by Jake Needham
“Cigar, Jack? Montecristos are your brand, aren’t they?”
I glanced from the cigars to the minister’s face, but he was expressionless.
“No? You must have picked up all you needed when you were in Hong Kong.”
The minister selected a cigar for himself, closed the case, and returned it to his jacket. Then he dipped into a side pocket and removed a cutter and a box of matches. He inspected the Montecristo, clipped the end, and lit it. I noticed he took his time about doing it.
“I think I’m getting the message here, Minister,” I said quietly as he drew on his cigar.
“No, Mr. Shepherd, we haven’t gotten to the message yet. All I’ve done is convey that we know a great deal about what everyone around here is doing. Including you.”
“Who’s we?”
The minister took another puff on his Montecristo, then resumed, ignoring my question.
“We know, for example, that you made some inquiries in Hong Kong concerning the Asian Bank of Commerce. May I ask why you were you pursuing that particular line of inquiry up there, Mr. Shepherd?”
“I thought you already knew what everyone around here was doing. Including me.”
The minister laughed, apparently genuinely.
“We do, Mr. Shepherd, but sometimes we have a little trouble understanding why they do it.”
I said nothing.
“Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I don’t suppose it matters. My message to you tonight is the same regardless of your motives.”
The minister took another puff on his Montecristo, but he kept his eyes locked on mine.
“You must stop asking questions about the ABC.”
“And why is that, sir?”
“You might embarrass someone, Mr. Shepherd. If names happen to come up in the course of your inquiries-names of people who are, let us say, politically prominent and might have had some small, perhaps even accidental involvement with the ABC-you might cause them to lose face. You know Asia well, I am told. Surely you must know how bad a thing it is to lose face.”
“Accidental involvement? I don’t understand.”
The bleachers squeaked as the minister shifted his weight.
“You Americans have become obsessed with what you insist on calling transparency in government, Mr. Shepherd. But those of us who actually do the work of governing understand that we must occasionally engage in undertakings that we would not particularly like to become public. Frequently, those activities involve financial arrangements, and naturally those arrangements are generally routed through helpful banks like the ABC. It’s just the way things are done in Asia, Mr. Shepherd. It has always been so, and it will always be so.”
“Just for the sake of conversation, Minister, what do you suppose might happen if some of these arrangements you’re talking about looked as if they might become public?”
“Oh, I don’t really know, Mr. Shepherd.”
The minister waved his Montecristo in a little zigzag motion.
“But we have a saying here in Thailand that you might do well to remember: When the elephants move, the grass is trampled.”
The minister slowly stood, rolling his shoulders and stretching slightly.
“I always thought that was an African expression,” I said, watching him.
His eyes flickered for a moment, met mine, and then looked away. With his left hand in the front pocket of his jacket and his head tilted down, he walked toward the door that led back out of the squash courts. When he reached it, he took his hand out of his pocket, put it on the knob, and looked back over his shoulder.
“Actually, Jack, I think you’ll find it’s an old Icelandic proverb.”
Then he pushed through the door and was gone.
TWENTY ONE
I didn’t sleep sleep very well that night and predictably woke up way too early on Saturday morning. I lay quietly for a while, one hand resting lightly on the smooth skin of Anita’s thigh, replaying in my mind the way her body felt under my hands the night before. Anita was still sleeping deeply so I slipped quietly out of bed and padded into the kitchen to make some coffee.
My meeting with Dollar was looming in only a few hours and I pushed Barry Gale and the ABC into an unused corner of my mind while I dumped coffee into the filter and filled the coffeemaker with water. Before I saw Dollar I had to decide what I was going to tell him. Was I going to ask him about my conversation with Jello and the suspicions Jello had voiced about what Dollar and Howard might be doing together, or was I just going to let the whole thing slide?
While the coffee dripped I went back to the bedroom and pulled on some running shorts and a T-shirt and laced up my Nikes. Then, after draining two mugs and flipping half-heartedly through the Post, I drove over to Lumpini Park in the mood to do a little running and a lot of thinking.
I parked the Volvo on Soi Sarasin just in front of a strip of bars shuttered tightly against the morning but still smelling vaguely of cigarettes and spilled beer. It was the beginning of another cool day and I wondered vaguely if some kind of cosmic invoice for our pleasant weather was going to be presented to the city later in the year. If it ever arrived, I figured it would be a doozy.
Crossing the street and threading my way among the food venders half-blocking the park’s north gate, I broke into a lope on the broad walkway just inside. In front of me, off through a gap in a grove of banyan trees, patches of early morning sunlight were glistening on the lake and a light breeze rattled the fronds of the spindly palm trees that lined the walkway. In a few minutes I reached the edge of the lake and moved onto the grass. I found my rhythm quickly and I adjusted my stride and paced myself for a longer run than usual since I had a good deal to think about.
