LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (41 page)

Anita was still studying the menu when I sensed rather than heard someone behind me. I turned my head and sure enough a man was standing there. A moment before he had not been there, and now he was, and since we were sitting all the way across the dining room, a rather long way for anyone to walk unnoticed, I couldn’t imagine where he had come from.

He was youngish with a common and forgettable face, and he was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt with dark trousers and a nondescript blue tie. He made me think of a mid-level bureaucrat at some government agency.

“I’m Mike O’Connell,” the man said, not offering his hand. “I work for Mr. Karsarkis.”

I shot Anita a triumphant glance, but she took her time looking up and missed it altogether.

Keeping his hands clasped together in front of him, the man went on in a soft voice that carried the hint of an accent I couldn’t quite place.

“Mr. Karsarkis would like to invite you to join him for dinner tomorrow night. If you’re available, he’ll send a car.”

Before I had a chance to say anything, Anita did.

“This is utterly ridiculous.” She glared at the young man and poked her forefinger in my direction. “He put you up to this and I want you to know right now I’m not going to fall for it.”

“No, ma’am, he didn’t.” Mike O’Connell didn’t seem particularly surprised by Anita’s skepticism. “Mr. Karsarkis asked me to come in here and invite you to dinner.”

“Plato Karsarkis?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“
The
Plato Karsarkis.”

“He’s the only one I know, ma’am.”

“And you seriously expect me to believe Plato Karsarkis is here in Phuket and he sent you to invite us to dinner tomorrow?”

“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Karsarkis just spoke with your husband. Hasn’t Mr. Shepherd mentioned it to you yet?”

Anita lowered her menu, closed it with exaggerated care, and put it down on the table.

“I think he might have said something to that effect, now that you mention it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I finally tagged the accent.

“You’re an American,” I said. “New York? Boston? Around there?”

The young man summoned up something close to half a smile, but I thought he seemed a bit careful about doing it and didn’t answer me.

“We’d be delighted to join Mr. Karsarkis for dinner,” Anita said all of a sudden.

I turned my face away from Karsarkis’ emissary and raised my eyebrows to get Anita’s attention. “I’m not sure—”

“I am, Jack.”

She flicked her eyes back to the young man.

“What time tomorrow, Mr. O’Connell?”

“Would eight o’clock be convenient? If you’ll tell me where you’re staying, we’ll send a car for you.”

“And where are we having dinner exactly?”

“At Mr. Karsarkis’ home, Mrs. Shepherd. He is having several people around tomorrow night and thought you and your husband might like to join them.”

Anita nodded slowly. “You’ll appreciate, of course, I’m still having a little trouble with all this.”

“Yes, ma’am. Apparently.”

“I hope you’ll excuse me saying so, Mr. O’Connell, but it is difficult for me to accept that Plato Karsarkis is quietly living in Phuket and giving dinner parties.”

“Yes, ma’am. But that’s where he is and that’s what he’s doing. Where shall I tell the driver to pick you up?”

“Never mind about that,” I cut in.

I tried to strike a tone cool enough to leave no doubt at all as to my view of Karsarkis’ invitation.

“We’re not going,” I said. “We have other plans.”

“We
are
going, Jack.” Anita’s voice was low, but her tone was just as cool as mine had been. “I’d like to go.”

“Can we talk about this later, Anita?”

“No.” Her faced mimed a smile, but I didn’t see any humor in it. “We can’t.”

I looked at O’Connell. He was expressionless. I felt trapped. I gathered I was.

“Okay,” I finally said. “But no car. We’ll drive ourselves.”

“Then may I fax a map to your hotel, sir? That would probably be best.”

Not only was Plato Karsarkis living in Phuket and giving dinner parties, he was faxing out maps to his house.

“That’s fine,” I said. “We’re staying at a hotel on Cape Panwa called the Panwaburi. I don’t know the fax number, but—”

“You’ll have a map by tomorrow morning, sir.”

O’Connell took a step back from the table and inclined his head politely.

“Enjoy your dinner,” he said. Then he turned and walked away across the dining room.

