by Jake Needham
“Who was the client?” I asked.
“What client?”
“The one Dollar was with when he was mugged.”
“Oh.” Jello started in on the second croissant and sipped at his coffee again before he answered. “Just John didn’t say.”
It was hard to believe that Dollar could have been mugged coming out of the United Center on Silom Road at ten o’clock at night. That was one of the highest profile spots in Bangkok, and at that time of night the sidewalk should have been crowded with punters going back and forth to Patpong just down the street.
“Why don’t you call Dollar and ask him what really happened?” Jello suggested.
I looked at my watch. Coming up fast on ten. I had to get going or I would be late for my class.
“It all sounds like a lot of nothing,” I said. “I gotta go. I’ve got a class to teach.”
We said our goodbyes and I headed out. As I pushed out through the door, I glanced back over my shoulder.
Jello was still sitting quietly at the table, twisting his coffee cup with one hand and polishing off the second of his chocolate croissants with the other. He licked the last crumbs off his thumb and forefinger and stared straight ahead at the street, apparently thinking about nothing more important than the traffic flowing past on Ploenchit Road.
But I knew Jello and I knew that wasn’t true. Something had just happened, only I couldn’t figure out what it was.
THIRTEEN
My ten o’clock class went surprisingly well. The sugar and caffeine did an impressive job. I had just walked into my office after the class when my telephone rang.
“Hello.”
“Could you come to the office tomorrow afternoon to talk over a couple of things, Jack? About five or so would be good for me.”
If Dollar could be brusque, I supposed I could, too, so I ignored his question.
“I was going to call you later,” I said. “I heard you got knocked around last night.”
There was a short silence.
“Where did you hear that?” Dollar asked after a moment.
“Jello told me. The way I hear it, Just John told him.”
“Jello? The ECID guy?”
“Yeah.”
Dollar let that hang there for a moment, and then I heard an exasperated grunt.
“Figures.”
I waited a moment for him to offer some explanation, but he didn’t.
“So is it true?” I finally asked him.
“Well…” Dollar hesitated. “It was no big deal.”
“No big deal.”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not much of a story.”
I waited Dollar out. Eventually he filled the silence.
“We were coming out of the office and two kids jumped us while I was calling my driver. The little shits were probably just a couple of pill heads trying to grab our briefcases. It happens.”
“Not really. Not in front of the United Center at that time of night.”
“Sure it does.”
“You hurt?”
“A little, I guess. Bruises, and I’m sore as hell, but I’ll live.” I could almost hear Dollar thinking before he went on. “Look, just keep this under your hat, would you?”
“If it’s such a big secret, why did you tell Just John about it?”
Dollar paused for a long time and I sensed he was trying to decide how much he had to say to make me let it go.
“It’s his job to look after firm security,” he finally said. Then he fell silent again.
That was the first I had heard of that. I always thought Just John was just a glad-hander and a boozer. Dollar telling me that he did security work for the firm opened up several questions-most conspicuously, exactly what was John supposed to be securing Dollar’s law firm from. But before I could ask, Dollar started talking again.
“Anyway, a couple of tourist police came along right after we ran the fuckers off. Eventually John would have found out even if I hadn’t told him myself. That would have pissed him off real good. This town is too goddamned small for me sometimes.”
It seemed odd to me Dollar would care one way or the other if Just John was pissed off. Who worked for whom? But another question elbowed past that thought and went right up to the front of the line.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked Dollar instead.
“What?”
“You said ‘we’ were coming out of the office and ‘we’ ran them off.”
Dollar hesitated, and suddenly I knew exactly what he was about to say.
“Howard the Roach,” he muttered just as I was thinking exactly that. “Look, Jack, I could have told you something else instead of admitting right off that it was Howard, but you’d probably-”
“Was he hurt?” I interrupted.
“Not really,” Dollar replied after a second’s hesitation. It seemed to surprise him that I hadn’t asked him something else and the relief in his voice was evident.
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said.
I thought about the conversation Dollar and I had about Howard a couple of days ago and I wondered again what Dollar wasn’t telling me.
“Look, Jack, can you come around tomorrow like I asked?” Dollar asked when I said nothing else. “It’s important.”
“I’m going to Hong Kong tomorrow.”
“Hong Kong?” I could swear Dollar sounded startled. “Why Hong Kong?”
“Board meeting. Southeast Asian Investments.”
“Oh, yeah.” There was a tinge of relief in Dollar’s voice for some reason. I was certain of it. “How long you going to be there?”
“A couple of days.”
“Then how about Saturday morning? You free then?”
Whatever Dollar had on his mind must really have been important. As far as I knew, no lawyer in Bangkok had ever gone to the office on a Saturday before.
“I could manage that if you want.”
“I know you’ll probably be tired from the trip and all, and I hate to ask, but-”
“It’s okay,” I interrupted, taking Dollar off the hook. “I’m only going to Hong Kong, not Honduras. It’s not a problem.”
