The Third Brother

Nick McDonell

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781843544784
• eBook ISBN: 9780857895271
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

Mike is spending the summer working for a magazine in Hong Kong when Christopher Dorr, a brilliant journalist, goes missing in Thailand. Mike's editor decides to send him to Bangkok to report on the drug-tourism crackdown, but Mike's real mission is to find Dorr, who is also an old friend of his parents. This is the beginning of a vertiginous journey that propels Mike into fast and seedy nights in Thailand and back to New York, to a home wrecked by violence. The Third Brother moves with the speed of a bullet to portray a young man - and a family - shattered by lies and by excess.

PART I

Mike was privileged and troubled at the same time. He knew that if you grow up with money you don’t think about being rich, and that the same is probably true of courage. But if you grow up with lies, you find out that some lies become true. Mike knew this, too, and so did not lie. Except to himself, about his parents.

They were husband and wife but sometimes mistaken for siblings. They could have been carved out of the same piece of alabaster. Mike inherited the long high planes of their cheekbones, and he loved them in a very conscious way. They were both troubled themselves, and their trouble accelerated Mike’s childhood. He had seen them at their worst, violent and irrational, naked in public, smooth features contorted. In his reckoning as a young man, though, they were fine, and he had decided, in the face of their madness and addictions, that he loved them. And his life was his own.

1

The summer is dragging for Mike as he rises, by escalator, out of the cool subway into the Hong Kong heat. He is too tall, out of place as he crosses the jammed street to Taikoo Tower, where he has been working for six weeks. Seems like a year. The tower looms over him, silent workers and pulsing technology, a kingdom of itself above the Hong Kong streets. Mike doesn’t like the skyscraper—it has become predictable—but he is grateful for the air-conditioning. Everything inside the tower works. Outside, not. His job, his internship, is at a news magazine that he had never read until the twenty-two-hour flight from New York.

Mike has several bosses at the magazine, but the reason he has the job is that the managing editor, Elliot Analect, is a friend of his father. Analect even looks like his father, Mike realized when they shook hands. All of those guys look alike, all tall, clean, white guys who have known one another for decades. They were in the same club at Harvard, wore the same ties. And then they went to Vietnam and almost all of them came back. Growing up, Mike didn’t see his father’s friends much but he had the sense they were in touch. So when it was time for his first internship, the summer after his freshman year, Mike was not surprised that he ended up working for Analect. He was glad, at least, that the job was in Hong Kong and not in midtown Manhattan.

As a summer intern, Mike seldom gets out of the office, spends his days wading the Internet. He is doing research, mostly for Thomas Bishop, one of the magazine’s correspondents. Mike has a view of Analect’s office and sometimes watches his father’s old friend through the smoked-glass walls, but they have had little contact since that initial welcome handshake. And the most excitement Mike has had was when Analect abruptly spoke with him in the hallway, promising to take him out to lunch at the end of the summer. Strange, Mike thinks, and wishes there was more for him to do. As he surfs the Internet he thinks about fathers and sons, and how friendship does not necessarily pass down. Mike has already seen seen this often among his friends and their fathers.

So Mike is glad when the assignment comes, even though he is very surprised. He had been watching again, and Analect had been standing in conversation with Bishop for nearly ten minutes. Mike had been looking closely through the glass—he sensed the men were angry with one another—when Bishop suddenly turned and opened the door. Mike feared he was caught, but then Bishop waved him into the office and Analect asked if he wanted to go to Bangkok. “Help Tommy with some reporting,” as he puts it.

Bishop nods slightly at Mike. Bishop is a small man, with fat features and prematurely graying black hair.

“The story is backpacker kids going to Bangkok to do ecstasy,” Analect says. “Just don’t get arrested.”

“He doesn’t want to have to retrieve you,” Bishop says.

“It’s really just a travel story, is another way to look at it,” Analect goes on.

