by Jake Needham
He kept ahead of them for a while—mostly by running hard, shuffling papers fast, and doubling up his losses—but when the magnitude of the debacle became so large that he couldn’t hide it any longer, the entire mess collapsed in a heap. That was when Wilkins disappeared without a trace. He left his house to drive to the bank one morning and stepped right off into the twilight zone.
Two weeks later, Barry Gale—or someone—was found at the bottom of the swimming pool at the guest house. His suicide was quickly attributed to the working relationship between Gale and Wilkins. There was even some speculation that Barry Gale could have been the real mastermind behind the whole currency futures scam and that he might have been using the less experienced Wilkins as a front man; but with one man dead and the other missing, following up the speculation would have been difficult.
In the end, apparently no one even bothered to try.
SEVEN
WHEN NATA FINISHED reading the story, she looked at Darcy. “Maybe this guy Gale really is still around,” she said.
“Then who was the stiff in the pool?” Darcy asked.
No one said anything since the answer was pretty obvious. If Barry Gale was still alive, Wilkins was the prime candidate for the Esther Williams role. Moreover, that opened the possibility that Barry might have had something to do with arranging the casting.
“You think this guy might be indexed somewhere with EDGAR?” Darcy asked Nata.
“Who’s—” I started to ask.
“Never mind,” Darcy interrupted, and obediently I fell silent.
Nata typed briefly and then slid her hand over a trackball sitting next to the keyboard. As she rolled the cursor around one of the screens and clicked here and there, both she and Darcy leaned in closer. After a moment I saw them exchange a look and then Darcy leaned over Nata’s shoulder and typed a few keystrokes. After that they both watched the other screen in silence.
“That’s pretty amazing,” Nata finally said, more to herself than to Darcy or me.
She clicked the left mouse button on the trackball twice, looked at the screen for a long time in silence, and finally rotated her chair until she was facing me.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jack.”
Up until then I thought we had been doing just fine.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I found the name Barry Gale in a keyword search of EDGAR’s primary data index,” Nata explained. “But when I went to the locations referenced in the search, there was nothing there. All the references came up as invalid entries.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
Darcy glanced at Nata for a moment and then shook her head. “Never.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, looking from one to the other.
“There are a couple of possibilities, I guess,” Nata took over again. “Three, really. Mistakes in data paths can occur. Maybe this is just the result of a simple input error.”
“But you don’t think so.” I was sure, at least, of that much. Nata’s face made it plain. “What else?” I asked.
“The references may have been there once, then deleted for some reason and the index entries were overlooked.”
“I didn’t think database entries were ever deleted, just updated.”
“Right. Usually they’re not.”
“So then what’s the third reason?” I asked.
Nata hesitated, glancing at Darcy, who nodded once.
“The entries may be encrypted with a unique key that we don’t have,” she said. “That’s never happened before either, but theoretically I suppose it’s possible.”
“And what would that mean?”
“There’s generally a turf battle of some kind going on in Washington, Jack. It might just be that one agency has something going and it’s taking particular care to make sure that another agency can’t find out about it. It could be that sort of thing.”
“Could be?”
“Look, Jack, we’re good, but we’re not perfect. Some of the really big hitters can bury stuff so deep we can’t get to it. To tell you the absolute truth, it hasn’t happened before, but it is possible.”
“Really big hitters? What are you telling me? What kind of database is this anyway?”
Nata felt silent, then glanced toward Darcy again. Darcy sighed and folded her arms.
“Don’t put me in a bad spot here, Jack. Let’s just say that it is a comprehensive summary of…” Darcy paused, weighing her words, “nonpublic U.S. intelligence data concerning foreign organized crime activity. If there was any real connection between your man, the Texas State Bank, and the Russian mob, it would be in here.”
“In other words,” I said, “you’ve hacked the FBI.”
“If we had, you wouldn’t want us to tell you, would you?”
I had always thought the expression about someone’s eyes twinkling was pure poetic exaggeration, but right at that moment Darcy’s actually did.
“So what can you tell me that won’t get me twenty to life?”
“My gut says you’re about to step into it here, Jack,” Darcy said. “I’d back off and let it go if I were you.”
That wasn’t exactly what I had been expecting to hear.
“Don’t you think that’s sensationalizing this thing a little, Darcy? How can it hurt just to meet a guy at Foodland and talk to him?”
“He may tell you something you’re better off not hearing,” she said.
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
“Do you want some help?” Nata asked.
“Help? Doing what?”
“If you’re really going to meet this guy, it might be a good idea to have somebody throw a loose net over you. That way you’d pick up on any surveillance that might be on you or any other funny business that might be going on.”
“I don’t like the sound of this very much.”
“You asked for our advice and I’m giving it to you.”
“Look, if there’s really something nasty going on here, the last thing I want is to get you two involved.”
