The Glass Kingdom Read online

  The Glass Kingdom is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Osborne

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Osborne, Lawrence, 1958–

  Title: The Glass Kingdom : a novel / Lawrence Osborne.

  Description: First edition. | London ; New York : Hogarth, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020002452 (print) | LCCN 2020002453 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984824301 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984824325 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6065.S23 K56 2020 (print) | LCC PR6065.S23 (ebook) DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020002452

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020002453

  Ebook ISBN 9781984824325

  randomhousebooks.com

  Design by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Michael Morris

  Cover illustrations: Anastasia_Nio/Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Lawrence Osborne

  About the Author

  Kwam lub mai mee nai loke

  There are no secrets in the world

  —THAI PROVERB

  ONE

  On the upper floors of the Kingdom, as the first winds of the monsoon picked up, the rains swept in just before first light. The cannons of a storm sounded in the distance. In Sarah’s apartment, where she kept the tall sliding windows open, she felt the gusts even in her sleep, the geckos hunting on her walls scattering, moving toward the ceiling and its deeper shadow. She dreamed that she was swimming in an indoor pool back in New York, at the old YWCA near Fifty-Third Street, alone and chilled, until a siren wailed in the distance and the pool disintegrated. Her eyes opened, the equator returned, and the sweat on her back failed to dry. She panicked for a moment and felt for the edge of her mattress to situate herself. What day was it? Koel birds called out across the city, whooping laments, and at once she remembered the waste lots of jungle below her windows with their listing flame trees alongside the ruined tobacco warehouses that had stood there since the Japanese occupation. A faint hum came from the stormy Saen Saep Canal nearby, its black water churning with dawn commuter boats. She was alone among the flies, and the moon was still high above the dirty white skyscrapers of Bangkok.

  The construction sites that surrounded the Kingdom had not yet stirred to life. But now storklike figures in gumboots picked their way through the pools, squatting under awnings and smoking their morning pipes while rain collected in the cement craters around them. They seemed to work night and day, dark Khmer men in chams who sometimes came out into the stifling air and looked across at the aristocrats in their vertical kingdom. There was nothing in their eyes, no recognition, just as she imagined there was nothing in hers. She drank a pot of French press coffee at her garden table and heated up half a defrosted croissant. The hour before six A.M. was the only time of the day when she felt safe, the hour she imagined when even the policemen here slept for a brief interlude, distracted from their own enormous indifference to crimes and punishments.

  Gradually, the first low rays hit the hundreds of towers. In the gardens fifteen floors below, the maids had emerged with their carpet beaters. The villas lay all around her, with their high walls and fan palms, and in a sheltered pool within one of them an old woman lay on her back with a small dog on her stomach, a virtuoso balancing act. The sluggish fountains came back to life, breakfast was served in summerhouses, and men in black suits departed in limousines. She had chosen her spot carefully. It was a corner of upper-class affluence hidden within a forgotten ruin.

  She had been in her new apartment for a few days and had purposely met no one, apart from the eccentric Thai grandee who was her landlady, Mrs. Lim. It was how Sarah wanted to keep it. Most of the seven rooms in her apartment were still unfurnished and did not yet feel familiar. In the sitting room her three suitcases still lay open on the floor, clothes spilling out of them. She was too listless to unpack them properly, and was still uncertain whether she might have to decamp as suddenly as she had arrived. Therefore she left the cotton blinds permanently down against both the sun and other tenants. Inside, there were parquet floors and a long kitchen like a ship’s galley with a chessboard floor and an American fridge with steel doors. There was a feeling of estrangement and isolation about it, though the previous tenant had been a Thai designer who had painted all the walls ocher and dark green, which might have been colors of luck and fortunate karma for all she knew. The cabinets were made of old teak, a wood now illegal, and there was a stained-glass window in the kitchen. Now that she thought about it, she was fortunate that the class-conscious landlady had not asked to see a passport. She had impressed Mrs. Lim with her aura of good breeding, and it appeared that the august American name Talbot rang a little silver bell even here. In reality, she had chosen the name Sarah Talbot Jennings merely to be forgettable.

  Each morning began with an idle swim in the shared pool. For this she went down in the elevator in her swimsuit and a bathrobe, wearing spa slippers and carrying a thermos of more freshly brewed coffee. But before that, and facing her bathroom mirror, she pulled her newly dyed white-blond hair up into a tight ponytail, and inserted the colored contacts that changed her eyes from green to blue. She had found them in a Thai supermarket, a line called Alcon FreshLook. It was not a complicated operation, and she was learning to do it a little faster every day. When she was done, she put on her bathing suit and calculated all the moves she would make that day. Mere repetitions calculated to pass the time, to make her appear ordinary, because an unplanned day is more difficult to organize than a planned one. Since she had no job, it was an unexpectedly difficult problem she had to solve anew every morning. She was in the city purely to make herself invisible for a while, to turn herself into a living ghost in one of the few places where a solitary white woman would be little noticed, sexually or otherwise. When eventually the day was completely mapped out in her head, she sortied out in her bathrobe with her thermos and stepped onto her private landing, where the elevator awaited.

