by Jake Needham
“Be there or be square? Jesus, pal, where do you get your dialogue? Old Cheech and Chong movies?”
The man pushed himself out of his chair. He picked up his Stetson and when he put it on he carefully adjusted the angle of the brim, bending it slightly between his fingers until he seemed to be satisfied it was sitting exactly right on his head.
“Well, Slick, if I was you I wouldn’t worry about it none. You’ve got a whole shit load of better things than that to think about right now.”
Then the man slipped on his sunglasses, tossed me a little salute, and walked away. As I watched him thread his way among the tables crowded with Chinese tourists wolfing down their set-price lunches, I reached over and picked up the small stack of photographs he had left on the table.
There were three of them. The images were blurred and grainy as if they had been taken from a great distance and they had an odd green cast to them. My guess was that they had been taken through some kind of high-powered night vision equipment, although I was certainly no expert in such things and couldn’t be sure. Nevertheless, the contents of the photos were unmistakable.
In the first, I was getting out of our rented jeep in front of Karsarkis’ house. In the second, Anita and I were standing at the front door waiting for someone to open it. In the third, I was standing at the top of the steps to Karsarkis’ house waving idiotically into the night. When I had done that on the night of Karsarkis’ dinner party and Anita had asked me why, I told her something about wanting to be certain I hadn’t missed anybody who might be out there watching us. At the time I thought I was joking. Apparently I wasn’t.
I glanced up ju sglahinst in time to see Deputy United States Marshal Clovis Ward reach the sidewalk. I followed him with my eyes as he turned left down Beach Road and walked toward the Holiday Inn. Even when I could no longer distinguish him in the crowd of tourists that filled the sidewalk, I could still see that damned Stetson bobbing just above the flowing mass of bodies. Then I lost sight of it, too, and the man was gone.
ELEVEN
I didn’t intend to tell Anita about this guy bracing me after she had left the restaurant, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her about the photographs. I thought the idea of being watched and photographed by the United States Marshals Service might frighten her, particularly since it scared the crap out of me.
Still, not telling her might be a problem, too. Driving back to the hotel in the jeep, we would be together in awfully close quarters and Anita had eerie radar. I wasn’t absolutely sure I could get away with keeping it from her.
I needn’t have worried. Anita had made arrangements with some real estate agent she had found in Patong to look at a house on our way back to the hotel and she talked on and on about the place while we drove. I let her, because it kept me off the hook.
“And guess the best part,” she concluded breathlessly. “Go ahead. Guess.”
“They’re going to give the house to you for nothing.”
“Be serious.”
“I was.”
“Jack, it has a tennis court.”
That gave me pause. I’d always wanted a house with a tennis court and Anita knew it.
“What kind of court?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as disinterested as possible.
“I don’t know. The usual kind, I guess. You know, with a net.”
“I meant what kind of surface does it have, Anita? Hard court? Clay? Grass?”
“I know what you meant. I was just joking. The woman didn’t say.”
“Woman?”
“The agent,” Anita said and gave me a big wink. “I think you’re going to like her as much as you’ll like the tennis court.”
That naturally enough tickled my curiosity and shut me up for a while, exactly as Anita had probably intended it to. The woman had given Anita a map and was going to meet us at the house. I could hardly wait.
Following the route marked on the map in yellow ink, we went south from Patong past the Le Meridien Hotel complex to Karon Beach and then further south to Kata Beach. Just beyond a huge Club Med complex that bore a remarkable resemblance to an abandoned POW camp, the main road turned east, tracing a route over the coastal hills and back to Phuket Town.
According to the map, instead of turning there we were supposed to go straight ahead and follow a smaller road that continued south until we saw a sign just beyond Little Kata Beach that read No drive beyond this point by police order. At that sign, according to the instructions the woman had given Anita, we were to drive straight on. Naturally. Welcome to Thailand.
We located the sign without difficulty and then, about a quarter mile beyond it, we found ourselves on a winding asphalt road that climbed steeply up from the coast into a lush, tropical jungle. It was not long before we were completely engulfed in a jungle vglahid that cliof giant ferns, banana trees, oversize cattails, and coconut palms. Everywhere bougainvillea grew wild, etching red and white veins in the tangle of the rain forest. The temperature dropped so abruptly it felt like someone had turned on a huge air conditioner.
The house we were looking for was at the end of a driveway off the road to the right. The entry was marked with twin rows of rubber trees, their white-splotched trunks glowing like runway lights in the deeply saturated green of the forest. The two rows were so perfect, every tree so flawlessly aligned and utterly identical in height and growth, they looked like a cartoon. I half expected to see Jiminy Cricket skipping along just ahead of us, whistling happily as he showed the way.
The agent’s silver Range Rover was parked at the end of the driveway, right in front of the house. As we pulled up the woman got out and stood waiting, smiling in that particularly servile yet obviously artificial way real estate agents seem to smile the world over. Anita introduced us, but I was too busy looking the woman over to get her name straight. I thought it was Sanilee, or Saralee, or some kind of Lee, but at least I got her nickname. It was Nok.
