World of Trouble (9786167611136) (47 page)

When Stassen & Hardy sent me out to
Bangkok to fish around in the wreckage of the Merchant Group to see
if anything was left for our clients to claim, it wasn’t long
before I was up to my butt in a morass of untraceable fund
transfers and funny-money loans involving shell companies
headquartered in places like the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga.
The gamy odor of the whole sordid mess was unmistakable, but I
couldn’t develop any solid connections between the Merchant Group’s
operations and the usual suspects in international scams of that
sort: the intelligence agencies, drug traffickers, and arms brokers
who were generally skulking somewhere in the shadows. Dollar, as I
recalled, seemed to find the whole muddle more amusing than
sinister, and working that case with him turned out to be the
finest graduate seminar in Asian commercial skullduggery I could
ever have wanted.

Dollar was right in the middle of telling my
students a few stories about the Merchant Group, winging his way to
the considerable amusement of the class through some of the wilder
conspiracy theories, when he suddenly looked up at the back of the
hall and cut me a wink that was impossible to miss. A few of the
kids twisted around in their seats to check out my reaction. I
reflexively returned a half-smile, but Dollar’s gesture left me a
little unsettled. The wink seemed to imply that Dollar and I shared
some secret concerning the Merchant Group that he couldn’t impart
to the class. If that’s what he thought, I couldn’t imagine what
that secret was supposed be.

I was still thinking about that when the
class started to applaud and I realized that Dollar had finished.
The kids gathered their stuff, slid out of the narrow rows of
theater-style seating that were tiered up off a center aisle, and
began to make their way down to the main floor and out of the
hall.

By the time I reached the bottom of the
steps, the hall was almost empty and Dollar was leaning on the
lectern at the front of the room waiting for me.

LAUNDRY MAN

“WAS THAT WINK
supposed to mean something to me?”

“You’re getting kind of Canadian in your old
age, Jack. Anybody ever tell you that?” Dollar eyed me for a moment
and then he shrugged. “A kiss is just a kiss; a smile is just a
smile; a wink is just a wink. Like that.”

I knew Dollar wasn’t normally one for empty
gestures. Regardless, he obviously wanted to let this one slide, so
I didn’t press the point.

“Anyway, forget that,” Dollar said. “I’ve got
something I need to talk to you about.”

“Maybe we should move this outside,
Dollar.”

The man’s voice came from behind me, and when
I turned I saw John Hanratty slouched down in a seat in the front
row right next to the entrance to the lecture hall. I hadn’t
noticed John come in and I wondered what he was doing there. John
wasn’t a lawyer, not as far as I knew anyway, although he worked
for Dollar’s law firm in some capacity. I had never been absolutely
certain what John actually did for Dollar’s firm, but I gathered he
functioned as a sort of greeter for out-of-town clients when they
came to Bangkok, something most of them were happy enough to do
whenever they could come up with an excuse that their wives would
buy. Clients were always flying in for what were euphemistically
called conferences, only to spend most of their time on a stool
next to John at one of the city’s justly famed go-go bars.

Everyone I knew called John by his nickname:
Just John. The source of that nickname was a local legend. Whenever
someone who knew only John’s first name asked for his last, so the
story went, John would invariably reply, “It’s just John.” Popular
rumor had it that Just John was retired from the CIA. That, of
course, interpreted his gesture concerning his name as a penchant
for secrecy rather than just an indication of friendliness. I
thought the story far too colorful to be true, but I really didn’t
know Just John all that well so I had never asked him about it.

“I didn’t know you were coming this morning,
John.”

“Shit,” he grinned as he pushed himself out
of his seat, “neither did I until a couple of hours ago.”

Just John was a big man and all of his
features seemed slightly over-scale: big hands, wide forehead,
barrel chest, prominent nose. He must have been in his sixties, but
he was tanned and fit-looking despite a beer gut that rode his
middle like a kangaroo’s pouch. His gray hair was long enough at
the back to curl down inside the collar of the neat, button-down
white shirt he wore tucked into sharply creased, dark gray
trousers.

