Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  Then Bar Phillips did something that put an end to Winnebago’s speculations. He came inside, walked directly to their table, and sat down.

  “Hey, man,” he greeted Eddie. “I would’ve known you anywhere. You still look exactly like—”

  “Don’t start,” Eddie interrupted.

  “This is the guy?” Winnebago asked, cutting his eyes back and forth between Bar and Eddie.

  Eddie nodded.

  “You got a problem of some kind, friend?” Bar glanced at Winnebago without moving his head.

  “I was just wondering what the helmet was for.”

  “You haven’t been in town very long, have you?”

  Winnebago rolled his eyes and went back to his fried chicken.

  “So,” Eddie said, looking Bar over. “I see you’re still writing for the Post.”

  Bar didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he leaned forward and helped himself to a large cup of Pepsi sitting in front of Eddie, sloshing it around slightly to make sure it wasn’t empty.

  “You mind?” he asked, holding it up. “It’s hotter than hell out there tonight.”

  “I saw your column in a paper back at the hotel,” Winnebago spoke up.

  “You liked it, huh?”

  “I said I saw it.”

  Bar finished the Pepsi and returned the cup to the table. “Okay, so much for all the happy talk shit,” he said. “Was that you asking around the Crown Royal for me last night?”

  “Yeah,” Eddie answered.

  “And tonight you’ve been waving money around and leaving messages for me all over the Pong?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Jesus, man. Subtlety still counts for something. Even in Bangkok.”

  “ I need your help. I’m looking for someone who used to live here.”

  “Who is it?”

  “A guy I served under in the marines. Harry Austin.”

  “Never heard of him. You say he used to live here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s left Bangkok now?”

  “He’s left everywhere now. He’s dead.”

  While Bar went back to playing with the empty Pepsi cup, Eddie told him about the newspaper clipping and ad-libbed a story about Austin’s family hiring him to find out what had really happened, which he thought sounded pretty good even if he did say so himself.

  “You got a picture of this guy?”

  Eddie pulled a copy of the clipping out of his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and put it on the table.

  Bar glanced at the photograph and Eddie noticed he didn’t flinch at the blood.

  “Don’t know him. He was probably never here or I would.”

  “He was here all right, for a while at least. I don’t know exactly how long.”

  Bar gave a shrug and Eddie thought he seemed to be losing interest in the conversation.

  So Eddie brought up the $10,000.

  “Let me get this straight. You’re going to pay me $10,000 just to help you find out about some clown who got himself run over somewhere in Bangkok?” Bar didn’t even try to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You going to tell me the rest of it now? Or do I have to wait a while?”

  “There’s nothing else. You know everything I know.”

  “Bullshit.” Bar said it without inflection, like a man counting trees. “If that was all there was to it, you wouldn’t have some guy outside following your ass around town.”

  “There’s someone following us?” Winnebago quickly put down the last of his chicken.

  “Looks that way.”

  “How do you know?”

  Bar gave him a tried look. “This guy has his eyes locked on you and Eddie like you were two naked girls doing the dirty. He’s pretty hard to miss.”

  Eddie glanced involuntarily toward the door, although he didn’t really expect to see anything.

  “What’s he look like?” he asked.

  “Fat, obvious, and clumsy.”

  “A cop?”

  “Not that fat,” Bar smiled. “Besides, he’s a white guy. There are no white cops in Bangkok.”

  “A fed? The FBI or something like that?” Eddie asked.

  “Maybe. I’d guess CIA, but in Bangkok you always guess CIA.”

  “CIA?” Winnebago couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You think the fucking CIA is following us?” he squeaked.

  “Could be.” Bar’s voice was gratingly cheerful. “Now, you want to tell me the whole story, or should I just head on back across the street where the naked girls are?”

