Laundry Man js-1

by Jake Needham

  When I got back to Bangkok on Friday morning, Anita pouted briefly to make sure her displeasure at the extra night I had spent in Hong Kong was officially noted. Nevertheless, harmony was fully restored by evening and when we left for the Polo Club the night ahead was looking pretty promising.

  I had the Volvo’s top down as we drove south on Soi Langsuan. Winter in Bangkok can be short but, with luck, the string of temperate days and chilly nights sometimes hangs in through February. This year we had been very lucky. The cool breezes were still drifting south from China and the air remained sweet and balmy, ripe with benevolence.

  Anita seemed besotted by the softness of the night. Her head was tilted back against the headrest and her eyes were closed. She was wearing a straight black dress that left her bare legs visible halfway up her thighs. I could hardly force myself to watch the road and my eyes kept drifting over every time the traffic thinned. I was getting another fix when I realized Anita had opened her eyes and was looking straight back at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Not nothing. That much I was pretty sure of.

  “Okay.” She leaned over, knitted her hands together over my shoulder and rested her chin on them. “I like you in a tux, handsome, but remind me again why we’re on our way to a stuffy club tonight wearing these costumes.”

  “The Kingdom of Thailand has a new minister of finance and we are honoring him.”

  “We?”

  “Well… Citibank and Standard Chartered Bank are honoring him. You and I are mostly along for the ride.”

  “And exactly why are they honoring him? Has he done something good?”

  “Not yet. But we live in hope.”

  A red-and-cream bus suddenly changed lanes and cut right in front of us. It was so jammed with people that it looked as if some of them were about to squirt out through the windows. I braked hard and muttered a curse, but Anita didn’t seem to notice.

  “Do we have any role in all this honoring?”

  “Not really. I imagine they invited me because they thought I’d bring you. We’re more or less decoration.”

  “Ah… decoration. I do so love being decoration.”

  Anita turned her head away and closed her eyes again.

  “Was else is it you have on your mind, Jack? There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “It is to me.”

  I hadn’t said anything to Anita about Barry Gale asking me to find the ABC’s missing money and I had also omitted mentioning Jello’s story about Dollar’s apparent connections with some pretty unsavory people. I had initially decided that telling Anita either story would accomplish nothing other than to make her uneasy for me, yet now I wondered why I had looked at it that way. Something about driving through the Bangkok night seemed to transform the dime-novel tales Barry and Jello had spun me into narratives with an almost operatic quality to them, so impulsively I started recounting both stories to Anita in spite of my earlier resolution not to.

  I tried to stick strictly to what I actually knew, and it wasn’t all that much so it didn’t take all that long. I finished just as we got to the narrow soi that led into the Polo Club. I slowed at the gate as a uniformed guard saluted and pushed aside his little red-and-white wheeled barrier, but Anita didn’t speak again until I had pulled into an empty parking place and shut off the engine.

  “My God, Jack. What have you gotten yourself into?”

  “I’m not into anything, Anita. I have absolutely no intention of being involved in any way with Barry Gale.”

  “But you’re already involved with Dollar, and if he’s-”

  “Jello’s wrong about that. Dollar’s as straight as anybody I’ve ever known.”

  “I thought you told me that Jello knew everything that was worth knowing about what happened in Bangkok.”

  “He does, usually, but this time he’s got it wrong,” I repeated doggedly. “I know Dollar Dunne and there’s no way in hell he’d launder money for drug dealers. Absolutely no way.”

  Anita was shaking her head as I walked around and opened her door. I helped her out and she stood quietly looking at me until I had closed the door again.

  “I’ve asked you to be careful, Jack. I’ve asked you over and over. And then you tell me something like this.”

  “None of this has anything to do with me, Anita.”

  Anita thought about that for a minute and then smiled sadly. “But it will.”