“Just a travel story,” Bishop repeats, chuckling.

“You’re their age,” Analect continues, “the backpackers’. You’ll be good at talking to them. Ask questions. It can be your story too. And one other thing I’ve already explained to Tommy . . .”

Mike catches Bishop rolling his eyes.

“. . . I want you to look up Christopher Dorr.”

Mike can’t place the name.

“He used to do a lot of the investigative pieces Tommy does now,” Analect says, looking straight at him, seeming almost to ignore Bishop. “He’s been in Bangkok for a while, I think. It’d be good for someone from the magazine to look him up.”

Mike tries to decode this and can’t. Analect tells him again to stay out of trouble and that Bishop will take care of him. It seems to Mike that Bishop is pleased to have the help, but that there is more to it. When they are leaving the office, Analect tells Mike to wait for a moment, and when they are alone, he tells Mike that Dorr had been a friend of Mike’s father, years ago. That they had all been good friends, actually, the three of them practically brothers, and that Mike’s father would be glad for news of Dorr.

Mike looks out the window. He notices for the first time how really extraordinary the view from Analect’s office is. Mike can see the the whole city, enormous and smogged and throbbing. For a moment he can’t believe the sound of it doesn’t blow in the windows. But Analect’s office sits quietly above it all, humming coolly. Mike is suddenly uneasy, with only the inch of glass between the two of them and the loud, empty space above the city. He looks back at Analect, who is frowning.

“Dorr and your father were sparring partners, when they boxed back in college,” says Analect.

Mike looks back out over the city. He knew about the boxing, but his father had seldom mentioned Dorr. It all surprises him, but maybe it’s just seeing his own features reflected in the glass, and the long drop to Hong Kong from fifty stories up.

2

When Mike was a small boy, his parents often entertained. In New York City in their world, they were famous for the dinners they gave in their big house at the end of Long Island, especially Thanksgiving. Mike remembered the candlelight and gluey cranberry sauce, which he would wipe off his hands into his hair. His older brother, Lyle, remembered the same things. There were servants, who disciplined Mike when his parents did not. One Philippine lady in particular boxed his ears. When he was older he remembered how it hurt but not her name. Their parents gave these dinners several years in a row. There were mostly the same guests, adults who would tousle Mike’s fine but cranberried hair and their children, a crew of beautiful, spoiled playmates whom Mike assumed he would know forever. He still saw some of them, at parties and dinners of their own on school breaks. At hearing that one or two of them slid into addiction, Mike would remember chasing them through his mother’s busy kitchen. His mother was never in the kitchen, of course, but it was definitely hers. Small paintings of vegetables and an antique mirror hung on its walls.

When dinner started, the children would go to the playroom and eat with the nannies. They lounged on heavy couches, watching movies until they fell asleep and the nannies went outside for cigarettes. Lyle especially loved these dinners and made a point of talking to everybody, lingering in the dining room rather than watching movies with the other children. He loved listening to adults talk. So did Mike, but he knew he didn’t understand the way his older brother did.

The adults sat and drank wine and laughed and smiled at one another in the fall candlelight. Many of them had started families late or had been married once before and had only recently started new ones. Jobs were interesting; there was much travel. There was a lot to talk about, and the subtext was that they were lucky to have the lives they had. Mike remembered everyone being very happy.

Before one of these dinners, Lyle decided that he and Mike would be spies. Lyle had gotten a small tape recorder, only a toy really, for his birthday earlier that fall. Their plan was to hide it in the dining room to record the dinner conversation. While the servants were setting up, and Mike’s mother was upstairs dressing, and Mike’s father was out walking along the ocean, Lyle and Mike secured the tape recorder under the table with duct tape.

As the guests arrived and had drinks, the boys slid between them and crawled under the table and switched on the recorder. They were very excited all through dinner, but they didn’t tell any of the other children what they were up to. By dessert, Mike couldn’t wait any longer. He wanted to go get the recorder. No, said Lyle, they’ll be there for a long time. Let’s just look.

