by Jake Needham
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 the 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.
The feeling that came over me that day in Phuket had not been a memory at all.
It was a premonition.
THREE
“YOU LOOK AS if you’ve seen a ghost, my darling.” Anita glanced at the Campari and soda on the bar. “Is that for me?”
“You can have it if you want,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis ordered it, but he didn’t drink any of it.”
I inclined my head in the direction where Karsarkis and his entourage had just disappeared.
“He just left,” I added.
Anita sat down on the stool Karsarkis had vacated and crossed her legs at the knee. Arranging her skirt, she pushed the Campari to the back of the bar and studied me closely.
“What happened while I was gone, Jack? You’re staring at me like I just turned into Whoopi Goldberg.”
I was still trying to decide how to explain what had happened in such a way Anita might actually believe it when she unerringly zeroed in on my uncertainty. But then she jumped to the wrong conclusion.
“Which old girlfriend of yours is here, Jack?” Anita craned her neck theatrically around the room. “Are you going to introduce us?”
Before I could muster a response to that, the hostess walked up carrying two red and gold covered menus.
“I have a table for you now,” she smiled.
Then the hostess caught the set of Anita’s features and stopped smiling. She glanced from Anita to me and back again.
“Do you still want a table?”
“Of course we do, my dear.” Anita patted the girl on her forearm. “My husband is just trying to come up with some kind of a story to explain away his slightly sordid past.”
When I stood up, the hostess backed away and shifted her eyes around the room as if she were searching for help, then turned and scurried off toward a table on the far side of the dining room. By the time Anita and I got to it, the hostess had already abandoned two menus and fled back to the safety of her station by the door.
“Nice going,” I said as I pulled out Anita’s chair for her. “Now that girl probably thinks I’m a pimp on holiday.”
Anita said nothing. She turned her full attention to the menu and appeared to lose all interest in whatever might be on my mind. She appeared to, but I knew better. Anita was a master of the technique used by all the best television interviewers. She asked a question, and she waited for the answer. Then after you had answered whatever she had asked, she waited some more in complete silence, which naturally got you to thinking you hadn’t given a very good answer or perhaps you had left something out.
That was when you started talking again, usually without thinking very much before you did, and while you were rambling around trying to find something new to say that would satisfy her enough to get her to go on to the next question . . . BAM! . . . that was when she got what she needed to kill you.
I knew all that, but I decided to take a chance anyway. What I had to tell Anita was just too good to wait any longer. I pushed my menu to one side and took a deep breath.
“Please listen to me carefully, Anita, because I’m being completely serious here. I did not see an old girlfriend. I saw Plato Karsarkis. I walked into the bar while you were in the bathroom and he was standing there talking on a mobile phone. I sat down and a couple of minutes later he walked over, introduced himself, and took the stool next to me.”
Anita didn’t react. She didn’t even look up from her menu.
“It’s true,” I said, thinking to myself how pathetic I sounded when I did.
There was a short silence.
“I know I had lobster last night,” Anita finally said, “but Phuket lobster is so wonderful. What do you think? Should I have lobster again?”
“Anita, I am telling you exactly what happened when you were in the bathroom. Plato Karsarkis was here.”
“And he walked over and introduced himself.”
“Yes.”
“To you.”
“Yes.”
“Did he say why?”
“He told me he had heard of me.”
Anita finally looked up from her menu, but her expression remained neutral.
“He’d heard of you?”
“Yes. He said he’d heard I had a first-rate legal mind.”
Helpless before the male compulsion to brag to an attractive woman, actually to almost any woman, I ventured a bit further down that road before I could stop myself.
“He said I was pretty well known in certain circles.”
Anita looked back down again at her menu.
“Then perhaps I will have the lobster,” she said. “You certainly ought to be able to afford it.”
“Anita, I’m telling you I just had a conversation with Plato Karsarkis right over there at that bar.”
I gestured pointlessly across the room and I felt suitably foolish as soon as I had done it.
“I thought he was supposed to be dead,” Anita said, glancing up again, but only with her eyes.
“Some people think so,” I said, “but obviously he isn’t.”
“And what is Plato Karsarkis doing in Phuket?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
I had no difficulty at all understanding Anita’s conviction that I was pulling her leg. Plato Karsarkis was the most notorious international corporate criminal since Marc Rich had scammed a billion dollars and rented the Prime Minister of Israel to lean on his buddy Bill Clinton to get himself pardoned. What’s more, Karsarkis was famously secretive, legendarily elusive, and so stories had it, constantly attended by a squad of Irish bodyguards widely said to be provided by the IRA for which Karsarkis did a few favors in return from time to time. Anita knew very well that a few months before, Plato Karsarkis had vanished off the face of the earth and hadn’t been seen by anyone since.