Nok was tall for a Thai, nearly six feet, and she had the slim figure and bouncing strut of a runway model rather than the more generally compact and inconspicuous way of walking most Thai women employed. She wore a white blouse and a long yellow skirt with a wide belt and high-heeled sandals that taken together were perhaps just a touch too elegant for the occasion. Her long hair was slightly teased up and then swept straight back from her high forehead and her eyes were invisible behind huge tortoiseshell sunglasses. She looked vaguely familiar, although I was sure I’d never met her before. Then in a moment it came to me. She looked as if she had stepped straight out a seventies photograph of Jackie Kennedy and her friends.
“The house was built about three years ago,” she was saying as I eventually tuned into the conversation, “but no one has ever lived in it. We’re selling it for the bank that provided the financing.”
The woman’s right hand held a mobile phone and she was gesturing toward the house with it, using its little antenna as a pointer. I followed it with my eyes and for the first time took a close look at the house.
I had to admit it wasn’t bad. Not up to the standard of Plato Karsarkis’ house, of course, but still very nice. The style was something you would probably call early Hollywood Hills, hardly the sort of thing you’d expect to find in Phuket. Still, I had to admit the whitewashed walls and plain lines went surprisingly well with the green of the rain forest and the streaky blue of the sea beyond.
“What do you think, Jack?” Anita asked.
I mumbled something suitably vague that seemed to satisfy her and then trailed along behind the two women as they started their tour.
As it turned out, the house was impressive and Nok was thorough and professional in her presentation. For twenty minutes or so we paced the huge living room with a stone fireplace that looked somewhat out of place on a tropical island, examined the teak-floored bedrooms, peered at the designer-perfect kitchen, and took in the sweeping views from the hillside westward over the Andaman Sea. The thing that really grabbed me of course was the ten
nis court, a green-tinted Har-Tru surface carefully laid out along a north-south axis just as it should have been. It, too, enjoyed a spectacular sea view.
When the tour was done, we regrouped by the cars and Nok handed us both business cards and little booklets about the house. I flipped through {ippour was my copy of the brochure while she was talking, but nothing really caught my eye until I got to the last page and saw the asking price. It was eighty-five million Thai baht, nearly three million United States dollars. If this Hollywood Hills house had actually been in the Hollywood Hills, at least on one of the better streets, that probably would have been just about right. But it was in Phuket, and I couldn’t imagine there was any house in Phuket that had ever sold for that much money.
I held the little pamphlet up and looked at Anita.
“Have you seen the price?” I asked her.
“Yes, it’s pretty ridiculous,” Nok spoke up before Anita had to say anything. “But Thai banks are completely unrealistic about the value of property. They’d probably take a lot less if you offered cash.”
“It does seem high,” Anita mumbled, but she didn’t look at me.
“Well, my husband and I bought a house from the same bank,” Nok said, still pitching hard. “We offered about half of what they were asking and stuck to it and eventually they took it.”
“That’s still may be a little more than I wanted to spend,” Anita admitted.
“It’s a lot more than I wanted to spend,” I added.
“Did you have a figure in mind?” Nok asked politely, looking at me rather than Anita.
“Yes,” I smiled. “Zero.”
Nok looked puzzled, as she should have.
“I would be buying the property,” Anita explained. “Jack’s not sure it’s a good idea. That what he means.”
Nok started talking to me again, although I wasn’t sure why.
“Phuket is a great place to have a second house, I can tell you that,” she said. “My husband and I have a penthouse in Bangkok and a farm up north of Chiang Mai as well as our place here, but we spend as much time in Phuket as we can.”
That was a lot of real estate, even in Thailand. Now that I thought about it, I realized it would have taken at least a month of my university salary to pay for the simple, but elegant clothing in which Nok was dressed and another six months or so to cover the elaborate, but refined jewelry she wore with it. Now it was my turn to look puzzled. I had never guessed there was so much money to be made selling houses in Phuket.
“Oh, I’m not really a real estate agent,” Nok quickly volunteered, sensing my curiosity. “I just do this sometimes to help out a friend. And for the gossip, of course. Phuket’s just loaded with gossip. When you deal with real estate, you get to hear every bit of it.”
“I’m sure you do,” I nodded.
“Neither my husband nor I really work,” she shrugged.
“You don’t?”
“My husband is an American,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“I’m an American,” I said. “I work.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. My husband sold a business in the United States. I don’t really know what kind of business. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Anyway, he’s retired here now.”
“What’s his name? Bill Gates?”
“No,” she {o, amp;="1em said, not getting the joke, which was okay with me since it wasn’t a very good joke. “It’s Edward Dare. Most of his friends call him Eddie. Do you know him?”
I shook my head.
“You should. You’d like him, and he doesn’t know that many other Americans out here. Maybe we could all have dinner somewhere one night soon.”
“That would be nice.” Anita jumped in to rescue me before the ethnic solidarity routine spiraled completely out of hand. “But I’m afraid we’re going back to Bangkok tomorrow.”