  “Look, I already said I have absolutely no intention-”

  Anita suddenly reached out with her forefinger and put it against my lips. I stopped talking. She smiled, a little sadly once again it seemed to me and shook her head. We walked under the trees toward the club’s entry and in the silence I listened to the sound of her high heels clicking against the stones that paved the parking lot.

  We started up the short flight of brown brick steps that led to the club’s main building and Anita suddenly looped her left arm through my right. “Hey, boy, I’m just a painter,” she said. “What do I understand about stuff like this?”

  I always figured she understood plenty.

  “I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Jack. You always do.”

  I smiled and pulled her toward me.

  I hoped to hell she was right.

  The Polo Club is the nouveau offshoot of the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, a notoriously exclusive mid-city club famed for its decades-long waiting list, crummy golf course, and membership roster of old Thais who didn’t much like foreigners. The main building is a low-slung, rambling structure of brown brick set off with wooden trim and surrounded by lush tropical landscaping. Dark-tiled corridors-each with a peaked roof covered in cedar-shakes and open on the sides-link the main building with the half-dozen or so other buildings in the complex. The Polo Club even sports a modest equestrian trail and a handful of horses, probably so the name of the place will make some kind of sense. Occupying a prime block of real estate in the very heart of central Bangkok, the Polo Club seems to rise from the city’s haze like some sort of suburban mirage.

  Citibank and Standard Chartered were no doubt holding their reception there in order to make the biggest possible splash. After all, the new minister of finance was an Oxford graduate who had done a brief turn at Harvard Business School. Even better, he was reported to like foreigners well enough and, everyone present fervently hoped, perhaps even foreign banks. He was the kind of Thai many other Thais referred to among themselves, at least when they were certain their voices weren’t carrying too far, as a brown Brit.

  Ministers of finance came and went fairly rapidly in Thailand and the next time around the foreign banks might not be so lucky. They were more likely to get a local politician from Ubon Ratchathani, someone who hadn’t been able to stand foreigners since his daughter married a shoe salesman from Brisbane and ran off to live in Queensland. That was why most of the foreign banks figured they had better grab the chance to kiss this particular minister’s butt while it was still around to be kissed.

  When we mounted the steps, a short gray-haired man in a dark suit stepped forward and pressed his hands together in a wai, the graceful Thai gesture of greeting that is nuanced in ways foreigners are helpless to unravel. I returned the wai in my normal clunky fashion and then offered my hand, too, just to make certain I had touched all of the cultural bases.

  “Khun Teuk, may I introduce-”

  “Completely unnecessary, Jack.” Teuk beamed like a man who had just won the lottery. “Everyone in Bangkok knows Anita.”

  “You are very generous, Khun Teuk.” Anita tilted her head gracefully to one side and waied. She did it a lot better than I did, and Teuk beamed again.

  “Please, this way.” Teuk pointed up the walkway toward the gardens that flanked the swimming pool. “It was such a nice night that we decided to move things outside.”

  “I wondered where everyone was.”

  “Well, the guest l
ist is a little smaller than usual. We didn’t invite every hanger-on in town this time.” He giggled slightly, a nervous high-pitched whinnying sound. “Almost everyone is here already. Don’t know what Bangkok is coming to. People showing up on time? Next it’s going to be locusts.” He whinnied again.

  When Teuk turned away, Anita leaned slightly toward me.

  “Who the hell is that?” she stage-whispered without turning her head.

  “A guy from Citibank. I’m not really sure what he does.”

  “So these are the kind of people you hang around with when I’m away, huh?”

  I couldn’t think of any answer to that, but a waiter with a tray of drinks intercepted us at just that moment and bailed me out. We each selected a Campari and soda, and then stepped down off the walkway into the gardens and looked around.

  A luxuriant, emerald-green lawn bordered with mango, oak, and gum trees stretched fifty yards or more from where we stood to the polo field on the south. To the east a thick grove of tall palms protected the deep lawn from the intrusion of the city. The trees were hung with white fairy lights and wicker tables and chairs had been set up under them in small groups. Formally-dressed people mingled on the lawn, while a string quartet played Mozart on a platform almost hidden under a bank of white orchids. The night was a study in jade and auburn sprinkled with black and white.