  The Kingdom consisted of four towers, each with twenty-one floors, each connected to the others by closed-off landings whose glass do
ors could be opened only with the security key each tenant possessed. They were thus entirely private. The first and second floors of the building, however, were public spaces. On the lower of these two floors was a replica of a French formal garden, with shrubberies dying in the heat and two-story villas around it, a grander form of lodging offered by the Kingdom. The patios were filled with Chinese lions and plaster Germanic milkmaids with wide-brimmed bonnets pinned onto walls of plastic ivy.

  A flight of steps connected the decaying garden with a large pool on the floor above it, itself surrounded by trellises of untamed foliage and Chinese box trees with their aroma of crushed almonds, looking out over abandoned tobacco warehouses. This kind of building had once been fashionable. It was a long-outmoded idea of luxurious living built in the heady days of the early ’90s, the Asian boom that had come and gone and come back again. Now-bankrupt tycoons had built European-style fantasies up and down the street, with turrets, portcullises, and topiary, but they had faded and peeled in a heat that didn’t suit them. The little canals, the klongs, which once gave the illusion of lordly moats, had filled with toxins and monitor lizards.

  In the elevator Sarah found herself reflected in a full-length mirror. She glanced up at the security camera in the corner, knowing that the men at reception were watching her at all times, and as she did the camera’s eye seemed to blink. On the fourth floor, a middle-aged woman dressed in a housecoat and slippers got in with her Pomeranian, and in an instant the elevator was claustrophobic. The woman, unable to speak English, had one hand gripped around a leash studded with glass diamonds. The elevator doors at last opened to the first floor, where Burmese maids were already gathered with their masters’ own little Pomeranians and toy poodles. There was a sound of carpets being beaten in the surrounding obscurity. Sarah walked past them, climbed the single flight of steps up to the pool, and slipped into the water.

  The children had not yet arrived with their inflatable dolphins and flamingos, and the maids high up in the windows paused to stare down at the white girl resting in the shallows. How did she appear to them? As she looked back at them that morning, another early-morning swimmer made her way toward the pool. A woman of about Sarah’s age, thirty more or less, in the black one-piece of a serious amateur lap racer. The newcomer didn’t even notice Sarah at first and was under the trellis, throwing aside her towel, when she finally did so. She had not yet drawn her goggles down over her eyes when a brief smile came to her lips, and she wished Sarah a good morning. She was Thai or Eurasian; it was hard to tell, though there was little that was European about her.

  Sarah returned the greeting. She then edged away to give herself a little more space. The woman positioned herself carefully, delicately self-conscious, and then sprang into a slick front crawl that propelled her to the far side of the pool in seconds. She did ten laps before she stopped at the shallow end, whereupon she raised her goggles and looked over at Sarah.

  “Did I disturb you?”

  She spoke in British-inflected English, the accent regionally indistinct. Instinctively, Sarah decided that she was wholly Thai after all. She had learned her English at a good school, that was all.

  “Me? No. I’m not really here to swim. I just come to cool off and waste time.”

  The girl slapped the water with both hands. As if obeying her signal, the clouds parted above the surrounding towers, and a shaft of sunlight shot down into the gardens and hit a corner of the pool. It was a different heat from the air’s humidity.

  The girl went on, “Well, it’s as good a reason as any to be in a pool. But I haven’t seen you here before.”

  Sarah said that she had just moved into her apartment. It was on the fifteenth floor, in the southeast tower—Tower B.

  “I’m on the floor below you—floor fourteen, in Tower A,” the girl said. “I’m Mali, by the way. But my nickname is View.”

  “View?”

  “Yes. It’s a Thai thing—we give our children these odd little names. I know the English don’t do that.” The newcomer’s voice was pitched in the English way, but its sensuality felt slightly rehearsed to Sarah’s ear.

  “I wouldn’t know, I’m an American.”

  “You here alone?” she asked.

  Sarah paused for a moment before answering. “Yes.”

  The girl cast a cool and unforgiving eye over the looming towers above them.

  “It’s quite a place to be alone.”

