Bullet Beach (11 page)

They turned, went through an arched doorway and into a larger room, though of the same coloration and purity. The man, slender as a reed and ageless, sat on a large upholstered silver gray chair. He wore a white robe, trimmed in gold. A second look and Shanahan could pick up a few more details. The skin was a little too tight at the neck. The flesh was a little too tight on the bone. Before him on a small table was what Shanahan thought to be a glass of iced tea.

The man looked up. His eyes were bright. This wasn't the man who sat beside him on the bench in the park.

‘Why are you here?' the man asked with a mix of impatience and confusion.

‘I was told to come here.'

‘I meant why are you here? In Thailand. I would have thought you were long gone by now. You should be you know.'

‘I'm looking for Fritz Shanahan.'

The man had a wide smile. His face crinkled in amusement.

‘How very poetic,' the man said, nodding toward a chair that was a match to his own.

‘Why is that poetic?' Shanahan asked, sitting.

‘Though it's a little adolescent, there's something poetic about a man looking for himself. There is something profoundly sad, though. You, a man of such experience approaching the endgame of his life without the knowledge he was born with.'

‘Looking for myself?' Shanahan decided it might be wiser to let this man do all the talking.

‘It is what you said. You think a beard makes you a different man than you were before you grew it?'

Shanahan shook his head ‘no.'

‘It's very brave and perhaps a little adolescent as well,' the man smiled again, ‘to come back here.' The man reached for his glass. His fingers were long and narrow, bony and old.

Shanahan thought the man and his apartment were pretentious, affected. Then again, he reminded himself, he thought his own beard was an affectation. He would shave it when he returned home.

‘I am not Fritz Shanahan looking for myself,' Shanahan said, though he had given thought to the idea of keeping the lie alive. But, given what he'd learned so far, being Fritz might be more dangerous than being Dietrich. ‘I'm his brother, Dietrich.'

Shanahan wasn't sure he'd ever really seen anyone demonstrate the expression ‘taken aback' so well. It was as if the little man had received some sort of tiny slap from an invisible villain. Recovering, he smiled as broadly as he done before.

‘You are a rogue, Fritz,' the man said. ‘You almost convinced me for a split second. Interesting dodge. But you won't pull it off. You'll have to do something better than that. A little cosmetic surgery, perhaps. In the interim, no doubt a very short one, you have places to go and promises to keep.'

Thai though the man was, his English was without accent. The words ‘rogue' and ‘dodge,' were interesting choices.

‘You know,' the man continued, ‘that I've always given you more room than anyone else, but there are limits to my patience even for someone as charming as you.'

‘Charming?' Shanahan asked. It wasn't a word usually used to describe his personality. ‘Perhaps Fritz got a bit more of the Blarney Stone than I did,' Shanahan said. ‘I assure you I'm not charming and I'm not Fritz.'

The man got up from his chair, plucking a pair of glasses from his robe pocket, and walked toward Shanahan and examined his face. He reached down and lifted up Shanahan's left hand. He stepped back.

‘You seem to have grown your pinkie back,' he said as he went back to his chair.

‘It's from the lizard side of the family.'

‘Fritz would smile when he said something like that,' the man said.

‘You are beginning to get the picture.'

‘You don't fall down on the floor and kick and bite and generally scare off the clientele do you?'

‘Not recently. Why do you ask?'

The man smiled. ‘You brother has these fits from time to time. Some people are frightened of him. They think he is possessed.'

‘What do you think?'

‘I think we're all possessed.' The man smiled again, shook his head. ‘What brought you to me?'

‘A man told me to come here and ask for Moran?'

‘Who is Moran?'

‘I have no idea,' Shanahan said. ‘Aren't you Moran?'

The man laughed. ‘No, and you aren't Fritz. Am I asleep or in a silly play?'

‘All I know is I'm Dietrich Shanahan and I was told to come here to find my brother.'

‘What are we going to do with two of you? One was more than enough.'

‘You have any idea where he is?'

