LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)

by Jake Needham

  I scratched at the back of my neck with one hand and made a show of thoughtful deliberation.

  “You have to understand that I needed to see your reaction before I gave you the last little bit of it,” I said after a pause. “I had to see if you already knew.”

  My visitor eyed me a moment, a half-smile creeping over his face, and then he leaned against the wall, waiting.

  “I have no idea where the money is,” I said. “Neither do they.”

  I paused to let that sink in.

  “And now that they’ve killed Barry Gale, they’ll never find it.”

  There was a look of puzzlement in my visitor’s nod. “But what about the bank records you gave them?” he asked.

  “The network I got them into was the university network at Chula, not the Asian Bank of Commerce. What Phony Frank got was a list of transactions I’d made up for the final exam in my international banking class. I don’t think they’ll be of much use to someone who’s trying to overthrow the Chinese government.”

  My visitor stuck his tongue into the corner of his cheek.

  “You’re shittin’ me,” he laughed.

  “I shit you not, partner.”

  The man laughed some more and clapped me on the shoulder.

  “You sure you don’t want a job at the White House, Jack? You’re just the kind of sneaky, deceitful bastard who would fit right in.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the red and yellow plumes of the setting sun coloring the sky above the Andaman Sea. They were bombarding the heavens like rockets, bursting against the clouds and sprinkling a dusting of pink and gold over the gunmetal surface of the sea.

  “No thanks,” I said after a moment. “I’m fine right here.”

  AFTER MY VISITOR left I took one of the Montecristos out of the box and went back out on the terrace. I dragged a chair around until I could slump back into it and prop my feet up on the railing, then I lit the cigar, cupping my hand around its tip to block off the ocean winds until a red coal was burning deep inside. Taking my time, I nursed a tiny cone of ash into life at its tip.

  I sat there smoking quietly and soon I was enveloped by a night deeper than any I could remember. I stole away into it and thought back over what my visitor had said.

  Did the White House really know nothing about any of this?

  Had no one there ever heard of Just John or Phony Frank, or about the murders of Dollar Dunne or Howard the Roach or Barry Gale?

  Maybe he had told me the truth. Maybe nobody there knew anything.

  But then again, maybe somebody there knew everything.

  What else would he have said if they had?

  Tilting my head back, I looked up at a canopy of stars that was so radiant, so lustrously deep and rich that all at once I felt a sensation of being released from the world. It was as if at any moment I was about to be lifted gently away from the earth and drawn straight up into the sky.

  I took a deep draw on my cigar. The wet ocean air collected the gray wisps of smoke and tugged them away into the night.

  THE END

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  KILLING PLATO

  ONE

  IT STARTED THE way a spy story should start.

  On a misty night in Phuket.

  In a little bar.

  I recognized him the moment I walked in. He was standing by himself holding a tiny stainless steel telephone to his ear. His body was turned slightly away from me, his elbows resting on the polished teakwood of the bar top, and he was gazing out toward the ocean, nodding his head occasionally, listening more than he was talking.

  Plato Karsarkis could not be here of all places, casually leaning on a bar in Phuket, a resort island off the eastern coast of Thailand. There was plainly no way in the world that could be.

  Yet, just as plainly, there he was.

  Anita and I had spent the day exploring. A warm drizzle began to fall late in the afternoon and we decided to call it a day and have an early dinner at a place called the Boathouse that is right on the sand at Kata Beach. I parked the jeep and Anita stopped at the ladies room while I went in to get us a table. The girl at the hostess stand said she would have one free in fifteen or twenty minutes, so I left my name and went into the bar to wait.

  The bar was laid out in the shape of a large C. Plato Karsarkis was leaning on the side nearest the ocean and so I took a stool on the opposite side that offered both a striking panorama of the Andaman Sea and the opportunity to stare at Karsarkis without being too obvious about it. I ordered a Heineken and wondered what Anita’s face would look like when she came out of the ladies’ room and saw him.

  Anita had designated this trip to Phuket as our official honeymoon and she had been obsessive about making every detail of it perfect. We were both well into our forties—I somewhat more so than she—and we had been living together for almost two years before we got married so I really couldn’t understand why she was making such a big deal out of having a honeymoon now. Still, Anita had her own ways, and I had absolutely no intention of risking a quarrel by volunteering my thoughts on the subject.

  Anita was an artist, a painter whom European art circles had clasped to their bosom as a harbinger of what the critics were calling a new wave of post-feminist revisionism, whatever that meant. Even when her behavior didn’t make complete sense to me, I always tried to remember Anita had an ability to see the world in ways that I could not, ways that were continually surprising and frequently illuminating.

  I shifted my weight on the stool to cover the turn of my body and glanced back toward Karsarkis.

  He seemed taller in person than he had on television, although I had always heard it was supposed to be the other way around. His forehead was quite high, his nose rounded in that way that some people call Roman, and his curly gray hair trimmed closely against his skull. He wore a tight black T-shirt tucked into black chinos cinched with a narrow belt, also black, and although he must have been in his fifties, maybe even older, he looked pretty able-bodied. The whole effect was something like a cross between Giorgio Armani and Richard Nixon.

