World of Trouble (9786167611136)

by Needham, Jake

  “I know.”

  “And I really don’t think—”

  “When you get there, go to Bangkok Bank. See a guy named Tanit Chaiya who’s an Executive Vice President in the head office on Silom Road.”

  “I didn’t say I’d go, Charlie.”

  “All Tanit needs from you is a structure he can use to make it all look okay. Some kind of overseas corporate acquisition will do it. Tell him we’re buying the Eiffel Tower or some goddamn sports team in the United States. Just make it look good.”

  “If that’s all there is to it, why can’t I just draft something after I get back to Hong Kong and email it to this guy?”

  “Because the Bank of Thailand wouldn’t approve the transfer if that was all you did. They’re not going to approve it at all without a little persuasion.”

  Shepherd nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He could see now where this was going.

  “You with me here?” Charlie asked.

  “How much persuasion?”

  “I’d say a couple of million would probably get the job done. Maybe a little less or a little more. Use your own judgment. I don’t know exactly how they’re going to play it when we try to move the money, but I know what the bottom line is going to be. That’s why I need somebody there to look them in the eye and make sure this gets done. Buying people is easy. Making sure they stay bought is a lot harder.”

  “You’re making me uncomfortable here, Charlie.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’m not going to get involved in bribing the Bank of Thailand. The US government takes a dim view of that sort of thing. Americans go to jail for bribery.”

  “This isn’t a bribe.”

  “Then what would you call it?”

  “It’s like ransoming a kidnapped child. Americans don’t put people in jail for paying ransoms, do they?”

  “I doubt the Department of Justice would look at this quite that way.”

  “I’m not going to sit here and let them steal my money, Jack. That’s not right.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Shepherd admitted.

  “I’ve got to pay a few people if I want my money back. That’s the way business works in Thailand. You know that.”

  “Yes, I know that, but still—”

  “So I’m asking you to take care of this for me, Jack. If I can’t do something myself, you’re my guy.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “I’m just looking after my own interests here. You’re the best. You know everything there is to know about international corporate structures and banking operations. You’re Mozart with money. You can make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”

  “Far be it from me to sound modest, but—”

  “And I trust you,” Charlie interrupted. “You’re smart, you’re tough, you’re connected. And you’re an honest man. That’s why I hired you.”

  A silence fell and they both sat back for a while and just watched those black rubber boats drifting on the Persian Gulf. It was a companionable silence. Shepherd liked Charlie no matter what some people said about him. He even liked all the outrageous bullshit Charlie got involved in. Charlie was good for more outrageous bullshit in a day than most men were in their entire lifetimes.

  The truth of the matter, Shepherd knew full well, was that managing outrageous bullshit was what he was good at. Managing outrageous bullshit was what he did for a living. Sometimes he even wondered if he could do anything else.

  After a moment Charlie started talking again. “I’ve asked Adnan to pull together the documentation on the Thai accounts for you. You can start with that. If you need anything else, just ask him and he’ll get it for you.”

  “Is Adnan here?” Shepherd asked.

  “He’s over in the office,” Charlie said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the other house across the compound.

  Adnan was Charlie’s personal assistant. He was in his forties, slight with slicked-back hair and pale skin, and he claimed to be Lebanese. Shepherd didn’t think Adnan really was Lebanese, but he had never challenged him on the point. After Charlie fled Thailand two steps in front of a flood of corruption charges and settled in Dubai, Adnan had taken on the vague title of personal assistant. Shepherd didn’t know for certain what Adnan actually did for Charlie, but what he did know for certain was that he really didn’t like Adnan. Adnan clearly didn’t like him either, so Shepherd figured they were square all around.

  “What’s really going on here, Charlie? I need to know.”

  “I thought you didn’t do politics, Jack.”

  “Assassination attempts and bribing central banks isn’t politics.”

  “It is in Thailand.”

  Shepherd said nothing. Charlie did have a point there.

  “You can’t have it both ways, Jack.” Charlie leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “Either you’re part of everything here or you’re a lawyer who just looks after financial matters for me. We can do this either way, but you need to decide which way it’s going to be.”

  Shepherd didn’t say anything for a moment. He just sat and looked at Charlie, and Charlie just sat and looked back.

  “I don’t do politics,” Shepherd repeated after a minute or two had passed like that.

  “Fine.” Charlie stood up and rubbed his hands together. “So you’re my lawyer and you look after financial matters. Then go to Bangkok and rescue my money. Go right now. You want to take one of the planes? Use the G-4.”

  “No thanks,” Shepherd said. “I like flying commercial.”

  Charlie chuckled and shook his head. “You’re really a piece of work, Jack. Here I put a thirty million dollar jet at your disposal and you tell me you’d rather drag your ass out to the airport, stand in the security line, and take a commercial flight. What the hell am I going to do with you?”

  What was Charlie going to do with him? It was a question Shepherd had asked himself from time to time, although he suspected in a somewhat different context. He had never come up with a particularly satisfactory answer either.

  “So are you going to do this for me, Jack?” Charlie asked. “There’s no one else I trust.”