“Come on, Jack.” Dollar placed a hand against
my back and nudged me gently toward the door. “Let’s take a
walk.”

The three of us left the building and turned
north across the campus. Just John said nothing at all, but Dollar
and I made small talk as we strolled unhurriedly in the general
direction of a massive, lumpy pile of masonry that looked like a
bomb shelter built on the surface rather than underground. In
actual fact it was an eight-story, windowless shopping center with
a doubtful reputation where a lot of Chula students hung out
between classes, eyeing each other over the vendors’ stalls heaped
with knockoff clothing, cloned cell phones, and pirated DVDs.

Eventually I got bored with waiting for
someone to tell me what this conversation was supposed to be
about.

“What’s on your mind, Dollar?” I asked.

“As I recall, Jack, we referred Howard the
Roach to you last year. That’s right, isn’t it?”

I nodded. Howard Kojinski liked to pose as a
big-time financier, but he was actually one of those guys who
seldom made it past the fringe of anything that mattered. He had
earned his colorful moniker, so I understood, because of the way he
operated on those rare occasions when he accidentally stumbled into
something that involved real money.

Why are cockroaches so unpleasant?
the question goes.
It’s not because of what they eat,
is
the answer,
it’s what they fall into and mess up.

“You organized a company for him in Hong
Kong, didn’t you?” Dollar kept walking, his hands folded behind
him. “Then you used it to set up an LA property deal he had going
with a some Chinese hustlers.”

I nodded again and waited for Dollar to get
to the point.

“Just John’s looking into what Howard’s been
up to lately. What have you heard from the little asshole?”

“Nothing.”

Then I thought about Dollar’s question and
realized how odd it was.

“Why would you think I’d heard anything from
Howard?”

“Well, Jack,” Dollar gave me a tentative
look, “you know more about manipulating corporate structures than
anyone I’ve ever known. You’re the man when it comes to all that
shit. If Howard had a problem with some of his funny-money stuff, I
thought he might have called you.”

“And does he have a problem?”

“Sure he does, Jack. Howard always has a
problem.”

“What is it this time?”

Howard claimed to have business interests all
around the world, but all I knew for certain was that he had done a
few minor real estate deals here and there and that he owned a
California company named In The Pink Inc. The company had been a
nearly defunct distributor of pornographic videos when Howard
bought it, but even after he unloaded the porno inventory on some
Iranian students, Howard loved the name of the company so much he
never changed it.

The only other thing of any value that In The
Pink Inc. owned was a small tract of land in Hollywood that was
just east of the old Warner Brothers studio lot. There was nothing
on the site but a run-down building occupied by something that
billed itself as a karaoke club and Howard wanted to redevelop the
property with a small strip mall. Another strip mall was just what
LA really needed, of course, so he had somehow convinced three
young Hong Kong Chinese disco entrepreneurs to put up the money.
That had been the reason for setting up the development company in
Hong Kong, or so I had been told. Regardless, before I even managed
to get the titles to the land straightened out and the property
transferred into the new company, Howard’s backers lost interest in
the deal and he told me to forget the whole thing.

“Don’t tell me Howard’s strip mall deal is
alive again?” I asked.

Dollar didn’t answer me right away. I got the
feeling that he was still trying to read my reaction to Howard’s
name.

“No, it’s not about all that,” Dollar finally
said, but that was all he did say.

We had reached the edge of the campus and
Dollar abruptly turned east and headed for Phayathai Road, a busy
north-south thoroughfare that bisected Chula. I still couldn’t see
where this was going, but I trailed along anyway, waiting Dollar
out. Just John had dropped a few paces behind us, apparently losing
interest in the conversation. I could easily see how that might
be.

“Jack, I need to understand exactly how much
you know about this mess Howard’s got himself in.”

“I just told you. I don’t know anything about
Howard or any mess he’s in. I haven’t heard from him since last
year.”

I couldn’t imagine why Dollar was suddenly so
interested in Howard. I certainly wasn’t.

Then all of a sudden it occurred to me what
all this might be about, and I stopped walking so abruptly that
Just John stumbled into me from behind.