  “Jack!”

  I heard the voice calling me and looked around.

  “Over here, Jack!”

  A hand was flapping at us from a group of men standing near the center of the lawn so I took Anita’s elbow and we started over. About halfway there the crowd parted and I saw that the hand belonged to a government official I saw around town occasionally.

  Anita went back into her stage whisper.

  “Do I know him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I kept my eyes on the group and tried to answer Anita without moving my lips.

  “His name’s Tammarat something or another, but everybody calls him Tommy.”

  “Another Citibank guy?”

  “Nope. Officially, he’s a deputy to the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But if you don’t already know that he’s really something at the NIA, he’ll be happy to drop hints until you get the idea.”

  “NIA?”

  “The National Intelligence Agency.”

  Anita glanced over to see if I was joking.

  “You mean he’s a spy?” she asked.

  “Yeah, something like that, I guess.”

  “A Thai spy?” Anita was beginning to giggle. “Who does he spy on? Laos?”

  “Jack, Jack!” Tommy rushed toward us before I could think what to say to that and clasped my right hand with both of his like a politician working the crowd. “And this must be the famous Anita.”

  Anita couldn’t hold back any longer. She burst out laughing, and Tommy’s manner changed abruptly. His eyes went flat, examining first her and then me.

  I improvised. “There was this joke I heard yesterday when I was in Hong Kong, Tommy, and I told it to Anita while we were walking in. I think she just got it.”

  “Ah…” Tommy looked at me without expression. “That must be why you’re late tonight. Telling funny jokes is very time-consuming.”

  “Waiting for Anita to get dressed is very time-consuming.”

  I felt Anita’s hand brush my elbow. “Jack, I see Laura over there. Would you excuse me?”

  She favored Tommy with her most charming smile, waied and slipped away.

  I didn’t know anyone in Bangkok named Laura, of course, and I was certain that neither did Anita.

  TWENTY

  Tommy watched silently until Anita had disappeared into the crowd, then he placed his hand in the small of my back and nudged me in the direction of the men he had been talking to.

  “Come over here a minute, Jack. I want you to meet some people.”

  Tommy made the usual introductions all around, and as usual I missed almost everyone’s names except for the last man Tommy introduced.

  “Jack, you know Manny Marcus, don’t you?”

  “Q Bar?” I asked as we shook hands, and the man nodded without saying anything.

  Mango Manny’s double-breasted black jacket was buttoned tightly over his paunch and with it he wore a yellow tie, black shirt, and huge diamond ring. His thinning hair, unnaturally black, was slicked back against his skull and even in the low light it glinted and glistened. In spite of the darkness, Manny wore gold Cartier sunglasses with very dark lenses. I knew the shades were Cartier because they said so on both earpieces.

  “Some mutual friends of ours recently suggested I call you,” I ventured carefully, not sure how much I should say but not wanting to pretend I had never heard of Manny either.

  Manny took off his Cartiers, folded them carefully, and pushed them into his breast pocket.

  “Too bad you didn’t,” he said.

  “I didn’t see any reason to bother you.”

  Manny let his eyes linger on mine for a moment. “No,” he said, “you probably wouldn’t.”

  While I was still trying to work out what that was supposed to mean, I felt Tommy’s hand on my back again.

  “Jack, I need to talk to you about a little business matter without bothering our friends here.”

  Tommy mumbled apologies to the group and then nudged me away out of their earshot. He draped one arm over my shoulders and lowered his voice.

  “Do you know where the squash courts are?”

  Tommy’s question didn’t make much sense so I didn’t answer right away. Was Tommy about to challenge me to a squash game? That didn’t seem likely.

  “The squash courts, Jack. Are you listening to me?”