I looked at Anita without saying anything. She looked back at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

“Well,” she finally murmured, breaking the silence. Then she retrieved her menu from the table and resumed studying it. “Shall we order?”

KILLING PLATO

THE NEXT MORNING
I was sitting on the deck of our cabin drinking coffee and picking at a huge platter of unidentifiable fruit Anita had ordered from room service when I noticed an envelope that had apparently been left at our door sometime during the night. I opened it and found it was the map Karsarkis’ emissary had promised, and it made more sense to me than I had really expected it to.

As islands go, Phuket isn’t that large. It only takes a little over an hour to drive the length of it from north to south and about half that to cross it east to west. Karsarkis’ house was on the far northwestern coast of the island, on the headlands above a place called Nai Thon Beach, maybe a forty-five minute drive from our hotel but no more than a modest jog from Phuket’s only airport. I wondered if that was a coincidence. Probably not. Karsarkis no doubt kept a couple of packed bags in the trunk of his car, just in case.

After little more than a quick scan of the map, I saw I wouldn’t have any trouble finding the place where Karsarkis was holed up. That, of course, raised a fairly obvious question in my mind. How in the world could everyone
else
on the planet be having so much trouble finding it?

As curious as I might be about that, I wasn’t curious enough to let Plato Karsarkis spoil my vacation. After all, the man wasn’t
my
problem, was he?

So for the rest of the day, in between moments of laboring earnestly at an arduous regimen of swimming with Anita and napping on the beach, I carefully focused my attention on the young, sarong-clad girls with impossibly shiny black hair who plied us endlessly with sweating goblets of exotic drinks and plates heaped with cold seafood. Then, when the sun began to slide toward the sea, Anita and I showered and changed—what does one wear to dinner at the home of an internationally wanted fugitive?—and just after dusk we left our cabin and began climbing the steep pathway up to the hotel parking lot.

The night smelled of salt water and rotting fish, of neighborhood kitchens and mystifying foods, of diesel fuel and burning charcoal, and of plants and flowers with euphonious but utterly unpronounceable names. I inhaled deeply and wondered what it was about the smell of the night in Thailand that always made me feel so utterly alive.

Anita seemed to me uncharacteristically anxious, perhaps even apprehensive in some way, and that wasn’t really like her at all.

“Are you worried about this?” I asked.

Anita hesitated before she answered. “I don’t know what you mean,” she finally said.

“Yes, you do. Have you changed your mind about going to this dinner, Anita? You know I’d be very happy just to bag it.”

“Look, Jack. Why
wouldn’t
we go? We’ve been invited to dinner by someone most of the world would kill to have dinner with.”

“An unfortunate choice of words.”

“Don’t be so glib. I want to go. Really. Give me just one reason we shouldn’t.”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because the man’s a criminal on the run?”

“Oh, I see. A criminal on the run. You mean like that Japanese guy you play tennis with sometimes, the one the FBI is trying to get its hands on for securities fraud? Or maybe he’s more like that Thai banker whose daughter’s wedding we went to last week. Surasak? Isn’t that his name? They say his bank collapsed because of the hundred million or so he drained out of it and sent to Switzerland, don’t they? Or maybe you mean—”

“Now who’s being glib?”

“I honestly don’t see the difference.”

“Look, Anita, Karsarkis is in a whole different league from guys like that. He made his fortune buying massive amounts of smuggled crude oil from Iraq back during the economic embargo before the war. Then he constructed a daisy chain of paper companies in suitably shady places and transformed the Iraqi crude into apparently perfectly legal oil from perfectly legal sources by whipping up a phony paper trail for it. He funneled money to the Iraqis when he knew they would end up using it to kill Americans.”

“I thought he had a rather interesting explanation for all that,” Anita said.

Interesting was the right word for it, although whether Karsarkis’ tale actually amounted to a defense was another question altogether. Still, after Karsarkis’ lawyers had artfully arranged for his story to leak to the press, it was what had made of the whole case such a public sensation.

Karsarkis’ lawyers were prepared to admit he had done what the government claimed, more or less, but they insisted he had been secretly functioning as an American agent when he did, and acting under the direct instructions of the White House, no less.

“You don’t really believe any of that spy crap, do you, Anita?”

