Laundry Man

was a little thud and then I remembered that I had shoved my cell phone into my pocket before I had left the apartment that morning, just in case Anita woke up before I got back and wondered where I was.

So why hasn’t she called?

I pulled on the polo shirt and the jeans, then I bent down and retrieved the phone. That was when I realized I had forgotten to turn it on, which might explain why I hadn’t heard from Anita. I sat there holding the phone for a moment and thought about calling her, but what was I going to tell her?

Darling, I’m riding in a bus with a bunch of phony Japanese tourists. I’m wearing some borrowed clothes and I have a.45 automatic in a bag on the seat next to me. Why? Well, it’s this way. I’m being slipped into Phuket by a semiretired British gangster so I can find a guy who’s been dead for a few years and who may be planning to shoot me. But don’t worry. I’ll be fine. And I’ll try to be home in time for dinner.

Nah, I decided. Maybe it would be better if I just waited to call Anita until things cleared up a little.

I snapped the cover of the phone shut without turning it on and tossed it into the duffle bag. Then I shoved my sweaty clothes and my running shoes in after it and zipped it up. I pulled on the Topsiders and unfolded the dark blue windbreaker to ward off the chill from the air conditioning. When I did, I saw the big yellow lettering across the back: FBI.

Very funny, Manny. Very fucking funny.

Outside the windows of the bus I watched the forest of container cranes lining the Chao Phraya River and realized we were passing the main port facilities on the river. That meant we were driving southeast. That wasn’t the direction we would be going if the bus were headed to Phuket, so I gathered I wasn’t going to Phuket overland. I settled back and wondered how Manny was going to get me there.

A little less than an hour later the bus passed through the old fishing town of Chonburi and the Gulf of Thailand came into view. Although it was flat and brown, hardly the stuff of great seascapes, the Japanese unlimbered their cameras, rushed to the right side of the bus, and started clicking frantically away. I had assumed of course that these were all Manny’s people and just part of the charade he had set up to get me out of Bangkok, but now I wasn’t so sure. They certainly looked authentic enough, pressing up against the windows and firing off their Canons and Nikons with little whoops of joy. They were either real tourists after all or this bunch was deeply into method acting.

I suddenly remembered there was a private airfield at Bang Phra, a little town just north of Chonburi, from which a flying club operated. I had been there a couple of times with friends who were members and it occurred to me that that might well be where we were headed now. Sure enough, as Bang Phra went by on our left, Thavee began to slow down. He raised his right hand above his shoulder, and without looking back, beckoned me forward. I slipped the strap of the duffle over my shoulder and walked up the aisle. I stood just behind him and balanced myself against the swaying of the bus.

“You know flying club?” Thavee asked without looking at me.

“I’ve been there.”

Thavee nodded a couple of times and bent forward to check both of his wing mirrors. As he downshifted and braked, I could see off in the distance a tattered windsock and a large blue-painted hangar with a metal roof.

“I park by hangar. Glider outside. Everybody get out to take picture with glider.”

He shot a look back over his shoulder to see if I was listening, although I couldn’t imagine what else he thought I might be doing.

“Wait for all to get away from bus, Arjan, then go inside hangar. Ike be there.”

“Are you telling me that this guy is going to fly me to Phuket in a glider?”

Thavee glanced back again and grinned.

“No problem, Arjan. You never fly in glider before?”

I shook my head.

“Then you want Thavee’s advice?”

“Sure.”

Thavee started a turn off the highway and then twisted around in the driver’s seat and gave me a long, serious look.

“Flap you arms hard, Arjan. Flap you arms hard.”

FORTY

The hangar doors were wide open. Two white gliders sat pushed against the rear wall, their wings overlapping like the carcasses of giant birds awaiting the arrival of a taxidermist. Otherwise the building was empty.

Could you actually fly to Phuket in one of these things? I had heard that gliders stayed up for hours when the conditions were right, but the only time I had seen one airborne it had been mostly going in circles and that was something I was already doing fine all on my own.

I took a few steps toward the back of the hanger and examined the two gliders more closely. They were odd aircraft, awkward and beautiful at the same time. Their fuselages were thin cylinders, just wide enough to hold two people sitting in single file under an elongated Plexiglas bubble, and their wings were long and spindly, impossibly fragile-looking. From the nose of each plane a huge steel ring extended up and forward, and I assumed that was where the tow rope was hooked up to the powered aircraft that hauled them several thousand feet into the air where they were then cut loose to make their own silent way back to earth.

While I was unhappily contemplating the place on each plane where the engines should have been, a miniature door in the right-hand wall of the hangar squeaked open. A woman leaned in and beckoned to me. She was tiny, probably weighing not more than a hundred pounds, and her gray hair was neatly bobbed. I might normally have taken the woman to be somewhere in her sixties, but the brown coveralls and black work boots she wore and the red bandana on which she was wiping her grease-stained hands made me wonder.

I walked toward her and when I got closer I saw the red stitching over the right breast pocket of her coveralls.

Ike, it said.

“Okay, hotshot,” she snapped. Let’s kick the tires and light the fires.”

Well, wasn’t that wonderful? Grandma Moses here was about to take me flying in an airplane with no engine.

“You’re Ike?” I asked.

“No son, I’m the fuckin’ Easter Bunny.”

I glanced back and forth between Ike and the two gliders for a moment, but then I gave up al hope of salvation and just pointed toward the gliders. “You want me to help you pull one of these out?”

Ike snorted in disgust and stalked away, leaving the little door standing open for me.

“Not those, hotshot,” I heard her say from somewhere outside. “We’re taking the tow plane. It’s back here.”

The tow plane was a yellow Piper Cherokee with a white stripe down its side. It looked old and a little tired and there was a big dent right in the middle of the vertical stabilizer. On the other hand, there was something about it that I liked a lot: it had an engine.

Ike did a quick walk around, wiggling the wing flaps and poking at some other parts I couldn’t identify. When she actually did kick the tires, I almost laughed out loud. Eventually, Ike pulled herself up on the wing, climbed from there into the cockpit, and strapped herself into the left seat. I followed, the duffle bag slung over my shoulder.

Strapping myself into the right-hand seat and stowing the duffle under my feet, I slammed the cabin door and snapped the bolt into what I hoped was the locked position. Ike fired the starter and a couple of minutes later she was gunning the engine and dancing down the bumpy asphalt strip. We were airborne.

The little plane climbed out quickly, its engine pulling more powerfully than I would have thought possible for its size. Below us was a monotonous configuration of brown and green sheets streaked with shards of muddy water. They were rice fields mostly: long, narrow strips laid out between widely spaced roads like the lanes in a