Dollar’s law firm hired me to consult with
their clients on specialized corporate matters fairly frequently. I
even had a small office of my own there and I thought Dollar knew
me pretty well by now. I didn’t want any clients, and even if I
did, I’d certainly be able to get them without stealing them from
him. If that was what Dollar was implying now that he thought I was
doing, I didn’t like it one little bit.

“Are you suggesting that I’m trying to hijack
one of your clients, Dollar?”

“No,” Dollar quickly shook his head. “Nothing
like that.”

I looked at him carefully. I wasn’t sure I
believed him. It seemed to me that was exactly what he
was
suggesting.

“Then you’d better explain to me what you’re
talking about,” I said.

Dollar shifted his eyes off mine. He glanced
at Just John and then sighed heavily.

“Why don’t we just forget all this for now,
Jack? If you haven’t talked to Howard recently, you haven’t. Just
let me know if he calls. Will you do that for me?”

“What’s going on here, guys?” I looked back
and forth between Dollar and Just John. “Why don’t you just lay it
out for me?”

Dollar said nothing. It was Just John who
answered me.

“Howard’s gone and done something stupid,
Jack. We need to straighten it out.” John lifted his arms from his
sides, palms up. “That’s all. We just want to be sure nobody gets
hurt when we do.”

I didn’t understand what that meant, but at
least one thing was coming through loud and clear.

“Is there something you’re not telling me
here, guys?”

Dollar looked exasperated. “Jack, there’s a
ton
of shit we’re not telling you. Do you think we’re
completely stupid?”

“If you’re not going to tell me what we’re
talking about, then why in the world are we having—”

Dollar pointed a finger at me, cutting me
off. “Keep your nose clean,” he interrupted. “We’ll be in
touch.”

Then Dollar turned and walked away. Just John
tossed me a little salute, half-smiled, and followed him without a
word. Within a few strides they were moving crisply in lockstep.
They looked to me like they were making directly for Phayathai
Road. I figured Dollar’s driver was hovering somewhere there,
idling in Dollar’s big Mercedes and ignoring the traffic backing up
behind it, waiting patiently for the boss to appear.

I stood there and watched them go and I
wondered for a moment if I would eventually find out what Dollar
was talking about. Then I asked myself the really important
question. I asked myself if I really wanted to know.

LAUNDRY MAN

AS I WALKED
slowly
back to my office I pushed Dollar, Just John, and Howard the Roach
firmly into the back of my mind. They weren’t my problem right
then. It was this guy who claimed to be Barry Gale who required my
attention.

Would I be naïve to meet whoever called me
just because he had pitched a tale that tickled my sense of the
bizarre? But then, what could be the harm in it?

I couldn’t think of anyone I had offended
enough to want to do me harm, at least not recently, and it seemed
unlikely that anyone would mount such an elaborate ruse even if
they did wish me harm. Someone could certainly get to me easily
enough without going through all this. And what kind of mischief
could take place in a supermarket crowded with other people
anyway?

As improbable as it might seem, maybe my
caller really
had
been Barry Gale? Who else could have
known the things he knew?

Whoever turned up at Took Lae Dee tomorrow
night -- whether it was Barry Gale or not – he would have some kind
of a story to tell. And then he would no doubt want something from
me. I couldn’t imagine what that might be, but I figured I had
better be prepared for anything. That is, of course, if I went down
there at all. I still had a little time to make up my mind. Maybe
the place to start doing that was with finding out more than I knew
right then about Barry Gale and the body that had been found in
that Dallas swimming pool.

I flipped through my mental Rolodex looking
for somebody who might be able to help me and several good
possibilities came to mind. Fortunately Bangkok was a dream of a
location for people in the information business whether they were
working for governments or involved in some private enterprise or,
as was not infrequently the case, doing both at the same time. The
city was the doorway to Southeast Asia, and the Thais didn’t much
care what anyone did there as long as it didn’t involve them. That
made Bangkok an irresistible base of operations for almost anyone
who was up to anything they didn’t want too many people to know
about.