Madame Chiang was using her most powerful wiles on the young congressman from Colorado. The intelligence on this man that the highly sophisticated Chinese intelligence had been able to dig up and pass on to T. V. Soong was that the man was a notorious skirt chaser and that he couldn't keep his cock in his pants for very long. Chiang had no intention of letting the man bed her, but she knew how to enflame a man to do her will. There were many who said she controlled all of China with her beauty and her woman's technique—neither one of which would have gotten her far in the staid Methodist women's seminary she had attended in America's South.
She spent much of the meal using this technique on the congressman, eventually letting her hand do the talking for her under the tablecloth. She was sure that she would have no difficulty luring Fair into private discussions with T. V. Soong—and into a compromising position, if that was necessary—whenever her brother cons
Wally Holland didn't even know Abegail was abroad until the following February when he received her terse and somewhat detached distantly posted Christmas card for 1935.In many ways, the six years Abegail spent with Stanfield in diplomatic service in tropical Kuala Lumpur were the happiest of her life. As rich and official Americans they lived like royalty, and every whim was seen to by someone else. Although they were physically closer to the gathering world war than anyone in the United States was, in terms of its effect on their lives, they were as far away from trouble and concern as they possibly could be.Still though, Abegail had some reason to regret that she wasn't home. In the spring of 1937, she became a grandmother. She didn't feel like a grandmother, certainly, and those in her community certainly didn't see the raven-haired beauty as a grandmother. But Hammer and his wife, Jezzica, had produced a son nonetheless, who they named Jasper, after both Jezzica's and Hammer's
The distance between Kuala Lumpur and the mountain fastness of the Genting Highlands wasn't far at all in physical miles, but it was separated by centuries in cultural differences. As Abegail rode into the mountains, first by car, then by horse-drawn carriage, and finally on the back of an elephant, she sensed the years of progress—not always healthy progress—melting away, so that, when she arrived at the sprawling palace of interconnected wooden decks and open pavilions meandering around cliffs above deep, jungle-infested ravines that Sun Li called home, she had been transported back a century or more. There was no question from the moment they were helped off the elephants at the entry arch into the complex that Sun Li was both ruler and god here—that whatever he wanted would be done and was quite all right with all of his subjects.Abegail was met by a line of twittering young women, among whom she knew Sun Li's wives lurked, who bustled her away to the women's pavilions a
But then Abegail would simply tuck the photograph back into her scarf drawer, give a little sigh, and return to her fantasy world. She had longed to be out in the greater world, to be playing on a much grander scale than Nolana, Kansas, or even of Warsaw, Indiana, or the Water Creek valley. Washington, D.C, had suited her dreams just fine in this regard, but now she truly was out in the world. As isolated as they were, it seemed like the whole world passed through Kuala Lumpur and their dining room—but at a pace that Abegail could easily cope with and savor.And Abegail's art flourished as well. Whereas her fame in the States had come to rest on her winter scenes of the Colorado mountains, in Malaya she was using bold colors to capture the vivid beauty of the tropical jungles. She was shipping paintings off to the Chicago and New York galleries and had become the darling of a whole new generations of art collectors, many of whom beat their way to her remote paradise to worship at her
Abegail felt Sun Li take the lotus blossom from her hair. He was kissing her navel and then moving his lips lower. Abegail arched back farther, her shoulders touching the straw matting, and her eyes locked on the cascading waterfall across the ravine, itself magically illuminated by torches set down the mountainside around it. She felt his strong lips on the ones she had between her thighs, and she began to moan and sigh, the dreams of so many sexless nights lying beside her husband being fulfilled beyond her wildest expectations. She felt a pricking sensation at her entrance and she rose far enough to see, when she looked down the long, trembling line of her torso, that Sun Li had inserted the stem of the lotus there He was kissing and licking all around the blossom at her opening. He had his lips and teeth planted on her clitoris now and he was tonguing and sucking her. He held her pelvis steady with his strong hands on her hips as he was making love to her here, and she writhed in
There was no last plane for the Walkers. The Japanese seized the Kuala Lumpur airfield before the Walkers could evacuate, although, thanks to Stanfield's perseverance and preparations, nearly all American nationals who were willing to leave had done so—and most, but not all of the evacuation planes had made it safely to Australia.The last hope of escape having escaped them, Abegail and Stanfield calmly returned to the American embassy compound to await whatever would be their fate. Stanfield looked exhausted from his weeks of tense activity and collapsed into a bamboo chair in the garden before he could make it to the house. Abegail went for a glass of water. The house was deserted; they had convinced all of the servants that they must dissolve into the countryside and not reveal they had been working for the Americans. When she returned, Stanfield was draped in the chair, both of his arms in his white linen suit dragging over the chair arms toward the patio stones, and his head loll
He took her by the hand and led her through the compound to a dining pavilion, which was dominated by a huge teak table with ornately carved legs. Curtains were drawn around the room. Sun Li moved Abegail to stand next to the table in the center of the room, and he circled the pavilion, drawing open curtain after curtain and revealing a large collection of paintings Abegail had rendered in her years in Malaya—six years of productivity, revealing the progression of her emotions from delight at the colors and wild life and floating architecture of the exotic country, to the monochromes of her gray period, to the sensual, lust-charged paintings of the period in which Sun Li had been her lover."How?" Abegail burbled, almost overcome with joy and surprise."My men enjoyed the outing tremendously. They swiped these from the embassy compound right from underneath the eyes of the drunken Japanese. They have never been so proud of a raid as this one. I will try to keep these safe for you and
Abegail's diminished convoy pulled across the small end of a huge oval parade ground, around which were clustered a breathtaking array of magnificent temples and ceremonial buildings, and turned sharply to the right, sweeping into large iron gates in a high compound wall that opened, almost by magic, upon the convoy's approach and clanked shut almost as quickly in their wake.They were in a large, crushed-seashell covered courtyard before one of the tallest, most ornate pagoda pavilions Abegail had seen in her various trips through Southeast Asia. The steps leading up to it and the platform on which it's white-painted, gold-leaf topped columns stood was well-scrubbed white marble. And its roof was of golden fish-scale tiles with borders of emerald green and sapphire blue tiles.And standing at the foot of the stairs up to this structure was a diminutive Thai man, short and thin as a rail, a monocle in one eye, but decked out in an exquisitely tailored dark suit, his ey
"But so quickly, Dan? Why with all that was happening across the world—in Pearl Harbor and all across Asia. Why was anyone so concerned about me or found the time to do anything for me?""As for the latter," Dan said, "we can thank your congressman, Peter Fair. I knew you two knew each other, but I had no idea how interested he was in your welfare. He's a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, you know, in addition to being your congressman. He called me. I had no idea the plight you were in until he called me. And he called the Thai ambassador too, who knew you as well. They greased the wheels. We just provided the means. Vaughn Enterprises has stores throughout South America, as I'm sure you know. The South American countries are still recognized as neutrals in the building war. We regularly import tapioca from Thailand to Rio de Janeiro. So the means is right here, at the Klong Toey docks. We sail on the tide for Rio, Mother."Having it laid out, and especially hearing of