Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got a big laundry.”

  “The biggest.”

  “Why not just call Austin up and tell him that yourself?”

  “We think that’s a bad risk. Put yourself in Austin’s position, Eddie. Some stranger rings up one day and says, ‘We hear you probably have ten tons of currency that once belonged to the Bank of Vietnam and we wonder if you’d like to make a deal with us to launder it into bank deposits and legitimate investments.’ What’s he likely to do then? What would you do? If he panics and runs, we might never find him again. To minimize that possibility, we think that someone should contact Austin whom he knows and trusts. You’re the perfect guy.”

  The man’s story made more sense than Eddie had expected it to. It might even have been moderately persuasive, if he hadn’t known that Captain Austin was already dead, of course.

  “I am here, Eddie, to offer you a fee of $100,000 for contacting Austin and trying to convince him to do a deal with us. Your fee will be paid in advance. Even if you fail, or if it turns out that Austin has nothing and knows nothing, you keep the money. What have you got to lose?”

  A hundred grand?

  Eddie’s mind raced. If he just told the man right now that Austin was dead, there all that money went. If he didn’t tell him, if he took the fee, crapped around a while, and then announced that he had stumbled upon a small problem putting his case to Austin, he would get to keep it, wouldn’t he? That was what the guy just said. He got the money whether he was successful or not. On the other hand, if he took the guy’s money knowing that he couldn’t do anything that was the same as stealing from him, wasn’t it?

  Before Eddie decided what to do, the man added one more thing.

  “Furthermore, if Austin enters into an arrangement with us, we will pay you an additional $1,000,000.”

  For a moment Eddie wasn’t certain he had heard right.

  “How much?”

  “$1,000,000.”

  “$1,000,000? Are you goddamn kidding?”

  “You’ll never meet anyone more serious than I am, Eddie.”

  Eddie pushed himself out of his chair and walked slowly to the window. How many times in his life was somebody going to walk through his door and offer him $1,000,000 to do anything, let alone something that he might easily be able to do? Or could, if Austin were alive. The captain being dead and all did raise the bar somewhat Eddie had to admit. Raised the crap out of it actually.

  Eddie studied the people down below his window in Grant Street. He wondered briefly what all those people were rushing toward. Maybe more to the point, what was rushing toward them? What was already out there waiting for each of them, a few minutes or a few days into their futures, the son of a gun already cocked and aimed right between their innocent, bovine eyes?

  Maybe one was about to stumble on a curb and break his leg; maybe the bus another was catching would crash and he would be dead before he could get home; maybe somebody was about to walk up to a third and offer him a life-altering bag of money for doing something that sounded simple but was actually impossible; or maybe nothing at all was going to happen to any of them.

  “There’s something you should know,” Eddie said to the man as he eased himself back into the chair behind his desk.

  “Yes?” Rupert’s voice was empty, waiting.

  “Austin’s dead.”

  The man didn’t really look all that surprised, Eddie noticed. Not exactly the reaction he had been expecting.

  “Well, that may make things more difficult.”

  Suddenly Rupert stood up. He pulled an oversized brown envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and dropped it onto Eddie’s desk.

  “I am still prepared to retain you under the same terms regardless of that. If you wish to accept my offer, you must come to Bangkok immediately. In this envelope are an airline ticket, a hotel confirmation, and funds for your expenses. The day after you arrive in Bangkok, $100,000 will be wired to any bank you chose anywhere in the world.”

  The stiff set of Rupert’s features suddenly broke and a surprisingly soft smile spread across his face. “I do hope you will accept my proposition, Eddie. Bangkok can be rather fun, you know.”

  Then he winked, opened the door, and was gone.

  Jesus H. Christ. What the fuck was that?

  First the guy wants to hire him to find Austin and make a deal to launder ten tons of money Austin may never have had. Then, when Eddie tells him that Austin’s dead, he just nods and says that might make it more difficult, but he still wants to hire Eddie anyway.