“Oh, not us,” Darcy jumped back in. “You know my policy about avoiding operations. But we could find somebody to cover you without much trouble.”
“How about Mango Manny?” Nata asked, looking at Darcy.
“That’s a good thought,” she answered. “You know him, Jack?”
“I don’t think so. I imagine I’d remember meeting anybody with a name like Mango Manny.”
“His real name is Emmanuel Marcus. He’s a Brit. Used to be a top hitter in London, but he made a couple of silly mistakes and had to relocate on short notice.”
“Mistakes?”
“Oh, you know. Hit the wrong people a couple of times. That sort of thing.”
Darcy made it sound like the fellow had done nothing worse than misdirect a few Federal Express packages.
“Manny’s been in Bangkok… oh, four or five years now, I think. He owns Q Bar, that place on Soi 11 where the hipper-than-thou crowd hangs out. You’ve been there, haven’t you?”
“Nope. Too expensive for me. I’m more a Cheap Charlie’s kind of guy.”
“Manny’s very well connected. Plays golf with all the right generals and government ministers. But the important thing is that he’s got a really first-class organization.”
“You mean at his bar?”
“No, not that. Manny brought the marijuana business here into the twenty-first century. Really made it fly, so to speak.”
“He’s a drug dealer?”
Darcy looked down and kicked her toe at the carpet. “He’s more of a… management consultant. Besides, he won’t touch anything but grass. The man’s not a criminal, Jack.”
I took a deep breath.
“Just let me be sure I understand what you’re telling me here,” I said. “Just because you can’t find a couple of references to Barry Gale in your magic machine, you’re seriously proposing that I get some screw-up cockney hit man turned godfather to the Thai
marijuana trade to work security for me when I go to the Foodland tonight to meet a dead guy. Have I pretty much got it?”
“Manny’s not a cockney,” Darcy said. “He went to Cambridge.”
“Oh well, that changes everything.”
“He’s really a pretty good guy,” Nata put in. “I think he just watched too many Bob Hoskins movies when he was young and never got over it.”
There was a little silence then and Darcy and Nata both watched me expressionlessly. In the quiet, I thought I could feel something stirring around me. I didn’t know what it was, but it felt large and unpleasant.
“What do you think I should do, Darcy?” I finally asked.
Darcy placed one hand gently on my back. She had the sort of look on her face I imagined a mother might give a son who was going off to war, a look that said there wasn’t a thing she could do but wish him luck and hope for the best.
“Be careful, Jack. Be very, very careful.”
EIGHT
WHEN I GOT home I found some chicken in the refrigerator and leftover rice in the cooker. I heated them both in the microwave while I opened a Heineken, then I doused the chicken and rice in hot Sriracha sauce and took it into the living room so I could watch a replay of yesterday’s Redskins game on ESPN while I ate.
Anita got home around ten. As soon as she closed the door behind her she took a couple of quick little hopping bounds across the room and dived over the back of the couch. Then she rolled into my lap and hung one arm around my neck.
“I missed you, darling.”
I tilted my head down and kissed her lightly on the lips. “I missed you, too. How was London?”
“Cold. Wet. Dark. Like always. Am I interrupting your game?”
“Not really. I wasn’t paying much attention.” I groped for the remote control and pressed the mute button.
Anita and I had been together for a little more than a year. She was a true child of the world, having been born in Paris to an Italian mother and an English father and then moved to Hong Kong by her parents when she was ten. Later on she went to high school in New York and then graduated from UCLA with a degree in film.
Now she was a painter of considerable note, although I had to admit somewhat sheepishly that I’d never heard of her when we first met at a Sotheby’s auction in Bangkok. Actually, I suppose that I had never heard of many painters, except for a few who died in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and all of them had beards, but it wasn’t long before I discovered that Anita had a huge reputation in Europe as a young artist to be watched. I, too, thought she should be watched, although I was pretty sure what I was watching and what the European art critics were watching were completely different things. At least I hoped they were.
A few months after our meeting at Sotheby’s, Anita had simply packed up her whole studio and moved from London to Bangkok and it wasn’t very long after that she became white-hot in European art circles. She always said that it was the sensuality of Thailand that had given her work the push it needed to make that happen, but I naturally held to the theory that I might have been at least partially responsible.
Anita was much in demand among the art set in Europe these days and she traveled there frequently to do publicity for galleries that sold her work. Of course, she was also much in demand by me in Bangkok, and it pleased me beyond reason that she made such an effort to strike a balance between those two tugs on her life.
“So what have you been up to?” Anita asked me as maroon-and-gold uniformed giants silently smashed into blue-and-white giants on our television screen.
I hesitated before I answered, not entirely sure what to say about the call from the man who claimed to be Barry Gale. It was just a beat, but Anita jumped all over it.
“Ah ha! Out chasing bargirls, I’d bet.”
