KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (13 page)

“Oh shit,” I interrupted.

I could almost hear Anita’s bewilderment in the silence that followed.

“What in the world is wrong with you, Jack? This is wonderful news and you’re treating it like some kind of calamity. The bank has offered to—”

“You don’t get it do you, Anita?” I interrupted again before she could get wound up.

“No,” her voice faltered. “I guess I don’t.”

“Just stop and think a moment.”

There was a brief silence.

“What am I supposed to be thinking about, Jack?”

“Anita, I didn’t talk to anyone about this house. You didn’t di suptalk to anyone about this house. Even the real estate agent didn’t talk to anyone about this house. So why do you suppose the bank just rang up all of a sudden and offered to reduce the price by eighty percent and loan us the full amount?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you think somebody must have told them we looked at the property, then gave them a pretty good push to help us out?”

“You’re saying that somebody’s trying to do us a favor?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, I see. You think somebody wants to do us a favor and then ask you for something in return.”

“Right again,” I said. “Now who would that somebody most likely be?”

“I can’t imagine who… oh, shit.”

“Bingo. A big cigar for the little lady.”

This time the silence was longer and I let it stretch on until Anita eventually broke it.

“How do you suppose that US marshal guy found out about the house, Jack?”

“Give me back the cigar.”

“What?”

“You’ve got it wrong, Anita. It’s not the marshals.”

“Then who is it?

“Come on, Anita. Don’t be ridiculous. Think. Who could possibly have the clout to be behind something like this? Mr. Plato Karsarkis himself, I’d wager.”

“Oh, Jack, I don’t think so. Plato wouldn’t be so sneaky. If he wanted something, I think he’d just come out and ask you for it.”

“He
has
asked me, Anita. And I said no. Remember?” I struggled to keep the testiness out of my voice. “I told you all that business about the hotel deal and the big fee he offered me for doing very little, and I told you I turned him down. I gather Karsarkis isn’t a man who likes to be told no.”

“Don’t you think you’re being just a little egocentric, Jack?”

“A little
what
?”

“I’m just saying, I’m sure there are plenty of people Plato can call on if he needs help. He hardly has to sit up nights thinking up ways to lure you into his debt.”

I sighed. It was obvious Anita liked Plato Karsarkis regardless of the dire warnings she had given me about him. In fact, even if she decided I was right and Karsarkis was indeed behind the sudden and unexplained generosity of BankThai, I’d bet she was more likely to say it was just a friendly gesture from a nice man than to see it as the cynical dangle which I was absolutely certain it was.

“We are not going to buy that house, Anita.”

“Maybe Plato has nothing to do with this.”

“And maybe I just saw a flock of pigs flap by outside my window. I will not buy that house, Anita, and you can’t either. You can’t put me in that position.”

I could feel waves of bad vibrations coming down the telephone line at me.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Jack, but I don’t take orders from you.”

“I’m not giving you orders, Anita, I’m trying to get you to understand that—”&mdrom

“You will not tell me what to do, Jack. I’m very angry with you and I am going to hang up now. Good-bye.”

And with that Anita put down the telephone.

I hung up, too. Then I sat quietly for a while trying to calm the loud buzzing sound that had started up somewhere in my head.

Eventually I retrieved my Montecristo from the ashtray where I had abandoned it when Nok called and relit it. I took a long pull, filling my mouth with the bittersweet smoke and exhaling in a long, protracted stream. That helped, at least a little.

I stood up and walked over to the windows. The
heavy particles of chemical crud that made up a good part of Bangkok’s air occasionally captured and diffused the last light of day in a way which caused a soft, mango-colored fog to creep over the city right before sunset. When that happened, it made the city seem almost unbearably if only fleetingly romantic.

I stood at the window and watched the sun sink out of sight behind the mirrored office towers that lined Silom Road. I waited for the mango fog, but it never came.

I TRY TO
rustle up a tennis match every now and then to fight the good fight against onrushing decrepitude, but it’s usually difficult to find anyone in Bangkok who wants to play tennis. Men in Thailand mostly play golf. That generally means lolling around a course for half a day drinking beer with your pals while one eighteen-year-old girl scurries around holding an umbrella over you and another drags your heavy golf bag. Breaking a sweat isn’t part of the deal.

Finding a place to play tennis in Bangkok is a challenge, too. Other than the courts at a couple of snobby private clubs where you have to pay a generous bribe to the membership committee to get in, the few tennis courts in the city are pretty crummy. They’re usually not much more than cracked and buckled slabs of concrete wedged between high-rise buildings, not so much athletic facilities as parking lots with nets that generate income for the landowners until they get some financing together to build yet another apartment tower.

So as an alternative form of exercise I try to run a few miles every now and then. The big problem there is that places to run in the city are at almost as much of a premium as tennis courts. That is, unless you have a particular affection for climbing in and out of potholes while playing tag with thirty-year-old Chinese buses driven by teenagers zonked out of their mind on uppers.

Queen’s Park isn’t very big, but it is one of the better places in Bangkok to run. It’s quiet and pleasant, at least it is if you measure it by the standard of the few other public parks in Bangkok, which is pretty modest. Sandwiched between the Emporium, the city’s ritziest shopping complex, and some nondescript commercial buildings including a walled compound belonging to the Iranian Embassy, it amounts to a couple of acres of concrete pathways, a little grass, some trees, and a few fountains with a small lake in the middle of it all. The place actually feels pretty much like a real park, if you don’t think about it too much.

I parked on the street and walked into Queen’s Park from the Sukhumvit Road side, looking around for my usual jogging companion. Near the back of the park, I spotted Jello bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet while he watched some kids playing an energetic if not particularly skillful game of basketball.