When they peeked around the dining room door, Elliot Analect saw them and held up the tape recorder, which he must have found much earlier, maybe when he first sat down. Analect wasn’t a regular guest at these dinners. He was usually abroad somewhere. At this point he was a correspondent in East Asia, and Mike’s father was especially glad to have him for Thanksgiving. Mike’s mother didn’t like Analect. Mike didn’t know this the way Lyle did, but he had a sense of it too.

When Analect held up the recorder Mike knew instantly they would be in trouble. He saw the way the adults laughed but didn’t think it was funny. One of them, drunker than the rest and not a very good friend of Mike’s parents, was even a little angry. Mike remembered that he worked for one of the networks. Their mother was embarrassed and that always made her cross as well. Mike’s father called the boys over and tried to set things right by giving them a talk in front of the table that was both funny and serious. Analect removed the tape from the recorder and put it in his pocket.

3

On the flight from HKI to BKK, Mike asks Bishop about Christopher Dorr.

“A crazy fuck,” Bishop tells him. “Won awards. Then just stopped filing, so the magazine stopped paying him. I won’t bullshit you, I never liked the guy much.”

Mike doesn’t know what to say.

“Analect’s the one that lost him,” Bishop goes on. “He should check in on Dorr himself.”

Mike looks out the window at the flat turquoise sea below. He wonders if Analect has spoken to his father since he arrived in Hong Kong. No, or his father would have said something. But then they haven’t talked much since Mike left. Mike knows there were some things his father never talked about. His life before his children wasn’t a secret; it just never came up. Mike always thought that maybe this was because his father hadn’t wanted to end up in banking but did anyway. Mike thinks if he talks to Dorr he’ll know a lot more about that.

“You don’t have to worry about Dorr,” Bishop is saying. “Just fill your notebook with stony backpacker quotes and we’ll have a week in Bangkok. Pretty girls in Bangkok. You’ll have a blast.”

Mike keeps expecting Bishop to give him specifics about what else he wants for the story but he never does, just sleeps most of the three-hour ride. Mike looks at Bishop and thinks that if you sleep on a plane you could crash and be unsure whether you are dreaming until you are dead. Mike isn’t worried about the specifics. He figures he’ll get whatever information he needs when the time comes. Bishop has already told him they’d have the place wired because of some friends of his who are based in Bangkok.

“You’ll like them,” Bishop said, and then called them the “Flying Circus.”

Following Bishop, Mike sails through Bangkok customs on a tourist visa. The room is hot but the lines are short. Customs officials in lizard-colored uniforms slam their stamps and the pale Europeans and Americans in bright, patterned shirts sweat in line and shuffle through.

As they clear, Bishop tells Mike that in Bangkok it’s easier To be a Journalist if you’re not a journalist. “You’ll see what I mean when you meet the Flying Circus,” he says. “They get away with anything.”

On the way in from the airport, Bishop tells Mike to take the night off, check out the city. He is going to meet his “best girl” and, in fact, is going to be spending most of his time with her. He needs a break. This is good for Mike because he will get to do most of the reporting. Of course Bishop will write the story in the end; Mike just has to find the stony quotes. They both get a week in Bangkok and he will make sure they share the byline. “It’ll be a good surprise for Analect, but you really have to do it yourself,” says Bishop.

Getting out of the cab in front of his hotel, Mike knows that Bishop is going to ditch him. What the hell.

4

Mike knew something strange and probably bad had happened that Thanksgiving. Everyone went home earlier than usual. Lyle was miserable, almost in tears, and Mike tried to comfort him. Mike often felt that he did not see problems his older brother saw.

As the two boys lay in their bunks that night, Lyle in the top, they heard the sounds of an argument coming from their parents’ room across the hall. Eventually the sounds would become so familiar that Mike never remembered a time when he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III