SEVENTEEN
I try to rustle up a tennis match every now and then to fight the good fight against onrushing decrepitude, but it’s usually difficult to find anyone in Bangkok who wants to play tennis. Men in Thailand mostly play golf. That generally means lolling around a course for half a day drinking beer with your pals while one eighteen-year-old girl scurries around holding an umbrella over you and another drags your heavy golf bag. Breaking a sweat isn’t part of the deal.
Finding a place to play tennis in Bangkok is a challenge, too. Other than the courts at a couple of snobby private clubs where you have to pay a generous bribe to the membership committee to get in, the few tennis courts in the city are pretty crummy. They’re usually not much more than cracked and buckled slabs of concrete wedged between high-rise buildings, not so much athletic facilities as parking lots with nets that generate income for the landowners until they get some financing together to build yet another apartment tower.
So as an alternative form of exercise I try to run a few miles every now and then. The big problem there is that places to run in the city are at almost as much of a premium as tennis courts. That is, unless you have a particular affection for climbing in and out of potholes while playing tag with thirty-year-old Chinese buses driven by teenagers zonked out of their mind on uppers.
Queen’s Park isn’t very big, but it is one of the better places in Bangkok to run. It’s quiet and pleasant, at least it is if you measure it by the standard of the few other public parks in Bangkok, which is pretty modest. Sandwiched between the Emporium, the city’s ritziest shopping complex, and some nondescript commercial buildings including a walled compound belonging to the Iranian Embassy, it amounts to a couple of acres of concrete pathways, a little grass, some trees, and a few fountains with a small lake in the middle of it all. The place actually feels pretty much like a real park, if you don’t think about it too much.
I parked on the street and walked into Queen’s Park from the Sukhumvit Road side, looking around for my usual jogging companion. Near the back of the park, I spotted Jello bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet while he watched some kids playing an energetic if not particularly skillful game of basketball.
Technically Jello was just another Thai police captain and the Thai police had amp;mdroello bounca lot of captains, but as long as I had known him he had also been a senior member of the Economic Crimes Investigation Division. It was a position that gave him a considerable amount of personal clout since ECID was primarily an intelligence operation. Most cops concerned themselves with who was doing what to whom, and occasionally even why. Jello focused more on how much they were getting paid for it and what they did with the money. Since money in Thailand was more important than life, it made him a key player in almost everything of any consequence that went down anywhere in the entire country.
I had never been entirely certain what the source of Jello’s colorful nickname was. For a while I had assumed his rotund physique had something to do with it, the image of his belly quivering like a bowl of jello coming easily to mind whenever we ran together. However lately I had gotten the impression the name might have gone all the way back to his childhood when he had been sent away to a boarding school in Connecticut. I wondered if hidden within it was one of those scarring cruelties most of us could recall from our childhood but would rather not. If there was, he never mentioned it.
Jello must have seen me coming out of the corner of his eye. He glanced back over his shoulder when I was a good fifty feet away and gave me a wave. I tossed out a little salute and broke into a jog toward him.
“You’re late,” he said when I got there.
“I am,” I agreed, jogging in place next to him.
“Aren’t you at least going to say you’re sorry.”
“I am not. Any other preliminaries?”
“Guess not.”
“Then you’re ready for a few miles?”
“Let’s do it.”
“What you think? Five today? Maybe ten?”
“Whatever, old man.”
I knew perfectly well some kind of warm-up routine before running was almost mandatory now that I wasn’t a young hot shot anymore, but most of the time I couldn’t be bothered so I just ran slowly for the first half a mile or so and hoped after that everything would take care of itself.
A pebbled concrete walkway circled the small lake in the middle of the park and we jogged slowly through the first circuit without conversation. Jello was a man of few words, which to my way of thinking made him the perfect companion for a run, maybe the perfect companion for every occasion. On the other hand our sporadic runs together were also a good time to talk about things that needed talking about. Sometimes he had questions for me. Sometimes I had questions for him. The lifeblood of Thailand was favors done and debits accumulated. Jello and I had kept our personal accounts pretty much in balance, but this afternoon it was my turn to apply for a little withdrawal.
We picked up our pace on the second circuit and were moving pretty well before I finally broke the silence.
“Want to play word association?” I asked.
Jello turned his head slowly and looked at me, but he didn’t say anything.
“It works this way-”
“I know how it works,” he said.
“Okay, good. Then I’ll say a word, and you tell me the first word that comes into your mind.”
Another slow back and forth swivel of Jello’s head. Another silence.
“Herey'›quo;
A nanny in a white uniform was pushing a baby carriage down the middle of the walkway and I dodged around her, glancing quickly at Jello to see if he had noticed my phenomenally graceful sidestep. If he had, he was concealing it nicely.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Stop asking if I’m ready.”
“Okay, then, here’s the word,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis.”
“That’s two words.”
“Think of it as one and you’ll be okay.”
“Still two words.”
“Don’t be a fucking pedant, Jello. Just tell me the first thing that comes into you mind when you hear the words Plato Karsarkis.”
We ran on for several minutes after that without either of us saying anything else, which was pretty much exactly what I thought would happen. Flocks of pigeons had taken up residence on the walkway ahead of us and as we bore down on them they rose into the air and dispersed like puffs of brown-gray smoke, their cooing and flapping barely audible in the rumble of the city around us.
“So,” Jello eventually said, “I gather you’ve heard.”
“You’re supposed to give me the
“Fuck you.”
“That’s two-”
“Just lay it out,” Jello interrupted. “You’ve got something to tell me about the guy or you wouldn’t have brought him up.”
A heavy woman with an appalling blonde dye job walked straight into us swinging her elbows so wildly she nearly pushed us off the pavement. I gathered she was a tourist since she was wearing a conical-shaped straw hat she had apparently bought in some street market along with a red hill-tribe vest. No local would ever wear a get-up like that.
“I hear Karsarkis is in Phuket,” I said.
“Bullshit, Professor. You’re fishing.”
“That’s what I heard.”
“From who.”
“From Plato Karsarkis,” I said, keeping my voice as empty as I could. “When Anita and I went to his house for