“Well, maybe another time.” Nok seemed genuinely disappointed. “I’m sure he’d really enjoy meeting a couple from back home.”
“I’m Italian,” Anita said. “Jack’s the American.”
“And I live in Bangkok,” I added. “That’s where ‘back home’ is for me.”
“Oh. .” Nok briefly looked disappointed again, but then she abruptly brightened. “Anyway, I hope you’ll think about the house. Phuket is a wonderful place to live and there’re so many prominent people here. It’s just that you never hear about them because everyone is so discreet.”
I rolled my eyes and said nothing, but Anita couldn’t resist.
“Prominent people?” she asked, her voice dripping innocence.
“I don’t like to gossip,” Nok said, “but I hear…”
She bent toward us and lowered her voice, although I had the impression the house was sufficiently isolated we could have set off a low-yield nuclear device without anyone hearing it.
“A cousin of the British royal family secretly owns a beautiful house at Karon Beach through a Cayman Islands company, and there is a very prominent American actor who owns a beautiful villa above Cape Panwa which is in his manager’s name. I’m not permitted to tell you who it is, but…well, I can promise you’ve seen a lot of his movies.”
I struggled to look impressed, but I just couldn’t pull it off.
“And of course our most prominent resident of all has a stunning house up on one of the northern beaches you probably haven’t seen. It’s very private and very isolated.”
I glanced smugly at Anita and then back at Nok.
“Now who would that be?” I asked.
“Ah…” Nok glanced from side to side and lowered her voice even more. “No one knows for sure if he’s here now, but there are these people all over the island. They’re trying to be low-profile, but you can’t do much around here without somebody noticing.”
“Who’s all over the island?”
“You know,” Nok winked at me. “You Americans. The Secret Service, the FBI, the military. Probably even the CIA.”
“So why are they here?” I asked as naively as I could manage.
“I’ll bet you know already.”
“No, I don’t. Really.”
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Okay.”
Nok raised her chin slightly and shifted her eyes first to Anita and then back to me. I could have sworn I actually saw them glitter, possibly with dollar signs.
“They’re getting the house ready for Barack Obama. It’s going to be his secret retreat.”
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. Anita looked embarrassed and a suspicious look crept over Nok’s face.
“Say…you’re not one of them, are you?”
For one wild moment I thought about confessing I was actually the Director of the CIA and then telling Nok I would have to kill her now that she knew, but I let it slide.
TWELVE
In the car on the way back to the hotel Anita floated the topic of the house a couple of times, but I absolutely refused to bite. My guess was she was working up to a suggestion we put in equal amounts and buy the house together in spite of its cost, but there was no way in hell that was going to fly with me. Tennis court or not, a three-million-dollar house in Phuket was a long way out of my league.
Still, Anita’s radar must have been at full power, or maybe she just saw something in my face that I hadn’t realized was there, but it wasn’t very long before I realized I was getting the hard eye from her. That was when she dropped the subject of the house and focused her full attention on wheedling out of me what was really on my mind.
I didn’t even try to resist. It would have been useless.
Taking a deep breath, I told Anita about Marshal Ward and how he had accosted me back in Patong when she was off exploring real estate offices. I omitted only the part about the pictures Ward had left on the table. Somehow announcing to my wife that people were following us around and clandestinely taking pictures seemed to me to be unduly alarmist. Of course, th
at one photograph of me waving like a madman in front of Karsarkis’ front door would probably have made me look like a real asshole to her, too, but I told myself that had nothing to do with why I was keeping quiet about the pictures. Nothing at all. Really.
“And he wants you to go back to Patong and meet him tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t have to go.”
“But you are going, aren’t you?”
“Well…I guess I’m curious.”
That was embarrassingly lame, of course, but there it was.
“Are you at least going to call somebody and check on him before you go?” Anita asked after she had thought about that for a moment. “Maybe he’s not who he says he is.”
“Oh, I think he is.”
“And this you know exactly how, Sherlock?”
I thought back to the way the man had examined me appraisingly with his flat, cop’s eyes.
“I’ve had a lot of experience with guys like this, Anita. I know a Fed when I see one.”
Anita looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
“You were a corporate lawyer in Washington, Jack. Your idea of life on the streets was walking to the garage to get your Mercedes instead of calling somebody to deliver it to you. Don’t let your romantic fantasies get the better of you.”
That brought on a few minutes of silence, as I su ~ippouasispected Anita intended for it to.
“What do you suppose this man wants with you?” she resumed, ignoring the third-degree burns she had just inflicted.
“I think he just wants to be certain I’m not one of Karsarkis’ lawyers.”
“Why would he care if you were?”
Anita had a very good point there, it seemed to me. Why indeed?
The only role the marshals would have in a matter like this would be to transport Karsarkis back if the State Department could convince the Thai government to agree to his extradition. Who Karsarkis’ lawyers were, or who they weren’t, didn’t offhand seem to me to have much to do with that.
“Maybe he wants you to spy for him,” Anita said.
