KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (8 page)

“Or maybe,” I pressed on, “it’s mostly that the men are white and the girls aren’t.”

“I don’t make judgments based on skin color,” Anita snapped.

“Excuse me,” I pointed out, “but you just did. Western women usually do when it comes to Thai women. You see a Thai woman with a white man and you assume the white man is there because he’s getting sex and the Thai woman is there because she’s being paid for it. And the worst part is you’re not even ashamed of assuming that.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Oh yes, it is. It’s
exactly
that easy. I made a deal with guys like those over there a long time ago, Anita. They don’t judge me. I don’t judge them. I figure it’s a pretty fair arrangement all around.”

Anita let the subject drop, which I took to be a pretty good sign, and we walked on for a while after that in a silence.

Eventually we came to a waist-high stone wall behind which black iron tables were scattered across a brick courtyard shaded by a thick canopy of palm trees. The tables were dressed with white linen and folded pink napkins and the whole thing made an undeniably pretty picture. When we stopped to take it in a very young woman of uncommon beauty approached with a shy smile, bobbed her head in a diffident greeting, and proffered a menu. I took it and pretended to study its offerings, but mostly I sneaked surreptitious glances at the girl.

She was wearing a traditional Thai sarong made out of green and gold silk that encased her slim figure from head to toe in a sheath of shimmering color. Her long hair was tar black and glowed with a sheen that held its own even against the vivid luminescence of her dress. She had the wide, unblinking eyes of a cat—a Siamese cat, I thought, but quickly dismissed the comparison as far too obvious—and her face formed a warm yet slightly shy smile that for the life of me I could not imagine to be purely commercial.

“That looks good, Jack. Don’t you think?”

“Yes indeed, I do.”

Anita was considerate enough not to require me to acknowledge we were referring to different things altogether.

The yo kstirateung woman showed us to a table positioned between two thick palms, one which had a fine view of the ocean just across the road. I ordered a bottle of some no-name white wine and we sipped it as we studied the menus. The wind rattled the palm fronds above us, the surf rolled with a basso drumming in the background, and the smells of grilling lobster drifted on the warm, salty air.

It was a nice moment, I had to admit, but not nice enough to make me stop wondering why Anita had wanted us to drive to Patong in the first place. Anita had just made it unmistakably clear that Patong was hardly her kind of
place and I knew there was something on her mind other than lunch and a walk through town. I just didn’t know what it was yet.

That was the very moment Anita chose to close her menu, put it down, and tell me what was really going on.

“I THOUGHT MAYBE
after lunch we could have a look in some of the real estate offices, Jack. I’ve been thinking it might be nice to buy a house down here. Someplace I could get out of Bangkok to paint.”

I examined Anita carefully. She seemed to be completely serious.

Anita’s career as an artist had recently taken off. Her London agent was a genius at PR and he had hyped Anita as an Italian woman living and painting in exotic Thailand at exactly the right time to make her sound like the next great hot find. Of course, she had a lot of talent, too, and that was probably the biggest reason for her success, but great PR never hurt anybody. Everything she painted was selling and the prices she was getting were jumping, so I had no reason to doubt the guy’s pitch that Anita was hot. That had always been exactly my own point of view.

Regardless, none of that led me to conclude we ought to be buying a house in Phuket.

“No way, Anita. Absolutely no way. We have a perfectly nice apartment in Bangkok, and don’t forget I’m just a poor business school professor. I can’t afford a vacation house in Phuket.”

“I didn’t ask you to buy a vacation house in Phuket, Jack. I said
I
was thinking of buying a place here to paint. It won’t be your money and it won’t be your decision.”

Uh-oh.

“I’d like your help and your support, Jack. But it’s not absolutely necessary.”

“Okay, Anita. Calm down. I’m sorry if I was a little harsh. I was just surprised, that’s all. We’ve never talked about anything like this before.”

“Well we’re talking about it now.”

We were indeed, and something about it was already making me uncomfortable as hell. The subject had only just come up, but already I had the distinct feeling we weren’t just talking about a house here. Worse, I couldn’t see exactly what it was we actually
were
talking about.

