Big Mango (9786167611037) (26 page)

“I’m glad you think so.” Eddie pushed back
his chair and stood up. “How long do I have to decide?”

“Take all the time you want, Eddie. All the
time you want.” Reidy reached out and clapped him on the arm. “Just
as long as you do it before the gooks get sick of all your fucking
around and burn your worthless ass.”

“That probably won’t be very long,” Sanchez
added. “I’d say the end of next week would be pretty much it for
you.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right, Eddie.” Reidy
switched his campy grin back on, and tweaked it up a little. “The
end of next week, buddy. The end of next week.”

BACK
outside the American
Embassy’s front gate, Bar shuffled his weight from one foot to the
other.

“I don’t get it,” he said to Lek. “What the
hell just happened in there?”

“Maybe Chuck’s tired,” she ventured. “It’s
late and I guess he wanted to go home.”

“Chuck doesn’t get tired. And he hasn’t been
home since 1994.”

“What happened in—”

“That was a joke.”

Lek looked confused, but she didn’t say
anything.

A taxi crawling slowly along the curb pulled
up right next to them. The driver racked the engine to get their
attention and pointed toward his rear seat with a hopeful
expression on his face. Bar shook his head. The driver flapped his
hand up and down, unwilling to give up, but Bar ignored him and
turned his back.

He was going around in circles trying to
figure out what Dare was really up to. It was starting to give him
a headache. If he had any sense, he would follow Chuck’s lead and
just go home, too, but he was way too wired for that. Maybe he
ought to call Dare up and simply ask him what he was up to. What
did he have to lose? If Dare didn’t come up with a story that made
sense, Bar could just wish him a nice life and go home to bed. But
if he told him a really good story…well, he guessed he would wait
until he heard it to decide.

When the young marine guard behind the
embassy gate began eyeing them suspiciously, Bar grabbed Lek’s
elbow and towed her up the sidewalk toward the heavy traffic on
Rama IV.

“Did Harry really have a pile of money when
he died?” he asked her.

“He was well off, I guess, but I don’t think
he was rich.”

“Didn’t you say he warned you that he had a
lot of money and people might come after you because of it?”

“I really don’t know what he meant by that. I
never saw it.”

“Has anybody ever done that?

“Done what?”

“Come after you. Come around asking you a lot
of questions about Harry.”

“Like what?”

“Like, I don’t know, what he did or who he
hung out with. Things like that.”

Lek shook her head.

Bar wasn’t certain he believed her, although
he couldn’t offhand see any reason why she would lie to him either.
Still, it didn’t make sense. There was quite a crowd out there with
a serious interest in the life and times of Harry Austin and he
didn’t see how it was possible that no one had ever gotten around
to talking to Lek about them. Dare had even asked
him
about
Harry Austin, and he didn’t know the guy from a bar of soap. Lek
had been married to the man, for Christ’s sake. Why hadn’t anyone
ever taken a run at her?

“Where are we going?” Lek asked while Bar was
still pondering all that.

Bar hadn’t thought about it when he pulled
her away from the embassy gate. He just wanted to get away from the
place and shake off the queasy feeling it always gave him. But now
that she had asked the question, the answer popped right into his
head. And he was absolutely sure it was exactly the right one.

***

TWENTY
minutes later, Bar
and Lek got out of a taxi under the high portico in front of the
Oriental Hotel. Bar smoothed back his hair and nodded obligingly at
the young boy in crisp whites who swung open the lobby door for
them.

With Lek trailing behind him, he headed
straight for the registration desk where a tiny, prim-looking
westerner in a morning coat stood sorting through a stack of
papers.

“Could you tell me what room Mr. Edward Dare
is in, please?”

The little man looked up slowly. His puffy
cheeks and small black eyes made Bar think of an offended frog.

“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t give out that kind
of information.” He scrutinized Bar and Lek carefully. “The privacy
of our guests is paramount to us.”

Bar nodded slowly a couple of times as if he
was really glad to hear that.