Why wouldn’t Anita think I was joking? Even I was having a little trouble believing this had really happened.
Anita was still studying the menu when I sensed rather than heard someone behind me. I turned my head and sure enough a man was standing there. A moment before he had not been there, and now he was, and since we were sitting all the way across the dining room, a rather long way for anyone to walk unnoticed, I couldn’t imagine where he had come from.
He was youngish with a common and forgettable face, and he was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt with dark trousers and a nondescript blue tie. He made me think of a mid-level bureaucrat at some government agency.
“I’m Mike O’Connell,” the man said, not offering his hand. “I work for Mr. Karsarkis.”
I shot Anita a triumphant glance, but she took her time looking up and missed it altogether.
Keeping his hands clasped together in front of him, the man went on in a soft voice that carried the hint of an accent I couldn’t quite place.
“Mr. Karsarkis would like to invite you to join him for dinner tomorrow night. If you’re available, he’ll send a car.”
Before I had a chance to say anything, Anita did.
“This is utterly ridiculous.” She glared at the young man and poked her forefinger in my direction. “He put you up to this and I want you to know right now I’m not going to fall for it.”
“No, ma’am, he didn’t.” Mike O’Connell didn’t seem particularly surprised by Anita’s skepticism. “Mr. Karsarkis asked me to come in here and invite you to dinner.”
“Plato Karsarkis?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The Plato Karsarkis.”
“He’s the only one I know, ma’am.”
“And you seriously expect me to believe Plato Karsarkis is here in Phuket and he sent you to invite us to dinner tomorrow?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Karsarkis just spoke with your husband. Hasn’t Mr. Shepherd mentioned it to you yet?”
Anita lowered her menu, closed it with exaggerated care, and put it down on the table.
“I think he might have said something to that effect, now that you mention it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I finally tagged the accent.
“You’re an American,” I said. “New York? Boston? Around there?”
The young man summoned up something close to half a smile, but I thought he seemed a bit careful about doing it and didn’t answer me.
“We’d be delighted to join Mr. Karsarkis for dinner,” Anita said all of a sudden.
I turned my face away from Karsarkis’ emissary and raised my eyebrows to get Anita’s attention. “I’m not sure—”
“I am, Jack.”
She flicked her eyes back to the young man.
“What time tomorrow, Mr. O’Connell?”
“Would eight o’clock be convenient? If you’ll tell me where you’re staying, we’ll send a car for you.”
“And where are we having dinner exactly?”
“At Mr. Karsarkis’ home, Mrs. Shepherd. He is having several people around tomorrow night and thought you and your husband might like to join them.”
Anita nodded slowly. “You’ll appreciate, of course, I’m still having a little trouble with all this.”
“Yes, ma’am. Apparently.”
“I hope you’ll excuse me saying so, Mr. O’Connell, but it is difficult for me to accept that Plato Karsarkis is quietly living in Phuket and giving dinner parties.”
“Yes, ma’am. But that’s where he is and that’s what he’s doing. Where shall I tell the driver to pick you up?”
“Never mind about that,” I cut in.
I tried to strike a tone cool enough to leave no doubt at all as to my view of Karsarkis’ invitation.
“We’re not going,” I said. “We have other plans.”
“We are going, Jack.” Anita’s voice was low, but her tone was just as cool as mine had been. “I’d like to go.”
“Can we talk about this later, Anita?”
“No.” Her faced mimed a smile, but I didn’t see any humor in it. “We can’t.”
I looked at O’Connell. He was expressionless. I felt trapped. I gathered I was.
“Okay,” I finally said. “But no car. We’ll drive ourselves.”
“Then may I fax a map to your hotel, sir? That would probably be best.”
Not only was Plato Karsarkis living in Phuket and giving dinner parties, he was faxing out maps to his house.
“That’s fine,” I said. “We’re staying at a hotel on Cape Panwa called the Panwaburi. I don’t know the fax number, but—”
“You’ll have a map by tomorrow morning, sir.”
O’Connell took a step back from the table and inclined his head politely.
“Enjoy your dinner,” he said. Then he turned and walked away across the dining room.
I looked at Anita without saying anything. She looked back at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Well,” she finally murmured, breaking the silence. Then she retrieved her menu from the table and resumed studying it. “Shall we order?”
FOUR
THE NEXT MORNING I was sitting on the deck of our cabin drinking coffee and picking at a huge platter of unidentifiable fruit Anita had ordered from room service when I noticed an envelope that had apparently been left at our door sometime during the night. I opened it and found it was the map Karsarkis’ emissary had promised, and it made more sense to me than I had really expected it to.