The rest of lunch went quietly without either of us mentioning real estate again. The palm fronds continued to rattle, the surf continued to roll, and the smell of lobster continued to drift, but everything was different all of a sudden. It felt to me like Anita had just taken several giant steps back into a place where I was not invited.

When our plates had been cleared and we had both declined coffee, Anita scooted her chair back slightly by way of preface. I had no trouble guessing what was coming next, and of course I was right.

&ldq nstira sliguo;I’m going to walk around to a couple of the real estate offices and see what they have listed. Are you coming?”

“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s fine. I won’t be long.”

Anita’s voice was matter-of-fact as she stood up.

“Where will you be?” she asked.

I looked around, but nowhere particularly interesting came to mind, so I shrugged. “I guess I’ll just have another glass of wine here,” I said. “I’ll meet you back at the jeep in…what? An hour?”

“Fine. The jeep then, in an hour.”

“You remember where it is?”

“Yes, Jack.” Anita pitched her voice in that particular way that always made me uneasy. “I can find the jeep without you holding my hand.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind me not going with you?”

“Of course not, Jack. Why would I mind?”

Why, indeed?

Anita had been gone only a few minutes when a fresh glass of wine arrived, closely followed by a busload of tourists. As the gaggle of extended families unloaded and began piling into the restaurant, the sound of their heavily accented Cantonese clearly marked them to me as Hong Kong Chinese. I decided my peaceful afternoon was probably at an end. Cantonese isn’t a spoken language; it’s a screamed language.

I looked around, sizing up possible escape routes, and noticed a middle-aged westerner sitting by himself at a table not far away from me. He had a straw Stetson tipped back on his head and was gazing at the invading horde of Chinese tourists with obvious bemusement. When he caught my eye, he nodded a friendly greeting.

“How you doing?” he hollered over the clamor.

“I’m doing fine,” I called back noncommittally, although of course I wasn’t.

When the man stood up, collected his beer bottle, and started toward me, I was less than thrilled. Companionship was the last thing I wanted right at that moment, much less the companionship of some yahoo sex tourist wearing a cowboy hat.

“I’ll bet you’re a Yank,” the man beamed as soon as he walked up to the table.

“You got me.”

“Well, hot damn,” he said sticking out his hand. “Me, too. My friends call me CW.”

“Jack Shepherd,” I said, shaking the man’s hand.

He eyed the chair Anita had abandoned. “Mind if I set a spell?”

I didn’t know what else to say and I didn’t want to be rude to the guy, so I shook my head. “Go ahead,” I said.

The man sank heavily into the chair, removed his hat, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“I’m from Dallas myself, but I don’t mind telling you, this heat here is knocking me for a goddamned loop.”

“I guess I must be used to it.”

“Where you from?”

“I was born in the States, but I live in Bangkok now.”

“You live in
Bangkok
? No shit?”

“No shit.&rdq s;Nowidth="uo;

“What do you do there, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“I teach at Chulalongkorn University.”

“Really?” The guy bobbed his head in interest. “What do you teach?”

“International business, corporate planning. That kind of stuff.”

“Wow! Ain’t that something?” The man bobbed his head around as if he could hardly grasp such a thing, then he slyly shook his finger at me. “Something tells me that you’re a lawyer.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”

“I knew it,” he nodded. “I knew it.”

Tex took a moment to look pleased with himself for his perspicacity.

“Well, hey,” he said after a moment of awkward silence, “you being a local and all, how about answering a question for a fellow countryman?”

“Sure. What do you want to know?”

“Oh, I was just wondering…”

The cowboy leaned back in his chair and chewed at his lip for a moment, presumably demonstrating all the wondering he was doing, before he spoke. “Exactly how long have you known Plato Karsarkis?”

At first, of course, I thought I had misunderstood him.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“I asked how long you’ve known Plato Karsarkis. Actually, Jack, I suppose I ought to ask you this first. Are you representing him? Are you one of Karsarkis’ lawyers now?”