“Look here now, I’m not taking any crap from a painter. Particularly not one who flew all the way to London just spent to stand around some drafty gallery sipping Campari from a plastic glass and listening to strange men feign fascination with her paintings in a transparent effort to get into her pants.”
“Which bar is your favorite these days, my darling? Is it King’s Castle? That used to be the place to go in Patpong, wasn’t it? Or are you local boys avoiding the tourists these days and going to Soi Cowboy again? What’s hot there? Is it still Long Gun? Do they still do those lesbian shows like they used to?”
“I think you know way too much about way too many things.”
Anita grinned and brushed her lips quickly over mine, then she swung her feet to the floor and pushed herself off the couch. The graceful way she did it took my breath away.
“Don’t go away, big boy. Got to pee. Then I want to hear the whole story about your little honeys before I go over and scratch their eyes out.”
I would have married Anita in a moment, but she had never mentioned marriage and there was something that made me hesitate to ask. To do that would risk changing everything that made life so good right then, particularly if she said no, and that was a chance I was not prepared to take.
After Anita came back from the bathroom we leaned against each other on the couch and made small talk for a while but eventually, of course, I got around to telling her about the man who called my cell phone and claimed to be Barry Gale.
“That’s shocking, Jack,” she said when I’d finished.
The word took me aback a little. It sounded quaint and outdated somehow, out of place in a world that now had little room and less time for people who were shocked by anything. Yet it was a word that Anita wore well. I liked it on her.
“Do you think it really was him?” she asked.
“Well… maybe.”
“Then whose body was that in the swimming pool?”
“Got me.”
“Why would he fake his own death?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why is this man calling you now?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Well, Mr. Laconic, thank you for clearing everything up for me.”
“Hey,” I said, opening my hands in the universal gesture of coming clean. “You know what I know. It’s just not much.”
Abruptly, Anita pushed herself away from me and stood up. She walked to the window and stood there looking out at the city, her arms folded around herself as if the air had suddenly turned unexpectedly cool.
“Are you going out tonight to meet this man?” she asked without turning around.
I hesitated. I knew where this was going and it wasn’t anywhere good, but I couldn’t think of any way to bob and weave.
“Yes, I thought I would.”
“Why are you going to do that?”
“To find out what the phone call was all about.”
“You don’t have any idea what you’re getting into, do you, Jack?”
I could have told Anita about the background I had dug up through Darcy. I could have even told her about Darcy offering to get Mango Manny to go with me. On the other hand, Anita didn’t like Darcy much and, even if she had, the idea that Darcy thought I should have a semi-retired Cockney hit man for backup wasn’t going to do much to ease her concerns. I kept quiet about all that.
“You’re going alone?” Anita eventually asked when I said nothing.
“Yes.”
“All by yourself?”
“That’s what ‘alone’ means.”
“I’m not stupid, Jack.” Anita whirled around and fixed me with a hard stare. “But sometimes I think you are.”
I would have thought that diplomacy would come naturally to someone who was half Italian, half British, and born in France; but in Anita’s case, it didn’t.
“Meeting this man alone is really stupid, Jack. You could be killed.”
“Oh, Anita, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? Didn’t you just tell me that the embassy had been warning Americans to keep a low profile and to be alert?”
“The embassy does that all the time, Anita.”
“Do they? They warn Americans in Thailand to be careful all the time?”
“They warn Americans everywhere to be careful all the time. Look, the embassy’s just covering its ass. Nobody really pays any attention to these things.”
“Well, maybe you should.”
“Now don’t go getting—”
“You Americans are all alike, aren’t you, Jack. All a bunch of tiny John Waynes at heart. Well here’s a flash for you. Life is not a movie. You’ve got to have the sense to know when to be afraid.”
“Look, come over here and sit down.” I patted the cushion next to me with my open palm. “Let’s start over.”
Anita stayed where she was just long enough to make it unmistakable that she was sitting because she chose to, not because I had asked her to. Then she walked over and perched on the couch.
“I didn’t see any danger in going tonight or I wouldn’t go, Anita.”
“You didn’t see any danger in going to a dangerous part of town and waiting for some nut who called out of a clear blue sky claiming to be a dead man? You really don’t see any danger in doing that in the middle of the night?”
“It’s not a dangerous part of town, it’s a supermarket. And midnight isn’t really the middle of the night.”
“Don’t pull that lawyer crap on me, hot-shot.”
“Look, Anita, when was the last time you heard of a foreigner being assaulted by anyone in Bangkok?”
“The week before last.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That French photographer. It was in all the papers.”
Come to think of it, Anita was right. A couple of weeks before, a motorcyclist had shot to death a middle-aged Frenchman walking back to his apartment after an evening spent drinking at the Crown Royal in Patpong. The foreign community had fretted about that for a few days, but the whole incident quickly slid off their radar when the Bangkok Post reported that the Frenchman’s Thai wife and her nineteen-year-old Thai boyfriend had hired the shooter.
