KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (2 page)

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You didn’t offend me. We Americans need to stick together.”

Karsarkis’ ethnic brotherhood routine was wearing a little thin. I was pretty sure I’d read once he had been born in London of an Irish mother and a Greek father and had only become an American citizen when his lawyers advised him that it was in his best financial interest. On the other hand, I knew Karsarkis had a pretty compelling reason for not being in the United States right then and I figured it would be indelicate to delve too deeply into the whole issue of nationality and residence so I said nothing.

Karsarkis smiled. At least I think he did.

“Can I call you Jack?” he asked.

“If you like.”

“Excellent. Then you should call me Plato.”

That’ll be the day,
I thought to myself, but I just nodded.

Karsarkis took his hand away from the Campari without having drunk a sip and folded his arms across his chest.

“Everybody says you’re one of the smart guys, Jack. A first-rate legal mind.”

“I don’t practice law anymore. I just teach.”

“Yeah, I heard that. At Chulalongkorn University up in Bangkok.”

“That’s right.”

“Pretty good place?”

“Pretty good.”

“But you don’t teach at the law school, do you?”

“No. At the Sasin Institute. I teach international business.”

“You speak Thai that well?”

“My Thai’s okay, I guess, but the courses at Sasin are all in English so it doesn’t really matter.”

“You like teaching?”

“Yes, I like it a lot.”

What in the world was going on here? Karsarkis sounded like a man interviewing me for a job. I tried to read his eyes, but they had gone flat and in the fading light there at the end of the bar I could see nothing in them at all.

“You ever miss the action?” he asked.

“Action?”

“That stuff you used to do. All the hotshot stuff that made you famous.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t say anything at all. Karsarkis didn’t look like he really cared. Abruptly he stood up and gave the room a quick scan.

“I enjoyed talking to you, Jack, but I’ve got to go now.”

I glanced around to see if something had spooked Karsarkis. There were a few people scattered around the bar, a few others in the dining room, but as far as I could tell there were no SWAT teams storming the place. Maybe Karsarkis just couldn’t think o yquo;t tof anything else to say to someone he barely knew and was tired of keeping the conversation going. I could certainly understand that.

I stood up, too, and we shook hands again.

“I’ll stay in touch,” Karsarkis said.

I had no idea what
that
meant so I just nodded mutely.

When Karsarkis turned away and started for the door, a well-built, sandy-haired man of nondescript appearance and indeterminate age stood up from a chair by the wall and fell into step next to him. Almost immediately two other men materialized from somewhere and closed up behind them, covering their backs. I had assumed Karsarkis was alone. Now that I thought about it, I realized how foolish that was of me.

After Karsarkis had gone, I just sat on my stool looking straight ahead, too stupefied by what had happened to do anything else. Then all at once an incredibly vivid memory swept over me.

I had been about seven or eight. My father and I were driving somewhere, although I have long forgotten where, in his green and black Buick, a racy two-door model with a line of chromed ports down each side of the long, narrow hood. I sat on the bench seat next to him as straight and proud as my tiny stature would permit.

We were on a two-lane asphalt highway passing through dense stands of tall pine trees. A short distance ahead, a silver and white Greyhound bus pulled out to pass a tractor-trailer and shifted its whole mass into the lane directly in front of us. My head was half turned toward the road and half turned toward my father and, in the same instant I saw the bus barreling down on us, I also saw my father’s face. Although only a child, I somehow sensed that he and I were both sharing the same inexplicable thrill of onrushing menace.

As the bus drew closer and the leaping white dog on its nose grew to a terrifying size, I experienced without really knowing what I was feeling that eerily heightened state of awareness that comes from proximity to something truly dangerous. For just an instant, my father and I were frozen together, bonded to one another by our common helplessness.

Then bus cut back into its own lane, whipped past us, and we were spared. The moment ended. I would never feel that close to my father again.

There at the bar of the Boathouse, looking at the stool where Karsarkis had been sitting and the drink he had abandoned, a feeling came back to me that was just like the one I’d had on that long-ago day: exhilaration intertwined with onrushing ruin. It was a strange reaction, I know, and at the time I dismissed the feeling that flooded over me then as nothing more than a freak misconnection of a few synapses of memory run amuck. It was only later, looking back on everything that happened afterwards, that I could see how wrong I had been.

The feeling that came over me that day in Phuket had not been a memory at all.

It was a
premonition.

“YOU LOOK AS
if you’ve seen a ghost, my darling.” Anita glanced at the Campari and soda on the bar. “Is that for me?”