Technically Jello was just another Thai police captain and the Thai police had &mdroello bounca lot of captains, but as long as I had known him he had also been a senior member of the Economic Crimes Investigation Division. It was a position that gave him a considerable amount of personal clout since ECID was primarily an intelligence operation. Most cops concerned themselves with who was doing what to whom, and occasionally even why. Jello focused more on how much they were getting paid for it and what they did with the money. Since money in Thailand was more important than life, it made him a key player in almost everything of any consequence that went down anywhere in the entire country.

I had never been entirely certain what the source of Jello’s colorful nickname was. For a while I had assumed his rotund physique had something to do with it, the image of his belly quivering like a bowl of jello coming easily to mind whenever we ran together. However lately I had gotten the impression the name might have gone all the way back to his childhood when he had been sent away to a boarding school in Connecticut. I wondered if hidden within it was one of those scarring cruelties most of us could recall from our childhood but would rather not. If there was, he never mentioned it.

Jello must have seen me coming out of the corner of his eye. He glanced back over his shoulder when I was a good fifty feet away and gave me a wave. I tossed out a little salute and broke into a jog toward him.

“You’re late,” he said when I got there.

“I am,” I agreed, jogging in place next to him.

“Aren’t you at least going to say you’re sorry.”

“I am not. Any other preliminaries?”

“Guess not.”

“Then you’re ready for a few miles?”

“Let’s do it.”

“What you think? Five today? Maybe ten?”

“Whatever, old man.”

I knew perfectly well some kind of warm-up routine before running was almost mandatory now that I wasn’t a young hot shot anymore, but most of the time I couldn’t be bothered so I just ran slowly for the first half a mile or so and hoped after that everything would take care of itself.

A pebbled concrete walkway circled the small lake in the middle of the park and we jogged slowly through the first circuit without conversation. Jello was a man of few words, which to my way of thinking made him the perfect companion for a run, maybe the perfect companion for every occasion. On the other hand our sporadic runs together were also a good time to talk about things that needed talking about. Sometimes he had questions for me. Sometimes I had questions for him. The lifeblood of Thailand was favors done and debits accumulated. Jello and I had kept our personal accounts pretty much in balance, but this afternoon it was my turn to apply for a little withdrawal.

We picked up our pace on the second circuit and were moving pretty well before I finally broke the silence.

“Want to play word association?” I asked.

Jello turned his head slowly and looked at me, but he didn’t say anything.

“It works this way—”

“I know how it works,” he said.

“Okay, good. Then I’ll say a word, and you tell me the first word that comes into your mind.”

Another slow back and forth swivel of Jello’s head. Another silence.

“Herey">quo;

A nanny in a white uniform was pushing a baby carriage down the middle of the walkway and I dodged around her, glancing quickly at Jello to see if he had noticed my phenomenally graceful sidestep. If he had, he was concealing it nicely.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Stop asking if I’m ready.”

“Okay, then, here’s the word,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis.”

“That’s two words.”

“Think of it as one and you’ll be okay.”

“Still two words.”

“Don’t be a fucking pedant, Jello. Just tell me the first thing that comes into you mind when you hear the words Plato Karsarkis.”

We ran on for several minutes after that without either of us saying anything else, which was pretty much exactly what I thought would happen. Flocks of pigeons had taken up residence on the walkway ahead of us and as we bore down on them they rose into the air and dispersed like puffs of brown-gray smoke, their cooing and flapping barely audible in the rumble of the city around us.

“So,” Jello eventually said, “I gather you’ve heard.”

“You’re supposed to give me the
one
word that comes into your mind, man. That’s five words.”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s two—”

“Just lay it out,” Jello interrupted. “You’ve got something to tell me about the guy or you wouldn’t have brought him up.”

A heavy woman with an appalling blonde dye job walked straight into us swinging her elbows so wildly she nearly pushed us off the pavement. I gathered she was a tourist since she was wearing a conical-shaped straw hat she had apparently bought in some street market along with a red hill-tribe vest. No local would ever wear a get-up like that.

“I hear Karsarkis is in Phuket,” I said.

“Bullshit, Professor. You’re fishing.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“From who.”

“From Plato Karsarkis,” I said, keeping my voice as empty as I could. “When Anita and I went to his house for dinner.”

Jello ran on after that as if I hadn’t said anything worth commenting on. I used two slowly moving girls in high school uniforms to screen off a group of boys who were kicking a soccer ball and then slipped back into stride alongside him again.

“You don’t believe me,” I said.

“How’d you work that out?”

“I’ve got finely honed instincts for subtle human responses.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “You do.”

We passed the fountain and started around the lake again.

“So,” I said, “know what’s going to happen next?”

“Nope.”

“I do. I’ve got finely honed instincts for predicting the future, too.”

“Is that right?”

“It is. We’re going to do one more mile after this le o;

“That’s what’s going to happen next?”

“That’s it.”

“Huh,” Jello said. “Imagine that.”

THE BULL’S HEAD
was unusually quiet when we got there and Jello and I took a table in the back where there was no one else within earshot. After we had each drunk about half of our Carlsberg drafts in silence, Jello wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned toward me.

“So, Professor” he said, “what the fuck you talking about?”

I took my time about it, but I told Jello more or less everything about my encounter with Plato Karsarkis in Phuket, including the dinner at his house. I even told Jello about the dangle from Karsarkis to do some work for one of his companies.

“Did you know Plato Karsarkis was in Phuket?” I asked when I had finished.

“I think I heard something like that.”

“So what are you guys going to do?”

“Do?” Jello sipped at his beer. “About what?”

“About Karsarkis.”

“Why should we do anything?”

“You’re not going to arrest him?” I asked.

“What for?”

“What
for
? To turn him over to the Americans, of course.”