  Eddie toyed with a white plastic spoon, twirling it between his fingers. He didn’t want to tell Bar Phillips any more than he had to since he really didn’t know the guy that well, but he figured the chances of going it alone in a strange city were getting lousier by the minute. Maybe he would give Bar a little more. A little more, but certainly not all of it.

  Bar listened carefully while Eddie told him about the pictures with the red circles, his visit from the man who called himself Marinus Rupert, and his lunch at the Four Seasons with the same man, now calling himself the general.

  Eddie gently eased past the part about the $400,000,000. After all, someone could have a whole bunch of other reasons for wanting to find out about Harry Austin, couldn’t they?

  “That’s it,” he finished, catching Winnebago’s eye. “Whoever this guy really is, he’s paying me to find out what happened to Austin.”

  “Why you?”

  “I guess it’s because I used to know Austin. Apparently he thinks that’s an advantage.”

  “You have no idea at all who this guy is?”

  “No, none.”

  “You think the pictures were some kind of threat?”

  Eddie nodded.

  “Threatening you over…what exactly?”

  “Over trying to find out about Captain Austin, I guess. What else?”

  “No idea who sent them?”

  Eddie shook his head.

  “We could go and ask the guy waiting outside,” Winnebago suggested. “Maybe it was him.”

  “Nah,” Bar looked off toward Silom Road out beyond Popeye’s front windows. “Nobody subtle enough to pull that picture gag would do such a stinking job of tailing you.”

  “Military records are easy enough to get,” Eddie suggested. “A lot of people could have tied us to Austin. But I still can’t figure out what anyone thinks the two of us know that makes us worth threatening.”

  “Three,” Bar said quietly.

  Winnebago looked puzzled.

  “Three of you,” Bar repeated. “Not two. Both your heads were circled in the pictures, you said. And then there’s Austin.”

  “Yeah, but he’s dead,” Winnebago said.

  Bar nodded slowly. “My point exactly.”

  That brought a very long silence all around.

  “This guy who’s calling himself the general has got to know more than he’s told you,” Bar finally said. “He knows what he’s really looking for even if he hasn’t told you.”

  “He didn’t know Austin was dead,” Eddie said.

  “Yeah.” Bar leaned back in his chair. “I don’t get that.”

  “Can I count on your help?” Eddie asked.

  Bar turned his head away and looked out the big windows toward Silom Road.

  “I need to know,” Eddie pressed.

  “Let me think about it.” Bar flicked his eyes sideways for a moment and then back to Eddie. “It looks to me like you boys may be about to step on your dicks here, and $10,000 isn’t really enough to get me to risk mine.”

  “You mean you want more money?”

  “No, man, that’s not what I mean.” Bar’s face relaxed into something that was almost, but not quite, a smile. “Just let me think about it for a couple of days. I’ll call you.”

  “Would you tell me something before you go?”

  “Sure.”

  “How can I find out what happened to Austin’s body?
”

  Bar reached out and picked up the newspaper clipping that still lay on the table, studying it silently for a moment.

  “If he was killed where this says he was, it’s in the Thonglor police district. Any cab driver can find the Thonglor station. Go over there tomorrow and ask for Lieutenant Sirapop. Tell him I sent you and he’ll probably be reasonably helpful.”

  “Does he speak English?”

  “Enough. Just don’t try to discuss Spinoza with him.” Bar thought a moment and then added, “There’s one other thing. You’d better understand how things are done here if you’re going to fuck around with the local cops.”

  He lifted his eyebrows at Eddie, making a question out of it.

  “You’re telling me he’s dirty and that information will cost me.” Eddie didn’t bother to make a question out of it.

  “They’re all dirty, but Sirapop is pretty harmless as these guys usually go. He might help you out just because I sent you around, but if you don’t give him 5,000 baht or so, he’ll lose face. And if he loses face, I lose face. Give him the 5,000.”

  “Okay,” Eddie nodded.

  “Anything else?” Bar asked.