  “It’s only money, Charlie.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a lot of money.”

  Shepherd sighed and pulled a small notebook and a pen out of his pocket.

  “What was the name of that guy at Bangkok Bank again?”

  SEVEN

  SHEPHERD WALKED ACROSS to the villa Charlie called the office and went in through the kitchen door. A large room with a faux-beamed ceiling that overlooked the sea at the back of the house had been turned into a conference room, and that was where Shepherd found Adnan.

  Adnan was leaning over a big oak table that filled the center of the room examining what looked like a large map. Shepherd couldn’t see what the map depicted, partly because the angle was wrong and partly because Robert Darling was standing at the table next to Adnan blocking his view.

  Shepherd had met Darling a half dozen times. They were both trustees of Charlie’s charitable foundation and had run into each other at trustees meetings but not on any other occasion. Darling had said little about himself other than something professionally vague about being in the private investment business. Shepherd hadn’t pressed. He figured it was none of his business what the man did for a living. He had met a lot of people who introduced themselves in exactly the same way and he wouldn’t want to know what most of them did for a living.

  “I didn’t know you were here, Robert,” Shepherd said.

  Darling turned his head very slowly.

  “Hello, Shepherd. You look tired. Up late last night?”

  “No. Must be all the excitement. It’s a shame you missed it.”

  Shepherd knew he sounded testy and frankly he didn’t give a fig. What was with the you-look-tired shit? Darling was just the kind of guy who always had to take a shot, even when there was nothing to shoot at.

  Adnan quickly rolled up whatever it was they had b
een examining. He blocked Shepherd’s view of it with his body until he was done, then turned around holding it in his hands.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” he said.

  “So I see.”

  Adnan had a stiff smile that bared his teeth far more than was really desirable. Sometimes Shepherd thought he looked downright reptilian. Today was one of those times.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  Darling seemed quite amused at Adnan’s belligerence. He folded his arms and waited, a half smile on his face.

  “Charlie said you have some documents for me,” Shepherd said.

  “They’re in my office.”

  “Fine.”

  Adnan just stood and looked at Shepherd and said nothing else.

  “May I have them?” Shepherd prompted.

  “I would have sent them to you if you had telephoned.”

  “I’m sure you would. But I’m here, so I’ll take them with me.”

  Adnan still looked irritated and Darling still looked amused. Shepherd couldn’t work out what the hell was going on.

  “Look, guys, I’m sorry I interrupted whatever you were doing,” he said. “If somebody will just give me the stuff I came for, I’ll be on my way and leave you to it.”

  Darling glanced at Adnan and gave a little jerk of his head and Adnan scurried off. He carried his rolled up map or whatever it was with him when he left.

  That was interesting, Shepherd thought. He didn’t even realize Adnan knew Darling. Now here they were huddled together looking as if they were plotting something and Darling was running whatever it was. Shepherd filed the observation away with the large stockpile of other curiosities he had already collected in his wanderings around the royal court of Charlie Kitnarok. You could never tell when little things like that might turn out to be useful.

  After Adnan had gone, Darling took a blue and white box of Gitanes Brunes out of his inside jacket pocket, the non-filter kind, and held them out.

  “No thanks,” Shepherd said.

  Darling grunted, shook one out, and lit it with a gold lighter. He was a small man with a large head. On each occasion Darling and Shepherd had met, Darling had worn a well-cut dark suit, a white shirt, and a bow tie. His clothing gave him an air of primness. He looked like a man constantly smelling something unpleasant and suspecting it might be you.

  “I keep trying to quit,” Darling said, sliding the box of Gitanes back into his pocket. “I’ve even done hypnosis and acupuncture. Nothing works.”

  Darling loosed a world-class shrug, one any genuine Frenchman would have been proud to author.

  “I just like the fucking things too much,” he said.

  Shepherd nodded but he didn’t say anything.

  Darling took a long pull on his cigarette. “What are you up to these days, Shepherd?” he asked.

  “Same as always. Just practicing law. Trying to get by.”

  “I hear you’re living in Hong Kong now.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You like Hong Kong better than Bangkok?”

  “Yeah. You meet a better class of bar trash there.”

  Darling nodded slowly, almost as if Shepherd had made an interesting observation worthy of reflection, and drew on his cigarette again.

  “You’ve really been up and down these last few years, haven’t you, Shepherd?”

  Shepherd wasn’t sure what to say to that. Actually, he was sure since Darling was absolutely right. He just wasn’t about to give the bastard the satisfaction of agreeing with him.

  “You should have tried Paris,” Darling nodded as if he knew exactly what Shepherd was thinking. “There’s a long tradition of Americans running away to Paris when they are unhappy.”

  “Is that why you’re there?”

  “Don’t be cranky, Shepherd. It doesn’t become you.”

  “No? Most people think it does.”

  Darling puffed on his cigarette and watched Shepherd without expression. Either he didn’t have much of a sense of humor or he didn’t think Shepherd did.

  “Anyway,” Shepherd went on when Darling didn’t say anything else, “I wasn’t unhappy and I didn’t run away. I just decided it was time for a change and Hong Kong seemed like a place to start a law practice.”