I knew I either had to tell Dollar immediately what Jello had said to me or I could never tell him at all. If I kept quiet today and then said something about it later, Dollar would read my hesitation as having at least half-believed Jello in the first place-and of course, he would be right.
I had done a fair amount of work with Dollar and I had never seen anything that would suggest he was involved in money laundering; but I didn’t know Howard nearly as well and I could hardly claim to have the same conviction with respect to him. Either way, Jello had put me in a real bind. If what he said turned out to be true and I somehow ended up helping Dollar and Howard do their laundry, no matter how inadvertent my participation might be, Jello would be able to point out that I had done it in spite of being on notice as to what they were involved in. That would put me a long way up my own personal shit creek, and I would unquestionably be lacking the proverbial paddle.
The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that was exactly what Jello had in mind. He knew the position he was putting me in when we had our conversation at Anna’s. He was squeezing me. There was no nicer way to put it.
Although I doubted Jello knew anything specific about my meeting this morning with Dollar or about any of the frequent appearances Howard had been making in the conversations Dollar and I had been having recently, he would still no doubt have surmised that Dollar would eventually ask me to help out with Howard’s work again-and then I’d have no choice but to ask Dollar if there was anything behind Jello’s story. Jello had boxed me in with consummate skill. I couldn’t see any path out of the trap he had so carefully constructed, except of course for the one he obviously wanted me to take.
A major attraction for me of running in Lumpini Park was that the joggers there generally included a significant number of tanned, athletic-looking young women pushing gracefully around the lake with firm, confident strides. Just trying to look good for them usually kept me going pretty well. This morning, however, the pickings were slim. I was a little early and the only other runners I saw were two local men pumping doggedly along together without much apparent enthusiasm. I passed them easily. A few minutes later, just after I had crossed a narrow metal bridge over a tiny sliver of water, I glanced back to see how the two men were doing, but I couldn’t
see them anymore.
I was still wondering where they had gone when a woman suddenly appeared from a stand of banyan trees near the edge of the lake and fell into stride right next to me. When I glanced over, I did a long, slow take.
It was the woman who had been with Barry Gale at the Foodland.
She was wearing black shorts, a white halter-top, and a black baseball cap that said Oakland Raiders over the light gray bill. She ran easily, gracefully, her feet springing off the grass as if they were touching down on hot coals. Other than describing her features as Asian in a general way, I still couldn’t put a specific place of origin to her. The bone structure was too fine-high, wide cheekbones and a rounded European-looking nose-and now that I studied her closely I could see that none of the separate parts of her face really looked Asian at all except perhaps for the slightly tilted, deep brown eyes.
The woman neither turned her head toward me nor spoke.
Running shoulder to shoulder as we were, I could see that she was actually a little taller than I was, and since I was an even six feet that made her pretty tall for a woman. She was slim, but with distinct muscle definition, and she looked strong. Her complexion was the color of cinnamon, although her arms and legs were darker, burnished by strong sun to the color of cafe au lait, and her smooth skin glistened in the morning light as if it had been polished. She had pulled her shiny black hair back into a ponytail that, in scale with the rest of her, looked two feet long, and it rotated behind her head as she ran like a little propeller driving her forward.
“I was born in Hong Kong, Mr. Shepherd.”
The woman’s eyes stayed forward when she spoke.
“My mother was Chinese, but my father was American. He could never manage the tones in Cantonese, so we always spoke English at home.”
Her accent was half British and half American, and her diction and phrasing were those of someone well-born or well-educated, perhaps both.
“Should I tell you the answer to the other question that everyone asks me?”
“Sure.”
“It’s, no, both of my parents were rather short, actually.”
I chuckled and waited for the woman to go on, but she fell silent again. We ran on like that for a while, not speaking, the rhythmic slapping of our shoes against the grass the only sound marking our progress.
Eventually my curiosity overcame me and I wiped the sweat from my face on the sleeve of my T-shirt.
“This obviously isn’t a coincidence,” I said.
She let a dozen strides go by before she answered. “I thought this might be the best way for me to talk to you without attracting attention.”
Off to our right, three boys who couldn’t have been more than ten were practicing martial arts under the watchful eyes of an old man sitting on a folding stool, a straw hat low over his eyes. Each boy was carefully turned out in a white robe with a belt tied around his waist, and they all stood facing the old man in a neat row, concentrating with remarkable intensity for such small boys.
“Then I figure you’ve got about eight minutes to say whatever it is you want to say,” I said, raggedness creeping into my voice. “After five miles I generally drop dead, and that lamppost we just passed was my four-mile mark.”
One of the boys flung himself into the air and executed what looked to me like a pretty nifty spinning kick. As he did, he loosed an earsplitting shout that caused my companion to swivel her head sharply toward him.
There was another silence after that and this time it began to annoy me.
“Look, lady, if Barry thought sending you around would intimidate me somehow, you can tell him he doesn’t remember me very well.”
