the upheavals of modern life into a brew of ambivalence that beguiled the Western soul.
Eventually I gave up thinking about it all and went to bed. Anita still hadn’t come home and I lay there wide- awake, helpless to turn off the conversation with Tommy. There was something in it I was missing, I was certain of that; but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was no matter how often I played it back in my mind.
There was at least one thing that was clear enough, however: I was up to my ass in something I didn’t understand and I was sinking fast.
I was pretty sure nobody but Dollar Dunne or Barry Gale could tell me what was actually going on. Other people might have part of it-people like Stanley and Beth and Tommy-but I was certain now that only Dollar and Barry had all of it. I had to find at least one of them, but which one should I start looking for? Maybe it didn’t matter. I had no better idea where to start looking for one than I did the other.
Actually, to tell the truth, my prospects of finding either of them didn’t seem all that great. I noticed Barry hadn’t bothered to leave his number with me when we had met at Took Lae Dee and, what with him being dead and all, I doubted he would be in the book. And as for Dollar, from the way his house had been ransacked, I didn’t figure he had left a forwarding address with anyone either.
There had been something in the way Tommy spoke about Barry Gale that left me with the feeling he knew exactly where Barry was, but from the message he had delivered that evening I was equally sure he wasn’t going to tell me. After all, how could Tommy
That was a pretty funny line. At least it was for a Thai spy.
I tried again to get to sleep, but there was something in my conversation with Tommy that worked at me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I just couldn’t get my hands around whatever it was long enough to grab on to anything solid.
A few minutes later, thinking again what a funny crack that had been, there it was.
I jumped out of bed, pulled on some shorts and a T-shirt, slipped into a pair of loafers, and went straight down to the garage.
I got into the Volvo and lowered the top, and then I got out again and tried to stand exactly where I had seen the man in the dark blue suit standing when I had caught him leaning over my car in the faculty garage. When I bent forward just the way he had, my hands ended up where the steering column passed underneath the dashboard. I ran them carefully over the bottom of the column and up under the dash. Now that I knew what I was looking for, it didn’t take me long to find it.
The man had hidden the device behind the ignition wiring. I carefully pulled it loose and stood there weighing it in my hand. It was a tiny black plastic box half the size of a cell phone. At a glance, it even looked as if it might be a part of the car, but it had a small magnet attached that held it firmly to the back of the dashboard and I didn’t think Volvo put its cars together with magnets.
I examined the little box, wondering what its range was. That was probably why I had never seen anybody following me. They didn’t have to stay close enough to me to be seen. Whoever had planted the tracking device was probably just holed up somewhere with their feet on a desk, drinking lousy coffee and watching a little red dot crawl around a big wall map. Tommy had seemed genuinely puzzled when I accused him of having me followed and now I understood why.
I stood there in the silent garage holding the gadget for a while, then I walked down a few parking slots, squatted behind a big Mercedes with heavily tinted windows, and snapped the thing up into a hollow in its rear bumper. I rattled it a couple of times to make certain it was secure, then I stood up and wiped my hands on my T- shirt. The Mercedes belonged to an elderly man I only knew enough to nod to, but rumor had it he was a local godfather who controlled a lot of the underground casino action in Bangkok. There was also a widely-held view that he had a great many interesting political and military connections.
My neighbor’s travels would probably prove highly entertaining for whoever it was sitting out there watching that little red dot. I chuckled to myself about that all the way back upstairs.
TUESDAY IS MY busiest teaching day. Two lectures, a seminar on developing effective financial plans for start-up companies, and scheduled office hours for students who want to come in and suck up a little keep me pretty busy all day. I threw myself energetically into all of it, hoping that it might help me to clear my head, but whatever else I was doing my thoughts kept coming right back to the problem at hand.
I had to find either Barry or Dollar and work out what the hell was going on. If I didn’t, I would keep flailing around until I drowned or somebody put me out of my misery. It really was just that simple.
Talking to Stanley had been interesting, and listening to Tommy’s threats had been a real kick, but it seemed to me that I had been doing very little recently other than talking and listening. Something a lot more energetic was clearly called for if I was going to get this monkey off my back.
The time had come for me to hit the streets. To roll up my sleeves. To start digging. Any of those cliches would cover it fine. The idea was simple enough. If I really wanted to find either Dollar or Barry, I was going to have to get off my ass and do it.
The only real problem was I had no idea at all as to how to go about finding somebody who didn’t want to be found. Fortunately, I thought I had a way to cover that. Someone who was no doubt a lot better at that sort of thing than I was came to mind.
Mango Manny probably had eyes and ears in places most people didn’t even know were places. I didn’t know what Darcy had told Manny about me and I couldn’t guess what he might be prepared to do to help me out, but I figured there was only one way to find out for sure.
When my last student appointment of the day was over I went home and made myself a tuna sandwich and some iced tea. Anita was still at her studio so I polished both of them off sitting alone at the kitchen table and flipping through the
It might be a little early to check out the action, but it was exactly the right time to find out if a semiretired British hit man with connections to all the wrong people might be willing to do me a little favor.
THIRTY FOUR
Q bar is a stylish two-story structure of raw concrete and black glass set off by itself on a quiet back soi in Bangkok’s fashionable Sukhumvit district. Half obscured by groves of gum trees and tall stands of spindly bamboo, it looks less like a bar than the home of a very hip witch nestled away deep in a cartoon forest.
Nevertheless, a bar it is, although hardly just another pedestrian saloon. The place is a shifting kaleidoscope of gorgeous Thai women and flamboyant gay men, flat-eyed Chinese millionaires and hard Israeli hustlers, chubby Arab conmen and twitchy German smugglers, eager American drug runners and expressionless Japanese gangsters. Q Bar is nothing less than a Whitman’s sampler of the international riffraff that Bangkok sucks up like a vacuum cleaner, and by eleven every night it is crammed top to bottom with the beautiful people. Everyone who is chichi enough to count for anything in Bangkok has to turn up at least once a week or risk losing his standing.
It wasn’t yet quite eight o’clock when I bumped the Volvo over the gravel of the parking lot across the street from Q Bar. The lot was almost empty so I parked in a dark corner away back from the street. There weren’t that many Volvo convertibles in Bangkok and I wanted to avoid advertising my presence too blatantly to anyone who might happen to be passing by.
After I locked the car, I walked across the narrow soi and up the walkway that led past a parked rickshaw to Q Bar’s improbably turreted entry. I made my way up the narrow staircase just behind the bar and found a table to myself off on one side of the large outdoor terrace on the second floor. I remembered that the last time I had been there everybody had been puffing cigarettes like it was an entrance requirement and by eleven the interior had become one huge blue cloud. Most of the year, sitting outside in Bangkok’s humid night air wasn’t most people’s idea of a good time, but at Q Bar it sure beat the alternative.
