LONTAR issue #2 (12 page)

"I don't mind."

"Can you have them send it in Word, if it's not already?"

"Sure."

There was a pause that had to be filled with something, so she said: "Harry, can I ask one more great favor of you?"

"My pleasure."

"Would you give me permission to call you Kline? Harry's such a beautiful name, but there are so many R's in it. That's the only reason I kept on calling you Mister Kline all those weeks when you were doing such beautiful work in my apartment, after you told me to call you Harry. I'm happy to drop the Mister." She was self-conscious about the letter R. One in a name you were going to use a lot was bad enough, but two? Not that she wanted to talk to him again, however, now that she'd called him—well, she knew American men by now.

"Sure," Kline said, "I think I understand."

Salee put the phone down, wondering why she hadn't thought of getting him to send the inventory by e-mail before. Now she wouldn't have to copy a damn thing. She checked out the list of work done, especially the number at the bottom: $820,340. That was the very last sum Somchai laundered, before Aunt Mimi got him thrown into jail. Now, regarding the inventory, all she needed was one more zero and the place was as good as hers.
 

A message on the computer screen was telling her she had a new e-mail. Sure enough, Kline had gotten his office to send the inventory in double quick time. She opened the file, deleted the letterhead, and changed the number at the end to $8,203,400. Now the column no longer added up to the total. That was okay. Instead of a walk in the park she'd have fun according new value to the details: the kitchen, for example, was the biggest single item: dirt cheap at $500,341. How about $3,750,341? Hadn't Kline told her the quality of the steel was so good you could use it for Samurai swords? Now her mind's eye returned to Bethany; it was as if the lawyer's spirit were standing next to her screaming:
This is serious fraud, damn it,
and
I'm totally terrified
.
 

*

Her cell phone gave a space-age whoosh. The message said:
Call me
.

"So where are you?" Salee asked as soon as Mimi answered.

"I'm in Surin. I've rented a room for a couple of days."

"Can you boil a thousand eggs where you are now?" Salee said. After all, there was bound to be a wat around the corner—it was Thailand; even if Mimi had to make a run over the border there were plenty of wats over there. Khmer eggs were cheaper, too.

"I don't know," Aunt Mimi said, "there's a kitchen but I don't know if they have a pan big enough. You really need a thousand?"

"Achan Po's giving me an apartment worth seven million dollars before it was renovated—what's a thousand eggs? Anyway, I need magic to help my attorney."

"But even if I find the eggs and a wat, it's not going to be an Achan Po temple."

"It's covered in the teachings," Mimi said, "You can reach the Achan from a distance, like with a cell phone."

"Okay, but be careful. There's only one way I could have known about that smack. He tried to kill me because of prison culture. If he didn't, he would have lost face. The one he really wants to skin alive and screw with a red-hot soldering iron is you. Your Aunt Pu's son Kee is in the same jail and says Somchai's already made a thousand calls to Thai Town in California. He has your snuff team lined up but he's having trouble transferring dough. The bank won't accept instructions from inside the jail. He'll probably try to do it on the cheap with one hit man, then follow up with a full crew if you survive."

"Don't worry about it," Salee said, "just make sure you take the eggs to the wat. You want me to wire you the money now?"

"No," Mimi said, "money I have. I'm in shock, that's all."

*

That evening, Bethany aka BW brought all the papers for her to sign and told her she was about to be the major shareholder, chairperson and managing director of a company named Grosvenor Interactive Interiors—well, you had to call it something. Salee very much wanted to give her attorney a top-up massage, but Bethany said she had to prepare for court and didn't have time.
 

*

On the day she had to go to court, Salee got up early to meditate in the bedroom she'd turned into a shrine. There was a plastic effigy of Achan Po high up on one of the walls that bristled with flashing purple lights, and a tray underneath where she placed bananas, oranges and a sachet of Nescafé. She figured he didn't need anymore eggs just at the moment. Then she dressed in a slick black trouser suit with white lace blouse and left to meet Bethany at her law offices. Salee found her legal counsel sitting in her chrome-and-leather swivel-back chair frozen to the spot.
 

"I'm having a nervous breakdown... I just don't seem to be able to move... I can't understand it..." As she spoke, she turned gray and an expression of horror grew on her face.
 

Salee looked under the executive chair and saw a thin trickle of yellow liquid. "Don't worry about it," she said and went to the bathroom to find some tissue and a towel. The lawyer obeyed her like a child and, bare bottomed, told her where she kept her spare black skirt and some paper panties. It took no more than five minutes to clean and re-dress Bethany Winsgrove Washington, but the attorney was shaking all over. Salee took her hand and led her down to the street to hail a cab. When she'd settled Bethany in the front seat she sat behind her and wondered what she was supposed to do with a zombie attorney at the most critical point of the scam? Trouble was, lawyers were people who needed an explanation for everything. Salee wasn't like that at all, she took her dharma straight from the Achan, no questions asked. She didn't know how to begin to explain anything. All she could do was close her eyes and wait for Achan Po to give her the right words. When they came, they were a little shocking, even for him.
 

"Forget the law, it's a bunch of crap," she found herself saying as she massaged the nape of Bethany's neck, "the whole society's so messed up, it's like a piece of stellar debris falling into a black hole. Slip your chains and take off while you still can. Just step out into emptiness."

 
The attorney's mouth opened and closed a couple of times. "Will you catch me?"

"Of course not. You're weightless." Salee worked the back of Bethany's neck as long and hard as she could, then sat still and waited.

"Wow," Bethany said, rubbing eyes that had turned into blue saucers, "this is better than coke. The criminal path to enlightenment! I never would have thought of it myself. Seems to work. Look."

Salee looked at Bethany's outstretched arms. Straight as a ruler, steady as a rock. She'd better sit behind her during the hearing, though, in case she needed another sutra.