  “Yeah.” Eddie shot a quick glance at the blackness outside the big plate glass windows, wondering again exactly who was waiting for them out there. “You think this place has a back door?”

  “Shit, man.”

  Bar pushed back from the table and grinned.

  “The whole goddamned world’s got a back door.”

  Fifteen

  WHEN Winnebago woke up, he could have sworn he had the echo of a loud explosion rattling around in his head but, other than the low hum of the room’s air conditioner, he heard nothing at all. He decided that he must have dreamed the explosion and so he just lay there in bed wondering what time it was and trying to sort through everything that had happened the night before after they slipped out the back door at Popeye’s.

  He and Eddie had wandered around the Pong for several hours before coming back to the Oriental; that much he remembered clearly. He was also pretty sure they had dumped the guy who was supposed to be following them, but he wasn’t absolutely certain. Actually, he didn’t know why it mattered. Anyone following them would surely know where they were staying. Besides, all he and Eddie had done was go to a couple of bars in the Pong, put away a few drinks—quite a few, he winced as he felt his stomach pitch up—and fooled around a little with the girls. He couldn’t imagine who would care very much about two guys doing nothing more than that.

  The first place they had gone into had been pretty raw, Winnebago recalled now that his head was starting to clear a little; so much so that it had made him uncomfortable, or something close to it. When he and Eddie pushed through the heavy curtain hanging over the doorway, a pleasant young man in a white shirt and tie had quickly seated them on stools at the bar and gotten them bottles of Singha beer.

  On a narrow raised runway just behind the bartender there were a dozen or more girls dancing to ear-splitting disco music. They all looked pretty young to Winnebago, mostly teens and early twenties with maybe one or two who might have been thirty, and in spite of the lethargic way they were shuffling their feet with no readily discernible relationship to the music, they all seemed to be having a good enough time. The whole bunch of them were smiling, giggling and touching, chattering away to each other like girlfriends out together for an afternoon at the mall.

  It embarrassed Winnebago a little that that he and Eddie were looking up at the girls from such a sharp angle that he could have seen right up their skirts, that is he could have if they had been wearing any. Of course, since they were all completely naked except for their shoes, he had decided that worrying about whether his view offended their sense of modesty was pretty much a waste of effort. They were good-looking girls, mostly, but it had never crossed his mind before that having a bunch of naked women wiggling around right in front of him could be so monotonous. There he was, so close to their most private parts he could have given them a pelvic with a swizzle stick, and he was half yawning himself to sleep.

  Winnebago rolled his head around to confirm that it was still attached to his neck. Maybe Eddie was right and they really were getting old. Finding himself first embarrassed and then bored witless by a room full of naked young girls, not to mention getting completely wasted on only a few drinks, was not an encouraging sign.

  He was slowly raising his wrist to check his watch when a fusillade of thunder crashed into the room and Winnebago realized that was probably the noise that had waked him in the first place. It sounded like Bangkok was about to get hammered by one of those rainstorms that he remembered so well from Vietnam, the kind that hurled down sheets of water and lightning until you felt helpless and just sat very still until it stopped.

  He was trying again to read his watch, hoping its face would swim into focus, when he realized that there was another sound in the room, something other than the dying echoes of the thunder. It was a tapping noise and, after a few moments of intense concentration, he finally identified it as a persistent knocking on his bedroom door.

  Winnebago called out something that he gathered was at least vaguely intelligible because the tapping stopped. Slowly sitting up on the edge of the bed, he collected his wits. When he finally made it across the room and got the door open, Eddie stepped inside and closed it behind him.

  “Are you alone?” Eddie’s eyes worked their way quickly around the room, eventually coming back Winnebago whom he regarded dubiously for a moment. “You look like shit.”

  Winnebago was certain that under other circumstances he could have said something heart-stoppingly funny, but a sort of grunt was the best he could manage right then. He took a couple of faltering steps and sat back down heavily on the edge of his rumpled bed.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “A little after nine.”