  Then there was Bangkok again. It was hanging out there like a tenth planet generating a gravitational field all its own. It seemed to Eddie like he was riding in a little space capsule that was locked into an orbit whirring endlessly around the place. No matter how many times he made the damned circle, no matter how he tried to get away, eventually the pull would be too strong and Bangkok was going to reel him right on in. It was starting to seem utterly inescapable.

  On top of all that, there was the way the guy had left his office. Eddie laughed right out loud. He couldn’t keep the almost-forgotten lines from rolling through his head.

  And laying his finger

  Aside of his nose,

  And giving a nod,

  Up the chimney he rose.

  Well, shit a goddamned brick, Eddie thought to himself. Who was that masked man?

  Eight

  EDDIE had his feet on the desk and was poking idly with one chopstick at the remnants of the moo shu pork he had brought up from the Chinese place downstairs. Joshua had offered to get it for him, but Eddie had gone himself because he thought it might loosen him up a little to get out of the office, even just to walk down one floor.

  Ever since the man who called himself Marinus Rupert left that morning, Eddie had been mostly just sitting around trying to decide what to do. Almost the entire day had passed now and other than choosing steamed rice over fried he hadn’t made any particularly decisive moves. He had even gone Chinese in the first place because he was hoping his fortune cookie might give him a subtle nudge in the right direction, but Chung had forgotten to put one in the bag this time, the bastard.

  Was there some kind of hint for him in that? Eddie considered the possibility for a while. Perhaps he should see himself as a man without a fortune. Eventually, however, he decided that was stretching Chung’s pedestrian oversight a little too far and he let it slide.

  Joshua pushed his head into Eddie’s office. “It’s Jennifer on one.”

  Eddie shifted his eyes and glanced at the white light blinking rhythmically on his telephone.

  “No calls means no calls, Joshua.”

  “She said it was urgent. Anyway, I told her you were taking a deposition in the library.”

  “We don’t have a library.”

  “Take the call or not. Makes no difference to me.”

  Eddie twirled the chopstick in his fingers for a moment and then arced the white take-out carton toward the trashcan with his left hand. It hit the rim, bounced into the air and fell back into the center with a deeply satisfying plop.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to her.”

  Joshua nodded silently and closed the door, but Eddie didn’t immediately pick up the telephone.

  The brown envelope had been on his desk all day, exactly where Rupert had put it that morning, and now Eddie imagined that it was regarding him with a baleful gaze, impatient for him to make up his mind. The hundred grand tempted him a lot, he had to admit, and frankly so did the chance to figure out why so many people thought he knew what happened to the Bank of Vietnam’s money. But the picture of Harry Austin’s head split open in a Bangkok street, still vivid in his mind, was keeping his temptation under tight reign.

  Finally Eddie sighed, picked up the telephone, and stabbed at the blinking button. “Hello, Jennifer.”

  “Sorry to bother you, Eddie. I tried you at home first and you didn’t answer, so I thought you might be a
t the office. I guess if you’re working late like this you must be busy, so I’m sorry to—”

  “Jennifer,” Eddie quickly cut into her stream of consciousness before she got up to critical mass, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve got a lot on my mind. Why are you calling?”

  “I want you to talk to Michael.”

  “I do talk to Michael, Jennifer. I talk to him all the time. I talked to him just a few days ago.”

  “No, I mean right now. I want you to talk to him now.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “No. Well, yes.”

  “Okay. Which is it?”

  “He’s got a gun, Eddie.”

  For an instant, Eddie flashed on a picture of Jennifer and Franklin sitting rigid on the sofa while Michael waved a pistol at them and announced his demands.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s got a gun, Eddie. Some kind of pistol. A black one. I found it in his room yesterday.”

  “You searched his room?”