“Okay, yeah. Good.”
Dollar took a breath and rushed on.
“Look, Jack, there was one more thing I was calling about.”
No surprise there. I had already worked out from Dollar’s voice that there had to be something else.
“You haven’t heard from Howard since last night, have you?”
“Oh Christ, you’re not going to start all that again?” Dollar’s obsession over whether Howard was talking to me was taking on comic proportions. “If you don’t believe that I haven’t heard from Howard, why don’t you just ask him yourself?”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“I don’t understand. Didn’t you just say he was with you last night?”
Dollar cleared his throat. “Yeah, but I can’t find him this morning.”
“Where’s he staying?”
“He’s been at the Four Seasons, but I called there and they said he checked out.”
“Well, I can promise you he’s not sleeping with me.”
I let the silence that fell after that stretch on a bit.
“What is it you’re not telling me here, Dollar?”
I could hear him take a deep breath.
“If Howard hasn’t called you, Jack, why did he have your cell phone number written across the top of his notes?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand?” Dollar sounded annoyed. “Yesterday afternoon in the office I was looking at some notes Howard had about this deal he’s working on. Your cell phone number was written on the top of the first page.”
That stopped me. I had never given Howard my number. I was absolutely certain of that. As far as I knew, it was pretty tough to get anybody’s local cell phone number unless they gave it to you, at least not legitimately.
“I don’t know how Howard got my number, Dollar. I haven’t heard from him. Other than that I just don’t know what to tell you.”
“You sure?”
“Goddamn it, Dollar, I’m tired of all this crap!”
“Yeah,” Dollar sighed, “me, too. Sorry, Jack. Rough night.”
Then the obvious occurred to me.
“Are you asking me all this because you think those guys were after Howard? Is that why he took off?”
“Who knows? Who the fuck knows why that silly little shit does anything.”
“Well, it seems to me that a guy gets-”
“So you’ll be at the office on Saturday?” Dollar interrupted.
His voice rose to make a question out of it, but of course it wasn’t a question since I’d already told him I’d be there.
“Eleven,” he said. “Okay?”
It was clear that Dollar wanted to put an end to our conversation about Howard the Roach before it got any more specific, and I had had more than enough of Howard for the moment myself so I let him.
For several decades Dollar had worked the territory around the Pacific Rim, a place that was a mystery as dark as the creation for most westerners, and as far as I knew he had always done it with confidence, style, and not a little grace in spite of the high wire I suspected he might have been walking from time to time. I had never known Dollar to be rattled. Until now. Something had him pretty well shaken up. That was impossible to miss, even on the telephone.
I was suddenly glad I was flying to Hong Kong the next day. Getting away from Bangkok would be a deliverance.
First Barry Gale drops out of the sky wanting to pull me into the same scheme that had him on the run. Then Dollar gets involved in some kind of a mess with our old client Howard the Roach and doesn’t want to come clean with me as to what it is. The horseshit was all around me and rising quickly.
Screw it, I decided, enough time wasted on these clowns. Time to do something worthwhile. I took the elevator down to the parking garage and was still thinking about where to go to lunch when the elevator lurched to a stop and the door slid open.
I saw the man immediately. The way he was bending into my Volvo, I could hardly have missed him. Still, he was such an unexpected sight it took me a moment to react.
I had left the top of the Volvo down as I usually did when it was parked in the faculty garage and the man was taking full advantage of that. His back was to me and he was leaning over the driver’s door, reaching into the car with both hands. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but it seemed unlikely he was leaving me a winning lottery ticket.
The man was a westerner, and when I thought about it later it seemed to me that his appearance must have been average in every respect because absolutely nothing about it came back to me except for one thing. He was wearing a suit and tie. It was a dark blue business suit, and it would have been unexceptional anywhere else, but it made him pretty conspicuous in Bangkok where the heat made shirtsleeves the usual style for men.
When I stepped out of the elevator and started toward the Volvo, the man must have heard my footsteps on the concrete. He immediately straightened up, and without turning, began to walk quickly away.
“Hey! Excuse me!”
The man didn’t answer. Instead he quickened his pace and angled off toward a stairwell on the opposite side of the building.
“Hey!” I shouted as I broke into a trot.
The sound of my feet echoed loudly in the garage and the man bolted.
The door to the stairwell had been propped open with a concrete block, and in a dozen quick strides he reached it and shoved the block away with his foot. The man disappeared through the door and it clanged shut behind him. I knew from the click it made that it would be locked.
It was of course, and I could only stand and listen as the man’s footsteps clicked down metal steps to street level. Then I heard another door open somewhere below, and after a moment, close.
When I got back to my car I looked it over cautiously but saw nothing unusual. I felt foolish letting the idea of a bomb even cross my mind, but the thought was there and I couldn’t make it go away by pretending it wasn’t.
