LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (42 page)

“If you really think there’s any comparison between the other people I know and a man like Plato Karsarkis, Anita, then I
haven’t
made my point at all. Karsarkis is a fugitive from the United States,” I said. “He jumped bail and fled the country.”

“Like you fled the country, Jack?”

“That is a ridiculous thing to say.”

“Is it?”

Without waiting for Anita to say anything else, I started the Suzuki and put it in gear, then I drove out through the hotel’s gates and turned right toward the main road.

Several minutes passed before anyone spoke again.

“Is all that out of your system now, Jack?” Anita eventually asked in a quiet voice.

“Yes, I think it is, Anita. Thank you for asking.”

I shot a quick glance across at her, but she was looking straight ahead and I couldn’t see her face clearly enough to read anything in it. There was a period in my life when I’d understood women—I must have been about six or seven at the time—but since then, almost everything about them has been a complete mystery to me.

The road to Phuket Town was lined with street vendors, their metal cooking carts strung with fluorescent tubes and their charcoal fires painting the air with a streaky haze. A barefoot boy in dark shorts and a T-shirt who looked to be not much more than ten sat on a rock near the edge of the road eating some kind of meat off a wooden stick and following our jeep with his eyes. When he saw me looking at him he broke into a grin and waved. I waved back and glanced over at Anita, but she seemed not to have noticed.

We followed the highway through the edge of Phuket Town and then turned north toward the airport. As the road rose over the spine of the island, hills punctured the lush jungle here and there, black clouds drifting over their faces like puffs of smoke. Off to the left two streamers of cloud twirled in circles around the crest of a steep, forest-covered rise, and at its peak a forest of microwave towers threw spidery silhouettes onto the darkening sky.

Anita and I continued to ride in silence. At first I thought of it as a companionable silence, but the longer it went on the less certain of that I became.

“What are you thinking?” I finally asked Anita.

The moment I spoke I was sorry I had, partly because the question sounded so desperate and adolescent and partly because I wasn’t absolutely certain I actually wanted to know what Anita was thinking.

“That he must have liked you.”

“Who?”

“Plato Karsarkis. If he invited you to dinner, he must have liked you.”

“Maybe. Why does it matter?”

“It probably doesn’t,” she said. And then after a moment added, “What do you think his wife is like?”

“How do you know he has a wife?”

“Well . . . if he did have a wife, what do you think she would be like?”

“Probably a blonde with big hooters.”

We came to a tiny village. Doll-sized houses built mostly of concrete stood open to the night. Wide porches sheltered motorbikes propped against front walls, but there were no driveways and no cars. Occasionally the blue-white glow of a television flickered from a window, and you could feel rather than see people moving in the darkness.

I turned my head as we passed and saw one house that had been converted into a barbershop. A television set played soundlessly, and a pink sheet covered a little boy sitting in an ancient chair. A couple of dozen people, mostly other kids, sat silently in the darkness of the front porch, watching the little boy and the television set through the open windows.

I found the big grove of rubber trees about three miles past the village, right where the map said it was. White-splotched trunks in hundreds of perfectly parallel rows marched into the distance until they were lost in the darkness. Another two miles to the west I spotted the dirt track I was looking for. It led off to the left, running toward the coast through a thick grove of palms.

I slowed down and turned off the highway.

KILLING PLATO

“PAI NAI, KRAAP?”

The man at the gate had a voice that was flat, neither rude nor polite. He sounded young although I couldn’t see his face very well. As he approached the driver’s side of our rented Suzuki jeep there was only enough light to tell that he was a Thai with short-cropped hair wearing a uniform that looked military: camouflage fatigues, boots, and a webbed belt with a holster on one side and a flashlight on the other. In his left hand was a small walkie-talkie, and his right rested on the flap covering his side arm.

“We were invited for dinner. By Mr. Karsarkis.”

When the man gave no sign he understood English, I tried it in Thai.

“
Tan kao yen, kraap.”
We are here for dinner.

“Kor chue duay, kraap?”
the guard asked. What is your name?

“Mr. and Mrs. Shepherd.”

