Laundry Man

Anita was still sleeping when I got back so I showered and shaved as quietly as I could. I left a note reminding her of my meeting with Dollar and then went back downstairs to the garage and got back into the Volvo again. I had nothing in particular to do before eleven o’clock, but I thought it might be pleasant to head on down to the United Center, treat myself to a peaceful breakfast somewhere, and then just hang around the office and shuffle papers until Dollar showed up.

I drove south on Soi Chidlom and caught a red light next to the Central Department Store. While I sat there waiting for it to change, I watched the army of sales clerks arriving for work streaming into the huge store through the employees’ entrance. They were overwhelmingly young and mostly female. Although I had the Volvo’s top down and was quite comfortable in a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, most of the salesgirls wore coats over the white blouses and black skirts of their uniforms. Bulky nylon parkas in bright shades of red and yellow seemed to be the favored choice. One tiny girl even sported a purple ski hat pulled all the way down over her ears.

The Thais hated cool weather. At the first sign of sliding temperatures, they hauled out parkas fit for winter in Alaska and swapped their flip-flops for fur-lined mukluks. The city’s foreign residents usually reacted to the onset of winter in a somewhat more measured fashion. At most, we rolled down our sleeves.

When I got to Soi Sarasin and made a right in the direction of the financial district, I involuntarily glanced toward the spot where I had parked the Volvo that morning while I was running in Lumpini Park. The blue van was gone and presumably the man in the sunglasses and baseball hat had gone with it. I wondered briefly if I ought to take that as a good omen, maybe even a sign that everything would start getting back to normal and in a few days I would be laughing. No, that was going way too fast. This morning I’d settle for just getting through breakfast without squinting suspiciously at the waitress.

After parking in the United Center garage I walked downstairs to the Delifrance. I went through the short line and selected a plate of hard rolls and cheese, picked up a cafe au lait, and then took everything to a table outside on the tiny front terrace. I watched the morning traffic while I carved slivers of cheese onto the crusty bread and sipped at my coffee. When I was done with both, I went back inside, got another coffee, and sat quietly over it for a long time, thinking.

Jello’s story about Dollar still seemed ridiculous to me; but in an entirely different way, so was Dollar’s tale about being mugged leaving his office with Howard the Roach. I was sitting right where it had supposedly happened. The blue-and-white canvas umbrella under which I was drinking coffee might have been the very one Dollar claimed to have knocked over in the struggle. I could scarcely believe something like that had happened to them at all, let alone right here in the heart of Bangkok’s financial district. But if it hadn’t happened, if Dollar had made up the story, why had he done that?

As I thought about it all and sloshed the coffee around in my cup, a scene from an old movie suddenly popped into my head. Three Days of the Condor was one of those CIA conspiracy films that had been so popular right after Watergate when a lot of Americans decided they could believe anything about the kind of people who were running the country. In the movie Robert Redford was the honorable man sucked by accident into an intricate government plot to do something that no one really understood, but that in any event required the killing of a bunch of other honorable people to achieve some obscure end for someone-maybe the CIA, and maybe not. Redford was the hero of the movie, of course. He was cool. He was steady. And he projected a steely determination not to let the bad guys get away with it. Whatever it was.

I had stumbled across the movie on HBO one night a couple of weeks earlier. Watching it again for the first time in more than twenty years, it was my own reaction that surprised me, not the film itself. Redford no longer seemed to me to be the hero of the story. On the contrary, his unyielding determination to do right even if it put him or the other people around him in danger seemed tired and dated.

The real star of the film for me now was a character actor named John Houseman, a sort of benighted Santa Claus figure wearing a rumpled blue suit and speaking with a British accent. Houseman’s character was a lot older than Redford with a view of the world that was both wearier and less hopeful that wrongs could be righted just by the conviction they should be. He was the director of the CIA, and while you were pretty sure he wasn’t one of the bad guys, you weren’t absolutely sure he was one of the good guys either.

There was a moment in the movie when Houseman was reminiscing to one of his subordinates, a stiff-necked young bureaucrat played by Cliff Robertson, about the early days of the American intelligence community when he had been one of Alan Dulles’s boys, a crusading young hotshot battling the Nazis in World War Two. Robertson listened politely to Houseman’s recollections, as we all do sometimes to old men who may have told the same stories a few too many times, and when Houseman was finished, Robertson just sat there, not quite certain as to how he was supposed to respond. Finally, Robertson asked Houseman politely, “So, do you miss the action now, sir?”

Houseman seemed to consider that possibility as if for the first time, and slowly and deliberately he began to formulate a reply.

“No, I miss…”

Houseman paused, searching for exactly the right word, and you hung there while the old man rolled the possibilities around in his mouth until he found just the one he was looking for.

“… the clarity. What I miss is the clarity.”

He drew the word out…clar-i-tee…and Robertson nodded, but you could tell he didn’t understand what the hell Houseman was talking about. I wasn’t sure that I understood back then either. But I did now.

No, I didn’t miss the action any more than Houseman did. I didn’t miss the action one damned bit. I missed the clarity.

Clarity was what had brought me to Bangkok in the first place, and clarity was what I had found. If I let it slip away, one day I would end up just like that: living in the past, reminiscing to some young dunce who didn’t know what I had lost or care much one way or the other how I had lost it. I thought I had managed to creep quietly out of the big ocean and slide undetected into my small pond without anyone really caring I had gone, but all of a sudden I was getting more attention than a Hezbollah float in the Rose Parade.

Oh Lord, don’t do this to me. Don’t take it all away.

I looked at my watch. It was a little before ten-thirty. Since Dollar and I weren’t supposed to meet until eleven, I still had half an hour to kill, maybe a little more if Dollar showed up as late as he usually did.

If Howard and Dollar really were up to something, there would almost certainly be some hint of it in Howard’s case files. I could probably find it if I looked carefully, at least I could now that I knew what I was looking for, and there was time to look before Dollar showed up. What could it hurt?

In the lobby of the United Center a gray half-light illuminated a sleepy-looking security guard flipping through a newspaper behind a wooden desk. I walked to the elevators and pushed the button, but the guard never even glanced at me. Like most Thai security guards he probably wouldn’t have bothered to look up if I had ridden an elephant into the building.

On the fifteenth floor, I walked to the glass doors at the end of the hall where the big gold letters were dramatically backlit against a stark white wall:

DUNNE, ANDERSON, LORD amp; AMPORNPHAKDI

INTERNATIONAL ATTORNEYS AND COUNSELORS AT LAW

I did work fairly regularly for Dollar’s firm and I kept a tiny cubbyhole of my own there to avoid dragging client files back and forth to my office at Sasin, so I had a key. I took it out, bent down, and turned it in the floor lock. When I did, for a moment I thought I heard voices coming from somewhere inside.

It seemed unlikely anyone was there unless Dollar had shown up early after all, and that seemed really unlikely. When the lock snapped over I stood and pushed the door open and waited silently for a moment, listening, but I heard nothing else. I decided I must have been mistaken. I closed the door behind me and relocked it.

My office was the first door down the hallway to the left, just past the black marble counter manned during the workweek by two receptionists. It was a tiny windowless cell situated in the inside portion of the hallway ring, an area mostly set aside for toilets, storage, and a kitchen. I flipped on the lights and settled into my chair, swiveling around and pulling open the bottom drawer of the big cabinet file behind my desk where I kept my working files.