  What he did not look like, leaning nonchalantly there on the bar and talking into his shiny little telephone, was the world’s most famous fugitive. Which was funny, because that was exactly what he was.

  “That was a Heineken,” the bartender said, breaking into my reverie. “Right?”

  I pulled my eyes away from Karsarkis. “Right,” I said.

  The bartender placed a tall glass still frosty from the cooler on a blue and white striped square of cotton and poured my beer from the familiar green bottle. When he was done, he rapped the empty bottle smartly on the bar top, nodded, and walked away.

  As soon as he did, my eyes flicked right back to Plato Karsarkis.

  Karsarkis had put away his mobile phone and now he was just leaning against the bar on his forearms, doing nothing in particular. Oddly, it almost seemed as if he was looking at me. So unlikely was that it took several seconds for me to register that he really was looking at me. Worse, when Karsarkis saw the realization of it in my eyes, he raised his right index finger and shook it at me in an exaggerated gesture of mock irritation.

  I flashed a hasty and very self-conscious smile and, thoroughly embarrassed, looked down at the bar. I was reaching for my glass again just to have something to do when Karsarkis called out to me.

  “Are you Jack Shepherd?”

  My first thought of course was that I had misunderstood him. Plato Karsarkis could not have been speaking to me or have the slightest idea who I was. So I kept my eyes forward and said nothing.

  “Pardon me,” Karsarkis called out again. “You’re Jack Shepherd, aren’t you?”

  Christ, I had heard him right. Karsarkis was sp
eaking to me, and he did know who I was. With what I’m certain was a look of utter bafflement, I lifted my eyes back to Karsarkis. He shook his finger at me again, and then he stood up and started around the bar.

  Holy shit.

  The world’s most famous fugitive was not only alive and well and having a drink at the Boathouse in Phuket, he was walking straight toward me, his hand thrust out to shake mine.

  KILLING PLATO

  TWO

  I TOOK KARSARKIS’ hand. What else was I going to do? We shook.

  “I’m Plato Karsarkis.”

  “I know.”

  Karsarkis nodded quickly and lowered his eyes. The man’s brief acknowledgement of his notoriety seemed to me to contain an element of genuine embarrassment and, for a moment, I almost felt sorry for him.

  “May I?” Karsarkis pointed to the stool to my right, the one at the end of the bar right up against the wall.

  “Of course.”

  He pulled the stool out and sat down, pushing himself around until his back was to the wall and his face turned toward mine. The bartender had returned when he saw Karsarkis reach for the stool and stood waiting quietly.

  “Campari and soda,” Karsarkis said without looking at him. “And Mr. Shepherd will have another…”

  His eyebrows lifted into a question.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  Karsarkis nodded slightly at that, but made no comment. After a moment his eyes slid off mine and we sat there together in what was for me an uneasy silence until the bartender returned with his drink. After that, Karsarkis took a deep breath and let it out again and I thanked heaven that it looked like he was finally going to say something.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” Karsarkis said very softly. “I could stay in this place forever.”

  I didn’t know exactly what I had been expecting Karsarkis to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.

  Turning my head, I looked where his eyes were pointing.

  The Boathouse was at the edge of the beach in the back of a deep cove on Phuket’s west coast. Just on the other side of floor-to-ceiling shutters propped open to the ocean breeze, a wide swath of nearly white sand lay nestled in a U-shaped fringe of spindly palm trees. It was almost dark, but not quite, and a haze of pewter streaked with shards of mango yellow filtered tentatively over the beach like a feeble fog. A lone woman with a black sarong wrapped around her bathing suit—foreign, I thought, but at this distance I couldn’t quite tell—ambled along the surf line, kicking her bare feet through the shallow water.

  I glanced back at Karsarkis. He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else. I should have waited him out, I know, but I didn’t.

  “Look,” I said, taking a deep breath and plunging in, “I’m sure I would remember if we’d met, and I don’t think—”

  “We’ve never met. I just recognize you.”

  “Recognized me?”

  “Modesty bores me, and false modesty bores the shit out of me. You’re well known and I’m sure you realize that. I’ve even seen pictures of you in magazines and newspapers. That’s why I recognized you.”

  While it was true I had once been associated in various ways with some big players in international finance, I certainly didn’t think of myself as well known. I might be recognized here and there by a few people who moved in similar circles, but I really didn’t think those circles included the sort of people who breathed the rarified air where Plato Karsarkis flew.

  “There aren’t many other Americans living out here,” Karsarkis went on before I could figure out what to say. “So I just thought I ought to introduce myself.”

  “There are a lot of foreigners living in Thailand,” I said.

  I realized how petulant that sounded as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but I couldn’t call them back.

  Karsarkis didn’t seem to notice or, if he did, to care.

  “Yeah, but it’s mostly Europeans and a few Australians,” he said. “Not that many Americans in Thailand. Why do you think that is?”

  “I gather most Americans must like it well enough back home.”

