by Jake Needham
My office was a single, average-sized room on the second floor above a popular noodle restaurant. The shophouse we shared was old, or at least as old as anything in Hong Kong was permitted to become before somebody tore it down, and the interior walls were brick with a white glaze over them that had been troweled smooth long ago and now glistened like porcelain. I like the building a lot. It had soul. Not much in Hong Kong did.
It was a pleasant morning by Hong Kong standards, warm and not too humid, and as I walked along the sidewalk, thinking about nothing more significant than my attractive but oblivious companions on the ride down the Mid-Levels escalator, I registered a man up ahead who appeared to be crossing Hollywood Road directly toward me. He was a big man, really big, and he was wearing a lemon yellow Hawaiian shirt with what looked like a chorus line of topless hula dancers stretched across the considerable width of his chest. The guy even reminded me a little of someone I used to know in Bangkok.
The man dodged a taxi, stepped onto the sidewalk, and stood there as if he were waiting for me. My first reaction was puzzlement, but that was quickly followed by a degree of wariness since the guy was big enough to be visible from outer space. Slowly the truth began to dawn on me. The man didn’t just remind me of someone I used to know in Bangkok, the man was someone I used to know in Bangkok.
“Good Lord,” I said when I got close enough to him to be heard over the constant din of Hong Kong. “Is that really you, Jello?”
“Hello, Jack.”
Jello’s deep, rumbling voice always made me think of James Earl Jones. Shifting the bag with my coffee and cherry Danish into my left hand, I stuck out my right hand to shake his.
“What an incredible coincidence!” I said.
He didn’t smile when we shook hands, he didn’t even look surprised to see me, but nothing about that set off any alarms. Jello’s face almost never gave much away. His utter inscrutability was one thing that made him such a good cop.
“What in God’s name are you doing in Hong Kong, man?” I asked.
“Can we go inside?”
At first I didn’t understand what Jello meant.
“Inside where?” I asked.
He jerked his head toward his left shoulder, and I realized he was gesturing further along the sidewalk to the door leading to the staircase to my office. I stared dumbly at the door for a moment as if I had never seen it before. How did Jello know where my office was? I was certain I’d never told him, and the address certainly wasn’t listed anywhere.
I shifted my eyes back to Jello. “Then this isn’t a coincidence?”
He shook his head.
“You came to Hong Kong to see me about something?”
He nodded.
“What?”
“We should go inside.”
“Okay,” I said, and stepped past him.
I walked down the sidewalk to my office door, fished out my key, and unlocked it. Then I flipped on the lights and stood back for Jello to climb the staircase ahead of me.
“Nice office,” Jello said when we got to the top of the stairs.
It was. I liked it.
On the north side of the room, three tall windows look down on Gage Street, a narrow roadway below Hollywood Road so overhung with signs suspended from long metal poles that you can barely see the street through the tangle. Perpendicular to the windows is a big library table I found in a used furniture store. I keep nothing on it except for a large leather desk pad, two computers, and a telephone I never use. The wall behind my table is lined with three horizontal filing cabinets, each five drawers high with locking bars welded to their fronts and formidable looking padlocks dangling from each of the bars. On the south side of the room a line of tall bookcases is half filled with out-of-date law books and legal journals, while the rest of the shelves are crammed with the unidentifiable junk men seem to accumulate when they are left to their own devices.
I glanced at Jello and saw his eyes were fixed on the single large oil painting that hangs on the wall in front of my table, the place where my eyes rest whenever I lift them from whatever I am doing. It is square, about five feet on each side, and doesn’t depict any recognizable form. The painting is simply a riot of primary colors that swirl and swoop and splash over the canvas in a way that seems at a glance to be random, but on closer inspection begins to look as intricately interwoven as the fabric of an English tweed jacket.
“That one of Anita’s?” Jello asked.
Anita had taken all of her other paintings when she left, but she had given me this one for my birthday so I still had it.
“I had to put it somewhere,” I shrugged.
The painting was one of the few things I had brought with me from Bangkok to Hong Kong. I hung it in my office and almost immediately decided that was a very bad idea. But I still hadn’t yet gotten around to moving it. I would, of course. Just as soon as I found the time.
Jello looked at me without expression, his eyes empty.
I pointed to the two battered mahogany captains chairs I had found in the same used furniture shop and which now sat expectantly in front of my library table waiting for the guests which I seldom if ever had. Both chairs were profoundly disagreeable to sit in. That was of course exactly why I had selected them in the first place. If I did have any guests, I didn’t want them to get too comfortable.
“Take a seat,” I said.
I wondered for a moment if Jello would even fit into one of the chairs, but he managed. I walked around to the other side of my library table, put down the bag from the Pacific Coffee Company, and sat back in the green Aeron chair for which I had paid an embarrassing amount of money. I opened the bag, set out the coffee, and laid the cherry Danish on a napkin.