He stood. ‘I thought I did. But it is you instead. Happy hunting, Mr Shanahan.'

The elevator brought Shanahan back to the hallway as half a dozen young, slender half-naked girls, having finished a shift, came back giggling, slipping behind the translucent drapery. He passed unnoticed until the red door. A few in the bar looked his way as he came from a ‘no admittance' door. He glanced at the bar. Channarong was still there. The number of customers had increased. The girls on the stage looked as if they were doing the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils,' bringing back a long-ago memory just as odd as the last few minutes.

Outside, the neon lights from the cluster of clubs in the
soi
bounced around the wet streets and walls. People moved about, many of them in deep, but slightly drunken lust. He slipped on his plastic poncho and headed in the drizzle for the hotel. He would ask Channarong to do what he could to find out the name of the man in the white room and in what businesses, besides girls, he was engaged.

On the way back to the hotel, Shanahan tried to figure out what he learned from the meeting. It appeared that Fritz would be even harder to locate than he thought. He wasn't just hiding from the police as Shanahan had suspected, but also from folks he worked with. He found out that his brother looked a lot like him. They bore a striking resemblance when they were young, he remembered, but time and trouble can play havoc with the genes. On the other hand, Shanahan was aware that the man in the white room might be playing him. He reminded himself he was a stranger in a strange land and what appeared to be to a mind like his, might not be.

Maureen was awake, wrapped in a blanket, sitting in a chair with a rum and tonic.

‘You left me behind,' she said.

‘I did.'

She nodded, smiled. She wasn't going to make anything of it. It was one of the many reasons he loved her. She never pouted. Get even, maybe. But she didn't pout.

‘What did you find out?'

He told her.

‘Hmmnn, two Shanahans? This I have to see. Perhaps these people out to find your brother won't have to worry. There's a very good chance you'll kill each other.'

Shanahan smiled.

‘What?' she said, eyes wide, mouth open. ‘You smiled. Do you realize this is the fifth time in all our time together I've seen you smile.'

‘You're counting them?'

‘Five is not a hard number to keep track of. The point is: you smiled.'

‘I promise, I'll be more careful in the future.'

Cross took Casey out for a walk in the dewy morning. He had the old Catahoula hound on a leash because he had the genes of a pig-herder and tended to have an attitude toward the farm animals, particularly Maya's goat.

Breakfast awaited him. A big breakfast. His normal pot of coffee and maybe a piece of toast would be replaced with a three-egg omelet, roasted potatoes and sausage. It was a farmer's breakfast, but on this occasion it would not go to waste or waist. He had determined that Sunday's chore would be to fix the roof. He had purchased the shingles that last time he was up.

Once he got into it, he didn't mind this kind of work. Manual labor, especially the simple kind, meant he could think more clearly about other things. He worked until the August noon sun made it torture. He gave in to an old Adirondack chair facing a field of corn, a bottle of cold beer, and his thoughts.

Who was the man who held the shotgun? Not Taupin. And the girl in the trunk? Had the police an identity yet? The son-in-law lived in Woodruff Place on Middle Drive. Woodruff place was composed of three wide streets, each with a grass median and fountains at the mid-street turnarounds. Once an expensive neighborhood, it fell on hard times. Many of the old Victorians were subdivided into cheap apartments. Now on its way back, it still seemed to attract the more adventurous of the city's citizens – not something he thought Mr Taupin would appreciate. Was young Marshall Talbot a rebel? That was a reach, but he should spend some time on the lives of the victims. Marshall Talbot shouldn't be too difficult.

He took a sip of beer and looked out over the field. This might have been his life. Probably wouldn't have worked. The days of the family farm were receding. This one was merely a token. A couple of cows in the barn. Two dozen chickens or so, a young goat, and a large garden. Fields of corn and soybeans, along with an orchard on one side, surrounded the farm. None belonged to his parents. They had sold them off, one parcel at a time, just to stay alive. But they knew no other way to live.

People do what they have to do to survive, Cross thought. Whose survival depended on the deaths of the two people he was suspected of killing? And Edelman?

