Laundry Man

TWELVE

The next morning I overslept. I showered and dressed as quietly as I could in order not to wake Anita, got the Volvo out of the garage, and made straight for Starbucks. With any luck, I could soak up enough caffeine and sugar to set me up nicely for my ten o’clock class. The course was a real yawner, even for me-a lecture series on the application of American securities regulations to capital raisings in the United States by foreign companies-and I assumed my students really hated it. Today in particular, without a caffeine high and a sugar buzz I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting through it.

There were some people I knew who vilified Starbucks as an American corporate giant heartlessly homogenizing the unique cultures of the world in the headlong pursuit of profits. Strangely, I had noticed that the people who put the most energy into their vilifying were generally other Americans, mostly the kind you met abroad who were trying way too hard to be perceived as high-minded citizens of the world rather than just Yanks on the loose. I liked Starbucks. The coffee was good, the food was okay, and the chairs were comfortable. If that made me a closet imperialist, I could live with it.

It was a nice morning again by local standards. The night winds had come and gone and they had left behind a dazzling blue sky without the usual layer of brown crud to spoil it. I whipped up Ploenchit Road and pulled into the McDonald’s parking area just behind the Grand Hyatt. Smiling at the brown-uniformed security guard who came over to check me out, I transferred a red one-hundred-baht note smoothly into his lightly sweating palm.

“Korp khun maak krap.” Thank you very much, I told him. Then I went on my way ignoring the prominently posted signs that said the parking was for McDonald’s customers only. That was something I had to admit I loved about Thailand. The joyous, unrestrained air of corruption that permeated everything made life pretty simple once you learned to go with it.

I selected a plump cranberry-and-bran muffin, got a grande low-fat latte, and carried them both to a window table looking out onto Ploenchit Road. Someone had abandoned a copy of the Bangkok Post on the table and I flipped to the front page to skim the headlines while I ate. Reading an English- language newspaper in Thailand was always an adventure. Reading a Thai-language newspaper was probably an adventure, too, but I couldn’t read Thai nor could any other foreigner I knew, so I wasn’t absolutely sure.

When I first moved to Bangkok, I discovered that the Bangkok Post wasn’t anything at all like an American newspaper. The usual fare of graphic crime stories and breathless accounts of various groups demanding special treatment, preferably at the expense of other groups, was largely if not entirely absent from the pages of the Post. Instead, the Post seemed to make do with photographs of watch shop openings and incoherent stories about Thai politics, although I was never certain whether it was the stories or the politics that was more incoherent. When I got through reading the Post, which seldom took more than ten minutes, I was usually pretty certain that nothing much had happened anywhere in the world that was of any significance at all. That always put me in a good mood.

My head was buried in the sports section when I heard a familiar voice at my elbow.

“Sawadee krap, Ajarn.” Good morning, Professor.

Jello’s real name was Chatawan Pianskool and I had never been absolutely certain what the source of his nickname was. I always surmised it might have something to do with his physique, but I wasn’t sure. Jello was a big man with a prominent potbelly, which was unusual for a Thai. He was one of those guys a lot of people took lightly when they first met him since he was almost a cartoon of a jolly fat man, but that didn’t seem to bother Jello. On the contrary, it was something he frequently turned to his advantage.

Jello was a Thai police captain and he had been assigned to the Economic Crime Investigation Division as long as I had known him. Whatever Jello didn’t know about what was happening in Bangkok just wasn’t worth knowing, at least when it came to finance and commerce.

“You waiting for someone, Jack?”

“Nope,” I answered, folding the Post and tossing it onto the empty table next to me. “Sit down, partner.”

Just then a half-dozen giggling college girls tumbled in through the door and we both glanced over at the commotion. Barelegged and smooth-skinned, they were uniformly so slim that they looked like a clump of reeds waving in the wind. They were all dressed in the customary Thai university uniform: tight white shirts, sling-back heels, very short black skirts, and wide brown belts looped loosely around waists so tiny they looked as if they had to be optical illusions. Even at that age, there was a gliding grace about most Thai women that left men slack- jawed.

Jello and I both paused respectfully to take in the passing procession. In a lot of countries, two middle-aged men watching college girls in a coffee shop meant trouble, but in Thailand it was different. Feminine beauty was the country’s pride, not the humdrum landscape of its countryside. To admire it when you were in its presence was as acceptable as enjoying an ocean view in Hawaii.

When the girls had passed, Jello pulled out a chair and laid two chocolate croissants on a napkin alongside a large coffee.

“What’s new, Arjan?” he asked.

“Not much,” I said. “Same old same old.”

I had absolutely no intention of telling a senior ECID cop about Barry Gale. At least not yet.

“You working on anything important for Dollar these days?” he asked.

“Nope, nothing really.”

“Seen Dollar recently?”

“Not for a couple of days. Why are you so interested in Dollar this morning?”

“I heard something a little strange about him.”

I said nothing, but my antenna quickly deployed and made a couple of quick rotations. Jello wasn’t a man for idle gossip. Something was coming.

“I talked to Just John about an hour ago,” Jello went on. “John told me Dollar got beaten up last night.”

“Beaten up? Oh, come on. John must have been pulling your leg.”

Jello picked up his cup and blew on the coffee before he tasted it. He didn’t say anything and I saw he wasn’t smiling.

“I don’t think so, Arjan. He said that Dollar and some client got jumped by two guys when they came out of the office last night.”

“Dollar’s office? Dollar was mugged coming out of the United Center?”

“Yeah, in front of that Delifrance on the ground floor. I hear he put up a flight. Even knocked over one of those tables with the umbrellas when they were all rolling around.”

“What time was this supposed to have happened?”

“About ten.”

I still couldn’t believe it. Jello looked unimpressed by my skepticism, but that did nothing to change my point of view.

“Was Dollar hurt?” I asked.

“Apparently not. He didn’t even bother to report it to the police.” Jello’s mouth was half full and he dribbled a few crumbs of croissant onto the table.

Residents didn’t get mugged in Bangkok, only tourists, and even then mostly Taiwanese tourists for some reason. That approach had apparently become something of a firm rule among muggers since Taiwanese tourists seldom had much interest in returning at their own expense to testify against them, even if the mugger was unlucky enough to get caught-which he almost never was.

“Who was the client?” I asked.

“What client?”

“The one Dollar was with when he was mugged.”

“Oh.” Jello started in on the second croissant and sipped at his coffee again before he answered. “Just John didn’t say.”

It was hard to believe that Dollar could have been mugged coming out of the United Center on Silom Road at