by Jake Needham
“And does he have a problem?”
“Sure he does, Jack. Howard always has a problem.”
“What is it this time?”
Howard claimed to have business interests all around the world, but all I knew for certain was that he had done a few minor real estate deals here and there and that he owned a California company named In The Pink Inc. The company had been a nearly defunct distributor of pornographic videos when Howard bought it, but even after he unloaded the porno inventory on some Iranian students, Howard loved the name of the company so much he never changed it.
The only other thing of any value that In The Pink Inc. owned was a small tract of land in Hollywood that was just east of the old Warner Brothers studio lot. There was nothing on the site but a run-down building occupied by something that billed itself as a karaoke club and Howard wanted to redevelop the property with a small strip mall. Another strip mall was just what LA really needed, of course, so he had somehow convinced three young Hong Kong Chinese disco entrepreneurs to put up the money. That had been the reason for setting up the development company in Hong Kong, or so I had been told. Regardless, before I even managed to get the titles to the land straightened out and the property transferred into the new company, Howard’s backers lost interest in the deal and he told me to forget the whole thing.
“Don’t tell me Howard’s strip mall deal is alive again?” I asked.
Dollar didn’t answer me right away. I got the feeling that he was still trying to read my reaction to Howard’s name.
“No, it’s not about all that,” Dollar finally said, but that was all he did say.
We had reached the edge of the campus and Dollar abruptly turned east and headed for Phayathai Road, a busy north-south thoroughfare that bisected Chula. I still couldn’t see where this was going, but I trailed along anyway, waiting Dollar out. Just John had dropped a few paces behind us, apparently losing interest in the conversation. I could easily see how that might be.
“Jack, I need to understand exactly how much you know about this mess Howard’s got himself in.”
“I just told you. I don’t know anything about Howard or any mess he’s in. I haven’t heard from him since last year.”
I couldn’t imagine why Dollar was suddenly so interested in Howard. I certainly wasn’t.
Then all of a sudden it occurred to me what all this might be about, and I stopped walking so abruptly that Just John stumbled into me from behind.
Dollar’s law firm hired me to consult with their clients on specialized corporate matters fairly frequently. I even had a small office of my own there and I thought Dollar knew me pretty well by now. I didn’t want any clients, and even if I did, I’d certainly be able to get them without stealing them from him. If that was what Dollar was implying now that he thought I was doing, I didn’t like it one little bit.
“Are you suggesting that I’m trying to hijack one of your clients, Dollar?”
“No,” Dollar quickly shook his head. “Nothing like that.”
I looked at him carefully. I wasn’t sure I believed him. It seemed to me that was exactly what he was suggesting.
“Then you’d better explain to me what you’re talking about,” I said.
Dollar shifted his eyes off mine. He glanced at Just John and then sighed heavily.
“Why don’t we just forget all this for now, Jack? If you haven’t talked to Howard recently, you haven’t. Just let me know if he calls. Will you do that for me?”
“What’s going on here, guys?” I looked back and forth between Dollar and Just John. “Why don’t you just lay it out for me?”
Dollar said nothing. It was Just John who answered me.
“Howard’s gone and done something stupid, Jack. We need to straighten it out.” John lifted his arms from his sides, palms up. “That’s all. We just want to be sure nobody gets hurt when we do.”
I didn’t understand what that meant, but at least one thing was coming through loud and clear.
“Is there something you’re not telling me here, guys?”
Dollar looked exasperated. “Jack, there’s a ton of shit we’re not telling you. Do you think we’re completely stupid?”
“If you’re not going to tell me what we’re talking about, then why in the world are we having—”
Dollar pointed a finger at me, cutting me off. “Keep your nose clean,” he interrupted. “We’ll be in touch.”
Then Dollar turned and walked away. Just John tossed me a little salute, half-smiled, and followed him without a word. Within a few strides they were moving crisply in lockstep. They looked to me like they were making directly for Phayathai Road. I figured Dollar’s driver was hovering somewhere there, idling in Dollar’s big Mercedes and ignoring the traffic backing up behind it, waiting patiently for the boss to appear.
I stood there and watched them go and I wondered for a moment if I would eventually find out what Dollar was talking about. Then I asked myself the really important question. I asked myself if I really wanted to know.
LAUNDRY MAN
FIVE
AS I WALKED SLOWLY back to my office I pushed Dollar, Just John, and Howard the Roach firmly into the back of my mind. They weren’t my problem right then. It was this guy who claimed to be Barry Gale who required my attention.
Would I be naïve to meet whoever called me just because he had pitched a tale that tickled my sense of the bizarre? But then, what could be the harm in it?
I couldn’t think of anyone I had offended enough to want to do me harm, at least not recently, and it seemed unlikely that anyone would mount such an elaborate ruse even if they did wish me harm. Someone could certainly get to me easily enough without going through all this. And what kind of mischief could take place in a supermarket crowded with other people anyway?
As improbable as it might seem, maybe my caller really had been Barry Gale? Who else could have known the things he knew?
