Since I didn’t know what to say, I said nothing. Instead I glanced away and ran my index finger around the rim of my coffee cup.
“Let’s walk a little, Jack. Sitting in one place for too long makes me real nervous these days.”
Barry stuffed a red hundred-baht note into the wooden cup that held the check for my coffee and stood up, taking my elbow and tugging on it. I did nothing to resist and we left the store in silence. Threading our way through the jam of empty
When we got there Barry stopped and glanced cautiously in both directions. The usual late-night groups of foreigners were still trolling the sidewalks for action, but they were pretty well thinned out to the hardcore. Even the traffic on Sukhumvit was starting to move at something like a normal speed rather than crawling along bumper- to-bumper as it did for most of the day. As far as I could tell, there was nothing going on that should make Barry nervous.
Barry apparently agreed with my assessment. He shoved both hands into the pockets of his shorts and turned east, walking slowly with his head down. I followed, waiting for him to say whatever he wanted to say, but he just stared intently at the rough concrete of the sidewalk as if he might be trying to divine some message that had been left for him there.
I shot a quick glance over my shoulder and saw that the tall woman was following us at a discreet distance. However much Barry might have drifted off into his private reverie, she was more than making up for it with her concentration on both of us. I caught her eyes full on when I turned back, but she didn’t look away-didn’t even blink-and after a moment I did both.
Barry cleared his throat tentatively as if he didn’t know exactly what to say. Then abruptly he started talking anyway.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the whole thing.”
TEN
“How much do you know about what happened at Texas State Bank, Jack?”
“A little bit. I did some research after you called.”
“Then you know who Harold Wilkins is?
“The other director. The one who disappeared.”
“Harold Wilkins had been fronting for Russian mobsters for years. At first it was just some nickel-and-dime money laundering, but eventually Harold started thinking bigger and somehow he managed to cut a deal with Jimmy Kicks. Jimmy had a soft spot for banks in crappy, middle-sized shitholes like Dallas because he didn’t like dealing with sophisticated people. He always figured that sophisticated people were the most dangerous, and yokels were the greediest. Me, I’m not so sure. It might be exactly the other way around.”
I just listened and kept my mouth shut.
“Jimmy’s mules delivered bags of cash to Wilkins from the big Russian drug operations in the Northeast. Then Wilkins would see that all the money was booked to legitimate bank depositors, companies whose names he’d used to set up dummy accounts without them knowing anything about it. He always picked companies that were big cash operations, of course. Pawn shops were his favorite, but he liked restaurants and motels, too.”
“A lot of people like motels.”
Maybe Barry didn’t get the joke or maybe he didn’t think it was funny. Either way, he ignored me and went on talking.
“After the deposits were booked and a decent interval had passed, Wilkins would start funneling them out of Texas State and into Jimmy’s foreign bank accounts in a series of small transactions so they wouldn’t attract any attention.”
Two backpackers, a boy and a girl in their twenties who looked Scandinavian, passed us on the sidewalk. They were trudging doggedly in the opposite direction, bent forward under the weight of two massive yellow and black nylon packs. Barry fell silent until they were both out of earshot, then he went on talking.
“I guess it was inevitable an idiot like Harold would eventually get sticky fingers. He started wheeling and dealing with the money while it was lying around in the accounts he’d set up at Texas State. He figured he could use the float to make a few bucks playing the foreign exchange markets before he shifted the money out to Jimmy’s offshore accounts.”
“How did Jimmy catch him?” I asked.
“Jimmy didn’t. Wilkins was just unlucky. There was an audit while the stupid prick was off chasing pussy in New Orleans with the rest of the rubes.”
“The auditors were onto him?”
“No, it was strictly some routine stuff. They just started pulling foreign exchange contracts at random. They were spot-checking the bank’s exposure when it occurred to somebody that the number of positions was pretty big for a bank the size of Texas State. It didn’t take long for them to see that almost all of the positions had been opened by Wilkins. That was when the whole fucking thing came unraveled.”
“But didn’t they just close the positions the auditors found? How could the losses have been so big?”
“I told you, Wilkins was an idiot. I don’t think he got the market right even once. Every time a contract went bad he’d cover it by doubling his next position. By the time the auditors got on to him he was so far underwater he was shitting seaweed.”
“How much did he lose?”
Barry hesitated, and I glanced over at him just in time to see a sly look slide across his face. “Just over $60,000,000 according to the auditors’ final report.”
“I still don’t see how it could have been so much.”
“It wasn’t.”
I looked at Barry and shook my head. “You lost me.”
“Wilkins really did piss away a million or so fucking around with foreign exchange futures-that much of the story was true-but that was dog shit to Jimmy. It only mattered because it gave him an idea. He started wondering what would have happened if Wilkins had been thinking bigger? And that was when it came to him.”
“What came to him?”
“That if he could find a way to hang some really big losses around Wilkins’s neck instead of just the lousy million or so he had actually pissed away Wilkins would take the fall for the whole pile of shit. If Jimmy handled it just right, he could waltz away with all the phony losses without the slightest chance anybody would ever work out what really happened. I got to hand it to the guy, Jack. The concept was golden.”
“But not unless-”
“Yeah, that was problem, of course. Jimmy had to have an inside man at the bank to pull that kind of thing off. I’d been put in charge of investigating Wilkins by the rest of the board and given full authority over all the bank’s foreign exchange operations.” Barry turned his head and gave me a rueful look. “I guess I was the obvious choice.”
“Why would you do something like that?” I asked, not at all certain I really wanted to know.
“Jimmy told me he’d put twenty percent of whatever I could scam for him into a Hong Kong bank and give me a fresh start anywhere I wanted.”
Barry kicked at a pebble with his toe. It rattled off a garbage can on the sidewalk and bounced into the gutter.
“That’s the real American dream, isn’t it, Jack? To disappear into some tropical paradise, rich and reborn?”
“I don’t think-”
“Americans have been reinventing themselves since the fucking pilgrims hit the beach,” Barry interrupted. “It’s one thing we’re really good at. Today we just do it a little faster than we used to, that’s all.”
I said nothing, but Barry didn’t seem to care.
“Of course, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to start over again, you want to do it rich, and I was sure as hell going to do that. I knew I could get forty or fifty million out of Texas State without breaking a sweat. That
