“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t give out that kind of information.” He scrutinized Bar and Lek carefully. “The privacy of our guests is paramount to us.”
Bar nodded slowly a couple of times as if he was really glad to hear that.
“I’m Bar Phillips. You probably read my column in The Bangkok Post.”
The little man looked at Bar without a flicker of recognition.
“It’s called ‘Bar by Bar.’”
Nothing.
“It’s that page every week that has…ah, you know, entertainment tips, that sort of thing.”
Still no response. Bar swallowed the temptation to lean across the desk and twist the little bastard’s nose off. Instead he went on in a tone he hoped fell somewhere between the professionally detached and the cravenly unctuous.
“My assistant and I…” Bar tilted his head toward Lek and ignored the frog when he hoisted one eyebrow, “are interviewing Mr. Dare for the Post. But of course, if you won’t tell me where to find him, that’s not going to work out very well, is it now?”
The man lifted his arm and contemplated his wristwatch with exaggerated care.
“You have an appointment to conduct this interview at midnight?”
“The man’s a real night owl.”
“What is the gentleman’s name again, sir?”
“Eddie Dare.”
The man tapped briefly at a computer keyboard and peered at the screen.
“And your name, sir?”
“Phillips. Bar Phillips.” He cleared his throat. “The Bangkok Post columnist.”
The frog watched the screen for a moment, then tapped some more keys and returned his eyes to Bar’s.
“Would you like me to see if Mr. Dare is available, sir?”
“That would be ever so kind of you.” Bar gave the desk clerk a supercilious smile and got another in return.
The man glanced lifted the telephone at his elbow and dialed a number as Bar watched. He couldn’t have dialed it any more slowly, Bar was reasonably certain, but that was fine with him.
“Mr. Dare is apparently out,” the man said after listening a moment. “May I take a message for him?”
“No thanks. I have another appointment.”
As Bar and Lek turned away and crossed the lobby, the desk clerk caught the eye of a plainclothes security man who was posted near the entrance. He gestured toward them with a tilt of his head and the security man pointed at their backs and raised his eyebrows in a silent question. The desk clerk thought for a moment, and then he shook his head and went back to his paperwork. He wondered if he’d just been had somehow, but he shrugged it off. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time.
The doorman snapped a salute as Bar and Lek emerged from the hotel. He lifted his arm toward a taxi, but Bar waved him off. Instead, Bar turned right and walked down the hotel’s driveway with Lek trailing close behind. At the bottom, he turned right again into a narrow brick-surfaced path that ran between the hotel and the French Embassy. After two dozen paces, Bar turned right a third time, threaded his way through the hotel’s lush gardens, and circled the deserted swimming pool. Within five minutes, Bar and Lek had re-entered the Oriental through a rear door and were in an elevator on their way up to the seventeenth floor.
“How do you know what room he’s in?” Lek asked.
“I saw the number when that shithead dialed the phone.”
“But isn’t Mr. Dare out?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why are we going up to his room?”
“I have no fucking clue.”
When the doors slid open, they stepped smartly onto the deep carpet of the hotel corridor and Bar started looking for the right room number.
“Are you going to break in or something?” Lek asked.
Now there’s an idea, Bar thought to himself, but he said nothing.
When they got to the polished teak door of Eddie’s room, Bar side-glanced at Lek. “I’d better check first. Maybe Dare wasn’t answering the phone.”
He lifted his hand to knock, but Lek reached out and cupped it in hers before it made contact with the door.
“There’s a bell,” she said, pointing to a white button centered in a brass plate on the wall to the right of the door.
Bar quickly pulled his hand away from Lek’s. “I knew that,” he said and pushed the button with his forefinger.
***
SILOM Road was still throbbing with life when Eddie emerged from the dim interior of The Kitchen. He stood briefly in the street, and then he began to walk. For no particular reason, he turned to the left. He didn’t know where he was going, but for the moment at least, he didn’t care. Hands jammed deep into his pockets, he adopted a measured, deliberate pace. All at once, the colors of the street seemed to have become unnaturally bright; the sounds unexpectedly loud; and the smells unusually pungent. The alchemy of it tantalized and terrified him at the same time.
