by Jake Needham
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” I finally said. “You really have.”
“Do I?” Karsarkis looked annoyed. “Don’t shit me, Jack. You have a private line straight into the White House and we both know it. You are well respected and well connected and you have significant credibility with someone who has the ear of the President of the United States.”
“Look, Mr. Karsarkis, I—”
“So will you do it, Jack? Will you go to the White House and put my case for me?”
After that everyone, including me, sank into silence. I assumed they were waiting for me to say something, but I had absolutely no idea what to say.
Eventually Karsarkis leaned forward and fixed me with the kind of sincere gaze I figured they probably taught you at the Dale Carnegie School. “Can you do it?” he asked in a near whisper.
“Sure,” I said. “I can also eat a box of rat poison and stick my finger in a wall socket, but on the whole, I’d rather not.”
Karsarkis didn’t even smile at that. Instead, he just looked at me, then leaned back and waited some more.
“I really don’t know what to tell you,” I said after a long time had passed in silence.
“Just think about it. Mike will call you tomorrow. If you accept my proposal, he will wire your money immediately.”
I nodded slowly, not trusting myself to do much of anything else right then.
“Oh, yes. I almost forgot, Jack,” Karsarkis added, “there is one other thing.”
Karsarkis put a hand on the back of his neck and left it there as if he was trying to recall all the details about whatever it might be.
“It has come to my attention you may be in some danger.”
“Danger from whom?”
“There are several possibilities. Our association is rather well-known already and people who are associated with me attract a certain amount of attention.”
“We’re not associated.”
“I suppose it depends on how you look at it.”
Karsarkis let his eyes linger on me.
“You’re sitting here in my apartment right now, drinking my liquor, aren’t you? I just made you a business proposition, and no matter what you might say, we both know you’re considering it.”
I didn’t respond for a bit, which Karsarkis plainly expected because he just sat there and smiled at me.
Eventuallyfy" di I cleared my throat. “What kind of danger?”
“I’ve got a lot of enemies, Jack. Powerful enemies. People who want to do me harm. I really don’t understand why that is.”
Because you’re a lowlife scum-sucking bastard who sold out his country and then had a woman killed to cover his ass and keep his wallet dry?
“If the perception gets around that you know things about me,” Karsarkis continued, “there are people who would go to considerable lengths to find out what they are.”
“What people?”
“People,” Karsarkis shrugged. “I doubt you want to know anymore than that. I wouldn’t if I were you.”
I started to say something, but then thought better of it.
“There are those who will stop at nothing to get to me.” Karsarkis looked genuinely puzzled as to why that might be. “And my friends and associates occasionally get rather rough treatment.”
“We’re not friends and we’re not associates, so I guess I’m okay.”
“These are serious people,” Karsarkis continued as if I had never spoken. “You need serious people on your side, too, Jack.”
Without moving his head, Karsarkis shifted his eyes to Mike O’Connell who was still sitting silently across the room. O’Connell folded his arms and fixed me with what I take it was his hard-guy stare. I almost laughed out loud.
“We could help out with the problem, Jack,” he said. “If you let us, that is.”
Tommy slurped the last of his vodka and the sound startled me. I’d all but forgotten he was there.
“Listen to him, Jack,” he said. “A man needs his friends.”
I glanced at Tommy without saying anything.
Encouraged, he leaned toward me and spoke in a confidential whisper. “You really ought to—”
“Shut the fuck up, Tommy,” I snapped.
There was a long silence after that. Again, Karsarkis seemed to have anticipated it and was prepared to wait me out. This time I let him win the staring match.
“You may recall,” I said, “it didn’t impress me when you tried to get me involved in that hotel deal and offered me a lot of money for doing very little.”
Karsarkis watched me without responding.
“And it didn’t impress me when you tried to hook me in by leaning on BankThai to give me that house.”
Karsarkis nodded, but only very slightly.
“And I’m a lot less impressed than you may think by you waving a few million dollars around.”
Karsarkis was impassive.
“So now maybe you think you can impress me by trying to scare the crap out of me?”
“May I freshen anyone’s drink?” O’Connell was standing in front of me when he spoke, but I swear to God I have no memory of how he got there. I guess something was distracting me.
I stood up. “No, I don’t want another goddamned drink. I’m ready to go.”
Karsarkis was smart enough to know he had already made his best play so he made no effort to prolong the c prdrionversation. I had already turned toward the door when something occurred to me. I stopped and looked back over my shoulder at Karsarkis.
“Did you kill her?” I asked.
“You mean Cynthia?” Karsarkis seemed genuinely surprised at my question. “The Korean woman?”
“Is there more than one dead woman to ask about?”
Karsarkis gave a little shake of his head and looked away.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t kill her.”
“But you know who did.”
“I think so.”
“Who?” I asked.
Karsarkis blinked at that and let his eyes slide back to mine. I could see him thinking about it for a second, maybe two.
Then he gave another quick shake of his head and looked away again, saying nothing.
TWENTY TWO
TOMMY AND I took the elevator downstairs. Neither one of us spoke.