  He tossed out his own shrug, not nearly as good as Darling’s, but then he didn’t have so many role models.

  “Do you ever miss Bangkok?” Darling asked.

  “No.”

  “Dealing with Thais gets old pretty quickly, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  “And yet,” Darling said, taking another puff of his cigarette, “here you are today.”

  “And yet,” Shepherd nodded, “here I am today.”

  “You are a walking contradiction, Shepherd. A living conundrum.”

  Shepherd had the feeling this conversation was about something. He just couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Adnan came back into the room carrying a thick manila envelope. “These are the documents I was asked to collect for you,” he said.

  Adnan walked over and shoved the envelope at him. Shepherd took it and nodded. He made a point of not thanking Adnan.

  “There are copies of the statements for all the accounts at Bangkok Bank and Siam Commercial Bank,” Adnan said. “Both the corporate ones and the personal ones.”

  Shepherd nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  The expression on Adnan’s face was transparent. He wanted to know why he had been told to give those statements to Shepherd.

  Shepherd said nothing at all and Adnan was left with no alternative but either to come right out and ask or to let the matter go.

  He came right out and asked.

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “These are copies, aren’t they? They’re not the originals?”

  Adnan nodded. “Yes, they’re copies.”

  “Then I’ll destroy them when I’m done.”

  Adnan’s eyes shifted quickly to Darling, then back to Shepherd.

  “Done with what?” he asked.

  “I’m sure if Charlie wanted you to know, he would have told you.”

  Adnan blinked at that and in the silence that followed Shepherd heard Darling snort softly.

  “Well, gentlemen, I’ll leave you to it,” Shepherd went on quickly. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No bother at all, Shepherd,” Darling said. “You and I ought to have lunch while we’re both in town. Perhaps get to know each other a little better.”

  “Sure,” Shepherd nodded. “Give me a call.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” Darling said.

  Adnan, Shepherd noticed, said nothing at all.

  ***

  DARLING WATCHED THOUGHTFULLY as the door closed behind Shepherd. He took a last pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out in a heavy glass ashtray.

  “What do you think?” Adnan asked.

  Darling glanced back at the door through which Shepherd had just left.

  “About him?” he asked.

  Adnan nodded.

  Darling cocked his head. “I’m not sure.”

  “I am,” Adnan said. “He’s just another one of the general’s whims. He doesn’t matter.”

  Darling pondered that for a while. He pursed his lips and let his eyes wander the room.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said eventually. “I have a feeling he just might matter more than you think.”

  EIGHT

  OUTSIDE THE OFFICE was a ceramic-tiled terrace similar to the one outside the villa where Charlie lived. Shepherd settled into a green cushioned chair, swung his feet onto an ottoman, and pulled back the flap of the envelope Adnan had given him. Before he could take anything out of it, Sally Kitnarok sat down in the chair next to him.

  “Hello, Jack,” she said. “Over yesterday’s excitement yet?”

  “Still in recovery.”

  “They say you weren’t hurt.”

  “They’re right, wh
oever they are.”

  Sally had been married to Charlie for something like twenty years. Shepherd liked Sally. She was British born, but had grown up in Indonesia and Thailand where her father had done something or another with Save the Children. To the surprise of many, her foreign birth had never weighed on Charlie politically nearly as much as some of his allies thought it might when he began his rise to prominence.

  Normally Thais don’t much like other Thais marrying foreigners. Most of the hostility is normally directed at Thai women who marry foreign men, and there are a great many of them. They range from the much-maligned mail order brides to the daughters of the most prominent families in the country. Sometimes it seemed to Shepherd that women and rice were Thailand’s only exports of any value.

  For a Thai man to marry a foreign woman, on the other hand, is something else again. It’s rare, but not unheard of, and it doesn’t seem to bother Thais nearly as much. The arrangement even has a whiff of revenge about it, a humiliation of the foreigners who have carried off Thai women for generations. And there are few things that make the average Thai happier than seeing foreigners humiliated, even when that humiliation is just a figment of their imagination.

  “How much longer are you here for?” Sally asked.

  “I’m leaving soon. Probably tonight.”

  “For where?”

  Shepherd hesitated. Telling Sally that he was going to Bangkok didn’t seem the right thing to do for some reason. So he didn’t.

  “Home,” he said instead.

  Sally sighed. “I wish I could say that.”

  “You don’t like Dubai?”

  “You’ve heard that old expression, haven’t you, Jack? When your life is in the toilet, it’s Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, or goodbye.”

  “I’ve heard it. I’m just not sure it means very much.”

  “Maybe not,” Sally sighed again. “But Dubai just isn’t home. Oh, what am I saying? I haven’t got a bloody clue where home is anymore.”

  “That’s a pretty common problem in the twenty-first century,” Shepherd said.

  “Do you miss America?”

  Shepherd had never known how to answer that question. If he said yes, the next question would be why he didn’t just go back. If he said no, he would be asked why he disliked his own country. Shepherd had always made ducking the question altogether something of a personal policy so he turned Sally’s inquiry back on her.