“I’m Bar Phillips. You probably read my
column in
The
Bangkok Post.”

The little man looked at Bar without a
flicker of recognition.

“It’s called ‘Bar by Bar.’”

Nothing.

“It’s that page every week that has…ah, you
know, entertainment tips, that sort of thing.”

Still no response. Bar swallowed the
temptation to lean across the desk and twist the little bastard’s
nose off. Instead he went on in a tone he hoped fell somewhere
between the professionally detached and the cravenly unctuous.

“My assistant and I…” Bar tilted his head
toward Lek and ignored the frog when he hoisted one eyebrow, “are
interviewing Mr. Dare for the Post. But of course, if you won’t
tell me where to find him, that’s not going to work out very well,
is it now?”

The man lifted his arm and contemplated his
wristwatch with exaggerated care.

“You have an appointment to conduct this
interview at midnight?”

“The man’s a real night owl.”

“What is the gentleman’s name again,
sir?”

“Eddie Dare.”

The man tapped briefly at a computer keyboard
and peered at the screen.

“And your name, sir?”

“Phillips. Bar Phillips.” He cleared his
throat. “The Bangkok Post columnist.”

The frog watched the screen for a moment,
then tapped some more keys and returned his eyes to Bar’s.

“Would you like me to see if Mr. Dare is
available, sir?”

“That would be ever so kind of you.” Bar gave
the desk clerk a supercilious smile and got another in return.

The man glanced lifted the telephone at his
elbow and dialed a number as Bar watched. He couldn’t have dialed
it any more slowly, Bar was reasonably certain, but that was fine
with him.

“Mr. Dare is apparently out,” the man said
after listening a moment. “May I take a message for him?”

“No thanks. I have another appointment.”

As Bar and Lek turned away and crossed the
lobby, the desk clerk caught the eye of a plainclothes security man
who was posted near the entrance. He gestured toward them with a
tilt of his head and the security man pointed at their backs and
raised his eyebrows in a silent question. The desk clerk thought
for a moment, and then he shook his head and went back to his
paperwork. He wondered if he’d just been had somehow, but he
shrugged it off. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time.

The doorman snapped a salute as Bar and Lek
emerged from the hotel. He lifted his arm toward a taxi, but Bar
waved him off. Instead, Bar turned right and walked down the
hotel’s driveway with Lek trailing close behind. At the bottom, he
turned right again into a narrow brick-surfaced path that ran
between the hotel and the French Embassy. After two dozen paces,
Bar turned right a third time, threaded his way through the hotel’s
lush gardens, and circled the deserted swimming pool. Within five
minutes, Bar and Lek had re-entered the Oriental through a rear
door and were in an elevator on their way up to the seventeenth
floor.

“How do you know what room he’s in?” Lek
asked.

“I saw the number when that shithead dialed
the phone.”

“But isn’t Mr. Dare out?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why are we going up to his room?”

“I have no fucking clue.”

When the doors slid open, they stepped
smartly onto the deep carpet of the hotel corridor and Bar started
looking for the right room number.

“Are you going to break in or something?” Lek
asked.

Now there’s an idea
, Bar thought to
himself, but he said nothing.

When they got to the polished teak door of
Eddie’s room, Bar side-glanced at Lek. “I’d better check first.
Maybe Dare wasn’t answering the phone.”

He lifted his hand to knock, but Lek reached
out and cupped it in hers before it made contact with the door.

“There’s a bell,” she said, pointing to a
white button centered in a brass plate on the wall to the right of
the door.

Bar quickly pulled his hand away from Lek’s.
“I knew that,” he said and pushed the button with his
forefinger.

***

SILOM
Road was still
throbbing with life when Eddie emerged from the dim interior of The
Kitchen. He stood briefly in the street, and then he began to walk.
For no particular reason, he turned to the left. He didn’t know
where he was going, but for the moment at least, he didn’t care.
Hands jammed deep into his pockets, he adopted a measured,
deliberate pace. All at once, the colors of the street seemed to
have become unnaturally bright; the sounds unexpectedly loud; and
the smells unusually pungent. The alchemy of it tantalized and
terrified him at the same time.