“You can have it if you want,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis ordered it, but he didn’t drink any of it.”

I inclined my head in the direction where Karsarkis and his entourage had just disappeared.

“He just left,” I added.

Anita sat down on the stool Karsarkis had vacated and crossed her leano

“What happened while I was gone, Jack? You’re staring at me like I just turned into Whoopi Goldberg.”

I was still trying to decide how to explain what had happened in such a way Anita might actually believe it when she unerringly zeroed in on my uncertainty. But then she jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“Which old girlfriend of yours is here, Jack?” Anita craned her neck theatrically around the room. “Are you going to introduce us?”

Before I could muster a response to that, the hostess walked up carrying two red and gold covered menus.

“I have a table for you now,” she smiled.

Then the hostess caught the set of Anita’s features and stopped smiling. She glanced from Anita to me and back again.

“Do you still want a table?”

“Of course we do, my dear.” Anita patted the girl on her forearm. “My husband is just trying to come up with some kind of a story to explain away his slightly sordid past.”

When I stood up, the hostess backed away and shifted her eyes around the room as if she were searching for help, then turned and scurried off toward a table on the far side of the dining room. By the time Anita and I got to it, the hostess had already abandoned two menus and fled back to the safety of her station by the door.

“Nice going,” I said as I pulled out Anita’s chair for her. “Now that girl probably thinks I’m a pimp on holiday.”

Anita said nothing. She turned her full attention to the menu and appeared to lose all interest in whatever might be on my mind. She appeared to, but I knew better. Anita was a master of the technique used by all the best television interviewers. She asked a question, and she waited for the answer. Then after you had answered whatever she had asked, she waited some more in complete silence, which naturally got you to thinking you hadn’t given a very good answer or perhaps you had left something out.

That was when you started talking again, usually without thinking very much before you did, and while you were rambling around trying to find something new to say that would satisfy her enough to get her to go on to the next question . . . BAM! . . . that was when she got what she needed to kill you.

I knew all that, but I decided to take a chance anyway. What I had to tell Anita was just too good to wait any longer. I pushed my menu to one side and took a deep breath.

“Please listen to me carefully, Anita, because I’m being completely serious here. I did not see an old girlfriend. I saw Plato Karsarkis. I walked into the bar while you were in the bathroom and he was standing there talking on a mobile phone. I sat down and a couple of minutes later he walked over, introduced himself, and took the stool next to me.”

Anita didn’t react. She didn’t even look up from her menu.

“It’s true,” I said, thinking to myself how pathetic I sounded when I did.

There was a short silence.

“I know I had lobster last night,” Anita finally said, “but Phuket lobster is so wonderful. What do you think? Should I have lobster again?”

“Anita, I am telling you exactly what happened when you were in the bathroom. Plato Karsarkis was here.”

“And he walked over and introduced himself.”

“Yes.”

“To you.”

“Yes.”

“Did he say why?”

“He told me he had heard of me.”

Anita finally looked up from her menu, but her expression remained neutral.

“He’d heard of you?”

“Yes. He said he’d heard I had a first-rate legal mind.”

Helpless before the male compulsion to brag to an attractive woman, actually to almost any woman, I ventured a bit further down that road before I could stop myself.

“He said I was pretty well known in certain circles.”

Anita looked back down again at her menu.

“Then perhaps I
will
have the lobster,” she said. “You certainly ought to be able to afford it.”

“Anita, I’m telling you I just had a conversation with Plato Karsarkis right over there at that bar.”

I gestured pointlessly across the room and I felt suitably foolish as soon as I had done it.

“I thought he was supposed to be dead,” Anita said, glancing up again, but only with her eyes.

“Some people think so,” I said, “but obviously he isn’t.”

“And what is Plato Karsarkis doing in Phuket?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

I had no difficulty at all understanding Anita’s conviction that I was pulling her leg. Plato Karsarkis was the most notorious international corporate criminal since Marc Rich had scammed a billion dollars and rented the Prime Minister of Israel to lean on his buddy Bill Clinton to get himself pardoned. What’s more, Karsarkis was famously secretive, legendarily elusive, and so stories had it, constantly attended by a squad of Irish bodyguards widely said to be provided by the military wing of the IRA for which Karsarkis did a few favors from time to time in return. Anita knew very well that a few months before, Plato Karsarkis had vanished off the face of the earth and hadn’t been seen by anyone since.

Why
wouldn’t
Anita think I was joking? Even I was having a little trouble believing this had really happened.

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 dn din him inner 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?”