LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (40 page)

“It’s so beautiful here,” Karsarkis said very softly. “I could stay in this place forever.”

I didn’t know exactly what I had been expecting Karsarkis to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.

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
shit
out of me. You’re well known and I’m sure you realize that. I’ve even seen pictures of you in magazines and newspapers. That’s why I recognized you.”

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,” Karsarkis 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.”

That’ll be the day,
I thought to myself, but I just nodded.

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 of 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
that
meant so I just nodded mutely.

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 common helplessness.

Then bus cut back into its own lane, whipped past us, and we were spared. The moment ended. I would never feel that close to my father again.

There at the bar of the Boathouse, looking at the stool where Karsarkis had been sitting and the drink he had abandoned, a feeling came back to me that was just like the one I’d had on that long-ago day: exhilaration intertwined with onrushing ruin. It was a strange reaction, I know, and at the time I dismissed the feeling that flooded over me then as nothing more than a freak misconnection of a few synapses of memory run amuck. It was only later, looking back on everything that happened afterwards, that I could see how wrong I had been.

The feeling that came over me that day in Phuket had not been a memory at all.

It was a premonition.

KILLING PLATO

“YOU LOOK AS
if you’ve seen a ghost, my darling.” Anita glanced at the Campari and soda on the bar. “Is that for me?”

“You can have it if you want,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis ordered it, but he didn’t drink any of it.”

I inclined my head in the direction where Karsarkis and his entourage had just disappeared.

“He just left,” I added.

Anita sat down on the stool Karsarkis had vacated and crossed her legs at the knee. Arranging her skirt, she pushed the Campari to the back of the bar and studied me closely.

“What happened while I was gone, Jack? You’re staring at me like I just turned into Whoopi Goldberg.”

I was still trying to decide how to explain what had happened in such a way Anita might actually believe it when she unerringly zeroed in on my uncertainty. But then she jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“Which old girlfriend of yours is here, Jack?” Anita craned her neck theatrically around the room. “Are you going to introduce us?”

Before I could muster a response to that, the hostess walked up carrying two red and gold covered menus.

“I have a table for you now,” she smiled.

Then the hostess caught the set of Anita’s features and stopped smiling. She glanced from Anita to me and back again.

“Do you still want a table?”

“Of course we do, my dear.” Anita patted the girl on her forearm. “My husband is just trying to come up with some kind of a story to explain away his slightly sordid past.”

When I stood up, the hostess backed away and shifted her eyes around the room as if she were searching for help, then turned and scurried off toward a table on the far side of the dining room. By the time Anita and I got to it, the hostess had already abandoned two menus and fled back to the safety of her station by the door.

“Nice going,” I said as I pulled out Anita’s chair for her. “Now that girl probably thinks I’m a pimp on holiday.”

Anita said nothing. She turned her full attention to the menu and appeared to lose all interest in whatever might be on my mind. She appeared to, but I knew better. Anita was a master of the technique used by all the best television interviewers. She asked a question, and she waited for the answer. Then after you had answered whatever she had asked, she waited some more in complete silence, which naturally got you to thinking you hadn’t given a very good answer or perhaps you had left something out.

That was when you started talking again, usually without thinking very much before you did, and while you were rambling around trying to find something new to say that would satisfy her enough to get her to go on to the next question . . . BAM! . . . that was when she got what she needed to kill you.

I knew all that, but I decided to take a chance anyway. What I had to tell Anita was just too good to wait any longer. I pushed my menu to one side and took a deep breath.

“Please listen to me carefully, Anita, because I’m being completely serious here. I did not see an old girlfriend. I saw Plato Karsarkis. I walked into the bar while you were in the bathroom and he was standing there talking on a mobile phone. I sat down and a couple of minutes later he walked over, introduced himself, and took the stool next to me.”

Anita didn’t react. She didn’t even look up from her menu.

“It’s true,” I said, thinking to myself how pathetic I sounded when I did.

There was a short silence.

“I know I had lobster last night,” Anita finally said, “but Phuket lobster is so wonderful. What do you think? Should I have lobster again?”

“Anita, I am telling you exactly what happened when you were in the bathroom. Plato Karsarkis was here.”

“And he walked over and introduced himself.”

“Yes.”

“To you.”

“Yes.”

“Did he say why?”

“He told me he had heard of me.”

Anita finally looked up from her menu, but her expression remained neutral.

“He’d heard of you?”

“Yes. He said he’d heard I had a first-rate legal mind.”

Helpless before the male compulsion to brag to an attractive woman, actually to almost any woman, I ventured a bit further down that road before I could stop myself.

“He said I was pretty well known in certain circles.”

Anita looked back down again at her menu.

“Then perhaps I
will
have the lobster,” she said. “You certainly ought to be able to afford it.”

“Anita, I’m telling you I just had a conversation with Plato Karsarkis right over there at that bar.”

I gestured pointlessly across the room and I felt suitably foolish as soon as I had done it.

“I thought he was supposed to be dead,” Anita said, glancing up again, but only with her eyes.

“Some people think so,” I said, “but obviously he isn’t.”

“And what is Plato Karsarkis doing in Phuket?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

I had no difficulty at all understanding Anita’s conviction that I was pulling her leg. Plato Karsarkis was the most notorious international corporate criminal since Marc Rich had scammed a billion dollars and rented the Prime Minister of Israel to lean on his buddy Bill Clinton to get himself pardoned. What’s more, Karsarkis was famously secretive, legendarily elusive, and so stories had it, constantly attended by a squad of Irish bodyguards widely said to be provided by the military wing of the IRA for which Karsarkis did a few favors from time to time in return. Anita knew very well that a few months before, Plato Karsarkis had vanished off the face of the earth and hadn’t been seen by anyone since.

Why
wouldn’t
Anita think I was joking? Even I was having a little trouble believing this had really happened.