It was all obvious now, he supposed. Both the
Asian man following them when he pulled the elevator trick and the
four men outside the Stardust were probably Vietnamese. At least,
he had found out who he was up against, but he wasn’t all that sure
what good it was going to do him.

As he walked, the Thai lettering in the signs
overhead became a cryptic lattice of confusing, contradictory
counsel. Music blared from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Faces lurked in the half darkness: cigarette peddlers behind wooden
trays heaped with counterfeit Marlboro boxes; dark-faced hawkers
displaying sliced fruit in tiny glass cases lit with dim, yellow
bulbs; tuk-tuk boys smoking as they sprawled across the seats of
their improbable vehicles; a shriveled woman with a pale face
thrusting out a baby with one hand and rattling a can with the
other. Eddie floated through it all, suspended in a cocoon of
fatigue and disorientation.

Abruptly, he felt something within him begin
to shoulder those thoughts aside. He felt like a man contemplating
an oncoming attack of nausea.

Eddie glanced back over his shoulder in the
direction of The Kitchen. Tan Suit was standing at the doorway with
Reidy and Sanchez, his hands on his hips. He was nodding slowly at
whatever Reidy was saying, but he was looking directly at
Eddie.

Eddie continued his slow, methodical stroll
and, when he glanced over his shoulder again and saw Tan Suit about
a half block behind, he stopped and pretended to look through some
CDs a vendor had spread out on a folding table. Tan Suit stopped,
too, but didn’t even bother to pretend he was doing anything. He
just slouched against a wall about thirty yards back, a half smile
on his face, obviously figuring that the time would soon come when
Eddie would make up his mind about where he was going next.

Yeah, Eddie thought to himself, Tan Suit had
that absolutely right. It sure as hell was time for him to make up
his mind where he was going next, in every sense of the word.

***

“I
figured we would just
wait for you down in the lobby, but then…” Bar looked a little
sheepish and cut his eyes at Lek who was focusing somewhere across
the room. “Well, your door was open, so we just came in and
waited.”

Eddie had walked all the way back to the
Oriental, turning everything that he knew over and over again in
his mind while he did. Tan Suit kept thirty or forty yards behind
the whole way, but Eddie ignored him and got to the hotel just
after midnight. He supposed finding Bar and Lek waiting for him
inside his suite should have disturbed him but, coming on top of
everything else that had happened that night, that development had
seemed relatively minor league.

“The door wasn’t open, Bar.”

“It was after Lek did some little trick with
a credit card.”

Eddie nodded. “I wonder what other little
tricks she knows.”

Lek’s eyes flicked briefly to Eddie’s and
then away, but she said nothing.

“Come on, man. Don’t go hard-assed on us just
because McBride pissed all over you.” Bar tried for a jovial tone.
“It’s not like we tossed the place.”

“You should have. You might have found
something.”

“Well…” Bar bobbed his head vaguely, “I
wanted to, but Lek wouldn’t let me.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

Before anyone could add anything else, the
door opened and Winnebago came in. He glanced around and his eyes
fixed on Eddie. “You don’t look so good,” he said.

Eddie just nodded. He could certainly see
that might very well be true.

“ANYBODY
hungry?” Eddie
asked. “I’ve been trying to feed myself half the night without
getting it done yet.”

“I could eat,” Bar answered.

Winnebago put a cigarette into his mouth and
nodded. Everybody looked at Lek and she nodded, too.

Eddie called room service and ordered four
club sandwiches and two large pots of coffee. He often wondered if
anyone actually liked club sandwiches or if they had just been
invented to put on room service menus so people in hotels could
order something in the middle of the night that didn’t require any
thought. But then he had just ordered four club sandwiches himself,
so he supposed maybe he had the answer to his question right
there.

After Eddie hung up, he folded his arms and
looked at Bar. “So what are you doing here?”

“I want you to tell me the truth about why
you’re so interested in Harry Austin.”