Turning my head, I looked where his eyes were pointing.
The Boathouse was at the edge of the beach in the back of a deep cove on Phuket’s west coast. Just on the other side of floor-to-ceiling shutters propped open to the ocean breeze, a wide swath of nearly white sand lay nestled in a U-shaped fringe of spindly palm trees. It was almost dark, but not quite, and a haze of pewter streaked with shards of mango yellow filtered tentatively over the beach like a feeble fog. A lone woman with a black sarong wrapped around her bathing suit-foreign, I thought, but at this distance I couldn’t quite tell-ambled along the surf line, kicking her bare feet through the shallow water.
I glanced back at Karsarkis. He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else. I should have waited him out, I know, but I didn’t.
“Look,” I said, taking a deep breath and plunging in, “I’m sure I would remember if we’d met, and I don’t think-”
“We’ve never met. I just recognize you.”
“Recognized me?”
“Modesty bores me, and false modesty bores the
While it was true I had once been associated in various ways with some big players in international finance, I certainly didn’t think of myself as well known. I might be recognized here and there by a few people who moved in similar circles, but I really didn’t think those circles included the sort of people who breathed the rarified air where Plato Karsarkis flew.
“There aren’t many other Americans living out here,” Karsarkis went on before I could figure out what to say. “So I just thought I ought to introduce myself.”
“There are a lot of foreigners living in Thailand,” I said.
I realized how petulant that sounded as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but I couldn’t call them back.
Karsarkis didn’t seem to notice or, if he did, to care.
“Yeah, but it’s mostly Europeans and a few Australians,” he said. “Not that many Americans in Thailand. Why do you think that is?”
“I gather most Americans must like it well enough back home.”
“Then you still think of the States as your home?”
It was starting to sound like we were going to have one of those expatriate conversations I’d had a thousand times since I’d been living in Thailand. Modesty might be what bored Karsarkis. Expat conversations were what bored me.
“Look,” I said, “I live in Thailand now and as far as I know I’m going to keep living here. I really don’t know what else to tell you.”
“There’s something I’ve always wondered about,” Karrt, amp;rdquosarkis continued as if I had not spoken. “When Europeans or Australians live in a country that isn’t their own, nobody thinks a thing about it. But when Americans chose to live in another country, people keep asking us why.”
“A lot of people seem to think that Americans who live overseas are on the run from something.”
As soon as I said it I went silent and looked away in embarrassment. Karsarkis chuckled at my discomfort.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You didn’t offend me. We Americans need to stick together.”
Karsarkis’ ethnic brotherhood routine was wearing a little thin. I was pretty sure I’d read once he had been born in London of an Irish mother and a Greek father and had only become an American citizen when his lawyers advised him that it was in his best financial interest. On the other hand, I knew Karsarkis had a pretty compelling reason for not being in the United States right then and I figured it would be indelicate to delve too deeply into the whole issue of nationality and residence so I said nothing.
Karsarkis smiled. At least I think he did.
“Can I call you Jack?” he asked.
“If you like.”
“Excellent. Then you should call me Plato.”
Karsarkis took his hand away from the Campari without having drunk a sip and folded his arms across his chest.
“Everybody says you’re one of the smart guys, Jack. A first-rate legal mind.”
“I don’t practice law anymore. I just teach.”
“Yeah, I heard that. At Chulalongkorn University up in Bangkok.”
“That’s right.”
“Pretty good place?”
“Pretty good.”
“But you don’t teach at the law school, do you?”
“No. At the Sasin Institute. I teach international business.”
“You speak Thai that well?”
“My Thai’s okay, I guess, but the courses at Sasin are all in English so it doesn’t really matter.”
“You like teaching?”
“Yes, I like it a lot.”
What in the world was going on here? Karsarkis sounded like a man interviewing me for a job. I tried to read his eyes, but they had gone flat and in the fading light there at the end of the bar I could see nothing in them at all.
“You ever miss the action?” he asked.
“Action?”
“That stuff you used to do. All the hotshot stuff that made you famous.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t say anything at all. Karsarkis didn’t look like he really cared. Abruptly he stood up and gave the room a quick scan.
“I enjoyed talking to you, Jack, but I’ve got to go now.”
I glanced around to see if something had spooked Karsarkis. There were a few people scattered around the bar, a few others in the dining room, but as far as I could tell there were no SWAT teams storming the place. Maybe Karsarkis just couldn’t think o yquo;t tof anything else to say to someone he barely knew and was tired of keeping the conversation going. I could certainly understand that.
I stood up, too, and we shook hands again.
“I’ll stay in touch,” Karsarkis said.
I had no idea what
When Karsarkis turned away and started for the door, a well-built, sandy-haired man of nondescript appearance and indeterminate age stood up from a chair by the wall and fell into step next to him. Almost immediately two other men materialized from somewhere and closed up behind them, covering their backs. I had assumed Karsarkis was alone. Now that I thought about it, I realized how foolish that was of me.
After Karsarkis had gone, I just sat on my stool looking straight ahead, too stupefied by what had happened to do anything else. Then all at once an incredibly vivid memory swept over me.
I had been about seven or eight. My father and I were driving somewhere, although I have long forgotten where, in his green and black Buick, a racy two-door model with a line of chromed ports down each side of the long, narrow hood. I sat on the bench seat next to him as straight and proud as my tiny stature would permit.
We were on a two-lane asphalt highway passing through dense stands of tall pine trees. A short distance ahead, a silver and white Greyhound bus pulled out to pass a tractor-trailer and shifted its whole mass into the lane directly in front of us. My head was half turned toward the road and half turned toward my father and, in the same instant I saw the bus barreling down on us, I also saw my father’s face. Although only a child, I somehow sensed that he and I were both sharing the same inexplicable thrill of onrushing menace.
As the bus drew closer and the leaping white dog on its nose grew to a terrifying size, I experienced without really knowing what I was feeling that eerily heightened state of awareness that comes from proximity to something truly dangerous. For just an instant, my father and I were frozen together, bonded to one another by our