As islands go, Phuket isn’t that large. It only takes a little over an hour to drive the length of it from north to south and about half that to cross it east to west. Karsarkis’ house was on the far northwestern coast of the island, on the headlands above a place called Nai Thon Beach, maybe a forty-five minute drive from our hotel but no more than a modest jog from Phuket’s only airport. I wondered if that was a coincidence. Probably not. Karsarkis no doubt kept a couple of packed bags in the trunk of his car, just in case.
After little more than a quick scan of the map, I saw I wouldn’t have any trouble finding the place where Karsarkis was holed up. That, of course, raised a fairly obvious question in my mind. How in the world could everyone else on the planet be having so much trouble finding it?
As curious as I might be about that, I wasn’t curious enough to let Plato Karsarkis spoil my vacation. After all, the man wasn’t my problem, was he?
So for the rest of the day, in between moments of laboring earnestly at an arduous regimen of swimming with Anita and napping on the beach, I carefully focused my attention on the young, sarong-clad girls with impossibly shiny black hair who plied us endlessly with sweating goblets of exotic drinks and plates heaped with cold seafood. Then, when the sun began to slide toward the sea, Anita and I showered and changed—what does one wear to dinner at the home of an internationally wanted fugitive?—and just after dusk we left our cabin and began climbing the steep pathway up to the hotel parking lot.
The night smelled of salt water and rotting fish, of neighborhood kitchens and mystifying foods, of diesel fuel and burning charcoal, and of plants and flowers with euphonious but utterly unpronounceable names. I inhaled deeply and wondered what it was about the smell of the night in Thailand that always made me feel so utterly alive.
Anita seemed to me uncharacteristically anxious, perhaps even apprehensive in some way, and that wasn’t really like her at all.
“Are you worried about this?” I asked.
Anita hesitated before she answered. “I don’t know what you mean,” she finally said.
“Yes, you do. Have you changed your mind about going to this dinner, Anita? You know I’d be very happy just to bag it.”
“Look, Jack. Why wouldn’t we go? We’ve been invited to dinner by someone most of the world would kill to have dinner with.”
“An unfortunate choice of words.”
“Don’t be so glib. I want to go. Really. Give me just one reason we shouldn’t.”
“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because the man’s a criminal on the run?”
“Oh, I see. A criminal on the run. You mean like that Japanese guy you play tennis with sometimes, the one the FBI is trying to get its hands on for securities fraud? Or maybe he’s more like that Thai banker whose daughter’s wedding we went to last week. Surasak? Isn’t that his name? They say his bank collapsed because of the hundred million or so he drained out of it and sent to Switzerland, don’t they? Or maybe you mean—”
“Now who’s being glib?”
“I honestly don’t see the difference.”
“Look, Anita, Karsarkis is in a whole different league from guys like that. He made his fortune buying massive amounts of smuggled crude oil from Iraq back during the economic embargo before the war. Then he constructed a daisy chain of paper companies in suitably shady places and transformed the Iraqi crude into apparently perfectly legal oil from perfectly legal sources by whipping up a phony paper trail for it. He funneled money to the Iraqis when he knew they would end up using it to kill Americans.”
“I thought he had a rather interesting explanation for all that,” Anita said.
Interesting was the right word for i
t, although whether Karsarkis’ tale actually amounted to a defense was another question altogether. Still, after Karsarkis’ lawyers had artfully arranged for his story to leak to the press, it was what had made of the whole case such a public sensation.
Karsarkis’ lawyers were prepared to admit he had done what the government claimed, more or less, but they insisted he had been secretly functioning as an American agent when he did, and acting under the direct instructions of the White House, no less.
“You don’t really believe any of that spy crap, do you, Anita?”
“Then what about that woman? What was her name?”
“Cynthia Kim.”
“Yeah, her,” Anita nodded. “She was going to testify it was true, wasn’t she? That the president himself had told her it was?”
Although Karsarkis’ defense attorneys had always remained properly mute in public, his numerous apologists had been everywhere claiming Cynthia Kim was going to be the defense’s star witness. According to the pro-Karsarkis people, who seemed to have more than a passing linkage with the anti-White House people, Miss Kim would testify she knew Karsarkis’ dealings had been authorized by the White House. She knew this, they said, because she herself was secretly placed inside Plato Karsarkis’ business operations by the White House in the first place. She had been put there to monitor Karsarkis’ activities and report back regularly to somebody, although precisely who was a bit unclear.
That would probably have been more than enough to mesmerize the public right there, but of course there was more.
During the time Miss Kim was supposedly spying on Karsarkis for the White House, it was widely and enthusiastically speculated—without the slightest supporting evidence, as far as I was aware— that she had been delivering her reports directly to the president. Perhaps, some claimed, she had even been giving the president something along with her deliveries that the FedEx man seldom if ever offers.