Whoever turned up at Took Lae Dee tomorrow night — whether it was Barry Gale or not – he would have some kind of a story to tell. And then he would no doubt want something from me. I couldn’t imagine what that might be, but I figured I had better be prepared for anything. That is, of course, if I went down there at all. I still had a little time to make up my mind. Maybe the place to start doing that was with finding out more than I knew right then about Barry Gale and the body that had been found in that Dallas swimming pool.
I flipped through my mental Rolodex looking for somebody who might be able to help me and several good possibilities came to mind. Fortunately Bangkok was a dream of a location for people in the information business whether they were working for governments or involved in some private enterprise or, as was not infrequently the case, doing both at the same time. The city was the doorway to Southeast Asia, and the Thais didn’t much care what anyone did there as long as it didn’t involve them. That made Bangkok an irresistible base of operations for almost anyone who was up to anything they didn’t want too many people to know about.
I turned the alternatives over in my mind while I walked, but there was really no reason to do that. I already knew exactly who I needed to see.
When I got back to the building where my office was, I went straight down to the garage and got into my Volvo. A few minutes later I was headed north on Phayathai Road.
DARCY RICE LIVED in one of Bangkok’s older neighborhoods that was out near Chitralada Palace where the king maintained his official residence. It was a part of town where you seldom saw foreigners, and that suited Darcy just fine.
Her house was at the end of a tiny soi that branched off Wisut Kasat Road at an Esso station. If you didn’t know exactly where you were going, it didn’t look like a street at all, but just part of the station’s driveway. Behind the Esso station the soi made a sharp bend to the right and ran along a row of nondescript shop-houses for about a hundred yards until it dead-ended at a green metal gate set into a high ginger-colored wall. Thick stands of rangy bamboo tumbled ove
r the wall from inside and gave the whole area a slightly overgrown appearance, but the bamboo had a very specific purpose. Concealed within it was a sophisticated security system that encircled the entire property. It was an exceptionally thorough piece of technology and it effectively ensured the total privacy of the occupants.
After Darcy retired from more than thirty years of working for the US government, some of it in Washington and the rest in various postings around Asia, she took her whole pension in a cash settlement and headed straight for Bangkok. I met Darcy shortly after she set up shop here. She had made it her business to look me up and introduce herself. At first I wondered why, but after I got to know Darcy better I understood perfectly well.
Darcy was in the business of collecting information and so she also collected people who had information. For a few months I heard from Darcy only occasionally, mostly when she needed me to explain some arcane twist of international finance, but gradually the calls and our visits increased in frequency and a friendship developed. Darcy had never spoken to me about her background except in general terms; however, I had no difficulty reading between the lines. CIA would have been an obvious guess, but I doubted it. My own theory was that Darcy had been with the NSA, the National Security Agency.
NSA was so secretive that it made the CIA look like the New York Times. What’s more, they did the stuff that few people even knew was going on—the computer break-ins, the telephone and email intercepts, the satellite surveillance, and the other black arts wizardry almost anybody out of the know would have been inclined to dismiss as paranoid fiction rather than real life. That was exactly the kind of stuff Darcy seemed to know all about.
Her computers occupied all of a two-story cottage across a swimming pool from the main house, and they were fat with data. There was little Darcy could not get access to. She could nail down details about intelligence networks and the activities of individual agents that conventional corporate investigative agencies had never heard of. The end of the Cold War had scattered a welter of unemployed, freebooting intelligence operators across the globe. A lot of them had tried to do the same thing Darcy had, but there were few others who could claim the sophistication of the operation she had created in Bangkok. It was nothing less than a private intelligence agency, one with capabilities equal to any competitor and to not a few governments.
At the end of the soi I stopped in front of Darcy’s gate and lowered the driver’s window. Before I could push the button on the intercom box, the gate split into two panels and began to swing inward. I gave a little wave in the direction where I knew the security camera was and the intercom speaker click-clacked in acknowledgment.
Parking on the gravel of the circular driveway, I got out and made my way up the short brick walk between rows of tropical plants so carefully tended and perfectly formed that they might have been shot out of plastic injection molds. Darcy opened the door and stepped onto the house’s wide front porch. She was a smallish woman, a few years past sixty, trim with a pleasant but forgettable face, and she wore her silver hair in a tightly fitted, masculine crop. As always when she was at home, she was dressed in a white silk blouse and an ankle-length sarong, today’s selection being in the brightest shade of saffron I had ever seen.
“It’s been a long time, doll.” She pecked me on the cheek and held my arm in a kind of embrace as we entered the living room of the house. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Out chasing women. What else is there to do in Bangkok?”
Darcy laughed and gestured me toward a couch in the elegantly proportioned living area. She sat on the one opposite and folded a leg up under her. A maid appeared almost immediately and placed sweating glasses of cold water in front of each of us, positioning them carefully on tiny squares of coarse, white cotton.
Darcy smiled at me and waited until the maid had glided silently out of the room before she said anything else.