It was all obvious now, he supposed. Both the Asian man following them when he pulled the elevator trick and the four men outside the Stardust were probably Vietnamese. At least, he had found out who he was up against, but he wasn’t all that sure what good it was going to do him.
As he walked, the Thai lettering in the signs overhead became a cryptic lattice of confusing, contradictory counsel. Music blared from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Faces lurked in the half darkness: cigarette peddlers behind wooden trays heaped with counterfeit Marlboro boxes; dark-faced hawkers displaying sliced fruit in tiny glass cases lit with dim, yellow bulbs; tuk-tuk boys smoking as they sprawled across the seats of their improbable vehicles; a shriveled woman with a pale face thrusting out a baby with one hand and rattling a can with the other. Eddie floated through it all, suspended in a cocoon of fatigue and disorientation.
Abruptly, he felt something within him begin to shoulder those thoughts aside. He felt like a man contemplating an oncoming attack of nausea.
Eddie glanced back over his shoulder in the direction of The Kitchen. Tan Suit was standing at the doorway with Reidy and Sanchez, his hands on his hips. He was nodding slowly at whatever Reidy was saying, but he was looking directly at Eddie.
Eddie continued his slow, methodical stroll and, when he glanced over his shoulder again and saw Tan Suit about a half block behind, he stopped and pretended to look through some CDs a vendor had spread out on a folding table. Tan Suit stopped, too, but didn’t even bother to pretend he was doing anything. He just slouched against a wall about thirty yards back, a half smile on his face, obviously figuring that the time would soon come when Eddie would make up his mind about where he was going next.
Yeah, Eddie thought to himself, Tan Suit had that absolutely right. It sure as hell was time for him to make up his mind where he was going next, in every sense of the word.
***
“I figured we would just wait for you down in the lobby, but then…” Bar looked a little sheepish and cut his eyes at Lek who was focusing somewhere across the room. “Well, your door was open, so we just came in and waited.”
Eddie had walked all the way back to the Oriental, turning everything that he knew over and over again in his mind while he did. Tan Suit kept thirty or forty yards behind the whole way, but Eddie ignored him and got to the hotel just after midnight. He supposed finding Bar and Lek waiting for him inside his suite should have disturbed him but, coming on top of everything else that had happened that night, that development had seemed relatively minor league.
“The door wasn’t open, Bar.”
“It was after Lek did some little trick with a credit card.”
Eddie nodded. “I wonder what other little tricks she knows.”
Lek’s eyes flicked briefly to Eddie’s and then away, but she said nothing.
“Come on, man. Don’t go hard-assed on us just because McBride pissed all over you.” Bar tried for a jovial tone. “It’s not like we tossed the place.”
“You should have. You might have found something.”
“Well…” Bar bobbed his head vaguely, “I wanted to, but Lek wouldn’t let me.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No.”
Before anyone could add anything else, the door opened and Winnebago came in. He glanced around and his eyes fixed on Eddie. “You don’t look so good,” he said.
Eddie just nodded. He could certainly see that might very well be true.
Twenty-Five
“ANYBODY hungry?” Eddie asked. “I’ve been trying to feed myself half the night without getting it done yet.”
“I could eat,” Bar answered.
Winnebago put a cigarette into his mouth and nodded. Everybody looked at Lek and she nodded, too.
Eddie called room service and ordered four club sandwiches and two large pots of coffee. He often wondered if anyone actually liked club sandwiches or if they had just been invented to put on room service menus so people in hotels could order something in the middle of the night that didn’t require any thought. But then he had just ordered four club sandwiches himself, so he supposed maybe he had the answer to his question right there.
After Eddie hung up, he folded his arms and looked at Bar. “So what are you doing here?”
