by Jake Needham
“Hear me good, Slick. I’m going to take Plato Karsarkis down. If you get in the way, I’m going to take you down, too. I’m telling you that as a favor, not as a threat.”
“I’m not part of this, CW”
“Well, Slick, you ever heard that line that goes, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem?’“
“Listen very carefully to me. I am only going to say this one time. I am not part of your problem. I am not part of your solution. I have a nice life here in Thailand and I am not going to screw it up. Not for Plato Karsarkis, not for you, not for anyone.”
“You really think it’s going to be that easy? You think you can just walk away from all this and that will be the end of it?”
“Yep, I do. From now on, just think of me as Switzerland.”
“He’s reeling you in just like a big, dumb old fish, Slick,” CW shook his head, “and you don’t even know it.”
“You’ve been a cop too long, CW. You smell shit everywhere.”
“He’s settin’ you up, boy.”
“Look, this may come as a real shock to you, pal, but I’m a grown man and I make all my own choices these days. Only people who’re greedy or stupid get set up, and I’m neither.”
“Whatever you say, Slick,” CW shook his head slowly again. “Whatever you say.”
There wasn’t much more of any consequence left to talk about after that and CW seemed to lose interest in me once I had made it clear I wasn’t going to be any part of whatever he was planning. York and Parker had left while CW and I were trading insults in the back of the bar and it wasn’t very long before I wished CW a nice life and left, too.
I walked out of the Blue Lotus and back to the Holiday Inn, then I drove all the way to the hotel with the top of the jeep down. A breeze had come up from somewhere and I thought the wet night air slapping against my face might clear my head by the time I got back, but it didn’t even make a decent start. I parked the jeep in the hotel lot and walked down the hillside toward our cabin.
About the time I passed the swimming pool, still and empty in the darkness, I started wondering if maybe CW did have a point after all. There might be something sticking to my shoe that wasn’t going to be nearly as easy to scrape off as I thought.
Perhaps Switzerland was a little too much to hope for.
THE MIDDLE
Bangkok
“Living in a foreign country
is like being on a football team without a home field.
You’re always playing away.”
—Desmond O’Grady,
Journalist
SIXTEEN
IT WAS MONDAY afternoon and Anita and I had been back in Bangkok for less than a week. If there was ever a vacation glow at all, it was already pretty much gone. Something was clearly out of rhythm with Anita. I had no idea at all what it might be and I couldn’t imagine that just flat out asking her would get me very far toward finding out. Still, I had students to see and courses to teach so I wasn’t worrying a lot about it. Instead I was smoking an afternoon Montecristo in my office, feet on my desk, reviewing my notes for the next day’s lecture in my tax havens course.
The subject of tax havens was surprisingly popular with the kids. I have always thought it was probably because the sorts of places we talked about absolutely reeked with international intrigue and distant romance: places like the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Monte Carlo. Any discussion of tax havens immediately conjures up riveting stories of a world awash with drug barons tucking away narco money, terrorists laundering arms money, and third-world ministers hiding bribe money. And the idea of all those naughty people whooping it up in Monte Carlo while giving the rest of us the finger is absolute catnip to a room full of business students casting about for the quickest possible road to undreamed-of riches.
In spite of the strange vibrations Anita had been emitting ever since we got back, on the whole I felt pretty good. A few days of hanging out at the beach had left me with a nice tan and a clear head. Best of all, I had successfully evaded all further conversation with Anita about buying a vacation house in Phuket. I figured I just might be on a roll.
At least I figured that until about six when my telephone rang. Bun, my secretary, had already gone home for the evening so I answered it myself. Looking back, I should have let it ring.
“Hello.”
“Professor Shepherd?”
“Yes.”
“This is Sanilee Dare.”
The woman’s voice was on the breathy side, but pleasant. She spoke American-sounding English and, like her name, her accent struck me as about halfway between Thai and American. Still, I had no idea at all who she was.
“I’m sorry, but are you a student?”
The woman laughed and it was a nice laugh.
“I showed you and your wife a house in Phuket last week. I’m Nok, remember?”
She laughed again before I could say anything. “I’m devastated. Thank God most men remember me a lot better than you do.”
I apologized to the woman for not recognizing her name, but I finessed her flirty approach to reminding me who she was. That could go nowhere good.
“I have some really good news for you, Jack.”
Nok may have been Thai, but she had apparently embraced the annoying American habit of jumping right into addressing everyone by their first name at the earliest possible opportunity. I guess it didn’t really matter one way or another, but I’d always hated that and it put me in the wrong frame of mind to hear the rest of whatever she had to say.
“I’m calling about that house you and your wife were interested in,” she said. “Remember?”
Somehow I didn’t recall expressing the slightest interest in the house Nok had shown us, but I didn’t say anything. She was a real estate agent and it wouldn’t really matter to her whether I did or not.
“Well, someone called from BankThai this morning,” she continued, “and guess what? They’re willing to drop the price to fifteen million baht.”
