“Listen very carefully to me. I am only going to say this one time. I am not part of your problem. I am not part of your solution. I have a nice life here in Thailand and I am not going to screw it up. Not for Plato Karsarkis, not for you, not for anyone.”
“You really think it’s going to be that easy? You think you can just walk away from all this and that will be the end of it?”
“Yep, I do. From now on, just think of me as Switzerland.”
‹. amp;raway frop width='1em' align='justify'›“He’s reeling you in just like a big, dumb old fish, Slick,” CW shook his head, “and you don’t even know it.”
“You’ve been a cop too long, CW. You smell shit everywhere.”
“He’s settin’ you up, boy.”
“Look, this may come as a real shock to you, pal, but I’m a grown man and I make all my own choices these days. Only people who’re greedy or stupid get set up, and I’m neither.”
“Whatever you say, Slick,” CW shook his head slowly again. “Whatever you say.”
There wasn’t much more of any consequence left to talk about after that and CW seemed to lose interest in me once I had made it clear I wasn’t going to be any part of whatever he was planning. York and Parker had left while CW and I were trading insults in the back of the bar and it wasn’t very long before I wished CW a nice life and left, too.
I walked out of the Blue Lotus and back to the Holiday Inn, then I drove all the way to the hotel with the top of the jeep down. A breeze had come up from somewhere and I thought the wet night air slapping against my face might clear my head by the time I got back, but it didn’t even make a decent start. I parked the jeep in the hotel lot and walked down the hillside toward our cabin.
About the time I passed the swimming pool, still and empty in the darkness, I started wondering if maybe CW did have a point after all. There might be something sticking to my shoe that wasn’t going to be nearly as easy to scrape off as I thought.
Perhaps Switzerland was a little too much to hope for.
THE MIDDLE
“Living in a foreign country
is like being on a football team without a home field.
You’re always playing away.”
SIXTEEN
It was Monday afternoon and Anita and I had been back in Bangkok for less than a week. If there was ever a vacation glow at all, it was already pretty much gone. Something was clearly out of rhythm with Anita. I had no idea at all what it might be and I couldn’t imagine that just flat out asking her would get me very far toward finding out. Still, I had students to see and courses to teach so I wasn’t worrying a lot about it. Instead I was smoking an afternoon Montecristo in my office, feet on my desk, reviewing my notes for the next day’s lecture in my tax havens course.
The subject of tax havens was surprisingly popular with the kids. I have always thought it was probably because the sorts of places we talked about absolutely reeked with international intrigue and distant romance: places like the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Monte Carlo. Any discussion of tax havens immediately conjures up riveting stories of a world awash with drug barons tucking away narco money, terrorists laundering arms money, and third-world ministers hiding bribe money. And the idea of all those naughty people whooping it up in Monte Carlo while giving the rest of us the finger is absolute catnip to a room full of business students casting about for the quickest possible road to undreamed-of riches.
In spite of the strange vibrations Anita udehad been emitting ever since we got back, on the whole I felt pretty good. A few days of hanging out at the beach had left me with a nice tan and a clear head. Best of all, I had successfully evaded all further conversation with Anita about buying a vacation house in Phuket. I figured I just might be on a roll.
At least I figured that until about six when my telephone rang. Bun, my secretary, had already gone home for the evening so I answered it myself. Looking back, I should have let it ring.
“Hello.”
“Professor Shepherd?”
“Yes.”
“This is Sanilee Dare.”
The woman’s voice was on the breathy side, but pleasant. She spoke American-sounding English and, like her name, her accent struck me as about halfway between Thai and American. Still, I had no idea at all who she was.
“I’m sorry, but are you a student?”
The woman laughed and it was a nice laugh.
“I showed you and your wife a house in Phuket last week. I’m Nok, remember?”
She laughed again before I could say anything. “I’m devastated. Thank God most men remember me a lot better than you do.”
I apologized to the woman for not recognizing her name, but I finessed her flirty approach to reminding me who she was. That could go nowhere good.
“I have some really good news for you, Jack.”
Nok may have been Thai, but she had apparently embraced the annoying American habit of jumping right into addressing everyone by their first name at the earliest possible opportunity. I guess it didn’t really matter one way or another, but I’d always hated that and it put me in the wrong frame of mind to hear the rest of whatever she had to say.
“I’m calling about that house you and your wife were interested in,” she said. “Remember?”
Somehow I didn’t recall expressing the slightest interest in the house Nok had shown us, but I didn’t say anything. She was a real estate agent and it wouldn’t really matter to her whether I did or not.
“Well, someone called from BankThai this morning,” she continued, “and guess what? They’re willing to drop the price to fifteen million baht.”
For a moment I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly.
“To what?” I asked. “Fifty million baht?”
“No,
From eight-five million baht, nearly three million dollars, to fifteen million baht, more like four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Jeez, I was a hell of a negotiator, wasn’t I? God only knows how low the price might have gone if I’d actually opened my mouth.
“That doesn’t make any sense to me,” I said.
“Well…” Nok hesitated. “Actually, it doesn’t to me either. I never talked to anyone over there. I don’t even know how they knew you had looked at the house. A man from BankThai just called me this morning and said he had been told you were interested in the property and his instructions were to reduce the price for you. He even said the bank would be willing to loan you the full amount if you wished.”
