”

“I understand,” I said. “It’s natural. I’m sorry I—”

“Do you know how they found Davy?” he asked.

“Davy?”

“My son,” Mr. Walker said.

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t know how they found him.”

Mr. Walker didn’t say anything for so long that I began to think that I had offended him too. “When Davy fell from the bridge,” he began, “he fell a long way, but the doctor said, the doctor said he probably survived that. His left arm wasn’t broken, it was shattered, like a windowpane. His leg was broken, too, but not so bad. She left him for two days, and then she shot him from behind. That was the worst part, her leaving him. Two days.”

The only noise in the room was the hum of the air conditioner.

“He was just thirty,” Mr. Walker continued. “So when Mrs. Walker . . . Mrs. Walker—I don’t think I’ve ever met a better Christian than my Nomie. She wrote to Martiya in prison, she sent her food even, and clothing. She forgave her. I think she genuinely forgave Martiya, because she knew Martiya—she knew that it wasn’t Martiya who killed her baby. But . . . but until you lose a child—you don’t know what a murder means. How do you act like a good Christian when someone does something like that to your boy?”

Mr. Walker’s voice was deep, and he spoke softly, and when he wanted to emphasize something, he spoke softer still, so that when he told me that Mrs. Walker was a good Christian woman, I was leaning on the edge of my chair, straining to catch his words. Mr. Walker stared at me a moment, and I realized with a start that his question wasn’t rhetorical. He was waiting for an answer.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how you act like a good Christian.”

“Fair enough. You don’t know what a murder means.” It wasn’t an accusation, just a simple statement of fact. Mr. Walker fingered the Greek dictionary lying open on his desk. “It’s a rough, rough business we’re in. I have a friend here who’s a phu yai, a policeman, and goes after the worst kind of men—drug dealers and men who put hill-tribe women in cages and sell ’em in Bangkok like pigs, I’ve seen it, rough business— but I sometimes think we Walkers chose the roughest line of work there is. I always wonder if David really knew how rough it is, if we prepared him. My parents knew, and my brothers and sisters, and Mrs. Walker, and I think even the other kids knew that it was a rough business—but David, he was such a likable guy. Everyone liked him. Charming as heck. I don’t think he ever really understood how cruel and vicious and cunning and resourceful the forces keeping the Dyalo in bondage were, how they were prepared to stop at nothing to keep the Dyalo enslaved.”

I had no idea whatsoever what Mr. Walker was talking about. I nodded and crossed my legs. He unfolded his long fingers and spread them out on his desk.

“We used to have her in this house, did you know that?”

“I had no idea.”

“Oh yes, she was here all the time. She had so many questions, and we might not be scholars, but we know the Dyalo better than anyone. She stayed right in this house, and she’d ask us all those questions for her research. She’d ask why the Dyalo think pregnant women can’t use iron knives and we’d tell her, or why the Dyalo think it’s shameful for the man and his wife to plant the rice in the field together. We’d tell her, ‘Well, gosh, that’s simple, you see it’s like this,’ and she’d say, ‘Gosh, you people are Dyalo!’ and Mrs. Walker would say, ‘Four generations—you get used to folks!’ But Mrs. Walker was wrong about that. We’re not Dyalo, and God made people as mysterious as He is. You don’t get to know anyone.”

A phone rang and rang again. Mr. Walker stopped talking for a second, and when Nomie shouted, “Honey, it’s for you, it’s Khun Nirawat,” he picked up the cordless phone which was sitting on his desk and began to speak in Thai. Excellent, fluid Thai—the kind of Thai I’d be lucky to have if I stayed in Thailand another thirty years. He raised a finger to say that he’d just be a minute. Something on the other end of the line made him chuckle. After a minute or two, he hung up the phone and his face grew serious again. “The Dyalo aren’t foolish, you know,” he declared, almost aggressively.

“I didn’t think they were,” I said, almost defensively.

“It was the hardest thing for that woman to understand. We understood that the Dyalo people . . . the Dyalo had certain needs, and the Dyalo recognized that we understood those needs. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Mr. Walker spoke so calmly, so reasonably, that I was sure that when I thought it over later it would all make sense. I nodded. Mr. Walker seemed satisfied with this response.

“The Dyalo would tell her that they were in bondage—bondage!—to the demons, and she’d write in her little notebook, ‘The Dyalo have a rich hierarchical system of animistic spirit worship.’ She didn’t believe them. But we knew what was going on, because we’ve been here so long. Back when we first came, family after family asked us, ‘Two thousand years! Why did it take you so long to come with God’s word? To bring us this Good News? We were orphans and slaves to the forces of darkness! Our fathers have died, our grandfathers all died in bondage—and they died without hearing this Word.’ Foolish people don’t talk like that, you know—people know when they’re slaves, and I tell you, brother, no man wants to live in chains.”

“Of course not,” I said. We sat for a second. I started to worry that my response had been condescending, so I asked, “What did you tell them?”

“Tell who?”

“The Dyalo. The Dyalo who wanted to know why you didn’t come faster.”

“I always said that we Walkers had come just as quickly as we could, and we didn’t know why the others hadn’t come sooner. But we were heartbroken, all of us, just heartbroken, that the Word didn’t come much earlier, in time for all their forefathers to hear. When we told the Dyalo that they didn’t need to be slaves, that they could be free—why! they’d come over to us, whole families, whole villages.” Mr. Walker’s green eyes were bright. “We warned her, we warned Martiya when she came that the evil spirits in the hills are dangerous, but she didn’t believe us. We told her that the Deceiver was in those mountains and she needed to take precautions. We told her it was all right here”—he tapped the Bible. “ ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ That’s in Ephesians, and we read that to her, and she smiled politely, and she wrote in her notebook, and then she shot our boy.”

He paused for a moment.

“She pulled the trigger, but make no mistake, it was the demons who killed him,” he finally said. “I think she got into those hills and slowly but surely the demons mastered her. I think the demons who wanted, who were desperate, to keep the Dyalo in bondage murdered David.” I must have looked at him strangely because he added, “It happens, you know—we’ve been here a long time and we’ve seen it.”

A moment later, Mrs. Walker came into the study and with hardly more than a look made it clear that it was time for Mr. Walker to take his rest. I thanked the Walkers and went outside. The black cat was dozing on the stoop of the house, and the tuk-tuk driver was still snoozing under the banyan tree.