Laundry Man

“Accidental involvement? I don’t understand.”

The bleachers squeaked as the minister shifted his weight.

“You Americans have become obsessed with what you insist on calling transparency in government, Mr. Shepherd. But those of us who actually do the work of governing understand that we must occasionally engage in undertakings that we would not particularly like to become public. Frequently, those activities involve financial arrangements, and naturally those arrangements are generally routed through helpful banks like the ABC. It’s just the way things are done in Asia, Mr. Shepherd. It has always been so, and it will always be so.”

“Just for the sake of conversation, Minister, what do you suppose might happen if some of these arrangements you’re talking about looked as if they might become public?”

“Oh, I don’t really know, Mr. Shepherd.”

The minister waved his Montecristo in a little zigzag motion.

“But we have a saying here in Thailand that you might do well to remember: When the elephants move, the grass is trampled.”

The minister slowly stood, rolling his shoulders and stretching slightly.

“I always thought that was an African expression,” I said, watching him.

His eyes flickered for a moment, met mine, and then looked away. With his left hand in the front pocket of his jacket and his head tilted down, he walked toward the door that led back out of the squash courts. When he reached it, he took his hand out of his pocket, put it on the knob, and looked back over his shoulder.

“Actually, Jack, I think you’ll find it’s an old Icelandic proverb.”

Then he pushed through the door and was gone.

TWENTY ONE

I didn’t sleep sleep very well that night and predictably woke up way too early on Saturday morning. I lay quietly for a while, one hand resting lightly on the smooth skin of Anita’s thigh, replaying in my mind the way her body felt under my hands the night before. Anita was still sleeping deeply so I slipped quietly out of bed and padded into the kitchen to make some coffee.

My meeting with Dollar was looming in only a few hours and I pushed Barry Gale and the ABC into an unused corner of my mind while I dumped coffee into the filter and filled the coffeemaker with water. Before I saw Dollar I had to decide what I was going to tell him. Was I going to ask him about my conversation with Jello and the suspicions Jello had voiced about what Dollar and Howard might be doing together, or was I just going to let the whole thing slide?

While the coffee dripped I went back to the bedroom and pulled on some running shorts and a T-shirt and laced up my Nikes. Then, after draining two mugs and flipping half-heartedly through the Post, I drove over to Lumpini Park in the mood to do a little running and a lot of thinking.

I parked the Volvo on Soi Sarasin just in front of a strip of bars shuttered tightly against the morning but still smelling vaguely of cigarettes and spilled beer. It was the beginning of another cool day and I wondered vaguely if some kind of cosmic invoice for our pleasant weather was going to be presented to the city later in the year. If it ever arrived, I figured it would be a doozy.

Crossing the street and threading my way among the food venders half-blocking the park’s north gate, I broke into a lope on the broad walkway just inside. In front of me, off through a gap in a grove of banyan trees, patches of early morning sunlight were glistening on the lake and a light breeze rattled the fronds of the spindly palm trees that lined the walkway. In a few minutes I reached the edge of the lake and moved onto the grass. I found my rhythm quickly and I adjusted my stride and paced myself for a longer run than usual since I had a good deal to think about.

I knew I either had to tell Dollar immediately what Jello had said to me or I could never tell him at all. If I kept quiet today and then said something about it later, Dollar would read my hesitation as having at least half- believed Jello in the first place-and of course, he would be right.

I had done a fair amount of work with Dollar and I had never seen anything that would suggest he was involved in money laundering; but I didn’t know Howard nearly as well and I could hardly claim to have the same conviction with respect to him. Either way, Jello had put me in a real bind. If what he said turned out to be true and I somehow ended up helping Dollar and Howard do their laundry, no matter how inadvertent my participation might be, Jello would be able to point out that I had done it in spite of being on notice as to what they were involved in. That would put me a long way up my own personal shit creek, and I would unquestionably be lacking the proverbial paddle.

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that was exactly what Jello had in mind. He knew the position he was putting me in when we had our conversation at Anna’s. He was squeezing me. There was no nicer way to put it.

Although I doubted Jello knew anything specific about my meeting this morning with Dollar or about any of the frequent appearances Howard had been making in the conversations Dollar and I had been having recently, he would still no doubt have surmised that Dollar would eventually ask me to help out with Howard’s work again-and then I’d have no choice but to ask Dollar if there was anything behind Jello’s story. Jello had boxed me in with consummate skill. I couldn’t see any path out of the trap he had so carefully constructed, except of course for the one he obviously wanted me to take.

A major attraction for me of running in Lumpini Park was that the joggers there generally included a significant number of tanned, athletic-looking young women pushing gracefully around the lake with firm, confident strides. Just trying to look good for them usually kept me going pretty well. This morning, however, the pickings were slim. I was a little early and the only other runners I saw were two local men pumping doggedly along together without much apparent enthusiasm. I passed them easily. A few minutes later, just after I had crossed a narrow metal bridge over a tiny sliver of water, I glanced back to see how the two men were doing, but I couldn’t see them anymore.

I was still wondering where they had gone when a woman suddenly appeared from a stand of banyan trees near the edge of the lake and fell into stride right next to me. When I glanced over, I did a long, slow take.

It was the woman who had been with Barry Gale at the Foodland.

She was wearing black shorts, a white halter-top, and a black baseball cap that said Oakland Raiders over the light gray bill. She ran easily, gracefully, her feet springing off the grass as if they were touching down on hot coals. Other than describing her features as Asian in a general way, I still couldn’t put a specific place of origin to her. The bone structure was too fine-high, wide cheekbones and a rounded European-looking nose-and now that I studied her closely I could see that none of the separate parts of her face really looked Asian at all except perhaps for the slightly tilted, deep brown eyes.

The woman neither turned her head toward me nor spoke.

Running shoulder to shoulder as we were, I could see that she was actually a little taller than I was, and since I was an even six feet that made her pretty tall for a woman. She was slim, but with distinct muscle definition, and she looked strong. Her complexion was the color of cinnamon, although her arms and legs were darker, burnished by strong sun to the color of cafe au lait, and her smooth skin glistened in the morning light as if it had been polished. She had pulled her shiny black hair back into a ponytail that, in scale with the rest of her, looked two feet long, and it rotated behind her head as she ran like a little propeller driving her forward.

“I was born in Hong Kong, Mr. Shepherd.”

The woman’s eyes stayed forward when she spoke.

“My mother was Chinese, but my father was American. He could never manage the tones in Cantonese, so we always spoke English at home.”

Her accent was half British and half American, and her diction and phrasing were those of someone well-born or well-educated, perhaps both.

“Should I tell you the answer to the other question that everyone asks me?”