by Jake Needham
“This is boring,” the Australian woman announced in a voice that invited no discussion of the point. “Let’s talk about something real sexy instead.”
“Oh, good,” I spoke up. “I like to talk about me.”
“Behave yourself, counselor,” Anita murmured from the other end of the table as several people tittered.
“Here’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” the woman went on without cracking a smile. “What is it with you men and Asian women? I mean, what the hell is it?”
I stole a quick glance at the two women around the table who were obviously Asian. The Thai was regarding the prime minister’s wife as she might eye a muddy sheepdog that was about to walk right across her new snow-white living room carpet, but the Chinese-looking woman who was with Yuri had the look of a startled raccoon suddenly caught in the headlights of a car.
Karsarkis seemed to appreciate the diversion, or maybe he just felt a bit of blood sport coming on, but regardless of which it was, he pushed the door wide open.
“I don’t understand, Karla,” he said, although it was obvious that he understood very well. “What are you talking about?”
“Ah, you know, Plato.”
I wondered if the woman had had too much to drink because she seemed to have difficulty speaking and was slurring her words. On the other hand, maybe it was just her Australian accent. It was difficult to tell for sure.
“You men go all gaga over these little girls here and I got a theory about that. I think men who run after Asian women are really all bloody pedophiles at heart. That’s what I think.”
“Yes, it’s very possible you’re right,” Anita joined in, and I nearly choked.
She smiled warmly at both of the Asian women sitting around the table, but went on quickly.
“My own observation is that western men who come to Asia are generally unsuccessful with western women and they are looking for harmless playthings who will feed their egos and make no demands. Essentially, they’re looking for children.”
Anita smiled again at the two Asian women sitting at the table as if to say that of course she didn’t consider either of them to be any such thing.
“That doesn’t mean that’s what they find,” Anita finished, “but it’s still what they’re looking for.”
“Have you been into the cooking sherry again, my dear?” I inquired in what I thought was an arch enough tone to make my message unmistakable.
Too late. The Australian chick was in full flight now. I looked at Karsarkis, who had pushed back in his chair and had an enormous grin spread across his face.
“Doesn’t it just make you sick?” she was saying to Anita who was bobbing her head in earnest agreement. “Sometimes I think these halfwits go around screwing these tiny girls just because it makes their pathetic little peckers look bigger.”
Karsarkis was about to bust a gut, but then I noticed that the other men around the table had gone unnaturally quiet, even the Englishman, who before this had looked as if he might never shut up. I glanced at the former prime minister. The old man had his head down diligently examining the texture of his carrot mousse. I got the distinct impression that he had probably heard all this before.
“You see all these fat, smelly wankers strutting around dragging these poor little girls behind them or riding a motorbike with one propped up on the back. Jesus, they treat those little girls like they were no better than pets who give blow jobs. What’s worse, the silly cows don’t even seem to mind it.”
The Australian woman tossed her head and pushed her hair back. There was something about her face that made me think of a badly drawn cartoon.
“Of course, they’re just doing it for the money.” She looked around the table and drained the rest of her wine. “The silly buggers run out of money and they’re out on their dirty arses before they know what hit them.”
“Serves them right,” Anita nodded, looking straight at me as she did.
Suddenly a mobile phone started to ring and for a moment nobody said anything.
“Excuse me,” I spoke up after the sound had gone on for a while. “That’s probably my Thai girlfriend calling.”
Everyone laughed, particularly Karsarkis, who looked as if he might have a stroke.
The Englishman eventually pulled out his telephone and flipped it open. He glanced at the screen, and then he closed it again without answering.
EIGHT
AFTER DINNER, MIA invited the other women to see the rest of the house while the men took their coffee and went out by the pool. In Thailand people still did that kind of thing. The mere thought of an arrangement like that in California these days would get you five to ten in San Quentin.
A houseboy wearing a white jacket and black bow tie offered cigars from a Dunhill humidor. The cigars were Davidoffs so naturally I took one, as did Karsarkis, but the others waved the houseboy away with varying degrees of courtesy.
The old prime minister stretched out on a lounge chair and within a few minutes was either dozing or dead. Meanwhile the Englishman and Yuri made vague excuses about telephone calls they had to make and headed off for other parts of the house. In short order I found myself alone with Karsarkis by the pool and I wondered if that was entirely coincidental.
We busied ourselves in silence for a while cutting and lighting our cigars. When Karsarkis eventually spoke, he kept his eyes on his cigar rather than looking at me.
“May I make a personal observation, Jack?”
I waved my cigar in what I figured was a suitably magnanimous gesture.
“Sure,” I said, “go ahead.”
“You seem to be pretty hostile tonight.”
“Good Lord,” I snorted, flipping my spent match in the direction of an ashtray. “I never would have guessed you watched Oprah.”
Karsarkis chuckled slightly at that, but then he lifted his eyes, cocked his head to one side, and stared at me until I looked away.
“You really don’t like me, do you, Jack?”