“Then what about that woman? What was her name?”

“Cynthia Kim.”

“Yeah, her,” Anita nodded. “She was going to testify it was true, wasn’t she? That the president himself had told her it was?”

Although Karsarkis’ defense attorneys had always remained properly mute in public, his numerous apologists had been everywhere claiming Cynthia Kim was going to be the defense’s star witness. According to the pro-Karsarkis people, who seemed to have more than a passing linkage with the anti-White House people, Miss Kim would testify she knew Karsarkis’ dealings had been authorized by the White House. She knew this, they said, because she herself was secretly placed inside Plato Karsarkis’ business operations by the White House in the first place. She had been put there to monitor Karsarkis’ activities and report back regularly to somebody, although precisely who was a bit unclear.

That would probably have been more than enough to mesmerize the public right there, but of course there was more.

During the time Miss Kim was supposedly spying on Karsarkis for the White House, it was widely and enthusiastically speculated—without the slightest supporting evidence, as far as I was aware— that she had been delivering her reports directly to the president. Perhaps, some claimed, she had even been giving the president something along with her deliveries that the FedEx man seldom if ever offers.

No one would ever know for sure.

Three days before Karsarkis’ trial was to have begun, Cynthia Kim’s body had been found in a suite at the Hay Adams, a terrifyingly expensive hotel a stone’s throw from the White House. She had been stabbed to death, first reports said, but when the full text of the medical examiner’s report inevitably leaked out, the whole truth turned out to be considerably more sordid.

The District of Columbia Medical Examiner reported that Cynthia Kim had been killed with a wide-bladed knife that was serrated along about an eighth of its length, one that was probably about the size and weight of a US military-issue K-bar knife. Miss Kim had been killed by a single slash that had severed her neck from ear to ear. So deep was the cut that her head had been nearly hacked off her body. The medical examiner also concluded that Miss Kim had been on her knees when the fatal wound was inflicted. Speculation as to exactly what she had been doing on her knees ran rampant, although not in family newspapers.

Cynthia Kim’s brutal murder naturally enough sent the press baying in search of Plato Karsarkis, and that was when everything
really
hit the fan.

Because Plato Karsarkis was nowhere to be found. He had vanished, utterly and completely, as absolutely as any human being could disappear from the earth.

The spinners of conspiracy theories went berserk. Had Karsarkis been killed as well? Or was he Miss Kim’s killer and now on the run? Was Karsarkis the mastermind behind some great crime? Or was someone methodically silencing the witnesses to an even greater crime?

Since the day he vanished, Plato Karsarkis sightings had been reported almost daily. Companies controlled by his financial empire operated dozens of businesses in half a hundred countries. None of them showed any signs of curtailing their usual activities, so there was plenty of potential for the dedicated Karsarkis-spotter to exploit.

The whole thing inevitably became, as they say, a carnival. It was Jimmy Hoffa, Robert Maxwell, and O. J. Simpson all rolled up in one. It was Lord Lucan and the dead nanny. It was Robert Blake and what’s-her-name. It was even more than that. Somehow the mysterious disappearance of Plato Karsarkis became nothing less than the Kennedy assassination of the twenty-first century.

“I’m not going to argue with you any more, Anita. Plato Karsarkis thinks he is a law all to himself. He doesn’t care how he makes money as long as he makes it. And as for what happened to Cynthia Kim, I bet you she was really going to send him down instead of backing up that bullshit story about him working for American intelligence. And he probably had her killed, too. You can take that to the goddamned bank.”

“And this you know exactly
how
, counselor?”

I hated Anita calling me that, and of course she knew it, which was exactly why she did it.

THE RED SUZUKI
jeep we had rented at the airport was parked about halfway around the hotel’s circular driveway, sitting by itself under a clump of spindly coconut palms. The night was steamy, but I didn’t feel any rain in the air and since the Suzuki’s top was already down I left it that way. We got in and I put the key into the ignition and twisted it, hard.

“Okay, Jack, you’ve made your point. Now calm down and don’t go all batty on me here. I think most of the people you know are criminals of one kind or another. What’s one more to you?”