“Nata is out in the cottage running some stuff. She ought to be in any minute.”
Nata had been Darcy’s companion for almost fifteen years and, not surprisingly, she was one of the primary reasons why Darcy had chosen Bangkok for her retirement. The daughter of a Thai general who had ended up on the wrong side of some long-forgotten military coup, Nata was a stunningly beautiful woman who must have been in her late forties. She was very slight with wispy, wide-set eyes, and she seldom wore make-up. Her skin was smooth and milky-looking, so white that you could go snow-blind just looking at it.
I was the pretty much the only foreigner I knew who hadn’t ended up in Thailand because of the women.
“So tell me, doll, what’s on your mind? I get the feeling you didn’t come all the way out here looking for a free lunch.”
“I guess I did in a manner of speaking. I need something.”
“Don’t we all?”
“I’ve got to meet somebody tonight, and I don’t want to sound completely stupid when I do.”
“Uh-huh.” Darcy’s face was professionally empty, waiting.
“I just need a little background. Nothing heavy duty.”
“Tell me the story. Let me decide that.”
I told Darcy about the telephone call and about my summons to Foodland that night. I also told her what I remembered about Barry Gale’s so-called suicide and the stories linking the Texas State Bank with money laundering by Russian mobsters. But I didn’t know much so that didn’t take very long.
“What I need is a digest of the press coverage around the time Barry Gale is supposed to have died,” I finished. “Can you manage that?”
“Exactly what are you looking for?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure. Anything that would prepare me for however this conversation tonight ends up going, I guess. Whatever that means.”
“I don’t see how any of the public stuff is going to help you figure out whether this really is your guy, if that’s what you’re trying to do.”
“Well…”
“Yeah, I know,” Darcy laughed. “You’d also like to see if I could come up with anything that might not have made the papers.”
“Something like that.”
“For you, Jack, anything.”
Darcy stood up and held out her hand.
“Let’s take a walk out to the cottage, doll.”
LAUNDRY MAN
SIX
THE BUILDING THAT DARCY called a cottage was actually the size of a whole house even if it didn’t look much like one. Had it not been for a door on the first level and two small windows on the second, it would have resembled a solid cube of stucco.
The first floor was a single brightly lit room with at least a dozen computer workstations positioned around its walls. Three matronly-looking Thai women, all apparently well into their sixties if not older, moved silently from station to station checking the screens and occasionally tapping a few characters on one of the keyboards. In the center of the room, on a low platform, there was a far more elaborate workstation equipped with four huge thin-panel displays supported by sleek, black pedestals.
Nata perched at the center of the platform in an orthopedic chair and rested her folded forearms on the table in front of a keyboard. She was looking from one display to the other, twisting her brows in concentration. A thin microphone on a chrome boom curved in front of her mouth and I had the impression she had been murmuring into it when we came in, but when she saw us she pushed herself back from the table and flicked the boom up over her head like a surfer chick flipping up sunglasses.
“Hey, Jack boy! Long time.”
“I was in the neighborhood, so—”
“Yeah, yeah. What is it this time? You never come to see me except when you want something.”
“That’s not entirely true,” I said, but it pretty much was.
Darcy stepped in and in a few clipped phrases related to Nata the high points of the story I had just told her about my call from the man claiming to be Barry Gale.
“This guy wants to meet you where?”
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Nata’s question was addressed to me, but she was looking at Darcy when she asked it.
“Took Lae Dee.” I said. “It’s in Foodland.”
“The one on Sukhumvit Road? Down by the Ambassador Hotel?”
I nodded. I didn’t much blame Nata for wondering about that part of my story. I was wondering a little about it, too.
During daylight hours Sukhumvit Road was one of Bangkok’s principal arteries, four lanes jammed with vehicles and the Sky Train running on massive concrete pillars down its center. It slashed like a fault line across the part of the city where almost every foreigner in town lived. For miles it was lined with luxurious shopping malls, expensive restaurants, and many-starred hotels. It was generally thronged with people: well-heeled tourists, foreign residents, and those adventurous Thais who didn’t mind so much mixing with either.
In the hours after dark, however, a different breed took over Sukhumvit Road. Even at its most benign, Bangkok was part Miami and part Beirut, and there was nothing benign about midnight on the fault line. In the late, late hours, Sukhumvit Road became Blade Runner country.
I had always thought there had to be some kind of international network devoted to coaxing social rejects and dropout cases worldwide into coming to Bangkok, because come they did by the thousands. They walked away from third-shift jobs in places like Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Berlin, and Toronto, packed what they had, bought a cheap airline ticket, and made their way to the Land of Smiles. Some were looking for a cheap tropical paradise; others thought they’d found Sodom and Gomorrah; but almost every one of them was hoping in some way to make a fresh start on a life that up until then probably had little to recommend it. Many of these refugees from reality probably couldn’t have located the city on a map before they decided it was the place for them, maybe they still couldn’t, but now Bangkok had become their last, maybe their only hope.