  Winnebago shook his head, willing it to feel smaller. “Why are you here, man?”

  “To wake you up.”

  “But didn’t we just go to bed?”

  “I got one of the girls at the front desk to call that police station and ask for Lieutenant Serpico—”

  “Sirapop,” Winnebago corrected Eddie, startling himself a little with his clear recall of what Bar Phillips had said the night before.

  “Whatever. Anyway, this guy’s supposed to be coming in at ten and I want us to go over there and catch him before he leaves again.”

  Winnebago tried to absorb that.

  “Over where?” he finally managed to ask.

  “Thonglor police station. I’m going back to my room to make a call while you get yourself together. We’ll grab breakfast somewhere on the way.”

  Eddie took another close look at Winnebago.

  “You really do look like shit. How much did you drink last night?”

  Winnebago didn’t bother to answer. Pushing himself reluctantly off the bed, he tossed off a salute and stumbled away in the general direction where he thought he had left the shower.

  ***

  BACK in his own bedroom Eddie tried to work out the time difference between Bangkok and the West Coast while he dialed.

  Making calls across the International Date Line always left him feeling muddled no matter how many times he did it. He was reasonably certain this time that he had it, that nine o’clock on Monday morning in Bangkok was six o’clock the previous Sunday afternoon on the West Coast. If he was wrong and it was really four in the morning or something like that, he was confident Jennifer would tell him all about it as soon as she answered.

  “Hello.”

  Eddie was mildly surprised when Michael picked up the phone instead of Jennifer, although he really wasn’t sure why he should have been.

  “Hey, Mike.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah. How are you?”

  “Okay.”

  Michael didn’t say anything else and they both sat and listened together to the hum of the international conne
ction for a moment.

  “This line sounds funny. Where are you?” Michael finally asked.

  “I’m in Bangkok.”

  Eddie wondered what Michael’s reaction to that would be.

  “Oh,” Michael mumbled.

  That’s it? Your father tells you he’s calling from some unimaginably exotic city halfway around the world and all you can say is, ‘Oh’?

  “Listen, Dad. Could you talk to Mom? She’s messing me around about my allowance again.”

  Eddie lifted the telephone away from his ear and let it sag slightly.

  Who was this person he was talking to? If this was really his son, and he had always lived by the assumption that Michael was indeed his son even if he sometimes wondered how that could be, why would he have so little interest in his father that he wouldn’t even bother to ask what he was doing in Bangkok? Was life in Seattle so endlessly fascinating that his father being in Bangkok seemed perhaps, by comparison, commonplace?

  “In a second, Mike. I just called to tell you about Bangkok.” Eddie juiced himself up a little and tried to add the right note of between-us-guys to his voice. “This is a really weird place. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “That’s cool, Dad, but would you talk to Mom now. I gotta, like, go out pretty soon and I need my money.”

  And with that Eddie heard the telephone receiver clatter onto a tabletop. Okay, so much for the father-son crap. He fidgeted for what felt like a minute or more, waiting for Jennifer to pick up. Feeling defeated and subdued by Mike’s complete disinterest in him, he had just decided to hang up when a male voice came on the line.

  “Eddie, it’s Franklin. Jennifer can’t come to the phone right now. Could she call you back?”

  “I’m calling from Bangkok, Franklin.”

  “Where?”

  “Bangkok.”

  “Oh…” He seemed to think about that. “Then maybe you should call her back, huh?”

  “Fine, Franklin. Tell her I’ll do that.”

  Eddie hung up quickly, before he said anything he might be sorry for later, and leaned back in the chair.

  Man, oh man. Was that it? Michael was his son, and Jennifer was…well, she was his ex-wife, of course, and married to someone else now, but Eddie still thought of Jennifer and Michael as his family anyway since it was the only one he had. On the other hand, maybe the time had come to rethink that. If that was the extent of his family’s interest in him, maybe he had things all wrong.