I ordered a beer and waited. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes Mango Manny slid into the chair opposite mine.

He was dressed quite differently from the way he had been at the Polo Club and I wondered if he might have been tweaking the cheeks of the local high society types a bit back then with those gangster duds. Tonight Manny wore a dark gray tropical-weight wool suit that must have cost at least five thousand dollars and a crisp, white- on-white dress shirt without a tie. Then I registered the thick gel coating his hair and the diamond ring on his left pinkie and I decided that Manny still left the same general impression that he had at the Polo Club: a low-fat Marlon Brando with a good tailor.

“What you drinking that Singha shit for?” he muttered as he sat down. “Tastes like fooking horse piss.”

Manny snapped out something to a hovering busboy. I had never heard Thai spoken with a cockney accent before and the combination produced an interesting if utterly unintelligible sound. The boy apparently had no trouble understanding Manny however because he nodded and disappeared. Moments later a white-jacketed waiter materialized. He poured Manny a cup of tea-white, no sugar, in a china cup that looked to me like Wedgwood-and then whisked away my Singha and replaced it with a Corona that had a dewy slice of lime tucked into its long neck. The bottle was so cold that the condensation formed a little pool on the metal table before I even touched it.

Manny took a pack of Marlboros out of the inside pocket of his jacket. He offered it to me, but I shook my head and sipped at my beer while he lit one. When he returned the pack to his jacket and I was certain I had his full attention, I put the Corona down and folded my forearms on the table.

“Darcy told me to come see you if I ever needed help, Manny,” I said. “I need some help.”

He nodded, drawing on his cigarette, then he sipped tentatively at his tea and nodded again in what I took to be a gesture of permission for me to continue.

While I told Manny the story of Barry Gale and the Asian Bank of Commerce, he sat quietly and puffed on his Marlboro, taking an occasional sip of tea. At the mention of Tommy’s nocturnal appearance in my apartment and his parting threat, Manny raised his eyebrows slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

I intended to tell Manny everything. I assumed he knew Dollar since everyone else seemed to, and I was even going to tell him about the apparent connection I had stumbled on between Dollar and Barry Gale, but somewhere in the middle of the telling, I changed my mind. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Manny-frankly I wasn’t absolutely sure whether I could trust him or not in spite of the weight that Darcy’s endorsement carried-it just seemed to me that keeping a few cards in my hand wouldn’t really hurt anything.

I wound up my tale with a description of the tracking device I had found in my car and I finished talking at exactly the same time Manny finished his Marlboro. He took out the pack back out of his jacket and shook out another, tapping it against the table a couple of times before lighting it. This time he left the pack lying on the table next to his cup. I took that as a good sign.

“All this shit got anything to do with that geezer they found under the bridge?” he asked.

“No.” I bit my lip slightly. “At least, not as far as I can see right now.”

I was prepared to edit the truth a little, but I hated flat-out lying to a man whose help I was asking for.

Manny stared directly at me, his face as flat as a dinner plate, and he continued to watch me while he took a long hit on the fresh Marlboro. He almost looked to me like he was sniffing the air for the scent of danger, and I wondered briefly if he had found it. Apparently not, because before long he shifted his eyes away from my face and focused somewhere out over my shoulder.

“So what you want from me, mate?”

“I need to find either Dollar Dunne or Barry Gale. Darcy says your people have the whole country wired. I was hoping you might be willing to help me.”

“I thought you said you weren’t involved. Now you want to find these buggers?”

“Look, Manny, think about it. I’m right in the middle of something here and I don’t know what it is or how to get out of it. When you start discovering surveillance devices in your car, you know you’re on somebody’s shit list. I can’t think of anybody but Dollar or Barry who can tell me whose list I’m on and how to get off it.”

Manny looked doubtful. The tea had grown cold and he pushed it aside with the back of his hand.

“Where these geezers gone?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Somebody always knows.”

“It’s not me. That’s why I’m here.”

“You think they’re together.”

“No, probably not.”

“But you saying you got no idea at all where either one of them might be?”

“Well…”

Many leaned back, folded his arms and waited.

“There’s some other stuff I didn’t tell you about,” I said after a few moments.

Manny nodded. He looked anything but surprised.

“I’ve got a hunch-and this is just a hunch, Manny-that one or both of them might be in Phuket.”

“Little birdie must a told you that, huh?”

I sighed. So much for keeping a few cards in my hand.

I explained to Manny about the connection I had found between Dollar and Barry Gale, and I told him what I had heard about Dollar laundering money for American intelligence. I didn’t tell him where I had heard it or what Stanley had said the money was going to be used for, and I noticed that he didn’t ask. Manny was a smart guy, all right. There were some things that smart guys didn’t really want to know.

But I did tell him about all the American Express receipts from Phuket I’d found in Dollar’s garbage and the package of property transfers that Darcy thought were fakes.

“It might mean that Dollar was using a property development scam in Phuket to launder money through the Asian Bank of Commerce and that Barry was hooked into it,” I said. “So maybe one or both of them have gone to ground somewhere down there.”

Manny didn’t say anything.

“It’s pretty thin,” I admitted.

“Bugger thin. It’s fooking transparent.”

“Yeah, well, it’s all I got.”

Manny’s eyes shifted off mine and were still for a long moment before he spoke again. “You know, you’re the second bloke today who’s come around asking me about these tossers,” he said, still not looking at me.

“You’re kidding me.”

“I look like Mr. Bean to you or what, mate?”

“Sorry, Manny, just a figure of speech.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t say anything else.

“So who else was looking for them?” I finally prompted.

Manny said nothing. I gathered I was asking him to break his personal code of ethics, and I also gathered that he wasn’t going to do it.

“Then what can you tell me?”

Manny looked pained. “I hear there’s a shooter looking for your boys.”

“Both of them?”

Manny nodded.

Somebody was looking for both Barry and Dollar, presumably to kill them? Who the hell could that be?

I couldn’t imagine that Jimmy Kicks would want Dollar dead — as far as I knew, Jimmy didn’t even know who Dollar was — and it seemed equally unlikely he would want Barry dead, at least not yet. Jimmy hadn’t found out where the ABC’s money had gone yet and he would certainly want to know that before he said goodbye to Barry.

It seemed just as unlikely to be the Chinese. Archie Ward had said they were unhappy that their money had disappeared, of course, but they probably wouldn’t be trying to kill anyone yet either. With Howard already gone, if they killed Dollar and Barry, too, then the only person left alive they might figure could find their money for them would be…

Son of a bitch,” I muttered when I suddenly saw where that line of reasoning was

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