  “Of course not.” Jennifer hesitated. “Well, he’s been acting funny lately, so I was just looking around. I thought maybe he was trying out drugs. You know, I just didn’t know what to do so—”

  “You searched his room,” Eddie finished.

  “Don’t be a fucking lawyer with me!” Jennifer snapped. “I don’t need a warrant. I’m his mother.”

  She stopped talking and Eddie stayed silent and listened to her breathe.

  “And you’re his father,” Jennifer went on after a moment in a calmer tone. “I want you to talk to him.”

  “Have you asked him about the gun?”

  She exhaled heavily. “He said it’s no big deal; sometimes he takes it to school.”

  “He’s taking a gun to school?”

  “That’s what he says. He claims a lot of the kids do.”

  “I have a little trouble believing that very many kids in the Seattle suburbs carry handguns in their backpacks, Jennifer.”

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, Eddie, but we live in the real world up here, not in San Francisco. It’s probably true.”

  After Jennifer had moved away, she got in her digs about San Francisco whenever she saw an opening. Still, the thought gave Eddie pause this time. Maybe he really was losing touch with whatever was happening out in the normal world, out there on the other side of the wall.

  “Is this some kind of gang thing?”

  “No. At least I don’t think it is. Michael’s too much of a loner for that. I didn’t think I’d ever be grateful he inherited that trait from you, but I guess I am now.”

  Jennifer wanted to blame somebody for this and she was trying hard to target Eddie, even if she didn’t quite know how to do it in a way that made any sense. He didn’t bite.

  “Where is the gun now?”

  “Michael took it somewhere. He won’t tell me where.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, Jennifer, if you can’t do it yourself, get Franklin to take it away from him.”

  There was a long pause. “Franklin’s in France. He won’t be back until Friday.”

  “Wonderful,” Eddie said. “Is Michael there now?”

  “He’s upstairs. I’ll get him.”

  While Eddie waited, he tried to think things through. Was this nothing but idle teenage posturing and blossoming machismo? Or was it something else? And if it was something else, how was he going to get Michael to tell him what it was? The father-son thing had been drifting a while now for reasons he was already having difficulty understanding. It seemed an impossibly tall order to find out why Michael had suddenly decided to cart a gun around while he was coping with everything else, too.

  “Yeah?”

  The deep resonance of the voice startled Eddie and for a moment he even wondered fleetingly who had picked up the phone. Michael used to sound like his mother over the phone when he was younger. Once, to his great embarrassment, Eddie had mixed them up when he called and Michael’s feelings had been badly hurt by that. At least he guessed it wouldn’t be hard to tell them apart from now on.

  “I hear we’ve got a problem, Mike.”

  “I don’t have a problem. You might. But I don’t.”

  “Carrying a gun’s dangerous, Mike, not to mention illegal.”

  Jesus, Eddie thought. A half dozen words out of my mouth and I’m already sounding like a goddamned lawyer.

  “Those scumbags you work for do a lot worse,” Michael said. “So if they arrest me, maybe you could work for me, too, Dad. How would that be?”

  “I don’t work for those guys, Mike. They’re my clients.”

  It was a distinction that Eddie had always treasured, but now it sounded embarrassingly lame. There was a sullen silence from the other end of the line, and for once he was grateful for it.

  “So where did you get the gun?”

  There was no answer. Eddie realized that it had been a stupid question to ask, and worse, pointless.

  “Okay, let’s try this a different way. Why do you have a gun?”

  This time he allowed the silence to go on, determined to wait Michael out.

  “I just keep it around.” Eddie could hear the shrug in his son’s voice. “Most of the time it’s not even loaded.”

  “So why do you have it?”

  “Just…you know, protection.”

  “No, I don’t know. Protection from what?”

  “From stuff. Whatever.”

  The silence started up again and Eddie let it go on until Mike broke it.

  “I figure I’d better start looking out for myself.” The cruelty in his voice was unmistakable. “Who else is going to do it? You?”

