Laundry Man

Manny ignored my question. “Can you leave now?” he asked instead.

“The sooner the better.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

“Sure. Let me go home and change and I’ll meet you-”

“Forget it,” Manny interrupted. “Now means now. They know you came to see me last night. They probably know I’m talking to you now. I’m not going to fuck around, let them get set up, then put my lot in danger.”

“I can’t go anywhere in these sweaty jogging clothes, Manny. And Anita was still asleep when I left. I’ve got to at least tell her where I’m going.”

“You tell her nothing. The less she knows, the better off she is.” Manny produced a cell phone from somewhere. “I’ll get some clothes for you.”

“I’ve got to talk to Anita,” I said. “I can’t just disappear.”

Manny shook his head.

“I’ll get a message to her that there’s some kind of business emergency. Now go take a piss or something while I get the rest of this shit fixed for you. I’ll be waiting for you out front in five minutes. You’re not there, I’m gone.”

THIRTY EIGHT

I washed my face and dried off as well as I could in a men’s toilet and ten minutes later I was at the entrance to the Polo Club buckling myself into the passenger seat of Manny’s Porsche which was exactly the color of a ripe lemon. Before I was even done Manny accelerated out the main gate past the poker-faced security guard, and still in second gear swung south on Wireless Road.

“Why are you doing this, Manny?” I asked.

Manny said nothing.

“Regardless,” I went on after a moment, “I want you to know I really appreciate it.”

“Wait till you find what happens to you, mate. Then you decide how much you appreciate it.”

A blue-and-white city bus chugged away from the curb in front of us. Manny corkscrewed around it with two practiced flicks of his wrists, downshifted, pulled a hard left into Rama IV Road, and headed east. Manny didn’t appear inclined to offer any indication where we were going so I sat back and awaited developments.

“I’ve set everything up to get you to Phuket on the quiet,” he eventually said without looking at me. “You were right about that. He’s holed up down there.”

“Okay.”

“After that some of my people will show you where this wanker is, but that’s all I’m going to do.”

“Fine.”

“Even then, if there’s some kind of a cock up…”

Manny didn’t finish the thought, but I got the point anyway.

“I understand.”

“You’ve got to do every fucking thing my people tell you to do. Every fucking thing. We clear on that, mate?”

“We’re clear,” I said.

I settled back and folded my arms, placing myself entirely in Manny’s hands. Strangely, that felt like a completely sensible thing to do.

An island resort off the coast of Thailand about five hundred miles to the south of Bangkok, Phuket is set in the turquoise splendor of the Andaman Sea and soaked by sunshine nearly year-round. It’s a glamorous, alluring vacation hideaway that has become justly famed among sailors, golfers, skin divers, and social glitterati all over the world.

Phuket has also attained a certain kind of fame among another quite different group-international criminals on the lam. The weather is good, the living is easy, the food is terrific, and the women are, well, Thai. Best of all, if the local police unaccountably notice them at all, rascals on the run are generally offered the option of making a modest contribution to the authorities in order to renew their invisibility. Most of the world seems to think of Thailand as not much more than an asylum for the morally impaired anyway-it’s the cuisine and the sex, the popular theory goes-so what better place is there for a scoundrel to lie low?

Morning traffic was building as we took the ramp up to the expressway. Still rolling, Manny flipped a note toward the tollbooth, downshifted, and accelerated away. I tilted my head back and listened to the distinctive, high-pitched whine of his Porsche running up through the gears. Manny cradled the black, leather-covered steering wheel in his palms like a man entirely at home with the little car. His elbows slightly bent, his hands in the approved racing positions of ten o’clock and two o’clock, he snapped his elbows right and left as he dodged from lane to lane.

Manny was in the far right lane as we took the long curve just past the Din Daeng intersection and turned north toward the old airport, but I wasn’t particularly surprised when he abruptly shot across three lanes of traffic and roared off onto an unmarked connector road that I knew would eventually lead back to the new southbound expressway link. We weren’t going to the airport. I had been pretty certain of that from the beginning.

“I’m only fucking around,” Manny said as if he were reading my mind.

The tall limestone column of the Victory Monument flashed by on our left and Manny loosed a blast from the Porsche’s air horn at a motorcyclist who started to cross in front of us.

“These guys are pros. If they’re on you, we won’t lose them like this, but it’ll look like we’re bloody well trying.” Manny patted the dashboard of the Porsche with affection. “We’ll keep their attention right here for a while.”

Call me crazy, but I had always thought that when you were trying to lose somebody the last thing you wanted was to keep their attention on you. On the other hand, what did I know about such things compared to a guy like Manny?

“Fuck you, you cocksuckers!” he suddenly screamed, slamming both big hands against the wheel so hard I was afraid he would break it off the column. “I’m too good for any of you bleedin’ wankers!” He slammed his hands down again, harder, and this time the whole car rocked.

A blue Toyota pickup with a half-dozen kids sliding around in the bed began to drift slowly into the middle lane right at us, its exhaust pipe burping puffs of purple-black smoke. I involuntarily leaned back in my seat, but Manny flicked his elbows and blew right by the truck in without slowing down. He turned north on Rama VI Road, made a U-turn through the parking lot in front of the Ministry of Finance, then took Sawankhalok Road south past Chitralada Palace. Just across from the Royal Turf Club, he swung into the garage reserved for officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Fishing a laminated card out of the glove box, he thrust it at one of the two battle- dressed soldiers blocking the entrance. While they examined the card, I examined the M-16s hanging across their chests.

After only a second or two, the guard handed the card back to Manny. He took a couple of quick steps away from the Porsche while muttering something under his breath to the other guard, then both of them cracked to attention and snapped their right hands to their helmets in salute. Manny ignored them and roared into the garage. He cut straight across the bottom floor to the exit and, accompanied by another flurry of salutes from another pair of heavily armed sentries, shot out of the garage again into Sri Ayutthaya Road. I started to ask him why he had a pass to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs garage, particularly one that seemed to merit such deference from guys carrying really big guns, but then decided I didn’t really want to know.

Manny bumped in and out of a couple of other parking garages, tooled around the Parliament building a couple of times, and after checking his watch, headed south through the tree-lined residential streets of the oldest part of the city. Soon after that the Grand Palace came into view. The red-and-green rooflines of its fairy-tale structures shimmered like a mirage in the wispy morning sun and the fragments of colored glass embedded in the high walls glinted as fiercely as the precious stones they appeared to be.

Inside those parapets had once been the mysterious core of the fabled Siamese empire, but these days there were only mobs of footsore tourists wilting in Bangkok’s customary heat and humidity. Regardless, narrow