by Jake Needham
“Help you, sir?”
The girl who walked up behind me was young, not more than eighteen probably, with big eyes and a slightly dumpy air about her. I wondered what she saw when she looked at the Germans and their companions for the night.
“Gafair dam.” Black coffee.
The girl bobbed her head and scribbled briefly on a thick pad before walking away. A few moments later a different girl, one of those who was scurrying around behind the counter, put a white ceramic mug down in front of me. I watched her pour the coffee and nodded in acknowledgement of her slight smile. I was jumpy enough already and really didn’t need the caffeine, but I lifted the mug anyway and reflexively sipped at the thick, bitter brew. With my free hand I pushed myself around on the stool and warily checked out what I could see of the interior of the supermarket.
I spotted the man almost immediately. He was half obscured by a tall stack of Diet Coke cans, looking me over without trying to hide it. I saw him glance at a woman standing next to him and place his hand on her arm. Then she followed his eyes and examined me too.
The man was a westerner about my age. He was wearing khaki shorts, an expensive-looking golf shirt hanging over his belt, and dark loafers without socks. Either he was completely bald or he had shaved his head cleanly and his scalp gleamed in the light. Oddly, he had a thin rim of neatly trimmed gray beard that ran all the way from ear to ear. The overall effect was to make his oval face look almost upside down. At a glance the man was largely interchangeable with the lean, tanned, middle-aged Western guys you could find around any of the five-star hotels in town favored by visiting executives. Well off, poised, cocky almost.
The woman was another story. I doubted she was interchangeable with anybody.
She was probably in her twenties and looked Chinese, except that she was at least six feet tall. Slim, graceful, and feminine in spite of her height, she was dressed in loose, dark slacks and a man’s white shirt. Her dark eyes looked tranquil, yet something gave her a quality of vigilance. She made me think of a cat lazing in the shade of a summer’s day, ready to spring into motion at the first sign of a pigeon.
I was already willing to bet this was the guy who had called me; and since the woman looked as if she was standing guard over him, I wondered briefly if that meant I was going to turn out to be the pigeon.
The man gave a little tug on the woman’s arm and they started toward me. When they were still fifteen or twenty feet away, she moved slightly to one side and leaned back against the chrome railing separating the store’s grocery section from the counter where I was sitting. Her posture remained relaxed and she cupped her hands around the top rail and stretched her legs out in front of her, crossing one ankle over the other. When she did, I couldn’t help but notice that they were very nice ankles indeed.
The man slid onto the stool next to me. “I didn’t think you’d recognize me,” he said.
But he was wrong. I did recognize him.
I had no earthly idea how it could be. It made no sense at all. But there was absolutely no doubt in my mind. This was Barry Gale.
I took another sip of my coffee just to have something to do and studied Barry over the rim of the cup. He was leaner than he had been back in Washington and his facial features appeared to have been scrambled up somehow, although I realized it might have been the absence of hair and the addition of the beard that gave me that impression. He looked different, but he looked the same, too.
“You’ve changed some,” I finally said.
“That was the idea, Jack. That was the whole idea.”
Barry’s eyes went away from mine, sought out the woman leaning against the chrome railing, and then came back to me.
“I had some redecorating done.”
“Redecorating? You had plastic surgery?”
“I guess I should have asked them to make me look more like Keanu Reeves and less like Jerry Ford, but I didn’t give it enough thought at the time. We were in a hurry.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
Barry ignored my question and looked away at a thick-legged blonde woman who might have been Russian pushing through one of the checkout stands with a white plastic bag. She was holding the hand of a tiny Thai girl who didn’t appear to be more than twelve.
Suddenly Barry dug down into his baggy shorts and produced what looked like a card of some kind, thrusting it out and wiggling it at me.
“They fixed me up with a whole new life, Jack. Look here.”