The man considered my reply for a moment, as if comparing it in his mind with a list of correct answers. Then he exchanged the walkie-talkie for his flashlight, snapped it on, and stepped back, playing the beam over our Suzuki.

“Rod jeep kong khun rue plan, kraap?”
Is this your jeep?

“Mai chai, kraap, kong Mister Avis.”
No, it belongs to Mr. Avis.

“Krai Khun Avis, kraap?”
Who is Mr. Avis?

“Mai pen rai.”
It’s not important.

The man nodded thoughtfully and made his way methodically around the jeep, inspecting it with his flashlight. Except for the jerking beam, the darkness was nearly complete. We sat still and said nothing.

When the man reached Anita’s side of the jeep, he leaned over and played the beam into the tiny back seat and over the floor behind the front seats. When he was done, he lifted it up and scanned forward inside the jeep, the beam of light bouncing through the rear-view mirror and into my eyes.

At last, apparently satisfied, he clicked off the flashlight and walked to the front of the Suzuki. He waved to someone who must have been standing just out of sight somewhere in the darkness. The gate squeaked loudly on its tracks as it was pushed open from the inside.

The first man stepped back, came to attention, and snapped us a salute, which I took to mean we could pass. I turned my headlights back on and, when I did, I could see the second man was almost a twin to the man standing next to our jeep, right down to the camouflage fatigues and the sidearm on his belt. I put the jeep in gear and we rolled forward. I felt the gate’s track bump past underneath us.

When we were inside, I looked across at Anita. “Well, that was interesting.”

“Yes, it was,” she murmured in a low voice. “I suppose.”

The driveway beyond the gate was asphalt and it climbed steeply into a dense, very green rain forest with scatterings of cashew and rubber trees among the otherwise impenetrable stands of mangroves and coconut palms. What seemed to be about a mile on, it twisted suddenly to the right and the forest disappeared. Directly in front of us, although still a good distance away, was a small rise and at the top of it we saw the house. Taking my foot off the gas, I let the jeep coast to a stop.

Bathed in floodlights and so white and colorless it hurt my eyes to stare directly at it, Karsarkis’ house looked like a cross between a movie set and a flying saucer crash. It was composed basically of four towers connected into a rectangle with long glass corridors. From the tops of each of the towers, glass pyramids rose some twenty feet further, each of them emitting a yellow glow suggestive of imminent levitation. At the foot of the rise there was a grass and stone surfaced courtyard with a low rectangular fountain in its center from which three nozzles burped rings of water into the night air. Just past the fountain, wide pebbled-concrete steps led from the courtyard up to a pair of glass doors flanked on both sides by a garden of what looked like lava rocks.

“You may park up there, sir.”

The sound of the voice from the shadows startled me, but not nearly as much as did the submachine gun I saw in the blond man’s hands when he stepped into the glow cast by our headlights. Although his voice was firm and commanding, the soft Irish lilt in his tones was impossible to miss.

“Up there with the others now, sir, please.”

Never much inclined to engage in dialogue with a man holding a submachine gun, I stepped on the gas and rolled on into the courtyard.

There was another Suzuki parked next to the fountain, a white one with the top up, and a dark Mercedes sedan just past it. There was also a big four-wheel drive of some kind, although I couldn’t immediately identify the make.

When we pulled to a stop behind the other Suzuki, I saw two drivers in gray safari suits sitting on the edge of the fountain, waiting and smoking cigarettes, silently watching. I assumed one went with the Mercedes and the other with four-wheel. It was pretty hard to imagine anyone being driven around in the backseat of a Suzuki.

When we got to the top of the steps that led up to the front doors, I stopped and turned around. The elevation of the rise gave onto a view out over the dense mangrove forests and across most of the sleeping island. The moon had risen and it cast a dim glow over the landscape. I could see a highway far away and for a moment I tracked a single pair of distant headlights creeping along its length. I thought I could almost see a pale glimmer of moonlight on the sea out on the eastern horizon, but probably it was just my imagination.

“Not bad,” I said to Anita.

I glanced over and saw her looking at me strangely.