“I want you to tell me the truth about why you’re so interested in Harry Austin.”
“I did tell you the truth.”
“If you did, you didn’t tell me all of it.”
Eddie dropped into a big chair across from Bar and hauled one leg up over the arm. He let his eyes drift across to Lek, but she was looking at the wall just above his head and apparently didn’t notice. His eyes wandered down her bare brown legs, folded together and tucked at a graceful angle under her chair, until they came to rest, as they had at the embassy, on her trim ankles. What was it about Lek’s ankles that kept giving him this little tweak? Surely he wasn’t that unaccustomed to the sight of smooth calves and slim ankles; or was he?
“What really put you onto Harry Austin?” Bar asked, interrupting Eddie’s musings.
Eddie forced his eyes away from Lek’s ankles for the second time that night and back to Bar. “I already told you. I was hired to find out what happened to him.”
Bar’s face was perfectly still and in his eyes Eddie could see a decision being made.
“If you tell me the whole truth, I can help. If you don’t, I’m just going to get up and walk out of here.” Bar lifted his eyebrows, raising ridges of skin over his forehead that looked like ripples of sand spreading over a beach. “I want to help you. I really do. Especially after what happened tonight. But I can’t do it unless you tell me everything.”
The long silence that followed Bar’s pronouncement wasn’t broken until the doorbell rang. Winnebago opened the door and a waiter in a starched, white jacket wheeled a room service table into the room with a flourish.
The four club sandwiches were elaborately quartered and arranged under glass domes with sprigs of greenery. The heavy silver coffee pots looked like they had recently been stolen from the Louvre. The young waiter started fussing about unfolding the table and gathering chairs, but Eddie grabbed the check off the table, signed it, and hustled the boy out as quickly as he could without flinging him bodily into the corridor.
As soon as the door closed, Bar started in on Eddie again. “Your story sucks, Eddie. If anyone actually did hire you to dig up Harry Austin’s past, it’s for some reason you haven’t told us. Or maybe no one hired you. Maybe you have reasons of your own. Either way, if you don’t tell me, I’m out of here.”
Eddie passed out the sandwiches and poured coffee. He took his own over to a chair by the window and ate the first quarter in silence.
“I think we ought to tell them,” Winnebago finally said in a low voice.
Bar and Lek picked at their sandwiches and watched Eddie think about Winnebago’s advice. Eddie was trying to work his way logically through all the different scenarios that had developed over the past few days, but all the possible combinations of interests and alliances were just too confusing and contradictory to rationalize into a coherent whole; or maybe he was just too tired to see how it all fit together.
Sometimes you just had to throw everything up in the air without knowing what you were doing, he thought to himself. Just throw it up and see how it all comes down.
Eddie took another sip of coffee, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and leaned back in his chair. Then he swung his legs up on the coffee table, put his hands behind his head, and began to talk.
He told Bar and Lek about Operation Voltaire and the ten tons of currency and gold taken from the Bank of Vietnam; about the Secret Service investigation that first led to Harry Austin and then to him; about Marinus Rupert hiring him to search for the money; about Rupert’s transformation into someone called the general; about Lieutenant Sirapop and his mention of the Little Princess; about the German who had seen Austin’s body dragged inside; about Reidy and Sanchez at Nick’s Kitchen showing him the black and white glossies of the general in the slinky black dress; and finally, about their claim that Vietnamese Intelligence was behind the general, and the Secret Service’s offer of one percent of the Voltaire money to double-cross the Vietnamese and deliver it instead to them.
Eddie watched Bar and Lek intently while he talked. It seemed to him that Lek looked stunned by his story, although she hid it fairly well, but he didn’t think that Bar even looked all that interested.
“I get the feeling you’ve heard all this somewhere before,” Eddie said to Bar when he had finished.