“No, I don’t represent him,” I responded automatically.

Then I recovered enough from my astonishment to start working up a royal mad-on over this rube’s ambush.

“But, just out of curiosity, who the fuck are you to be asking me something like that, Tex?”

The man reached into a back pocket and took out a black leather folder that looked like a wallet. For a moment I thought the man was about to show me his driver’s license, but then he put the folder on the table between us and flipped it open and of course it wasn’t a driver’s license at all.

There was a big silver star inside. It was pinned to one side of the wallet and an identification card inside a plastic-covered pocket was on the other.

“I’m Deputy United States Marshal Clovis Ward and I’m assigned to the Special Operations Group of the United States Marshals Service. We’re responsible for transporting high-profile prisoners and apprehending fugitives.”

“I don’t believe it.” I sat there shaking my head. “You have got to be shitting me.”

The cowboy used his forefinger to slip a business card out from under his ID and then pushed it across the table to me.

“Call the marshals service in Washington, Mr. Shepherd. They’ll vouch for me.”

I pushed back from the table without picking up the card and folded my arms.

The fellow looked ex-military, like a noncom who had put in his twenty, retired to Florida, and let himself go slightly to seed; but he still looked a little dangerous, too, mostly around his eyes, which were hard and black and weren’t smiling even though the rest of his face was. His hair was close-c sr wmostropped and badly cut above his receding forehead, and while his upper body appeared fit and muscular his khaki shirt stretched where it buttoned over his belly. I thought I glimpsed the thin purple ghost of a tattoo on the back of his left hand, but he kept it turned slightly away from me and I couldn’t be certain. He had a smoker’s face, heavily lined and with a pattern of sharp ridges and clefts that looked like a topographical map of the Grand Canyon, and his leather-toned skin suggested exposure to a lot of sunlight without the use of FDA-approved creams.

The man sat there saying nothing while I studied him, smiling unblinkingly at me and twirling a pair of aviator-style sunglasses between his thumb and forefinger.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Oh, I think you know.”

“Just in case I have the wrong idea, why don’t you spell it out for me?”

The man unbuttoned the flap on one of his shirt pockets, reached in with two fingers, and pulled out something that looked like a thin stack of photographs. He put them on the table on top of his business card, but the pictures, if that’s what they were, were face down. When I reached to turn them over, he covered them with a big hand that was hard and callused.

“You know where the Paradise Bar is?”

“The one here in Patong?” I asked, puzzled, not seeing why he wanted to know.

The man nodded.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s just up the road from here, but—”

“Nine o’clock tonight. Be there or be square.”

“
Be there or be square?
Jesus, pal, where do you get your dialogue? Old Cheech and Chong movies?”

The man pushed himself out of his chair. He picked up his Stetson and when he put it on he carefully adjusted the angle of the brim, bending it slightly between his fingers until he seemed to be satisfied it was sitting exactly right on his head.

“Well, Slick, if I was you I wouldn’t worry about it none. You’ve got a whole shit load of better things than that to think about right now.”

Then the man slipped on his sunglasses, tossed me a little salute, and walked away. As I watched him thread his way among the tables crowded with Chinese tourists wolfing down their set-price lunches, I reached over and picked up the small stack of photographs he had left on the table.

There were three of them. The images were blurred and grainy as if they had been taken from a great distance and they had an odd green cast to them. My guess was that they had been taken through some kind of high-powered night vision equipment, although I was certainly no expert in such things and couldn’t be sure. Nevertheless, the contents of the photos were unmistakable.

In the first, I was getting out of our rented jeep in front of Karsarkis’ house. In the second, Anita and I were standing at the front door waiting for someone to open it. In the third, I was standing at the top of the steps to Karsarkis’ house waving idiotically into the night. When I had done that on the night of Karsarkis’ dinner party and Anita had asked me why, I told her something about wanting to be certain I hadn’t missed anybody who might be out there watching us. At the time I thought I was joking. Apparently I wasn’t.