  It was a finger straight in the eye, but Eddie blinked it away. “Is there something you’re not telling me here, Mike?”

  “Look, let’s just cut the father-son bullshit, huh, Dad?”

  Michael’s voice was steely and distant and Eddie started to feel a little numb.

  “I just want to be sure my ass is covered. You ought to understand that. You spend enough time covering yours.”

  Eddie was fighting back his growing anger at Michael’s wild swings when, with a sudden flash of horror, a thought dawned on him. Had some former client of his been harassing Mike?

  “There’s nothing going on, honest,” Michael answered the question before Eddie could ask it. “I just want to take care of myself if I have to. You’re sure as hell not going to be around to help.”

  The conversation rattled around a little after that, but essentially it was over. Mike had said his piece and Eddie was left with no real response other than to get angry and hit back, and he was not going to do that. If that was what his son thought of him, that was what his son thought of him.

  The gun wasn’t the issue, Eddie knew. He was the issue. The gun would no doubt disappear in a few days, maybe it already had, but he wouldn’t. Jennifer could worry about the gun. Eddie was going to worry about why his son thought he was such a jerk.

  After he hung up, Eddie replayed the conversation in his head several times searching for subtle meanings and thoughtful insights he might have missed the first time around. He found none.

  Okay, maybe he wasn’t any big deal—he hadn’t done all that much with his life, he supposed—but why did his son see him as such a loser? It certainly wasn’t true. Was it?

  As he thought about his conversation with Michael, Eddie idly picked up the envelope Rupert had left on his desk and toyed with it, sliding it absentmindedly from hand to hand. Forgetting his vow not to open it until he had decided whether to accept Rupert’s offer, he slipped his forefinger under the back flap, ripped it across the top, and shook the contents out onto his desk. As he sat for a long time looking at what spilled out, he could feel the sting of Michael’s words being shouldered aside by a growing sense of foreboding.

  There was nothing particularly sinister or even surprising about what was in the envelope. It was exactly what Rupert had said it would be. Still, looking at it spread ou
t across his desk, Eddie thought he could feel the air around him start to grow heavy. At the very moment he opened the envelope, he was certain the atmosphere began to give off a restless, distinctive odor: oxygen being burned into ozone somewhere nearby, the first forewarning of an approaching storm. It was a vivid premonition. Bolts of lightning, still too far away to be seen, were coming closer by the minute. Soon, he felt absolutely sure, they would be slashing the sky around his head.

  Eddie cautiously picked up a rectangular red and gold folder and opened the cover. Inside was a ticket for a San Francisco to Bangkok flight on Singapore Airlines leaving Wednesday just before midnight. It was a round-trip ticket with an open return. At least, Eddie noted, it was first class.

  There was cash, too: hundred dollar bills, ten of them. And there was a letter from the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok confirming that a suite had been reserved for Mr. Rupert Edward Dare for an indefinite stay. The letter begged to thank Mr. Dare for the $5000 cash deposit to his account. A suite at one of the most famous hotels in the world and a first-class ticket on Singapore Airlines would normally be fine with him, but there was something about the open return and the indefinite stay part of the letter that bothered him a lot.

  When he thought about it later, Eddie realized he had acted unconsciously after that. He dug around on his desk until he found the remote control and then punched on the little Sony that he kept in the office for watching sports when he was pretending to work on weekends. He had only been going to check out CNN, as he remembered, just to see what the weather was like in Bangkok; purely out of curiosity.

  “Anything else before I leave, Eddie?” Joshua was standing just inside the door and Eddie registered the concern on his face even in the fading twilight of the office. He had no secrets from Joshua, so he had told him about Marinus Rupert and about the Secret Service. He had told Joshua what he knew, and that hadn’t taken long.

  “I’m okay, Joshua.” Eddie hesitated and then decided to take the easy way out. “The call from Jennifer was no big deal. A problem with Mike. Nothing I can’t handle.”