  “I heard you. Why are you asking me about squash courts?”

  Tommy looked at me levelly.

  “They’re out near the main entrance,” he said. “Just on the other side of-”

  “I know where they are.”

  “Then why didn’t you just say so?”

  “Even by your standards of non sequitur, Tommy, I thought you were kidding.”

  “This is no time for jokes, Jack. You are walking in deep shit, my friend, and I’m trying to help you here.”

  He paused, but I stayed poker-faced. What the hell was Tommy talking about?

  “I want you to go to the squash courts at exactly ten and wait there. Someone wants to talk to you.”

  “Who-”

  “Just be there, Jack,” Tommy interrupted. “And for Christ’s sake try to be discreet about it for once in your life, would you?”

  Then he shoved his hands deep into his pockets and walked away from me without a backward glance.

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was a quarter to ten so I spent the next few minutes wondering what I was going to do. Once or twice I caught a glimpse of Anita across the garden, but I got a distinct impression she was keeping her distance. I wasn’t sure I blamed her. So far the cast of characters she had encountered in my company made that look like a smart choice.

  An unnaturally thin German girl dressed in arty black cornered me for a few moments against the rose bushes and gushed on about a television documentary she was making concerning female homosexuality among the hill tribes. Then two English stockbrokers I knew spent a few minutes trying to convince me that the Thai stock market was just about to take off. It all added up to standard Thai cocktail party chatter: nothing but sex and money.

  At five minutes to ten I looked around for Tommy, but he was nowhere to be seen. Helpless to resist the intrigue, I abandoned my empty glass on a nearby table and headed toward the club’s front entry. Anyone who saw me would probably assume I was going to the toilet, but instead of turning left I turned right just past the bowling green and went through the door to the squash courts.

  Only a single dim light was burning, so I flipped on the big overheads and looked around. All three courts were empty, of course, as were the wooden bleachers that rose a h
alf-dozen tiers behind each of them. Feeling a little silly I sat down in the first row behind the court furthest from the door and waited. The bright lights glared off the white walls, throwing my reflection into high relief on the glass back wall of the courts. I thought I looked a little fuzzy.

  After a few minutes the door opened and a young, well-dressed man stepped inside, quickly closing the door behind him. He was tall for a Thai and lanky, and he moved with a confidence that made him look a little dangerous. I had never seen him before, I was sure of that, and the expression on his face suggested that he had probably never seen me before either.

  “You Khun Jay?”

  The man’s voice was polite, but he seemed a little twitchy. He had such a thick accent that I saw it was going to be difficult understanding whatever it was that he wanted to tell me.

  “Jack, not Jay. It’s Jack Shepherd.”

  “Arai na krap?” What?

  “I said I’m Jack Shepherd. Not Jay Shepherd.”

  There was a hint of puzzlement in the man’s nod.

  “Krap. You wait please.”

  The man stepped back outside, but just as I was standing up to follow him the new minister of finance walked in.

  “Mr. Shepherd,” he nodded pleasantly. “Sit down. Please.”

  I sat down.

  The minister stood in the doorway studying me for a moment, a half-smile on his face, and then he walked over and sat a few feet away on the same bleacher where I was. He settled himself comfortably, crossing his legs at the knee, and then he leaned forward slightly and laced his fingers together, resting his hands in his lap.

  He was an average-sized man, probably in his sixties. His patent leather shoes gleamed even in the low light and he wore his tuxedo like a man who was accustomed to wearing a tuxedo. He had a full head of silver-gray hair, hard black eyes, heavy-rimmed glasses, and the patient air of a traveler forced to camp out temporarily with barbarians.

  “It is a very dull party, isn’t it, Mr. Shepherd?”

  “It was until about thirty seconds ago.”

  The minister chuckled appreciatively, then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and extracted a black leather Dunhill cigar case. Pulling off the top he held it out to me and I saw the brown and white bands even before he spoke.