“I don’t think so.”
“Still a fucking hard-on, are you?”
“I just don’t particularly like being the butt of some clown’s crappy little joke.”
“Oh, this is no joke, Jack. I wish to Christ it was, but it isn’t.”
I said nothing.
“Do you know that place called Took Lae Dee?” the man eventually asked. “The little food counter up in the front of the all-night Foodland on Sukhumvit Road?”
“Yeah. I know where it is.”
“Meet me there tomorrow, around midnight. Just grab a stool and I’ll find you.”
“Midnight?”
“Is that a problem for you?”
“Yeah, that’s a problem for me. What makes you think I’d even consider coming to some damned supermarket at midnight just because a wacko pretending to be a dead guy calls me up and tells me to? I don’t know how you found out all those things about me, but if you think that’s enough-”
The man started laughing.
“Oh, it’s more than enough, Jack.”
He laughed some more. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance and I listened to it without saying anything else.
“I know you, my friend. You’d never pass up a chance to hear a story like this. Never. Especially not when it’s coming from a guy who’s gone to all the trouble I have to make himself dead.”
And with that, the man hung up.
TWO
I tossed and turned for a while after that, but I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon. Eventually I gave up trying altogether and I went into my study and took a Montecristo out of the humidor on my desk. I pulled open the sliding door and walked out on the balcony.
Generally Bangkok’s foreign residents went to considerable lengths to avoid breathing the city’s air until it had been thoroughly dried, adequately chilled, and comprehensively decontaminated. Not only was the stuff hot and soggy, usually it smelled spoiled and a little sour, like it had been breathed by way too many people already. But this was January, the middle of winter in Thailand, and the southernmost edge of a large dome of Siberian air had slipped down from China and momentarily broken Bangkok’s muggy heat. The air had turned pleasingly cool, even sweet, and it was richly thickened with the syrupy fragrances of frangipani, jasmine, and gardenias.
I cut and lit my cigar and I stood there smoking and looking out over the city for a long time.
When people in Washington first began to hear that I was leaving to live in Bangkok and teach at Chulalongkorn University, a few of them jumped to the conclusion I was making a point of some kind, abandoning the land of my birth for reasons that were probably political and no doubt wacky. Others who heard what I was doing-and I noticed this group seemed to be composed mainly of women-attributed my change of address to middle-aged male angst fueled by overly moist fantasies of slim, submissive Thai women serving me brightly colored tropical drinks with little umbrellas in them. Most people, of course, fell into neither of those categories. Most people just assumed that I had lost my damned mind.
Part of the problem was that the whole idea of living in a foreign country was just so strange to most Americans, particularly since very few of them had ever seriously entertained the thought, however fleetingly, themselves. After all, everyone wanted to come to America, didn’t they? Half the population of the earth was fighting to live in Orange County and work in a 7-Eleven, wasn’t it? Why in God’s name would an American even
Before I had made the big jump, back in what now felt to me like another life, Barry Gale and I had both been partners in a large and well-connected Washington law firm. The firm was huge and, in spite of our common occupation, I had run across him only occasionally. Truth be told, I could remember very little at all about Barry Gale.
Except, really, for one thing.
Barry Gale had been both the outside legal counsel and a member of the board of directors of the Texas State Bank in Dallas when it was engulfed in scandal, a hugely psychedelic mess involving a bunch of Russian mobsters from New Jersey who had been using the bank to clean and press their income from a variety of rackets up and down the East Coast. The character at the center of the imbroglio was an Armenian named Jimini Zubokof, who was better known as Jimmy Kicks because he had once, so the legend went, personally taken his gleaming Ferragamos to an FBI informant and kicked the poor bastard to death.
Somehow Jimmy became inexplicably possessed by the idea of shifting his money-laundering operations to Asia-anywhere in Asia, really-and he demanded his people find a compliant bank somewhere that would serve his purposes. Of course, all Jimmy Kicks actually knew about Asia was how to order Chinese takeaway and he wasn’t even very good at that, so in the ensuing upheaval at Texas State Bank offshore accounts and foreign currencies were whizzing all over the place and quite a lot of money disappeared. Tens of millions of dollars, or so the press reports claimed, were lost by the bank through dealing forward contracts in the foreign exchange market, although whose contracts they actually were or how the losses had been incurred was never made entirely clear.
Just as the whole saga was turning into old news, the disappearance of one of the bank’s directors and the suicide of another freaked out the conspiracy buffs and the story jumped straight back onto the front pages. As far as I knew, no trace had ever been found of the director who vanished, but the so-called suicide had been dramatic enough to grab most of the attention anyway.
There was a guesthouse in North Dallas that the bank leased for the use of out-of-town directors. That was where Barry Gale had been found, at the bottom of the swimming pool, pinned to it by a manhole cover tied around his neck with barbed wire.
I drew on my Montecristo and exhaled a slow stream of smoke into the darkness. From somewhere I heard faint music and I listened quietly for a long while as the mournful voice of a young girl sang Thai love songs full of sorrow and loss. Her voice had a quavering, reed-thin quality, and the sound of it drifted over the city like wisps of river fog. The air smelled of ozone and rancid water. Lightning leaped soundlessly between clouds off in the distance, and the breeze cranked up a notch.
While I smoked I studied the city’s skyline in the distance. The towers were brightly lit, etched into the night sky by lights so blindingly white that they seemed to drain the color from everything around them. In the distance beyond the skyscrapers I could just pick out the floodlights on the soaring, golden spires and preposterous-looking green and red tile roofs of the Grand Palace. Once the heart of a dazzling, secret world ruled over by a god-king, this eccentric collection of whimsical structures had lately fallen on less glamorous times. The King had long since decamped for more modern quarters and the Grand Palace was now neither grand nor a palace. These days it amounted to little more than a faintly shabby tourist attraction for the hordes of foreigners that swept over Thailand year-around.
There was a sudden flash of lightning and moments later a single, crunching boom of thunder drove the air out of the night. I dumped my cigar into an ashtray and walked back inside. As I shut the door, the storm hit like a fist.
THREE
Chulalongkorn University is right in the middle of Bangkok and the Sasin School of Business is in the northwest corner of Chula’s main campus. Sasin is housed in two mid-rise buildings that make up for what they lack in construction quality with their mediocre design. My office was on the sixth floor of the larger of the two buildings, around on the south side. It was nothing special, but at least I had a fine view of the golf course at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club and the towers of the Silom Road financial district just beyond it.
