KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (7 page)

“Look, I really don’t—”

“I had in mind a fee of $100,000.”

“I’m sorry?”

“$100,000. To look over the deal and give me your opinion.”

I wasn’t sure what Karsarkis expected me to say to that—it was too silly an offer for me to take it seriously—but he was standing there looking at me and obviously expected me to say something so eventually I did.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Surely it wouldn’t take more than a few hours to go over whatever you ha catet&rsquove. Nobody pays that kind of money for a few hours’ work.”

“I’m not proposing to pay you for your time, Jack. I’m proposing to pay you for your opinion. I could make a hell of a lot of money from this or I could lose a hell of a lot. You’re a smart guy and you know the territory out here. What you think about the deal and the way it’s structured is easily worth $100,000 to me.”

“Look, I’m very flattered, but—”

“Just think about it, will you?”

“I don’t need to think about it, Mr. Karsarkis. Even if I wanted to do it, I couldn’t. The school wouldn’t be happy about it.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning they don’t mind me doing some consulting work on the side, but they want me to keep it low profile.”

“We could keep this low profile. That’s no problem.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Yes, it is. I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”

“That’s not what I meant. Look, what I’m trying to say is the school…”

I trailed off. I was trying to be polite and I didn’t want to flat-out insult the man, but I decided there was nothing wrong with telling Karsarkis the simple truth.

“Let me put it this way. What I’m saying here is this: I really do not want to work for you, Mr. Karsarkis. Not even if you’re willing to pay me $100,000 for a few hours work. And I’m sure you understand exactly why that is.”

THE HIGHWAY WAS
nearly empty when Anita and I drove back to the hotel from Karsarkis’ house. The heavy wetness of the night was so dense the air felt almost like fog. We crossed the hills at the central core of the island in silence, both of us watching our headlights as the bobbing beams splintered in the moisture and made the thick vegetation lining the road glitter as if it were covered with fireflies.

“Be careful, Jack.”

I looked around, but didn’t immediately see what Anita was concerned about.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said be careful,” Anita repeated.

“Of what?”

“Of this man.”

I grunted. “Greeks bearing gifts? Something like that?”

“Be serious, Jack, and listen to me. Are you listening to me?”

I glanced quickly across at Anita. When I saw the set of her jaw, I knew there was only one possible answer to her question.

“Yes, Anita. I’m listening to you.”

“I am only going to say this once.”

“Okay.”

“People who live in the darkness are very seductive to you, Jack. So whatever you think you’re doing with this man, be very, very careful.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Anita, I not doing anything with him.”

“You’re about to take a huge chance here. I can feel it. You’re walking straight into something horrible, and you don’t even have the sense to be afraid.”

I didn’t reply.

It was a gorgeous night, quiet and very dark. The road was a divided four-lane arched here and there by concrete pedestrian bridges with a rank of tall aluminum streetlights marching down the grassy divider in the middle. The streetlights glowed a sulfurous yellow and the water vapor hanging in the air caught the butter-colored radiance and shaped it into luminous globes. It made me think of a line of huge yellow snow cones impaled on stainless steel sticks.

We drove in silence for a while and it was a few minutes before I realized Anita had slipped off to sleep, her head tilted against the back of the seat with her face turned away from me. I watched jack-o’-lantern houses drifting past the windows of our Suzuki, their waxy lights flicking through tiny openings. I smiled as a Buddhist temple loomed up briefly out of a grove of rubber trees, its fanciful, brightly painted towers sparkling fiercely, even in the darkness.

Moving into the left lane I passed a slow-moving Isuzu pickup. It had been converted into a primitive bus with rough wooden benches rigged down both sides of the bed, but that night it was empty. The stillness of the night in Thailand is always an illusion. It is never really empty. There is always something moving out there in the darkness: a car, a bus, a motorbike, a truck. Once I got myself lost near the airport in Bangkok very late at night, rounded a curve, and found myself face-to-face with an elephant somebody was riding right down the middle of the highway.