Seeing nothing obvious in the car’s open interior, I swung back first the driver’s door and then the passenger door. I felt carefully under the front seats, then folded them forward and checked just as carefully in the back seat and on the floor. Finally, I bent down and looked underneath the car like I’d seen people do in the movies. As far as I could tell everything seemed normal enough there, too, so I pushed myself to my feet again, reached in, and popped the Volvo’s hood release.
I stood with my hands on my hips and stared into the engine compartment wondering exactly what I thought I was looking for. I put my hand on a couple of cables and hoses and jiggled them and gave a tentative shake to a black, circular thing on top of the motor that I was reasonably sure was the air filter. I was certainly no mechanic and probably hadn’t had the hood open more than twice since I had bought the car, but I thought everything looked pretty much as it should. At the very least I was certain that there wasn’t a bundle of dynamite hanging off anything. When I started to feel foolish enough, I closed the hood quietly and leaned on it until the catch clicked shut.
Just because some pretty strange things had been happening to me recently it didn’t mean that I had to turn some ordinary-looking guy poking around my Volvo into a car bomber. Probably it was just somebody who liked convertibles, I told myself, and no doubt I scared the crap out of him when I bellowed like a madman as soon as the elevator door opened. Why had I jumped immediately to the conclusion that the guy was up to no good without even giving him the chance to explain?
Jesus, I thought to myself, if I’d thought before that I needed to get out of town for a while, I was absolutely certain of it now.
FOURTEEN
I went into the office late Wednesday morning to collect the stuff I needed for the board meeting in Hong Kong. My Cathay Pacific flight didn’t leave until four in the afternoon and I had nothing pressing to do so when Jello pushed the door open and stuck his head in I had my feet on the desk and was reading the Wall Street Journal.
“Hey, Jack,” he said. “You don’t look very busy.”
“I’m not,” I said, lowering the paper. “Just killing time. I’ve got a flight to Hong Kong later this afternoon.”
“You hungry?”
“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “Not really.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said you’re hungry.” Jello jabbed his thumb over his shoulder toward my door. “Let’s go.”
I folded the Journal and laid it on the desk while I thought that one over. “What’s going on?”
“We need to talk, Jack.”
“I see,” I said, but of course I didn’t. “You want to tell me what this is all about?”
“Not really, but I will.”
Jello looked uncharacteristically somber, so I stopped arguing with him. I swung my feet off the desk and followed him into the corridor, locking my door behind me. There would be plenty of time to come back for my things before I went to the airport.
“Did you talk to Dollar yet?” Jello asked as we walked toward the elevator.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yesterday.”
“So was he really mugged?”
“More or less.”
“What does that mean?”
“He said it was just a couple of kids trying to grab their briefcases.”
Jello grunted slightly, but he didn’t say anything else.
We rode down to the lobby in silence and then walked outside to where Jello had left a brown Toyota parked in Sasin’s circular driveway. He started the car and drove off. I let the silence go on until we had left the campus, passed the Princess Hotel, and turned into Phayathai Road.
“Where are we going?”
“Anna’s.”
Anna’s Cafe was on Soi Sa
ladaeng, a quiet street that cut directly across one of Bangkok’s most venerable residential neighborhoods just beyond the shadows of the office towers bunched together at the south end of Silom Road. I liked Anna’s a lot, partly because the food was good and the surroundings were pleasant, but even more because I thought of it as a kind of monument to the extraordinary adaptability and endurance of Thais.
When the Bank of Thailand gave up trying to support the currency in the mid-nineties, the country’s financial collapse had wrecked almost everybody. Financiers fled the country, corporate executives turned to selling sandwiches, and one particularly luckless investor put a gun to his head in front of the stock exchange and pulled the trigger. He missed. That struck a lot of foreigners as the perfect metaphor for how Thailand had gotten into such a mess in the first place.
Property developers were particularly hard hit. Dependent on loans from local banks to keep all their plates spinning, most of the plates came crashing down when the banks stopped lending in a knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis and starting calling in the loans they had already made. Even now, years after the economy had begun to grow again, Bangkok was still littered with the rotting carcasses of huge structures that had been abandoned by ruined developers who couldn’t afford to finish them. Some parts of the city looked like a movie set being readied for another remake of ‘Planet of the Apes.’
The developer who had owned the site where Anna’s now stood had been luckier than most when the crash came and the bank loans disappeared, having gotten no further than building a sales office touting an improbable high-rise condominium. What to do? An American property developer would no doubt have called his lawyers and sued everybody he could think of. The Thai developer, in happy contrast, had taken the ruined condo’s sales office and turned it into a stylish and profitable restaurant.
We turned between Anna’s gateposts and followed the driveway to the parking area at the back of the restaurant. Jello took the first open spot he found. He got out, slammed the door, and started toward the front entrance without looking back. I followed him wordlessly.