“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “Not really.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said you’re hungry.” Jello jabbed his thumb over his shoulder toward my door. “Let’s go.”
I folded the
“We need to talk, Jack.”
“I see,” I said, but of course I didn’t. “You want to tell me what this is all about?”
“Not really, but I will.”
Jello looked uncharacteristically somber, so I stopped arguing with him. I swung my feet off the desk and followed him into the corridor, locking my door behind me. There would be plenty of time to come back for my things before I went to the airport.
“Did you talk to Dollar yet?” Jello asked as we walked toward the elevator.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yesterday.”
“So was he really mugged?”
“More or less.”
“What does that mean?”
“He said it was just a couple of kids trying to grab their briefcases.”
Jello grunted slightly, but he didn’t say anything else.
We rode down to the lobby in silence and then walked outside to where Jello had left a brown Toyota parked in Sasin’s circular driveway. He started the car and drove off. I let the silence go on until we had left the campus, passed the Princess Hotel, and turned into Phayathai Road.
“Where are we going?”
“Anna’s.”
Anna’s Cafe was on Soi Saladaeng, a quiet street that cut directly across one of Bangkok’s most venerable residential neighborhoods just beyond the shadows of the office towers bunched together at the south end of Silom Road. I liked Anna’s a lot, partly because the food was good and the surroundings were pleasant, but even more because I thought of it as a kind of monument to the extraordinary adaptability and endurance of Thais.
When the Bank of Thailand gave up trying to support the currency in the mid-nineties, the country’s financial collapse had wrecked almost everybody. Financiers fled the country, corporate executives turned to selling sandwiches, and one particularly luckless investor put a gun to his head in front of the stock exchange and pulled the trigger. He missed. That struck a lot of foreigners as the perfect metaphor for how Thailand had gotten into such a mess in the first place.
Property developers were particularly hard hit. Dependent on loans from local banks to keep all their plates spinning, most of the plates came crashing down when the banks stopped lending in a knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis and starting calling in the loans they had already made. Even now, years after the economy had begun to grow again, Bangkok was still littered with the rotting carcasses of huge structures that had been abandoned by ruined developers who couldn’t afford to finish them. Some parts of the city looked like a movie set being readied for another remake of ‘Planet of the Apes.’
The developer who had owned the site where Anna’s now stood had been luckier than most when the crash came and the bank loans disappeared, having gotten no further than building a sales office touting an improbable high-rise condominium. What to do? An American property developer would no doubt have called his lawyers and sued everybody he could think of. The Thai developer, in happy contrast, had taken the ruined condo’s sales office and turned it into a stylish and profitable restaurant.
We turned between Anna’s gateposts and followed the driveway to the parking area at the back of the restaurant. Jello took the first open spot he found. He got out, slammed the door, and started toward the front entrance without looking back. I followed him wordlessly.
Anna’s was a one-story, white-pillared building of vaguely colonial design with a wide, red-tiled veranda running all the way across the front. Most people preferred to sit indoors since the large dining area was airy and spacious, but the weather was still unusually cool and the veranda looked inviting. I wasn’t particularly surprised when Jello walked to the end furthest from the front door and settled himself at a round teak table shaded by a white canvas umbrella. I pulled out a chair and joined him, folding my arms and leaning forward attentively against the table in hopes that my posture might encourage him to resume the conversation.
Jello sat slouched down, his body relaxed, but his dark eyes flicked around with the alertness of a pool shark cruising a game. “I like to sit out here when I’ve got some serious thinking to do,” he said.
“And is that why we’re here now? To do some serious thinking?”
A boy with an uncertain smile and fluttering hands brought us menus before Jello could answer.
“Not really,” he said as scanned one of the menus. “We’re here to have lunch. Okay if I order for us both?”
Without waiting for an answer, Jello ordered several Thai dishes and two bottles of Heineken and the waiter scurried away. That apparently marked the end of the pleasantries. After that Jello got straight to the point.
“What do you know about a man named Howard Kojinski?” he asked in his cop’s voice, the one that gave away nothing, but implied everything.
After being mentioned as far as I could recall exactly never, Howard the Roach was now popping up everywhere I went like crab grass after a wet winter.
“Couldn’t you have asked me that on the telephone?”
“You never know about telephones. Shouldn’t say anything on a telephone you’re not ready to read in the newspapers tomorrow morning.”
Jello’s reluctance to use the telephone for what seemed to me to be an innocent enough inquiry would have verged on the comic if Dollar’s recent obsession with Howard hadn’t already been worrying me. I was pretty sure now that nothing involving Howard the Roach was likely to turn out to be innocent, or for that matter, comic.
“For instance,” Jello went on, “what do you know about his background?”
The answer of course was little or nothing. Howard was Dollar’s client, not mine. I had always worked on the premise that I was advising whatever firm hired me, not any specific client of theirs. The clients were their problem, not mine.
“Not a lot,” I said truthfully. “He told me once that he was from Poland.” I thought about it some more. “Isn’t he an accountant?”
“What kind of work have you and Dollar been doing for Howard recently?”
“Whoa,” I said, and raised my right hand, palm out. “What does that mean?”
“It’s a simple question. Seems clear enough to me.”
“Then I’ll give you a simple answer. I won’t tell you. I’m not going to talk about anything that Dollar’s firm is doing for its clients, and you ought to know better than to ask me to.”
The young waiter returned and set sweating bottles of Heineken on cardboard coasters in front of each of us. Jello waved the proffered glass away, wrapped a big hand around the green bottle, and downed half of it in one hit. When the boy reached to put a glass in front of me, I shook my head as well, and he snatched it back and moved away.
“Don’t give me that lawyer crap, Jack. Just tell me the truth.”
God knows I wasn’t all that fond of being a lawyer, but every time somebody said that kind of thing to me it still rubbed me the wrong way.
“Look,” I said, giving my indignation free reign to strut its stuff, “why don’t you just ask Dollar if you want to know something about his firm and its clients? Leave me out of it.”
Jello nodded, looking off toward where a chubby blonde woman was getting out of a taxi. She had leathery skin and was wearing a red dress that was much too tight and far too short. Lugging two large Fendi shopping bags, she struggled up Anna’s driveway toward the front door, the bags slapping awkwardly against her heavy thighs.
“I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t, Jack. I’m going to tell you because I think you’re entitled to know exactly what’s going on here, but you’re not going to be happy to hear it.” Jello sounded like a librarian who was about to describe the best way to burn books. “Are you okay with that?”
“Look, Jello, you’re buying lunch. You can tell me anything you want to, but I’m not going to talk to you about