It took another half hour to get back to the hotel. Anita slept the whole way. I thought several times of waking her, maybe asking her again exactly what she was trying to tell me and what it was that I should do, but I didn’t.

I should have.

Later, looking back, I realized that if I had listene
d to Anita right then I might have had some kind of a chance to stop everything.

But, of course, I hadn’t listened to her, I hadn’t paid any attention to her at all. And after that, it was too late.

THE NEXT MORNING
Anita and I had breakfast on the desk outside our cabin and then lounged around for a while reading yesterday’s newspapers from Bangkok. That had always been one of the charms of Phuket for me. You could read yesterday’s papers instead of today’s and it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. Back in Bangkok I felt I had to be the informed man and every day I dutifully plowed through both of the local English-language newspapers and two or three international papers as well. In Phuket, I could never think of a single thing I really wanted to be informed
about
.

“Let’s drive over to Patong later, Jack. Want to?”

I was half dozing when Anita spoke. I didn’t respond immediately since I wasn’t absolutely sure I had heard her right. Had she really said she wanted to go to Patong?

Patong had once been a sleepy little fishing village on the west coast of Phuket, one that lay at the back of a deep bay with what had probably been one of the world’s most beautiful beaches. But now it was something else altogether. In less than a decade, the international glitterati, the famously beautiful, the notoriously stylish, and the just plain stinking rich may have seized the once drowsy tropical island of Phuket and made it their own, but they left Patong behind.

Patong had instead become ground zero for the hordes of package tourists shipped to Phuket by mass-market tour operators all over Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. The sleepy little fistfishing village was now mostly a jumble of travel agencies, cheesy souvenir shops, Indian tailors, all-night discos, and open-air girlie bars. Once Patong may have been the kind of gentle, palm-fringed South Seas paradise they wrote musicals about, but now it was just another nasty little hole.

“You want to go to Patong?” I asked. “Jesus, Anita, that place is a shit hole.”

“Don’t so snobby, Jack. It’s just a tourist town. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I hate tourists.”

“Oh, I see. Then, just out of interest, how do you think the Thais see you, white boy?”

That hurt. Boy, did that hurt.

THE USUAL ROUTE
from Cape Panwa followed the southern coast of the island for several miles and then abruptly swung inland and climbed through the rain forest in a series of steep switchbacks before descending again to the western beaches through another equally steep set of switchbacks. The road was slick from a light misting by a clutch of rain clouds still huddled over the center of the island and the traffic was light, but just as we crested the road’s highest point everything on the road in front of us abruptly stopped moving altogether.

We crept along for a half-mile, moving slowly through a double switchback, and then we saw the accident. A motorbike had gone down on a curve and the rider had skidded right into the path of a bus coming the other way. The mob of Taiwanese tourists from the bus was now huddled on the road’s shoulder snapping pictures of each other in front of the crumpled motorcycle. They were wearing Bermuda shorts and brightly colored golf hats and looked as if they thought the whole business might have been concocted just for their amusement.

The middle-aged Thai woman who had been riding the bike was sitting in the road just in front of where the tour bus had come to a halt. She had her legs stretched straight out in front of her and there was blood on her grease-streaked face. She held a grubby piece of cloth to the side of her head and stared off into the middle distance as one by one the Taiwanese stood in front of her and snapped pictures.

Anita shuddered and turned away. “Oh, Christ. I can’t look at that.”

“She seems to be okay. Probably more scared than hurt.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Jack.”

It was indeed, so I shut up and edged our jeep past the accident scene. Twenty minutes later we were rolling slowly through Patong searching for a parking place.

Since the whole village of Patong consists of essentially just two long streets, finding a place to park is pretty much a matter of cruising north along the ocean on Beach Road then turning around and coming back in the opposite direction on the parallel road that is about a hundred yards inland. It was barely past mid-day and we had no problem finding a spot almost immediately.