“Not exactly the same story, but a whole lot of others exactly like it,” Bar yawned. “Look, Eddie, Bangkok’s full of crap like that. About twice a month some hustler turns up here hot on the trail of the lost treasure of the Czars or waving a map to a stash of Japanese gold from the war. I don’t get too excited about it anymore.”
“I’m not a hustler,” Eddie responded quietly. “And this isn’t crap.”
“That’s the first thing they always say.”
“This time it’s different.”
Bar’s eyes flickered for a moment, opening and closing, and then they met Eddie’s. “And that’s the second.”
“Think about it, Bar. The Secret Service spends a year chasing this story around and then ends up offering me a deal to help them find the money. The Vietnamese organize an elaborate plot to trick me into helping them find the money. Why would they do that unless there was something there? They can’t both be that stupid.”
“Don’t forget the pictures,” Winnebago added.
“Yeah, those sure as hell didn’t come from the Secret Service or the Vietnamese. Whoever sent them to the three of us—”
“Four,” Lek interrupted and everyone looked at her. “Don’t forget, Harry got them, too.”
Eddie let his gaze linger briefly on Lek before turning back to Bar. “Whoever sent those photographs thinks I know something, and they’ve gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to warn me off. That means there are at least three separate crowds tracking the Voltaire money and they all have one thing in common: they’re all looking at me. If this is all just bullshit, why the hell do you think that is?”
Bar took a deep breath and rolled his tongue slowly around in his cheek. When he spoke, he measured his words carefully, like a man doling out medicine.
“You’re telling me there really is ten tons of money out there somewhere?”
“Looks like it. Maybe not ten tons anymore, but probably still one hell of a lot.”
Bar rubbed at his face with one hand while he tried to grasp the concept of hundreds of millions of dollars just lying around in Bangkok. “Even if it’s true, Eddie, why does it matter anymore?”
Winnebago looked at Bar like he had belched in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer. “I don’t know about you, you old fart, but a few hundred million dollars matters a lot to me.”
“Look, whether Austin was murdered or it was an accident,” Bar said, “the man’s still dead. If he knew anything, you’ll never fi
nd out now what it was. Not unless…”
Bar trailed off into silence.
“Unless what?” Eddie asked.
“Unless you’ve already guessed what it is.”
“I haven’t.”
There was a short silence and then Lek collected her purse and stood up. “Could I use the bathroom?”
“Try the one in there.” Eddie pointed to the door across the suite that led to his bedroom. “It’s probably cleaner than Winnebago’s.”
As soon as he heard the door click shut, Eddie leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and looked at Bar. “What do you know about Lek?”
“Don’t go paranoid on me, man. You heard what Chuck said. You know as much as I do.”
“Then what do you know about Chuck McBride?”
“Don’t worry about Chuck. The DEA guys out here are solid.”
“Yeah? How do you know that?”
“Know that the DEA guys are solid?”
“Know that McBride is DEA.”
“Of course, he’s DEA.” Bar looked at Eddie in exasperation. “What are you talking about?”
“He knows too much about Harry Austin and he’s too interested in him. Don’t you think that’s a little odd if he really is just a drug cop?”
“I’ve been to Chuck’s office at the embassy a hundred times. He’s got a sign on his door.”
“Oh, right. Because he has a little sign on his door at the embassy that says so, he must be DEA.”
“Come on, Eddie. How the hell do you know who your daddy is? Because your mamma told you so.”
Bar’s nose twitched and he sat toying with his coffee spoon. Although he didn’t say anything else, a look of discomfort crossed his face before he could chase it away.
Lek came back from the bathroom and settled onto the couch.
“What can you tell us about Captain Austin?” Eddie asked her as soon as she sat down.
Lek tilted her head to one side and studied Eddie for a moment before replying. “What do you want to know?”
“Start with the obvious, I guess. How about his finances?”
“Three years ago he had term deposits at Bangkok Bank that were just over fifteen million baht, about half a million US dollars. And he had a couple of savings accounts, regular day-to-day accounts with small balances. After I left the bank, I don’t know what happened to them.”
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