When we got back into the Mercedes, the driver headed south, winding through the neighborhood’s backstreets until he reached Sukhumvit Road, where he turned west. Sukhumvit was like a long neon tunnel. Streaks of colored light danced on the night and the roadway shimmered with rainbows of grease and gasoline. I felt like I could have been anywhere, but I wasn’t anywhere. I was in Bangkok, in the back of a darkened Mercedes, with a slightly tubby Thai spy, having just met secretly with the world’s most notorious fugitive who had offered me millions of dollars to seek a pardon for him from the President of the United States.
Damn. Looking at it that way, even I was impressed.
Traffic was heavy past Queen’s Park and the car crawled along until we reached Soi Asoke. I passed the time watching the lights rolling down the lenses of Tommy’s glasses and it wasn’t until we were abreast of the Sheraton that I finally posed the question I’d been silently turning over in my mind ever since we had left Karsarkis’ apartment.
“What’s your angle in all this, Tommy?” I asked. “Exactly why are you here?”
Tommy turned his head and looked at me, and when he did I saw he had been waiting for me to ask.
“I’m here because we need your help, Jack.”
“We? Is that the royal we, Tommy? Or are you trying to tell me this is something official?”
“I guess,” he said after a pause, “that depends on what you think of as official.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I have instructions to tell you there are people in the Thai government who would consider it a great service to our country if you would render Mr. Karsarkis whatever assistance he may r
equire while he is our guest here.”
“Those sound like very cautiously chosen words, my little friend. Very cautiously chosen indeed.”
“Look, Jack, stop giving me shit, will you? I’m only the messenger here. I’m just doing my job.”
“I’m not giving you shit, Tommy,” I said. “I’m just listening to you carefully, and I was particularly interested in prdrsti one word you used.”
“What word?”
“Guest. You called Karsarkis a guest.”
“Ah, Jack, drop the cutesy crap, would you?”
“No, wait a minute here, Tommy. I think that’s important. I’d like to know exactly how you draw the distinction between a fugitive and a guest. It wouldn’t have anything to do with being stinking rich and selling Thailand cut-rate oil while kicking back part of the deal to some heavy-hitting politicians, would it?”
“Look, Jack, I don’t need one of your wiseass lectures on honesty in government tonight. I really don’t.” Tommy twisted toward me and folded his arms. “Just tell me what I have to do to get you to help Plato Karsarkis get his fucking pardon and I’m out of here.”
“I want to be absolutely clear I’m hearing you right here, Tommy. Absolutely and completely clear.”
I pinned him with my best tough guy stare. I thought he flinched slightly, but perhaps I was only being hopeful.
“You are telling me the Thai government wants me to help Plato Karsarkis obtain a pardon from the President of the United States. That’s what I hear you saying here. Have I got that right?”
“Not the entire government,” Tommy said, turning away. “Don’t be a goddamned idiot.”
“Then I guess I don’t understand,” I said.
“Jack, do I have to fucking spell it out for you?”
“Yeah, fucking spell it out for me.”
Tommy looked completely exasperated and for a moment I didn’t know if he was going to say any more or not, but then he started talking again.
“Everybody in the government here isn’t on the take, Jack, regardless of what you might think.”
“Jesus, you mean a few people have eaten so much already they’ve left the table?”
Tommy ignored me, as he probably should have.
“There are some very senior people in the Thai government who think Plato Karsarkis is a danger to us,” he said. “They want him to go away. But they want that to happen without Thailand’s direct involvement.”
“Ah, I get it now,” I said. “The famously neutral Thais who, lest we forget, somehow managed to finesse World War II.”
Tommy made a sound like air rushing out of a tire. Then he sat back and folded his arms. I looked out at the street as the big Mercedes kept right on plowing through traffic like the Queen Elizabeth through a fleet of dinghies.
“These people I am referring to would owe you if you help Karsarkis, Jack, and take it from me these are people who you would like to owe you. You do this and you can just about write your own ticket around here.”
I didn’t say anything, although Tommy’s announcement certainly put a different light on all this, didn’t it? If at least part of the Thai government was pulling for Karsarkis to get his pardon, that gave the undertaking a certain sense of legitimacy it had lacked before. And then, too, some pretty impressive compensation had been laid on the table here. First Karsarkis counted out five million bucks and then Tommy made it sound like the Thai government would give me Phuket or something.
Karsarkis is going to pais nted outy somebody a shit load of money to represent him, I told myself. It wasn’t as if I would be serving truth and justice by refusing. If I said no, he’d just get someone else. So why not me? Why throw all that money and the everlasting gratitude of the Thai government away for…well, what? Besides, it might even be fun to show up at the White House as Plato Karsarkis’ lawyer. Billy Redwine would get a real hoot out of that, and everyone’s entitled to a lawyer, right?
After I had completed my personal orgy of self-justification, I flipped my bad-boy stare back on and gave Tommy a long look.
“Before I decide anything, I need to see all your intelligence files on Karsarkis. The raw files, Tommy. Not the edited crap.”