At first I thought the card was a driver’s license, but when I took it from Barry I saw it was actually a Hong Kong identity card. It certainly looked authentic enough, although I was certainly no expert on such things, and had what was probably supposed to be Barry’s picture laminated onto it. As with most ID cards, however, the photograph had a vaguely generic look to it and I wouldn’t have sworn an oath that it was the same man who was sitting in front of me right now. The name on the card was Arthur Daley.
“Stupid fucking name they picked for me though. Can’t imagine where they got it. Normally I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass, but I ask you, could I ever be somebody who’s called Arthur Daley, Jack? Could I?” Barry took the ID card back from me and shoved it into his pocket again. He shook his head. “Shit, man, no way.”
“For Christ’s sake, Barry, what the hell is going on here?”
“I’m not sure I know, Jack.”
Barry spoke quickly, furtively, his eyes rolling around the room.
“I’m living in a dark place and I don’t know how to get out of it. God help me, but I think you might be the only guy who can do anything to help me.” He turned his head and looked at me as if he could hardly believe things had come to that.
Since I didn’t know what to say, I said nothing. Instead I glanced away and ran my index finger around the rim of my coffee cup.
“Let’s walk a little, Jack. Sitting in one place for too long makes me real nervous these days.”
Barry stuffed a red hundred-baht note into the wooden cup that held the check for my coffee and stood up, taking my elbow and tugging on it. I did nothing to resist and we left the store in silence. Threading our way through the jam of empty tuk-tuks and parked motorcycles, we turned right and walked out to Sukhumvit Road.
When we got there Barry stopped and glanced cautiously in both directions. The usual late-night groups of foreigners were still trolling the sidewalks for action, but they were pretty well thinned out to the hardcore. Even the traffic on Sukhumvit was starting to move at something like a normal speed rather than crawling along bumper-to-bumper as it did for most of the day. As far as I could tell, there was nothing going on that should make Barry nervous.
Barry apparently agreed with my assessment. He shoved both hands into the pockets of his shorts and turned east, walking slowly with his head down. I followed, waiting for him to say whatever he wanted to say, but he just stared intently at the rough concrete of the sidewalk as if he might be trying to divine some message that had been left for him there.
I shot a quick glance over my shoulder and saw that the tall woman was following us at a discreet distance. However much Barry might have drifted off into his private reverie, she was more than making up for it with her concentration on both of us. I caught her eyes full on when I turned back, but she didn’t look away-didn’t even blink-and after a moment I did both.
Barry cleared his throat tentatively as if he didn’t know exactly what to say. Then abruptly he started talking anyway.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the whole thing.”
TEN
“How much do you know about what happened at Texas State Bank, Jack?”
“A little bit. I did some research after you called.”
“Then you know who Harold Wilkins is?
“The other director. The one who disappeared.”
“Harold Wilkins had been fronting for Russian mobsters for years. At first it was just some nickel-and-dime money laundering, but eventually Harold started thi
nking bigger and somehow he managed to cut a deal with Jimmy Kicks. Jimmy had a soft spot for banks in crappy, middle-sized shitholes like Dallas because he didn’t like dealing with sophisticated people. He always figured that sophisticated people were the most dangerous, and yokels were the greediest. Me, I’m not so sure. It might be exactly the other way around.”
I just listened and kept my mouth shut.
“Jimmy’s mules delivered bags of cash to Wilkins from the big Russian drug operations in the Northeast. Then Wilkins would see that all the money was booked to legitimate bank depositors, companies whose names he’d used to set up dummy accounts without them knowing anything about it. He always picked companies that were big cash operations, of course. Pawn shops were his favorite, but he liked restaurants and motels, too.”
“A lot of people like motels.”
Maybe Barry didn’t get the joke or maybe he didn’t think it was funny. Either way, he ignored me and went on talking.
“After the deposits were booked and a decent interval had passed, Wilkins would start funneling them out of Texas State and into Jimmy’s foreign bank accounts in a series of small transactions so they wouldn’t attract any attention.”