For a moment I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly.
“To what?” I asked. “Fifty million baht?”
“No, fifteen.”
From eight-five million baht, nearly three million dollars, to fifteen million baht, more like four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Jeez, I was a hell of a negotiator, wasn’t I? God only knows how low the price might have gone if I’d actually opened my mouth.
“That doesn’t make any sense to me,” I said.
“Well…” Nok hesitated. “Actually, it doesn’t to me either. I never talked to anyone over there. I don’t even know how they knew you had looked at the house. A man from BankThai just called me this morning and said he had been told you were interested in the property and his instructions were to reduce the price for you. He even said the bank would be willing to loan you the full amount if you wished.”
“Did he?”
“Oh, yes. He said the bank had absolutely the highest regard for you and he wanted to do anything he could to help you acquire the property. I had no idea you were such an important man.”
“Neither did I.”
There was a long silence. Nok apparently expected me to fill it. I didn’t.
“Ah…” Nok sounded tentative. Under the circumstances, I could hardly blame her. “Shall I tell them you’re interested?”
“No.”
“But your wife…” Nok abruptly stopped talking and slid into an uncertain silence.
“What about her?” I asked.
“When I called her she said you would definitely be interested and that was why she gave me your number. She asked me to call you.”
“Well, she was wrong. Please tell BankThai we are not going to buy that house at any price. Thank you for calling.”
I hung up before Nok could say anything else and tilted back in my chair, folding my arms over my chest.
This was turning into a fine mess, wasn’t it? The last thing I ne
eded was to have my name bandied about in connection with an offer by a Thai bank of an under-the-table deal to buy an expensive vacation house in Phuket. The implications were legion, and none of them were good.
After stewing over Nok’s call for a while longer, I picked the telephone up again and dialed Anita at home. She answered on the third ring and I skipped right past the usual pleasantries.
“What do you know about this house business, Anita?”
“Well, hello, darling. And thank you for calling. I love you, too.”
“I’m sorry to be so abrupt, Anita, but I’m working up a real mad-on here. Did you talk to BankThai about that house in Phuket without telling me?”
“No, Jack, I didn’t.”
Anita’s tone had turned icy, which I probably deserved, but I plowed ahead anyway.
“You talked to no one at that bank?”
“No one.”
“Did you talk to anyone else?”
“No.”
“Then why in Christ’s name would someone at BankThai suddenly call this real estate agent and…”
I trailed off, turning the woman’s story around in my mind looking for some kind of an explanation.
“Look, Jack. Sometimes nice things do—”
“Oh shit,” I interrupted.
I could almost hear Anita’s bewilderment in the silence that followed.
“What in the world is wrong with you, Jack? This is wonderful news and you’re treating it like some kind of calamity. The bank has offered to—”
“You don’t get it do you, Anita?” I interrupted again before she could get wound up.
“No,” her voice faltered. “I guess I don’t.”
“Just stop and think a moment.”
There was a brief silence.
“What am I supposed to be thinking about, Jack?”
“Anita, I didn’t talk to anyone about this house. You didn’t talk to anyone about this house. Even the real estate agent didn’t talk to anyone about this house. So why do you suppose the bank just rang up all of a sudden and offered to reduce the price by eighty percent and loan us the full amount?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think somebody must have told them we looked at the property, then gave them a pretty good push to help us out?”
“You’re saying that somebody’s trying to do us a favor?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, I see. You think somebody wants to do us a favor and then ask you for something in return.”
“Right again,” I said. “Now who would that somebody most likely be?”
“I can’t imagine who… oh, shit.”
“Bingo. A big cigar for the little lady.”
This time the silence was longer and I let it stretch on until Anita eventually broke it.
“How do you suppose that US marshal guy found out about the house, Jack?”
“Give me back the cigar.”
“What?”
“You’ve got it wrong, Anita. It’s not the marshals.”
“Then who is it?
“Come on, Anita. Don’t be ridiculous. Think. Who could possibly have the clout to be behind something like this? Mr. Plato Karsarkis himself, I’d wager.”
“Oh, Jack, I don’t think so. Plato wouldn’t be so sneaky. If he wanted something, I think he’d just come out and ask you for it.”
“He has asked me, Anita. And I said no. Remember?” I struggled to keep the testiness out of my voice. “I told you all that business about the hotel deal and the big fee he offered me for doing very little, and I told you I turned him down. I gather Karsarkis isn’t a man who likes to be told no.”
“Don’t you think you’re being just a little egocentric, Jack?”
“A little what?”
“I’m just saying, I’m sure there are plenty of people Plato can call on if he needs help. He hardly has to sit up nights thinking up ways to lure you into his debt.”
I sighed. It was obvious Anita liked Plato Karsarkis regardless of the dire warnings she had given me about him. In fact, even if she decided I was right and Karsarkis was indeed behind the sudden and unexplained generosity of BankThai, I’d bet she was more likely to say it was just a friendly gesture from a nice man than to see it as the cynical dangle which I was absolutely certain it was.