If he had stayed here, Cross thought, shaking off the images of the dead, would he have married a local girl, settled down, raised a family?

ELEVEN

Shanahan left his sleeping beauty just after daybreak. Outside the heat hit him, surrounded him, and seemed on the verge of suffocating him. And to think, he thought, this was the coolest part of the day. He would be in it just as long as it took him to get a cup of coffee and read the newspaper. He looked around to see if the tail was still on him. He didn't spot anyone. Could be the earlier tail belonged to the man in the white room and that the man thought that his dealings with Shanahan were over.

They weren't. He would call Channarong at a more civilized hour and find out more about this man who claimed to have mistaken Shanahan's identity. For the moment, this was his best if not quite only lead. Channarong had given him the address of one of the young men following him as well. As the coffee nudged his sleepy mind and the air conditioning cooled him down, he also remembered Maureen telling him she followed the man who sat on the bench to a police station, where he remained for at least a couple of hours.

Channarong again sat with them at breakfast.

‘I'd like for you to find out about the man upstairs,' Shanahan began after the three of them exchanged greetings.

‘God, you mean?' Maureen asked, grinning cat-like.

‘Upstairs in the bar.'

‘I know some things already,' Channarong said. ‘I ran into an old friend who was chatting up one of the girls.' Channarong told Shanahan the man's name, but it had endless syllables, and they agreed that from now on they'd call him Mr White. ‘He treats the girls better than most. They say he is good natured and generous.'

‘He also speaks English very well,' Shanahan said.

‘He does. That's not unusual for people in his line of work in Bangkok. He is a little frightened of germs. I was told that when he bought the bar, he completely remodeled the upstairs. Half of it is devoted to rooms for the girls and guys to spend time together.'

Maureen smiled.

‘The other half,' Channarong continued, ‘is his apartment. The air conditioning operates in conjunction with an air filter. He rarely goes out.'

‘Any connection with rubies?' Maureen asked.

‘None was mentioned.'

‘Maureen followed the man who provided me with Mr White's invitation to a police station.'

Channarong shrugged. ‘The police are very much involved in Mr White's kind of business.'

‘If that is his only business.'

‘Well, he has other bars, other girls,' Channarong said. ‘My friend says he has a private room in each one.'

‘Does he have a police record?' Shanahan asked.

‘I'll see,' Channarong said, taking a moment to form an answer. ‘I'll do what I can.'

‘I'm doubling what we pay you,' Shanahan said.

‘No need.'

‘You are doing far more than what we agreed. Are you willing to continue to help in that way? I could use your help.'

Maureen looked surprised.

‘A smile last night and now you are asking for help?' She turned toward Channarong. ‘Maybe they kidnapped Shanahan last night and this is Fritz after all.'

Channarong smiled and agreed to help.

It might have been the heat or the thought of traipsing about the backstreets of Bangkok that caused her to bow out of a trip to find the young man who followed Shanahan yesterday. Channarong suggested she go to the Oriental Hotel. The hotel had an amazing number of restaurants to choose from. The concierge, Channarong told her, would provide her with many shopping options as well.

‘You got her at restaurants,' Shanahan said.

Maureen made a face, but she knew it was true.

‘The object,' Channarong said, ‘is never to be more than a few minutes away from an air-conditioned mall, hotel or restaurant.'

Shanahan, like other
farangs
, couldn't seem to stop perspiring even if he stood still. Breathing too seemed a struggle. Escaping from the frying pan of an Indiana August he had jumped into a Bangkok fire. He would have to endure it. They would be going to neighborhoods not noted for multi-storied malls and elegant hotels.

The traffic was gruesome. Channarong had a van for the day and he seemed to have the same aggressive driving behavior as the rest of the vehicles on the wide expressway. They dodged motorbikes, buses, vans, tuk-tuks, trucks – all of whom seemed to be engaged in a race. Overhead, the BTS Skytrain whisked folks around without the practiced confusion below.