“My name’s not ‘lady.’“
“Oh? As I recall, you were a little hazy on that point when you introduced yourself.”
Now my eyes were forward, too, waiting her out.
“My name is Elizabeth Staley. Most people call me Beth.”
I stepped up my pace a bit, running faster as we passed a group of Japanese men who had just appeared from somewhere. They looked like a visiting sumo team, but they moved with remarkable grace and economy, gliding along as easily as marathoners. The woman effortlessly matched me stride for stride.
“Who the hell are you, Beth?”
She glanced at me and said nothing so I gave her another nudge. “I get the feeling you’re a cop of some kind.”
“I work for a private company, Mr. Shepherd. We provide personal security for Mr. Gale.”
“You’re a bodyguard?”
“I am a private security officer.”
I snorted, probably a little louder than really necessary to make my point.
We reached the south side of the park and I started to turn back toward the lake where my usual finishing line was, but Beth pointed in the other direction to where a green wooden picnic table sat empty under some low-hanging gum trees.
“You and I need to talk, Mr. Shepherd.”
“What about?”
“There are some things you need to know.”
“There are a lot of things I need to know, but I doubt you’re going to tell me about any of them.”
Beth smiled and I noticed it was a very nice smile.
“You might be surprised,” she said.
Maybe she was right. Pretty much everything these days seemed to be a surprise to me.
“This way,” Beth went on, pointing again at the picnic table, “if you don’t mind.”
I slowed down and looked at Beth. “Look, before this goes any further-”
But Beth couldn’t hear me. She had already turned away and was running toward the picnic table at the same even pace she had maintained all the way around the lake. She was already halfway there.
I shook my head and followed.
TWENTY TWO
We sat together on top of the table, our feet resting on one of the benches. I could hear the city coming awake out beyond the tree line that surrounded the park.
“What’s this all about, Beth?”
“I’m concerned about you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
“They may know you’re helping Mr. Gale,” she went on after a moment. “They may think you know what happened to the money and come after you.”
“But I’m not helping Barry.”
“Then why were you making inquiries in Hong Kong about the Asian Bank of Commerce?”
I stared at Beth. How could she know that?
“You weren’t exactly making a secret of it,” she said as if she were reading my mind. “You even left your business card at the bank’s registered office.”
Archie must have been right after all. Somebody was following me when I was in Hong Kong. Was it somebody Beth sent or was it somebody else? And regardless of who it was, why on earth had anybody been interested enough in what I was doing in Hong Kong to go to the effort of following me around? I hadn’t even been particularly interested in what I was doing in Hong Kong.
“It doesn’t matter why you were doing it,” Beth went on before I could ask her any of the questions piling up rapidly in my mind. “I wanted you to know that you’re safe.”
“Safe?”
“We’ve had a loose net on you ever since your meeting with Mr. Gale.”
That was the second time in a week someone had used the phrase “loose net” in connection with me. I didn’t like the sound of it now any more than I had the first time.
“That was you following me in Hong Kong?”
“We weren’t following you. Some colleagues of mine were running counter-surveillance procedures. Mr. Gale asked me to keep an eye out for a few days to see if anyone followed you after your meeting.”
“You’re scaring me, Beth.”
“I don’t mean to. You were clean in Hong Kong. You should know that.”
“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.” Then the obvious question occurred to me. “Did Barry send you here to tell me all this?”
Beth shook her head. Droplets of sweat dislodged from her hair rolled down her forehead, and into her eyes. She wiped them away with her hand.
“I just thought you ought to know I have you covered,” she said. “I didn’t want you to worry.”
I studied Beth and wondered about what she was really saying, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“I guess I don’t get any of this,” I finally said.
“It’s not very complicated. Barry is afraid somebody may try to get to the missing money through you. He asked me to keep an eye out to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s what I’m doing and I wanted to tell you that.”
Something behind me caught Beth’s attention and she looked away over my shoulder. I turned to follow her eyes and saw two men were walking toward us across the grass, the same two men who had disappeared earlier after I ran past them. Both of them were sweating and suffering badly in the morning heat and humidity and they looked even less like real runners now than they had when I passed them by the lake. I glanced at Beth and saw she obviously knew who they were so we sat and waited in silence until they got to the table.
Beth said something to the men in a language I didn’t recognize and I realized then they weren’t locals after all. The language sounded vaguely like a Chinese dialect, but I didn’t know a single word of any Chinese dialect so I couldn’t be sure. Beth had a question in her voice when she spoke-I was pretty sure of at least that much-and one of the men nodded quickly in response, giving a single crisp snap of his head. After that both men waited patiently while Beth looked off into space for a few moments.
“Okay,” she finally said.
Then she added something else in whatever language it was she was speaking and both men immediately turned and walked away without another word.
Beth took a deep breath and wiped both hands over her face.
“It looks like somebody may be interested in you after all,” she said.