Two backpackers, a boy and a girl in their twenties who looked Scandinavian, passed us on the sidewalk. They were trudging doggedly in the opposite direction, bent forward under the weight of two massive yellow and black nylon packs. Barry fell silent until they were both out of earshot, then he went on talking.
“I guess it was inevitable an idiot like Harold would eventually get sticky fingers. He started wheeling and dealing with the money while it was lying around in the accounts he’d set up at Texas State. He figured he could use the float to make a few bucks playing the foreign exchange markets before he shifted the money out to Jimmy’s offshore accounts.”
“How did Jimmy catch him?” I asked.
“Jimmy didn’t. Wilkins was just unlucky. There was an audit while the stupid prick was off chasing pussy in New Orleans with the rest of the rubes.”
“The auditors were onto him?”
“No, it was strictly some routine stuff. They just started pulling foreign exchange contracts at random. They were spot-checking the bank’s exposure when it occurred to somebody that the number of positions was pretty big for a bank the size of Texas State. It didn’t take long for them to see that almost all of the positions had been opened by Wilkins. That was when the whole fucking thing came unraveled.”
“But didn’t they just close the positions the auditors found? How could the losses have been so big?”
“I told you, Wilkins was an idiot. I don’t think he got the market right even once. Every time a contract went bad he’d cover it by doubling his next position. By the time the auditors got on to him he was so far underwater he was shitting seaweed.”
“How much did he lose?”
Barry hesitated, and I glanced over at him just in time to see a sly look slide across his face. “Just over $60,000,000 according to the auditors’ final report.”
“I still don’t see how it could have been so much.”
“It wasn’t.”
I looked at Barry and shook my head. “You lost me.”
“Wilkins really did piss away a million or so fucking around with foreign exchange futures-that much of the story was true-but that was dog shit to Jimmy. It only mattered because it gave him an idea. He started wondering what would have happened if Wilkins had been thinking bigger? And that was when it came to him.”
“What came to him?”
“That if he could find a way to hang some really big losses around Wilkins’s neck instead of just the lousy million or so he had actually pissed away Wilkins would take the fall for the whole pile of shit. If Jimmy handled it just right, he could waltz away with all the phony losses without the slightest chance anybody would ever work out what really happened. I got to hand it to the guy, Jack. The concept was golden.”
“But not unless-”
“Yeah, that was problem, of course. Jimmy had to have an inside man at the bank to pull that kind of thing off. I’d been put in charge of investigating Wilkins by the rest of the board and given full authority over all the bank’s foreign exchange operations.” Barry turned his head and gave me a rueful look. “I guess I was the obvious choice.”
“Why would you do something like that?” I asked, not at all certain I really wanted to know.
“Jimmy told me he’d put twenty percent of whatever I could scam for him into a Hong Kong bank and give me a fresh start anywhere I wanted.”
Barry kicked at a pebble with his toe. It rattled off a garbage can on the sidewalk and bounced into the gutter.
“That’s the real American dream, isn’t it, Jack? To disappear into some tropical paradise, rich and reborn?”
“I don’t think-”
“Americans have been reinventing themselves since the fucking pilgrims hit the beach,” Barry interrupted. “It’s one thing we’re really good at. Today we just do it a little faster than we used to, that’s all.”
I said nothing, but Barry didn’t seem to care.
“Of course, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to start over again, you want to do it rich, and I was sure as hell going to do that. I knew I could get forty or fifty million out of Texas State without breaking a sweat. That would mean at least eight or ten million for me.”
Barry suddenly brightened and barked a quick laugh.
“You ought to understand starting over better than anybody, Jack. That’s why you walked away from Washington and moved to Bangkok, isn’t it?”
I didn’t bother to argue with Barry. His suggestion that we had both done more-or-less the same thing was so outrageous I just let it pass.
