by Jake Needham
Mondays were particularly pleasant days for me since I had only one class scheduled. It was an eleven o’clock lecture course entitled “Legal Aspects of the Regulation of Multinational Corporate Acquisition Finance Transactions in the Countries of the Pacific Rim.” The kids called it “Wheel, Deal and Steal.” The course was a second-year elective that had never been very popular before I took it over, but now the enrollment was well above a hundred and the meetings had been moved to one of the large lecture halls across campus to accommodate the crowd.
My lectures were supposed to focus on case studies of the financing structures of major corporate acquisitions in Asia, but I always made an effort to sprinkle them with a few war stories to lighten up what otherwise would have been a dreary discourse on tax treaties, banking practices, and securities regulations. Almost all of my stories naturally concerned money—frequently very large amounts of it—and I had quickly discovered that money was an even better topic than sex for keeping students absolutely riveted.
The word around campus was that my lectures were entertaining and I suppose they were. Moreover, I was something less than the world’s toughest grader. If you turned up with reasonable regularity, course credit would be yours at the end of the semester without a great deal of fuss. I was a charter subscriber to Woody Allen’s Postulate: at least eighty percent of life is about just showing up.
There was another reason this particular course drew so well, however, one about which I had decidedly mixed feelings. My lectures generally featured anecdotes drawn from my own recollections of the bad old days, of gunslingers that had bought companies with big gestures instead of money and somehow gotten away with it for a while. Those stories were obviously popular with the students and that was what bothered me. I often got the uncomfortable feeling that they were less interested in absorbing the moral object lessons I was trying to impart than they were in figuring out how they could pull off the same kind of crap for themselves.
Regardless, today I was entirely free of the need to fret over what my students might make of my tales of greed and derring-do because I didn’t have to tell any. I was about to engage in the oldest ruse known to academia, the guest lecturer ploy. All I had to do today was appear attentive and not get caught closing my eyes.
I went down to the administrative office while I waited for Mr. Coffee to finish dripping, gathered the weekend’s harvest of incoming faxes out of the machine, and picked up copies of both the Wall Street Journal and the Bangkok Post. Flipping quickly through the faxes, I found only one addressed to me, a notice that the board meeting for Southeast Asian Investment in Hong Kong later in the week had been shortened from two days to one. That wasn’t particularly welcome news since I really enjoyed my all-expense-paid junkets to Hong Kong.
I walked back to the kitchen carrying the fax and the newspapers, picked out what looked like a clean mug from a cabinet above the sink, and poured myself some coffee. Then I returned to my own office, shut the door, dumped the fax on my desk, and settled back with the newspapers to do some serious coffee drinking.
TWO NEWSPAPERS AND three cups of coffee later, I made a preemptive toilet stop, then strolled across campus to the lecture hall where I found the guest lecturer for the day waiting outside for me. My designated hitter was an old Bangkok hand named Dollar Dunne, an American-born lawyer who had been around Thailand for longer than anyone I knew. As unlikely as it might seem, Dollar actually was his real name, one hung on him by a mother who either had a strange sense of humor or, given his ensuing success dealing his way around the back alleys of Asia, was startlingly prescient.
Dollar and I made small talk until the class had all taken their seats, then I did a couple of quick announcements and gave Dollar the kind of effusive and deferential introduction my guests always said was unnecessary but would have been mortally wounded not to receive. After that, I settled into a seat up at the back of the lecture hall and smiled as Dollar leaned against the podium and launched into what were no doubt wildly embellished tales of his adventures as a legal mercenary stalking the commercial jungles of Asia.
Dollar was at least in his mid-fifties, but his wiry build and the way he wore his thick, silver hair in what was almost but not quite a Marine Corps buzz cut made him look much younger. His skin was perfectly tanned and his features still had a boyish, open quality to them. Instead of the predictable uniform of expensive suit and a white shirt, Dollar was wearing rumpled khakis and a green golf shirt that looked faded from many hours in the sun. His choice of wardrobe said a lot about him. He was probably happiest when he was doing exactly the opposite of whatever was expected. I had to admit the image Dollar affected, although a little studied for my taste, was pretty potent. It gave him a raffish quality that a lot of people found irresistible.
Dollar and I had first met back when I was still living in Washington. Dollar’s firm had been lead counsel for a company called the Merchant Group that had gone suddenly and spectacularly belly up and left a good number of Stassen & Hardy’s banking clients holding embarrassingly empty bags. The Merchant Group had technically been a Luxembourg corporation with its operating headquarters in Bangkok, but in reality it was as Australian as a red kangaroo. Lyndon Merchant was an Aussie and mostly he ran the organization out of Perth. He called it a private international merchant bank, but I had never met anyone who could figure out exactly what that crafty assembly of buzzwords was actually supposed to mean.
What the company actually did was equally difficult to divine. It did deals, of course, as the players liked to say back when the expression was still socially acceptable if not exactly laudable, but there was no consistent quality to them. It bought random companies all over the world, mostly with money borrowed from gullible and greedy bankers whose primary interest was in pumping up their reported profits with fat fees; then it either flipped the companies quickly for a fast profit, generally to some sucker lined up in advance, or it cut the companies up, pulled the valuable assets out, and dumped what was left.