“Well…” I sorted through a number of possible responses to that and finally went with the one I thought was most honest. “No.”
Karsarkis shifted his cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right and smiled slightly. “You want to tell me exactly why?”
“Sure. You’re one of the people who get away with it. I don’t like people who get away with it.”
“With what?”
“With whatever you want. You make ridiculous amounts of money any way you like. You brush off any inconvenient laws that happen to get in your way. You let the suckers do the productive work and pay the taxes. You ruin people when they threaten you, maybe you even have a few of them killed every now and then if they get to be real nuisances. And what happens to you?” I raised my arms and gestured around me at Karsarkis’ extraordinary house. “Not a fucking thing. You live like the king of the world, laughing at all the idiots who can’t do a damn thing about it.”
To my surprise, Karsarkis just stood and listened to me, nodding his head slightly as if he were in full agreement.
Then, taking another long pull on his cigar, he exhaled and watched the smoke drift away. “You see me laughing, Jack?” he asked.
“You know what I mean.”
“I know this: I can’t go back to the United States now and I have a daughter there who needs me. Did you know that?”
I said nothing at first, but then I saw Karsarkis was staring at me as if he actually expected me to answer him so I did.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
“She’s nine years old. Living in New York with my first wife. She has leukemia, Jack, and she’s too sick to come here. If I can’t straighten all this out, she’ll die before I see her again. What do you think it feels like to be in exile halfway around the world, living in a country where you can’t read the signs and aren’t sure who you can trust, when you have a nine-year-old daughter back home who’s dying of leukemia?” Karsarkis pushed one of the lounge chairs aroun
d with his foot, sat down on the side of it, and looked up at me. “What do you think that feels like, you self-righteous son of a bitch?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
“I think you at least owe me an honest answer to my question, Jack. Do you see me laughing?”
I wanted to say if Karsarkis cared so much about his daughter maybe he should have thought about her back before he started peddling smuggled Iraqi oil to the highest bidder and pissing off the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, and God-only-knew who else. But I didn’t say any of that.
“What’s your daughter’s name?” I asked him instead.
“Zoe. After my mother.”
“Do you talk to her often?”
The silence went on for what felt like several minutes before Karsarkis spoke again.
“No, not often. It’s hard for both of us. She always ends up crying. I don’t deal with it very well.”
Drawing deeply on his cigar Karsarkis stood up and walked slowly over to the edge of the pool and peered down. For a moment I had visions of Robert Maxwell and wondered if I ought to take off my watch and shoes just in case he was about to jump in.
“You have any kids, Jack?” he asked all of a sudden.
“No, but…” I trailed off when I realized I wasn’t at all certain what I had started to say, so I didn’t say anything.
Karsarkis looked back over his shoulder at me with a kind of half smile on his face.
“You were going to say that you and Anita were talking about it, weren’t you?”
“No. I wasn’t.”
But, of course, I was.
“I’ve got a son as well as a daughter,” Karsarkis carried on, letting me off the hook. “Did I tell you that?”
I shook my head.
“Yeah, Frank’s at Columbia. I’m proud as hell of that boy, but I worry about him, too. Sometimes I think we’ve all lost our way. The kind of world we’re leaving for him and the rest of our kids is a less decent place than the one our parents left for us. I’m not sure he’s ready to deal with that.” Karsarkis smiled again, but in a minor key. “Anyway, he got into Columbia. That’s about as good a start as he could get. Maybe he’ll be okay.”
I had to admit I had never really thought of Karsarkis before as a guy who worried about his children’s future. Maybe I had judged him too harshly. On the other hand, maybe this was all just a load of crap he was shoveling out to make him sound like a decent guy and I hadn’t judged him harshly enough. Either way, I was growing somewhat curious about this man now and decided it wouldn’t hurt anything to keep the conversation going.
“Did you go to Columbia yourself?” I asked him.
“No. Georgetown.”
“Really? So did I. Georgetown Law.”
“Those Jesuits were tough little bastards, weren’t they?” Karsarkis smiled. “I learned a lot from them.”
“Like what for instance?”
Karsarkis seemed to be taken mildly off balance by the question, which was my whole reason for having asked it, of course. To his credit, however, he paused before he answered and I sensed he was thinking seriously about it.
“A sense of good grace,” he said after a moment, “and a perspective on life. You know: this too shall pass.”
I was pretty sure if Karsarkis was applying that lesson to his present circumstances, he was dreaming.
“What year did you graduate from Georgetown?” I asked.
“1969.”
I did the math as subtly as I could. That would make Karsarkis about sixty.
“The law school?” I asked.
“No, undergraduate. I had no interest in law school. I figured I could always rent all the lawyers I needed, so why bother going to law school myself?”
The image of a For Rent sign hanging around my neck wasn’t particularly appealing, but I let Karsarkis’ observation pass without starting a pointless argument over it. Instead I walked over to a lounge chair, sat down, and watched Karsarkis out of the corner of my eye while I smoked my cigar and wondered exactly what in the hell was going on. Here I was sitting around chewing the fat with the world’s most famous fugitive and what were we talking about? His children and the good old days back when we were both Georgetown Hoyas.