“How did you pull it off?” I asked him instead.
“It was easy. I phonied up a bunch of new contracts for bigger sums than Wilkins had ever dreamed of. Then I slipped them into the system with his trades so they’d look right. After that, I reviewed the trading accounts myself and claimed to have discovered them. How the hell was I going to get caught? Nobody really knew what had been going on but Wilkins, and who the fuck was going to believe him when he said most of the contracts I found weren’t his? Hell, the contracts I stuck in didn’t even have to be good phonies since everybody was more than ready to believe that a boob like Wilkins would have made a mess out of his own swindle.”
Barry smiled. It looked to me like it was trying not to, but he just couldn’t stop himself.
“Eventually I gave my solemn opinion to Texas State that legally they had to make good on every one of the contracts I’d found, and they did. When the smoke cleared, I’d creamed off just under $50,000,000 for Jimmy. That meant I’d cleared almost $10,000,000 for myself.”
We were just in front of the Ambassador Hotel when a pudgy local man broke out of the pack of touts that habitually lay in wait there to ambush passing male tourists. He approached us in an odd, crablike gait, scuttling almost sideways.
“Massage, boss? Many sexy girl.” The tout poked a tattered brochure toward Barry. “Take look?”
Barry didn’t say anything, but he turned his head very slowly and looked at the man. The tout didn’t say another word. He just jerked the brochure away and darted back to the safety of the other touts. I could feel the men following us with their eyes as we walked on by and I wondered what the man had seen in Barry’s face that frightened him so badly.
“That was when Jimmy got an even bigger idea,” Barry continued as if nothing had happened. “He was sick of getting screwed by banks, he told me. He had the $50,000,000 I’d just stolen for him already sitting around in offshore banks, less my cut of course, so he told me he figured this was his big chance.”
I just listened.
“Jimmy wanted his own bank. I knew of one that was available and I thought we could get it for close to the $50,000,000 that I’d scammed out of Texas State. Jimmy told me if I’d throw in my $10,000,000 with his $40,000,
000 and could do the deal for that amount, he’d give me a free hand to run the bank and a thirty-five percent shareholding.”
Now I was staring so hard at Barry I stumbled over an uneven joint in the sidewalk that jutted up unexpectedly in front of me.
“What are you telling me here, Barry? The Russian mob not only asked you to buy a bank for them, but to put some money into the deal yourself and become their partner? And you did it?”
“I didn’t become partners with the whole fucking mob, Jack, just with Jimmy Kicks. Don’t go all hysterical on me here.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Serious as shit, Jack. A chance to own thirty-five percent of an international bank and run it however I wanted to? I’d have been nuts to say no.”
“How could you even think of fronting for the Russian mob, Barry?”
“Now don’t get so high and mighty on me, Jack. We both crawled out of the same fucking pile of crap. You took your way out, I took mine. What the hell’s the difference?”
“That’s the second time you’ve tried the say that we both took the same road, and this time I’m not going to let it slide. There’s nothing remotely similar about the choices you and I made, Barry. Not a damned thing.”
“Tell me the difference.”
“The difference is that I didn’t fake a suicide and go into business with a bunch of Russian mobsters.”
“No, Jack, that’s not it.”
Barry produced the faintest of smiles.
“The difference,” he said, “is they didn’t ask you to.”
ELEVEN
We passed a McDonald’s that was closed for the night. Barry abruptly left the sidewalk and climbed the half-dozen stained concrete steps that led up to the darkened entrance. When he reached the last step, he turned around and sat down, looping his arms around his knees and lacing his fingers together.
“Was that Wilkins in the swimming pool?” I asked as I climbed up and sat down next to him.
“Who the hell do you think it was, Jack? The fucking tooth fairy?” Barry sounded genuinely annoyed. “Look, Wilkins was a dead man anyway. You don’t steal from somebody like Jimmy Kicks and then tell your grandchildren funny stories about it.”