  With that, she pulled herself out of the water and walked over to the towel draped across the back of her lounger. Her back was scooped and subtly muscular, the arms toned without being overdeveloped. There was a dark blue sak yant Buddhist tattoo on her left shoulder, a fashionable accessory these days. It carried a calculated element of sprezzatura. She walked with a poise that had been fine-tuned over the years. Like a dancer, Sarah thought, who never quite made it. She had a touch of recklessness about her, her perfectly cut hair reaching down to the small of the back, where it curled gently upward in a wave produced by tongs. An expensive cut. She had a thermos as well, Sarah now noticed. Mali unscrewed the top of hers and drank.

  “Would you like some?”

  “No, thank you, I have one,” Sarah said, pointing to her own on the lounger.

  “This isn’t coffee.”

  Sarah swung herself out of the pool as well and sat in the rapidly disappearing segment of sunlight.

  “What is it?”

  The girl came over and handed her the thermos. It was gin and tonic, and Sarah spat it out.

  “It gets me going,” the girl said, ignoring the spit, and leaned back on her elbows with a smile. “Maybe you don’t need anything to get you going. Let me guess—you’re a teacher or something? Don’t take that the wrong way.”

  Sarah said that she was a writer, of sorts.

  “Of sorts?”

  “I’m just starting out.”

  “Do writers start out?”

  “I guess they do.” Sarah felt herself tense, wanting to change the subject. “And you? Not a teacher, I’m guessing.”

  “I’m an assistant to a financial manager. A British guy.” Mali’s tone was vague, as if she were making it up. “Do I look like one?”

  “No, you very much don’t.”

  And for a moment Sarah’s hand instinctively went up to touch her hair. She was sure that the girl had given it a questioning look.

  The pool could be seen easily from hundreds of windows above it. Yet the Kingdom itself rarely cast a shadow over the water. Like an Egyptian temple, it had been designed with the movements of the sun in mind. Profiting from this, Sarah and Mali lay on the loungers looking up not at the rows of windows, many dusty and half-opened, but at the thickening monsoon clouds above them. There was a drumroll of thunder from far off, a single muted flicker of lightning. The first drops of rain on the trellis and on the surface of the pool.

  “I hate naa fon,” Mali said at last. “The rainy season.”

  “It’s my first one.”

  “Oh, you’ll hate it too.”

  Mali stretched out on her lounger, and it seemed to Sarah that she was in no hurry whatsoever to get to work.

  “Soon we’ll be living on an island. The street outside floods almost immediately. Some of the residents have little dinghies that they use to get to the main road. Two hours of rain and we’ll have a foot of canal water up to our knees. But if you don’t have to go to an office every morning then you won’t care.”

  “No, I’ll be here.”

  Breezing along with a lie she had prepared in advance, Sarah said that she was here to take an extended leave from her life in New York while writing a few freelance lifestyle pieces for Town & Country to keep herself occupied. It was enough for her to get by.

  Mali smiled at her. “Lucky girl. How long have you been in the city?”

  Sarah was vague: a few day
s. She had been traveling around Asia for a while, probing and experimenting, keeping her savings close to her chest.

  “You’re one of those, then.” Mali sighed, sinking back and sucking on the thermos.

  “One of what?”

  “Trust-fund babies. The building is full of them.”

  Mali’s eyes lit up with mischief, which in turn made Sarah smile, despite herself. In some way—Sarah thought—it was obvious that she didn’t need to work and it was amusing to think that she could so easily have been caught out.

  “You got me there.”

  The conversation rolled on. Mali revealed that she wasn’t married, nor did she have a boyfriend. She guessed Sarah was the same. Mali had had an inheritance but she had spent it all on disillusioning herself through her own pleasures, which was why she now had to work as a personal assistant. Her firm was nearby in the Interchange Building—a well-known office building a few blocks away on Soi 23—and she walked there every morning. Her clients were all high-society psychopaths. She then said, changing the topic, that she had two other friends in the Kingdom and that they sometimes played cards together after work. One was a chef, the other a hotel manager. Perhaps Sarah would like to join them one night?

  “How kind,” Sarah said, pretending to think it over while wanting nothing more than to distance herself from this early-morning gin-drinking woman who struck her as a loose cannon.

  She had been about to politely refuse, but something had shifted in her mind: perhaps a few acquaintances in the building might be expedient after all. Even after only a few days—she had to admit to herself—she was already lonely, and with that, distinctly bored. The distractions of the city had not yet penetrated her solitude, if they ever would, and each evening, not knowing quite what to do with herself, she would sit on her balcony and listen to the student dances lighting up the night in the university campus on the far side of the street. She grew aware of how completely they excluded her and how isolated she was likely to remain.