“We are not going to buy that house, Anita.”
“Maybe Plato has nothing to do with this.”
“And maybe I just saw a flock of pigs flap by outside my window. I will not buy that house, Anita, and you can’t either. You can’t put me in that position.”
I could feel waves of bad vibrations coming down the telephone line at me.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Jack, but I don’t take orders from you.”
“I’m not giving you orders, Anita, I’m trying to get you to understand that—”
“You will not tell me what to do, Jack. I’m very angry with you and I am going to hang up now. Good-bye.”
And with that Anita put down the telephone.
I hung up, too. Then I sat quietly for a while trying to calm the loud buzzing sound that had started up somewhere in my head.
Eventually I retrieved my Montecristo from the ashtray where I had abandoned it when Nok called and relit it. I took a long pull, filling my mouth with the bittersweet smoke and exhaling in a long, protracted stream. That helped, at least a little.
I stood up and walked over to the windows. The heavy particles of chemical crud that made up a good part of Bangkok’s air occasionally captured and diffused the last light of day in a way which caused a soft, mango-colored fog to creep over the city right before sunset. When that happened, it made the city seem almost unbearably if only fleetingly romantic.
I stood at the window and watched the sun sink out of sight behind the mirrored office towers that lined Silom Road. I waited for the mango fog, but it never came.
SEVENTEEN
I TRY TO rustle up a tennis match every now and then to fight the good fight against onrushing decrepitude, but it’s usually difficult to find anyone in Bangkok who wants to play tennis. Men in Thailand mostly play golf. That generally means lolling around a course for half a day drinking beer with your pals while one eighteen-year-old girl scurries around holding an umbrella over you and another drags your heavy golf bag. Breaking a sweat isn’t part of the deal.
Finding a place to play tennis in Bangkok is a challenge, too. Other than the courts at a couple of snobby private clubs where you have to pay a generous bribe to the membership committee to get in, the few tennis courts in the city are pretty crummy. They’re usually not much more than cracked and buckled slabs of concrete wedged between high-rise buildings, not so much athletic facilities as parking lots with nets that generate income for the landowners until they get some financing together to build yet another apartment tower.
So as an alternative form of exercise I try to run a few miles every now and then. The big problem there is that places to run in the city are at almost as much of a premium as tennis courts. That is, unless you have a particular affection for climbing in and out of potholes while playing tag with thirty-year-old Chinese buses driven by teenagers zonked out of their mind on uppers.
Queen’s Park isn’t very big, but it is one of the better places in Bangkok to run. It’s quiet and pleasant, at least it is if you measure it by the standard of the few other public parks in Bangkok, which is pretty modest. Sandwiched between the Emporium, the city’s ritziest shopping complex, and some nondescript commercial buildings including a walled compound belonging to the Iranian Embassy, it amounts to a couple of acres of concrete pathways, a little grass, some trees, and a few fountains with a small lake in the middle of it all. The place actually feels pretty much like a real park, if you don’t think about it too much.
I parked on the street and walked into Queen’s Park from the Sukhumvit Road side, looking around for my usual jogging companion. Near the back of the park, I spotted Jello bouncing
impatiently on the balls of his feet while he watched some kids playing an energetic if not particularly skillful game of basketball.
Technically Jello was just another Thai police captain and the Thai police had a lot of captains, but as long as I had known him he had also been a senior member of the Economic Crimes Investigation Division. It was a position that gave him a considerable amount of personal clout since ECID was primarily an intelligence operation. Most cops concerned themselves with who was doing what to whom, and occasionally even why. Jello focused more on how much they were getting paid for it and what they did with the money. Since money in Thailand was more important than life, it made him a key player in almost everything of any consequence that went down anywhere in the entire country.
I had never been entirely certain what the source of Jello’s colorful nickname was. For a while I had assumed his rotund physique had something to do with it, the image of his belly quivering like a bowl of jello coming easily to mind whenever we ran together. However lately I had gotten the impression the name might have gone all the way back to his childhood when he had been sent away to a boarding school in Connecticut. I wondered if hidden within it was one of those scarring cruelties most of us could recall from our childhood but would rather not. If there was, he never mentioned it.
Jello must have seen me coming out of the corner of his eye. He glanced back over his shoulder when I was a good fifty feet away and gave me a wave. I tossed out a little salute and broke into a jog toward him.
“You’re late,” he said when I got there.
“I am,” I agreed, jogging in place next to him.
“Aren’t you at least going to say you’re sorry.”
“I am not. Any other preliminaries?”
“Guess not.”
“Then you’re ready for a few miles?”
“Let’s do it.”
“What you think? Five today? Maybe ten?”
“Whatever, old man.”
I knew perfectly well some kind of warm-up routine before running was almost mandatory now that I wasn’t a young hot shot anymore, but most of the time I couldn’t be bothered so I just ran slowly for the first half a mile or so and hoped after that everything would take care of itself.