The west side of Beach Road is mercifully devoid of development and a broad concrete walkway runs along the sand for well over a mile. The beach itself isn’t all that great—the strip of sand is more khaki-colored than golden and a good deal of it is invisible under the ranks of canvas lounge chairs set out for rent by beachfront entrepreneurs—but the ocean is another matter altogether. Maybe, I grudgingly admitted to myself as we locked the Suzuki and set out walking, this hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.

The surf was rolling in as we walked, a low shore break that was useless f kwasa aor anyone hauling a board but otherwise suitably picturesque, and a warm breeze washed our faces with heavy salt air. The wind carried a jumble of pungent smells from which I could swear I could pick out the sharp spices of Madagascar and the moist veldt of Tanzania. Of course, I hadn’t the slightest idea what either of those things actually smelled like, but I was still pretty sure they were in there somewhere.

“You hungry, cowboy?”

I was just about to remind Anita we’d eaten breakfast pretty late and it was probably still too soon for lunch when I realized the salt air was already working its customary magic on my appetite.

“I could eat,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know. What do you feel like?”

“Seafood.”

Anita laughed and the sound of it tinkled in the warm breeze like wind chimes.

“Now there’s a surprise,” she said.

We crossed Beach Road and turned north. Open-air seafood restaurants lined the sidewalk, all of them displaying the day’s inventory on beds of ice spread out in big metal tubs. Offered for inspection were local lobsters, giant prawns, mussels, calamari, oysters, and an array of whole fish that were largely unidentifiable, at least to me. Most of the restaurants also sported huge outdoor grills where the seafood was cooked after it had been selected. The cloying smell of burning coconut shells mixed with the meatier odor of charcoal tugged at the river of tourists that flowed up and down the sidewalks of Beach Road.

Young women dressed in traditional sarongs of dazzlingly colored Thai silk greeted passers-by in front of most of the restaurants. Some offered diffident
wai
s, while others bowed and held out menus. A few cut straight to the chase with smiling shouts of “Come inside, please, sir and madam!”

Anita and I wandered past a dozen or more such places without stopping. I had never been very good at this sort of thing. The technique of picking a restaurant or a place to stay in a town I didn’t know very well was always a puzzle to me. How could I be sure a better choice didn’t lurk just a little way up the road?

Anita and I walked past something called the Pizzadelic Internet Pizzeria, which seemed pleasant enough in spite of its name. It offered a blue and white tiled outdoor bar and functional tables set up near the sidewalk underneath a mural that looked like it had been ripped off from a Grateful Dead concert.

“Want to go in here?” I asked, but Anita kept walking without bothering to reply.

A few moments later I spotted a McDonalds. It was pretty nice looking, too. The brick patio out front had some white plastic tables scattered around under a red and yellow striped awning and the place was jammed with an assortment of tourists and locals knocking back the Big Macs, reading newspapers, and generally engaged in what appeared to be some pretty vigorous hanging out.

I half turned toward Anita, but she spoke before I could manage to say anything.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said.

“Hey, okay, maybe it’s not all that great a place to eat, but at least you got to admit the fries have a lot going for them.”

Anita shot me a look.

“It’s not the food,” she said. “And you know it.”

“Know what?”

“You don’t see anything wrong with it, do you?’

“Wrong with
what
, Anita?”

“Those people.” She gestured with her head at the crowd lounging around in front of McDonalds. “Look at them.”

I looked.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “It’s mostly just tourists hanging out with their girlfriends.”

“
Girlfriends
?” Anita snorted. “Those women are whores, Jack.”

Ah-ha
, so that was it.

“Young Thai girls hanging around with scruffy middle-aged westerners who are probably twice their age? What do you think those women are, Jack? Schoolteachers on holiday?”

“What is it that bothers you so much, Anita? Is it that those men give the girls some money while they’re here? Or is it that the men are middle-aged and the girls are young.”

Anita didn’t bother to answer, but I wasn’t ready to let her off the hook yet. I was still harboring some resentment from the dinner table conversation at Karsarkis’ party.