When Stassen & Hardy sent me out to Bangkok to fish around in the wreckage of the Merchant Group to see if anything was left for our clients to claim, it wasn’t long before I was up to my butt in a morass of untraceable fund transfers and funny-money loans involving shell companies headquartered in places like the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga. The gamy odor of the whole sordid mess was unmistakable, but I couldn’t develop any solid connections between the Merchant Group’s operations and the usual suspects in international scams of that sort: the intelligence agencies, drug traffickers, and arms brokers who were generally skulking somewhere in the shadows. Dollar, as I recalled, seemed to find the whole muddle more amusing than sinister, and working that case with him turned out to be the finest graduate seminar in Asian commercial skullduggery I could ever have wanted.
Dollar was right in the middle of telling my students a few stories about the Merchant Group, winging his way to the considerable amusement of the class through some of the wilder conspiracy theories, when he suddenly looked up at the back of the hall and cut me a wink that was impossible to miss. A few of the kids twisted around in their seats to check out my reaction. I reflexively returned a half-smile, but Dollar’s gesture left me a little unsettled. The wink seemed to imply that Dollar and I shared some secret concerning the Merchant Group that he couldn’t impart to the class. If that’s what he thought, I couldn’t imagine what that secret was supposed be.
I was still thinking about that when the class started to applaud and I realized that Dollar had finished. The kids gathered their stuff, slid out of the narrow rows of theater-style seating that were tiered up off a center aisle, and began to make their way down to the main floor and out of the hall.
By the time I reached the bottom of the steps, the hall was almost empty and Dollar was leaning on the lectern at the front of the room waiting for me.
FOUR
“WAS THAT WINK supposed to mean something to me?”
“You’re getting
kind of Canadian in your old age, Jack. Anybody ever tell you that?” Dollar eyed me for a moment and then he shrugged. “A kiss is just a kiss; a smile is just a smile; a wink is just a wink. Like that.”
I knew Dollar wasn’t normally one for empty gestures. Regardless, he obviously wanted to let this one slide, so I didn’t press the point.
“Anyway, forget that,” Dollar said. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”
“Maybe we should move this outside, Dollar.”
The man’s voice came from behind me, and when I turned I saw John Hanratty slouched down in a seat in the front row right next to the entrance to the lecture hall. I hadn’t noticed John come in and I wondered what he was doing there. John wasn’t a lawyer, not as far as I knew anyway, although he worked for Dollar’s law firm in some capacity. I had never been absolutely certain what John actually did for Dollar’s firm, but I gathered he functioned as a sort of greeter for out-of-town clients when they came to Bangkok, something most of them were happy enough to do whenever they could come up with an excuse that their wives would buy. Clients were always flying in for what were euphemistically called conferences, only to spend most of their time on a stool next to John at one of the city’s justly famed go-go bars.
Everyone I knew called John by his nickname: Just John. The source of that nickname was a local legend. Whenever someone who knew only John’s first name asked for his last, so the story went, John would invariably reply, “It’s just John.” Popular rumor had it that Just John was retired from the CIA. That, of course, interpreted his gesture concerning his name as a penchant for secrecy rather than just an indication of friendliness. I thought the story far too colorful to be true, but I really didn’t know Just John all that well so I had never asked him about it.
“I didn’t know you were coming this morning, John.”
“Shit,” he grinned as he pushed himself out of his seat, “neither did I until a couple of hours ago.”
Just John was a big man and all of his features seemed slightly over-scale: big hands, wide forehead, barrel chest, prominent nose. He must have been in his sixties, but he was tanned and fit-looking despite a beer gut that rode his middle like a kangaroo’s pouch. His gray hair was long enough at the back to curl down inside the collar of the neat, button-down white shirt he wore tucked into sharply creased, dark gray trousers.
“Come on, Jack.” Dollar placed a hand against my back and nudged me gently toward the door. “Let’s take a walk.”
The three of us left the building and turned north across the campus. Just John said nothing at all, but Dollar and I made small talk as we strolled unhurriedly in the general direction of a massive, lumpy pile of masonry that looked like a bomb shelter built on the surface rather than underground. In actual fact it was an eight-story, windowless shopping center with a doubtful reputation where a lot of Chula students hung out between classes, eyeing each other over the vendors’ stalls heaped with knockoff clothing, cloned cell phones, and pirated DVDs.
Eventually I got bored with waiting for someone to tell me what this conversation was supposed to be about.
“What’s on your mind, Dollar?” I asked.
“As I recall, Jack, we referred Howard the Roach to you last year. That’s right, isn’t it?”
I nodded. Howard Kojinski liked to pose as a big-time financier, but he was actually one of those guys who seldom made it past the fringe of anything that mattered. He had earned his colorful moniker, so I understood, because of the way he operated on those rare occasions when he accidentally stumbled into something that involved real money.
Why are cockroaches so unpleasant? the question goes. It’s not because of what they eat, is the answer, it’s what they fall into and mess up.
“You organized a company for him in Hong Kong, didn’t you?” Dollar kept walking, his hands folded behind him. “Then you used it to set up an LA property deal he had going with some Chinese hustlers.”
I nodded again and waited for Dollar to get to the point.
“Just John’s looking into what Howard’s been up to lately. What have you heard from the little asshole?”
“Nothing.”
Then I thought about Dollar’s question and realized how odd it was.
“Why would you think I’d heard anything from Howard?”
“Well, Jack,” Dollar gave me a tentative look, “you know more about manipulating corporate structures than anyone I’ve ever known. You’re the man when it comes to all that shit. If Howard had a problem with some of his funny-money stuff, I thought he might have called you.”
“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.
FIVE