“I’ll share with you,” I said.
Jello shook his head.
“Just don’t say I didn’t offer.”
I pried the lid off the coffee and took a hit. Then I scooped up the Danish and bit off a corner. With the coffee in one hand and the pastry in the other, I swung my feet up onto my library table and gave Jello a long look.
“Now what’s this all about, man?”
SEVEN
WHEN I FIRST met Jello several years back, he was a Thai police captain assigned to the Economic Crime Investigation Division. Then, a couple of years ago, he was suddenly promoted to colonel and moved to the Department of Special Investigations, generally called Special Branch.
It sounded to most people like a big move up in his police career, but I knew it wasn’t. Jello had apparently stepped on powerful toes and made big players nervous. Special Branch was where all the really nasty cases went, the ones nobody wanted to touch for fear they would leave the stain on a promising career that could never be wiped clean. Nobody wanted to be transferred to Special Branch.
Jello was an honorable cop. Not just morally upright, but honorable in the sense that he saw his job as a calling. He had long ago decided his role in life was to stand up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves, which made him conspicuous among the other cops in Thailand, and that often made his life difficult.
I had never been certain about the source of Jello’s colorful nickname. His real name was Chatawan Pianaskool, but I’d never heard anyone called him anything but Jello. Thais often called each other by names that seem bizarre to westerners so I had never asked. For a while, I assumed his rotund physique had something to do with his name. The image of his belly quivering like a bowl of Jell-O came readily to mind whenever we ran together in Lumpini Park as we had frequently a year or two back. I doubted that was it, however. Something gave me the impression that the nickname might go all the way back to his childhood when he had been sent away to a boarding school in San Francisco. I wondered if hidden within it was one of those scarring cruelties most of us could recall from our childhood, but tried very hard not to.
Jello cleared his throat. “When was the last time you talked to Kate?” he asked.
I don’t know what I had been expecting J
ello to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.
“Why are you asking me that? Has something happened to her?”
“Jack, for Christ’s sake stop acting like a lawyer and just answer the fucking question.”
Which was, of course, exactly the wrong thing to say to me. I took my feet off the table, put down my coffee and Danish, and fixed Jello with my best hard-guy stare.
“Then maybe you ought to stop acting like a cop and simply tell me what this is all about.”
Kate was Kathleeya Srisophon. Once the director general of Thailand’s national intelligence agency, the local version of the CIA, she became prime minister when the previous prime minister was shot and her party split over choosing a replacement. No woman had ever been the Prime Minister of Thailand, and her selection was viewed by almost everyone as nothing more than a placeholder until the men of the party could get together and choose a real prime minister.
That never happened. Kate expertly consolidated her power within the party and marginalized the shifting cast of corrupt politicians who had controlled it up until then. She called elections and won overwhelmingly, giving Thailand the first elected majority government it had ever had in its entire history. Governments rose and fell in Thailand with monotonous regularity, but Kate seemed to have found a magic formula for the future and the people of Thailand rallied behind her.
Things were going great.
Until they weren’t.
JELLO SIGHED AND looked off in the direction of the windows. He waved one hand vaguely back and forth. It was a gesture that could have meant almost anything.
“I’m sorry, Jack. It’s been a bad few days. Let’s start over, huh?”
“Okay with me.”
Jello abruptly stood up and turned around. He took a couple of slow steps until he was a foot or so from Anita’s painting, then he bent forward from the waist and examined with what seemed to me to be exaggerated care a horizontal streak of orange near the middle of the canvas.
“You ever look at this picture from up close like this?” he asked.
“Can’t say that I have.”
“You ought to. It looks completely different when you don’t try to take in everything at once.”
“I get the feeling that’s supposed to be some kind of a metaphor, but I’m damned if I can figure out what it means.”
“I was thinking about what happened when you brought Kate and Charlie Kitnarok together a year or so ago.”
Charlie Kitnarok was a former prime minister of Thailand and a client of mine, maybe even a friend. After Kate became PM, Charlie started stoking up the army to remove her and return him to power.
“I wouldn’t describe what happened as bringing them together, Jello.”
“You prevented a civil war.”
“That’s something of an exaggeration. Besides, what difference did it really make? The army seized power anyway. It just took them a little longer than they planned.”
A couple of months earlier Thailand had added another military coup to the list of nineteen it had suffered since the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932. Kate’s government was removed, the constitution revoked, and the country placed in the hands of something called the National Peacekeeping Council which was a committee made up of the generals who had staged the coup. The issue when Kate became PM wasn’t really if something like that would happen, it was more a matter of when it would happen. Thailand only pretended to be a democracy. Most of the world seemed willing to accept the pretense, but the people of Thailand knew the truth all too well.
Jello looked at me for a moment, then he went back to his chair and sat down.
“They’ve arrested Kate,” Jello said.
“The police arrested her?”