  “Then you still think of the States as your home?”

  It was starting to sound like we were going to have one of those expatriate conversations I’d had a thousand times since I’d been living in Thailand. Modesty might be what bored Karsarkis. Expat conversations were what bored me.

  “Look,” I said, “I live in Thailand now and as far as I know I’m going to keep living here. I really don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “There’s something I’ve always wondered about,” Karsarkis continued as if I had not spoken. “When Europeans or Australians live in a country that isn’t their own, nobody thinks a thing about it. But when Americans chose to live in another country, people keep asking us why.”

  “A lot of people seem to think that Americans who live overseas are on the run from something.”

  As soon as I said it I went silent and looked away in embarrassment. Karsarkis chuckled at my discomfort.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You didn’t offend me. We Americans need to stick together.”

  Karsarkis’ ethnic brotherhood routine was wearing a little thin. I was pretty sure I’d read once he had been born in London of an Irish mother and a Greek father and had only become an American citizen when his lawyers advised him that it was in his best financial interest. On the other hand, I knew Karsarkis had a pretty compelling reason for not being in the United States right then and I figured it would be indelicate to delve too deeply into the whole issue of nationality and residence so I said nothing.

  Karsarkis smiled. At least I think he did.

  “Can I call you Jack?” he asked.

  “If you like.”

  “Excellent. Then you should call me Plato.”

  That’ll be the day, I thought to myself, but I just nodded.

  Karsarkis took his hand away from the Campari without having drunk a sip and folded his arms across his chest.

  “Everybody says you’re one of the smart guys, Jack. A first-rate legal mind.”

  “I don’t practice law anymore. I just teach.”

  “Yeah, I heard that. At Chulalongkorn University up in Bangkok.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Pretty good place?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “But you don’t teach at the law school, do you?”

  “No. At the Sasin Institute. I teach international business.”

  “You speak Thai that well?”

  “My Thai’s okay, I guess, but the courses at Sasin are all in English so it doesn’t really matter.”

  “You like teaching?”

  “Yes, I like it a lot.”

  What in the world was going on here? Karsarkis sounded like a man interviewing me for a job. I tried to read his eyes, but they had gone flat and in the fading light there at the end of the bar I could see nothing in them at all.

  “You ever miss the action?” he asked.

  “Action?”

  “That stuff you used to do. All the hotshot stuff that made you famous.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t say anything at all. Karsarkis didn’t look like he really cared. Abruptly he stood up and gave the room a quick scan.

  “I enjoyed talking to you, Jack, but I’ve got to go now.”

  I glanced around to see if something had spooked Karsarkis. There were a few people scattered around the bar, a few others in the dining room, but as far as I could tell there were no SWAT teams storming the place. Maybe Karsarkis just couldn’t think of anything else to say to someone he barely knew and was tired of keeping the conversation going. I could certainly understand that.

  I stood up, too, and we shook hands again.

  “I’ll stay in touch,” Karsarkis said.

  I had no idea what that meant so I just nodded mutely.

  When Karsarkis turned away and started for the door, a well-built, sandy-haired m
an of nondescript appearance and indeterminate age stood up from a chair by the wall and fell into step next to him. Almost immediately two other men materialized from somewhere and closed up behind them, covering their backs. I had assumed Karsarkis was alone. Now that I thought about it, I realized how foolish that was of me.

  After Karsarkis had gone, I just sat on my stool looking straight ahead, too stupefied by what had happened to do anything else. Then all at once an incredibly vivid memory swept over me.

  I had been about seven or eight. My father and I were driving somewhere, although I have long forgotten where, in his green and black Buick, a racy two-door model with a line of chromed ports down each side of the long, narrow hood. I sat on the bench seat next to him as straight and proud as my tiny stature would permit.

  We were on a two-lane asphalt highway passing through dense stands of tall pine trees. A short distance ahead, a silver and white Greyhound bus pulled out to pass a tractor-trailer and shifted its whole mass into the lane directly in front of us. My head was half turned toward the road and half turned toward my father and, in the same instant I saw the bus barreling down on us, I also saw my father’s face. Although only a child, I somehow sensed that he and I were both sharing the same inexplicable thrill of onrushing menace.

  As the bus drew closer and the leaping white dog on its nose grew to a terrifying size, I experienced without really knowing what I was feeling that eerily heightened state of awareness that comes from proximity to something truly dangerous. For just an instant, my father and I were frozen together, bonded to one another by our common helplessness.

  Then bus cut back into its own lane, whipped past us, and we were spared. The moment ended. I would never feel that close to my father again.

  There at the bar of the Boathouse, looking at the stool where Karsarkis had been sitting and the drink he had abandoned, a feeling came back to me that was just like the one I’d had on that long-ago day: exhilaration intertwined with onrushing ruin. It was a strange reaction, I know, and at the time I dismissed the feeling that flooded over me then as nothing more than a freak misconnection of a few synapses of memory run amuck. It was only later, looking back on everything that happened afterwards, that I could see how wrong I had been.