*

But once in court, Bethany put Salee in the witness box so she could tell Judge Ann Hawkins how one Somchai Nansurikorn had hired her company to carry out extensive re-decoration of the thirteen bedroom apartment, work of the highest order of craftsmanship with the best materials money could buy. With glacial calm, Bethany took out a file with about fifty photographs of the inside of the apartment. The judge lingered over the stainless steel kitchen for a moment and seemed to admire the island. Then came the punch line when Salee explained that the said Mr. Somchai Nansurikorn had disappeared without paying a penny of the bill. Bethany came up to the witness box to hand Salee a bundle of papers to verify. They included the incorporation documents and the long inventory of work done. Salee confirmed all the docs were what they purported to be.

"Did you say the owner of this thirteen-bedroom apartment has simply disappeared without a trace?" Judge Ann Hawkins said, looking Bethany straight in the eye.

Bethany coughed to indicate embarrassment at having to intimate what she could not prove, namely that there were indications that said Somchai Nansurikorn was involved in an illegal trade and was wanted by the FBI, but that was confidential and not to be bandied about.
 

"He's thought to be in hiding somewhere in South America," Bethany finished in a rush, white as a sheet.

"Big place," the judge said

"Probably Argentina or Chile," Bethany said, one hand in the pocket of her jacket working a piece of tissue over and over.

"Is this all in an affidavit somewhere, sworn by your client?"

"Page 15C in the bundle," Bethany said, breaking under the judge's gaze and starting to shake.

"So how are you going to serve him?"

"We're applying to serve on the property itself," Bethany managed before succumbing to a fit of coughing.

"Okay. Then if you prove the case, your client gets judgment for—what's the figure?"

From the witness box Salee saw Bethany turn gray and wobble on her feet—and there was not a damn thing she could do about it. Well, there was one thing: "EIGHT MILLION TWO HUNDRED AND THREE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS, YOUR HONOR," Salee hollered in a voice crammed with righteous indignation.
 

Silence. Judge Hawkins, stern as hell in her black gown, shifted the awesome burden of her attention from Bethany to Salee, as did the clerks, the ushers, the other lawyers and all the court groupies. The judge let a couple of beats pass, said, "Thank you, but please allow your attorney to answer my questions," then turned back to Bethany. "Is that the right figure, counsel?"
 

"Oh, yes, your honor," said Bethany, quite recovered and clear as a bell.

"Okay, so how does that help, if he's holed up in some bordello in Argentina?"

"If we've been unable to locate the defendant by that time we would have no choice but to apply to take a lien on the property. Basically, we would have to transfer ownership of the entire property to my client's corporation."

"How much is the property worth?"

"It's been valued at about seven million, your honor, but that was before the extensive internal work undertaken by my client. It hasn't been valued since," Bethany said, steady as a rock.

"You would auction it?"

"Not necessarily, your honor, this is a poor time to be selling property. My client would wait for the market to move higher."

 
"Okay," Judge Hawkins said, signed something and gave the papers to her clerk to deal with. "Order for service on the property should be ready by tomorrow. Next case."

In the cab back to Bethany's law offices, the attorney sat next to Salee in the back seat, smiled, curled up with her head on her client's shoulder and fell asleep. By the time they arrived she had woken up and was back to normal. Well, almost; there were lapses of concentration, as if a few dozen synapses had burned out, but otherwise okay. The attorney even managed some professional advice, in a stuttering, sporadic, bewildered monologue: there were plenty more steps to go...maybe the judge would want to see the work Grosvenor Interactive Interiors had done on the apartment, especially since she'd seemed to admire the kitchen...
especially
the island. "Maybe she'll use us to renovate her own place," Bethany said dreamily. "A new career for you and me. You know what? The law's just a bunch of crap."

Salee said: "Is there a gun shop around here? I need to buy a few." Given the attorney's vulnerable state, Salee didn't want to explain that Somchai had already tried to kill Aunt Mimi and was likely using one of his prison cell phones this very moment to talk to Thai thugs stateside, so she said: "It's so big, that apartment, there could be burglars at one end of the place and you wouldn't know until it was too late. Squatters even." Bethany told her where the gun shop was but would not go with her to buy any. The tall skinny attorney stood on the sidewalk and waved a hand to take in the cavernous street. "This entire city is a piece of stellar debris falling into a black hole. Slip your chains and take off, everybody."

*

 
At the gun shop, Salee assured the clerk that what she wanted was strictly for her own protection, strictly to keep at home; no way was she ever going to walk the streets of New York with a firearm in her handbag. She wasn't American, after all. The clerk said that if it was strictly for indoor use there was no point worrying too much about accuracy; what they needed to discuss was stopping power. Basically, the bigger the caliber, the more stopping power. In the end she bought a couple of ordinary looking pistols and a handgun with a barrel so wide you could stick a tube of toothpaste down it. That one only fired plastic bullets, though. The bullets were thicker than her thumb, a lot thicker, but they didn't do any real damage. What you had to do after you stunned the assailant with the plastic bullet was to hold the gun by the barrel and clonk him over the head. Salee had little strength in her arms so she would have to use momentum: a great arc so the handle came crashing down just behind his ear. She guessed there would be more than one thug, though, even in the first wave, unless Somchai was still having trouble with the banks. In a big apartment like that, a lone Thai boy from up-country was going to be too scared of ghosts. Anyway, a single assassin she could deal with, no problem. But, like Mimi said, Somchai would sooner or later send an army after her, there would be a great gun battle like in the movies. That's why she'd asked for a half dozen of the semi-automatic combat rifles, but the clerk said he couldn't sell her any unless she had the right license. It sounded like another job for attorney Bethany.