I had the feeling none of this was just idle chatter. Karsarkis was trying too hard to sound congenial. He was working up to something and I wondered what it would turn out to be.
Then I found out.
“Before I forget, Jack, there’s something I wanted to ask you,” Karsarkis said, breaking the silence. “One of our local companies is thinking about making a bid for a broken-down hotel chain they think they can do something with. I was wondering if you could look at the deal for me, just tell me what you think about it before they go any further.”
“I don’t have a private practice anymore, Mr. Karsarkis. I just teach. I already told you that.”
“Yeah, you did, but…” Karsarkis took another pull on his cigar. “I was hoping perhaps you would do this as a favor for a friend.”
“I already told you that, too. We’re not friends.”
“I don’t expect anybody to work for free, Jack. Whether they’re a friend or not. Nothing for nothing. I’ve always believed that.”
“Look, I really don’t—”
“I had in mind a fee of $100,000.”
“I’m sorry?”
“$100,000. To look over the deal and give me your opinion.”
I wasn’t sure what Karsarkis expected me to say to that—it was too silly an offer for me to take it seriously—but he was standing there looking at me and obviously expected me to say something so eventually I did.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Surely it wouldn’t take more than a few hours to go over whatever you have. Nobody pays that kind of money for a few hours’ work.”
“I’m not proposing to pay you for your time, Jack. I’m proposing to pay you for your opinion. I could make a hell of a lot of money from this or I could lose a hell of a lot. You’re a smart guy and you know the territory out here. What you think about the deal and the way it’s structured is easily worth $100,000 to me.”
“Look, I’m very flattered, but—”
“Just think about it, will you?”
“I don’t need to think about it, Mr. Karsarkis. Even if I wanted to do it, I couldn’t. The school wouldn’t be happy about it.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they don’t mind me doing some consulting work on the side, but they want me to keep it low profile.”
“We could keep this low profile. That’s no problem.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Yes, it is. I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”
“That’s not what I meant. Look, what I’m trying to say is the school…”
I trailed off. I was trying to be polite and I didn’t want to flat-out insult the man, but I decided there was nothing wrong with telling Karsarkis the simple truth.
“Let me put it this way. What I’m saying here is this: I really do not want to work for you, Mr. Karsarkis. Not even if you’re willing to pay me $100,000 for a few hours work. And I’m sure you understand exactly why that is.”
THE HIGHWAY WAS nearly empty when Anita and I drove back to the hotel from Karsarkis’ house. The heavy wetness of the night was so dense the air felt almost like fog. We crossed the hills at the central core of the island in silence, both of us watching our headlights as the bobbing beams splintered in the moisture and made the thick vegetation lining the road glitter as if it were covered with fireflies.
“Be careful, Jack.”
I looked around, but didn’t immediately see what Anita was concerned about.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said be careful,” Anita repeated.
“Of what?”
“Of this man.”
I grunted. “Greeks bearing gifts? Something like that?”
“Be serious, Jack, and listen to me. Are
you listening to me?”
I glanced quickly across at Anita. When I saw the set of her jaw, I knew there was only one possible answer to her question.
“Yes, Anita. I’m listening to you.”
“I am only going to say this once.”
“Okay.”
“People who live in the darkness are very seductive to you, Jack. So whatever you think you’re doing with this man, be very, very careful.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Anita, I not doing anything with him.”
“You’re about to take a huge chance here. I can feel it. You’re walking straight into something horrible, and you don’t even have the sense to be afraid.”
I didn’t reply.
It was a gorgeous night, quiet and very dark. The road was a divided four-lane arched here and there by concrete pedestrian bridges with a rank of tall aluminum streetlights marching down the grassy divider in the middle. The streetlights glowed a sulfurous yellow and the water vapor hanging in the air caught the butter-colored radiance and shaped it into luminous globes. It made me think of a line of huge yellow snow cones impaled on stainless steel sticks.
We drove in silence for a while and it was a few minutes before I realized Anita had slipped off to sleep, her head tilted against the back of the seat with her face turned away from me. I watched jack-o’-lantern houses drifting past the windows of our Suzuki, their waxy lights flicking through tiny openings. I smiled as a Buddhist temple loomed up briefly out of a grove of rubber trees, its fanciful, brightly painted towers sparkling fiercely, even in the darkness.
Moving into the left lane I passed a slow-moving Isuzu pickup. It had been converted into a primitive bus with rough wooden benches rigged down both sides of the bed, but that night it was empty. The stillness of the night in Thailand is always an illusion. It is never really empty. There is always something moving out there in the darkness: a car, a bus, a motorbike, a truck. Once I got myself lost near the airport in Bangkok very late at night, rounded a curve, and found myself face-to-face with an elephant somebody was riding right down the middle of the highway.