“No, really. It’s not bad at all. Sort of like living in Big Sur, I guess. That is if you can imagine living in Big Sur with the Thai army guarding your outer perimeter and IRA patrols roaming around inside your fence line.”

Then I lifted my right arm over my head and waved it back and forth a couple of times.

“Who are you waving to?” Anita asked.

“I just wanted to be sure we haven’t missed anyone,” I told her.

Anita was silent for a moment.

“Are you ready now, Jack?”

“Yes,” I said, “I think I am.”

I said I was ready, but I wasn’t. And not being able to find the goddamned doorbell didn’t do much to help either.

THE PAIR OF
glass doors at the top of the short flight of steps was positioned in a glass wall. I had to admit the effect was spectacular, but if it was an intelligence test to see who could figure out where the freaking doorbell was, I flunked.

So what did Karsarkis expect us to do? Knock on the glass like a couple of ninnies?

I could see right through the doors, across the corridor, and out the other side, straight into an interior courtyard where there was a huge rectangular swimming pool with water so Tidy-Bowl blue it looked like it had been dyed. Arranged in groupings around the pool were a dozen or more teak lounge chairs with white canvas cushions, most of them shaded by large beach umbrellas. Several groves of strategically placed palm trees set off the whole tableau.

“Wouldn’t you think he could afford a doorbell?”

I addressed the question to Anita. I didn’t really expect her to answer, and of course she didn’t.

I was just giving consideration to reaching for a rock when a maid in an ankle-length black skirt and white blouse silently materialized and swung open both doors. She stepped back as we entered, inclining her head and bringing her palms together in front of her face, the tips of her fingers reaching just to the bridge of her nose.

It was a traditional gesture Thais call a
wai
and I have always thought it a uniquely warm and elegant form of greeting that makes the western handshake seem hopelessly gawky by comparison. Of course, the
wai
is also a profoundly nuanced signal of relative social standing, and the way Thais wield it frequently leaves me a little bewildered. The inferior
wais
the superior, and the younger
wais
the older. That much I understand, but I still screw up my response most of the time because I am never entirely certain how to deal with the subtleties inherent in that equation. For instance, how to respond to a
wai
from a waiter who is really old? What carries the greater weight, the age or the station?

Since I’m just a foreigner, of course, no Thai ever expects me to get it right anyway so it isn’t really that big a problem. Nevertheless, Anita always seems to manage a lot better than I do, and I frequently find myself admiring the cool sense of standing and entitlement that she seems to bring to every new encounter.

We followed the maid as she led us down the wide glass corridor that defined the front of Karsarkis’ house. Lining it were a succession of small sculptures displayed on tall pedestals, and I paused briefly to examine one that turned out to be a likeness of a very fat woman bending forward and displaying her formidable rear end. The piece was made of something that looked like terracotta, and the material and the soft lighting of the corridor combined to cause the woman’s imposing posterior to glow with a bright pink sheen.

“I’ve heard that having a huge pink bottom helps females attract males,” I whispered to Anita.

She shifted her eyes toward me, but said nothing.

“Of course, the bad news is it only works if you’re a baboon.”

Naturally Anita pretended she hadn’t heard me.

The maid gestured us between two large fig trees that seemed to sprout straight out of the corridor’s marble floor and toward the pool outside in the courtyard. It wasn’t until we had taken half a dozen steps that I realized we weren’t outside at all. There was an unobtrusive glass dome that sealed over the whole courtyard, which was as comprehensively air-conditioned as the rest of the house.

I nudged Anita, rolling my eyes up at the dome. “I wonder if it’s bulletproof.”

“Cut it out, Jack,” she hissed.

Karsarkis was standing near the opposite end of the swimming pool with a distinguished-looking, somewhat elderly man who appeared to be Thai and wore a beautifully cut dark suit. It had to be the only beautifully cut dark suit on the whole island of Phuket where in most circles even the donning of long pants was considered hopelessly pompous. Karsarkis himself was plainly dressed in jeans, loafers without socks, and a long-sleeved white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He seemed to be listening intently to whatever the man in the suit was saying and he nodded slowly as the older man tapped the air with his fingers.