“I don’t see what good that would do you. Most of the stuff is from local sources so it’s in Thai anyway. You don’t read Thai as I recall, do you, Jack?”
“Not too well.”
“Well, there you go.”
“You got wiretaps on Karsarkis, don’t you?”
Tommy coughed and looked out the window.
“Yeah, I figured,” I said. “As far as I know Karsarkis doesn’t speak a word of Thai so whatever you’ve got has to be in English.”
Tommy cleared his throat and tried for a pacifying tone. “Look, Jack, I’d like to help you out, but—”
“You’re not helping me out. You’re helping yourself out. No files, no Jack Shepherd doing a single goddamned thing for Plato Karsarkis. That’s my deal.”
“Ah, man, I just can’t do it, Jack.”
Tommy sighed heavily and rubbed at his face. I said nothing. I figured if I kept quiet for a while, Tommy was bound to fold. I figured right.
“Look, Jack, I’ll talk to my boss,” he said, breaking the silence. “But that’s the best I can do.”
“Who’s your boss?”
Tommy suddenly grinned and winked at me. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Well, fuck, Tommy…”
“That’s all you’re getting from me, Jack. I’ll ask my boss about the files.”
“Okay, you do that.”
“But if we do give the files to you, does that mean you’ll represent Karsarkis? That you’ll try to get a pardon for him?”
I twisted around until I was facing Tommy full on. He looked alarmed and tilted his head back as if he thought I might be about to haul off and smack the crap out of him.
I leaned in close, my face right up against his, and I held it there until he flinched.
Then I winked.
“I can’t tell you that,” I said.
TWENTY THREE
AFTER TOMMY DROPPED me off at the university I went straight to the garage and retrieved my car without bothering to go back upstairs to my office. It was almost nine and I was hungry and a little pissed off and all I wanted to do was go home, open a beer, make a grilled-cheese sandwich, and kiss my wife. Although not necessarily in that exact order.
When I caught a trais ntas goffic light on New Petchburi Road, I just sat and stared out at the city trying not to think about much of anything. The red tile façade of Chidlom Place was up ahead, and I counted the windows up from the bottom looking for the lights of our apartment on the eleventh floor. The windows I figured for ours were dark and I knew Anita was at home, so I tried again. I ended up at the same dark windows for a second time and I decided I must be miscounting somehow and gave up.
Chidlom Place is quite a nice building by local standards, medium-sized with no more than two apartments on each of its twenty floors, and Anita and I had lived there ever since we’ve been together. There were hardly any Thais at all in the building for some reason. Foreigners with no visible means of support seemed to occupy most of the apartments. Anita had long ago christened it the eurotrash building.
The traffic light was still red when my cellphone started vibrating frantically in my trouser pocket. It goosed me so badly that my foot shot out and punched the accelerator, which caused my car to lurch into the intersection. Although I hadn’t come close to hitting anything, a cop directing traffic saw me and gave me a long look to appraise my cash value. When the cop saw I was a foreigner that pretty much sealed the deal since all foreigners are assumed by Thais to be rich. He was just starting to stroll over when a truck made an illegal turn right in front of him and he became distracted.
Spared for a moment, I fished the phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.
“Hello?”
“Sawadee krap, Professor,” Jello’s voice rumbled out of
the tiny earpiece.
“Hey, man,” I said. “You caught me in the car. I’m on my way home.”
“I figured. I just tried you there but nobody answered.”
I tilted my head and searched again for our apartment windows. That was odd. I thought for sure Anita was home.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
“I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t speak too quickly. I’m about to ask you if I can bust in on your happy home life tonight, maybe get you to look at something for me.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got some incorporation papers here for a company that turned up in an investigation and something doesn’t look right to me. I’d like to run them by you.”
“I’m not sure how much I could tell you from looking at Thai incorporation papers.”
“It’s not a Thai company. It’s a BVI.”
The British Virgin Islands is a fairly respectable place to organize holding companies that are perfectly legal but still exist as nothing more than a few pieces of paper in some lawyer’s filing cabinet. There are hundreds of thousands of such companies in use around the world for all sorts of purposes, most of them perfectly ordinary, although no doubt some of those purposes are less ordinary than others. Still, you seldom encounter a BVI company in Thailand and Jello’s call tickled my curiosity.
“I guess Anita’s not home so my hopes of a romantic dinner for two are pretty much in the crapper anyway. What time were you thinking of?”
“A half hour from now?”
“No problem,” I said. “Come on around.&re odthdquo;
“Thanks, Jack. I appreciate this.”
As I closed the telephone, the traffic light changed to green, and the cop swiveled back toward me. I tossed the phone on the passenger seat, gave him a cheery wave, and drove away before he could hit me up for a contribution to his favorite charity.
THE ELEVATOR OPENED on the eleventh floor of our apartment building and I crossed the small foyer and unlocked my front door. The only light inside was coming through the big windows in the living room and I had to turn on the lamps in the entrance hall as I walked through it. Wondering if Anita had gone to bed already, I stuck my head into the master bedroom, but it was empty.