“No, of course not. The army. The police only do grunt work now, man. The army has all the real power.”
I couldn’t remember talking to Kate at all since her showdown with Charlie Kitnarok in Phuket. Kate had sent a message to me afterwards that she wanted to see me about something, something she wanted me to do for her in her capacity as prime minister, but I never called her. I’d had enough of Thailand to last me a lifetime. All I wanted to do was go back to Hong Kong where everybody left me alone.
Kate and I had trusted each other once when something big and dangerous came unwound around us. At first, it was because we had to. Later, it was because we wanted to. That was when our moment came, but then it passed. Maybe our timing was lousy or maybe it was something else altogether. Either way, what did it matter now? Our time came, and our time passed. Simple as that.
Trying to breathe life into yesterday is a lousy way to face tomorrow. I didn’t know anyone who had ever succeeded at it, no matter how hard they tried. Still, I had to admit my mind drifted back to Kate now and then, that was true enough. If a thing or two had broken a little differently, perhaps I could have been a contender.
Words to live by, huh?
I could have been a contender.
“What was she arrested for?” I asked.
Jello shrugged and I watched the chorus line of Hawaiian dancers on the front of his shirt briefly break into motion.
“They claim to have evidence of government corruption when she was prime minister.”
“Of course they do. Every government Thailand has ever had was corrupt, including the military ones.”
“They say Kate was personally involved.”
“Bullshit.”
Jello shrugged again, but he said nothing.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You don’t look convinced. You don’t actually think Kate had her hand in the cookie jar when she was PM, do you? Kate was probably the only completely honest prime minister Thailand ever had.”
Jello shifted his substantial weight in the chair, but he still didn’t say anything. I waited him out.
“She may have known some of her ministers were stealing and did nothing about it,” he finally said when the silence became uncomfortable for us both.
“For God’s sake, Jello, if you went after every public official in Thailand who was scamming the country, there wouldn’t be any public officials left in Thailand.”
Jello said nothing.
“Do they have any evidence that Kate gave these guys a pass, or is this just more bullshit?” I asked.
“I doubt they have any, but it doesn’t really matter.”
“Like hell, it doesn’t. The law requires them to prove—”
“They don’t have to prove a damn thing, Jack. How much do you know about the National Peacekeeping Council?”
“A little,” I said. “Probably as much as anybody outside of Thailand knows. Which is next to nothing.”
“Then let me enlighten you. The coup was led by General Prasert Aromdee. He’s a tough, hard-nosed career army officer who has always made his ambition to run the country clear.”
“And now he’s part of the National Peacekeeping Council?”
“Not just part of it. As a practical matter, Jack, General Prasert is the National Peacekeeping Council. The rest of the council is mostly window dressing to give the other senior generals face, and of course so they can all keep an eye on each other. General Prasert is the government now. He jails anybody he wants for any reason he wants. He is the law.”
I swung my feet back up onto the library table and laced my fingers together behind my head.
“So what happens to Kate now?” I asked.
“She’s being held under house arrest and her passport has been confiscated. General Prasert is going to stage a trial.”
“When?”
“They say quickly, but who really knows?”
“You think she’ll be convicted?”
Jello looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Do you seriously think they would put her on trial without her being convicted? Can you imagine Prasert’s humiliation if the court found her not guilty?”
“But if they can’t prove—”
“Jack, Kate isn’t going to be tri
ed in America. She’s going to be tried in Thailand. The courts there do what they’re told, and they have already been told by General Prasert that the only possible verdict is guilty.”
“They’ll never send her to prison, Jello.”
“Of course they will. By arresting her in the first place, General Prasert left himself no alternative. Once he’s arrested her, he has to put her on trial. Once he puts her on trial, he has to see that she’s convicted. Once she’s convicted, he has to send her to prison. If she walks away at any stage, he’ll look weak.”
Jello was right, and I knew it.
I picked up my coffee and took a sip. It had gone cold, but I drank it anyway.
EIGHT
“YOU COULD HAVE told me all this over the telephone, Jello. You didn’t have to come all the way to Hong Kong just for that.”
“I didn’t come here to tell you Kate had been arrested, Jack. I came here to ask you to help her.”
“Help her? You mean as her lawyer? I can’t practice law in Thailand, Jello. You know that.”
“You’re not listening to me, Jack. No lawyer can do Kate any good. The outcome of the trial has already been determined.”
“Then what do you expect me to do?”
“You’re a well-connected man. You know a lot of people in Washington, and they know you. I want you to get them involved.”
“To put diplomatic pressure on Thailand to release her?”
“No, the more General Prasert is pushed from outside the country, the more determined he would be to show he isn’t susceptible to pressure.”
“Then I really don’t understand what you’re asking me to do here, Jello. I guess you’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
“You have friends at the White House, don’t you, Jack? You know people at the CIA and the FBI and in the Pentagon?”