LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (8 page)

“Whoever hit us, they got to us through our overseas depository accounts and drained most of our foreign currency holdings. About $180,000,000 disappeared a couple of months ago. Poof! Just like that. Somebody cleaned us out and then burned us to cover their tracks. That’s when all that shit about the bank started turning up in the papers.”

“$180,000,000?”

“Give or take.” Barry nodded slowly at me. He did it carefully, like a man with a really bad headache. “As a practical matter, Jack, it’s like this. The Asian Bank of Commerce has been robbed. Somebody else’s crooks fucked my crooks.”

I would have laughed, but I didn’t have the heart.

Barry stood up and stretched, then he went back to walking east along Sukhumvit again, moving slowly with his head down. I stood up, too, and walked along next to him, keeping pace. Barry seemed to have lost interest in conversation, which was okay with me since it gave me a chance to think.

I had always operated on the assumption that I had a fairly sophisticated understanding of the Asian financial scene. Finding out that a regional bank, even a modest one, had been taken over by Russian mobsters came as a considerable surprise to me, to say the least.

Regardless of Barry’s confidence that he had perpetrated his coup in complete secrecy, I doubted that. I was absolutely certain there had to be quite a few other people around who knew all about it. It was a common enough conceit among foreigners doing business in Asia that they had some kind of advantage over the locals and were invariably a step or two ahead of them. That was a presumption that many people I knew had ultimately come to regret.

Government officials, particularly those in Third World countries like the Philippines and Thailand, might seem sleepy to foreigners, but in my experience most bureaucrats around the region had a shrewd eye for opportunity. They were usually far from stupid, even if they played the part of bumbling provincials. I didn’t believe for a moment that every one of them had missed Barry’s little ploy. Of course, as long as the arrangement wasn’t general knowledge and the payoffs kept arriving regularly—tea money was the polite euphemism used in Asia for the practice of such official bribery—no one would make a fuss.

There were still an awful lot of screwy things about Barry’s story. It was unlikely, probably impossible, for vast amounts of money to have disappeared from ABC accounts all over the world at exactly the same time without the active collusion of somebody inside the bank. How could Barry not have thought of that since that was exactly the way he had scammed Texas State Bank in the first place? But he didn’t seem to have thought about it; or if he had, he chose not to mention it to me.

“So what does Jimmy have to say about all this?” I asked after a while.

“Are you fucking
kidding
me, Jack? You remember Harold Wilkins? He only lost
one
million dollars and you know what happened to him.”

“In other words, you haven’t told Jimmy?”

“No fucking way, man. No way he’d believe I wasn’t scamming him. Why do you think I’m hiding out in Bangkok?”

I glanced back at the woman again. She was about fifty feet back, right where she’d been since we left Foodland.

“So what are you going to do, Barry?”

“The way I figure it, I’ve got only one chance. I have to find that money and prove to Jimmy that I had nothing to do with it disappearing in the first place.”

All of a sudden Barry stopped walking and pointed his forefinger at me.

“You know more about international banking and money laundering than anyone I know, Jack. I need your help.”

“Me?
You want
me
to help you find your money?”

“Money’s hard to hide. It always leaves footprints. A guy who knows how can follow them anywhere. You’re the best there is, Jack, so you’re my guy. I need you to find the footprints and tell me where they lead.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

Barry looked back at the woman trailing us and held her eyes briefly. Then he lifted his left index finger and pointed to a pedestrian bridge just ahead of us that crossed over Sukhumvit Road to the Sheraton Hotel. Immediately she walked toward us, passed by without a word, and started up the concrete steps to the bridge. Barry kept his eyes on me.

“Come on, Jack. You can do this. Help me here. I’m twisting in the wind.”

“Look, Barry, even if I was willing to help you, and even if I somehow found the bank’s money, what good would it do? Somebody else would still have it and you’d still be screwed.”

“Yeah, but you haven’t heard the rest of my plan yet.”

The woman was about halfway up the steps, walking lightly on the balls of her feet like someone poised for a fast take off. There was no one within earshot, but Barry leaned slightly toward me anyway as if he wanted to be certain he was not overheard.

“After you find the money,” he whispered, “I want you to steal it back.”

Then Barry turned away, jogged up the steps, and caught up with the woman near the top. I just stood there and followed them both with my eyes as they crossed the bridge and disappeared into the Sheraton. I was too dumbfounded to do anything else.

THE NEXT MORNING
I overslept. I showered and dressed as quietly as I could in order not to wake Anita, got the Volvo out of the garage, and made straight for Starbucks. With any luck, I could soak up enough caffeine and sugar to set me up nicely for my ten o’clock class. The course was a real yawner, even for me—a lecture series on the application of American securities regulations to capital raisings in the United States by foreign companies—and I assumed my students really hated it. Today in particular, without a caffeine high and a sugar buzz I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting through it.

There were some people I knew who vilified Starbucks as an American corporate giant heartlessly homogenizing the unique cultures of the world in the headlong pursuit of profits. Strangely, I had noticed that the people who put the most energy into their vilifying were generally other Americans, mostly the kind you met abroad who were trying way too hard to be perceived as high-minded citizens of the world rather than just Yanks on the loose. I liked Starbucks. The coffee was good, the food was okay, and the chairs were comfortable. If that made me a closet imperialist, I could live with it.

It was a nice morning again by local standards. The night winds had come and gone and they had left behind a dazzling blue sky without the usual layer of brown crud to spoil it. I whipped up Ploenchit Road and pulled into the McDonald’s parking area just behind the Grand Hyatt. Smiling at the brown-uniformed security guard who came over to check me out, I transferred a red one-hundred-baht note smoothly into his lightly sweating palm.

“Korp khun maak krap.”
Thank you very much, I told him. Then I went on my way ignoring the prominently posted signs that said the parking was for McDonald’s customers only. That was something I had to admit I loved about Thailand. The joyous, unrestrained air of corruption that permeated everything made life pretty simple once you learned to go with it.

I selected a plump cranberry-and-bran muffin, got a grande low-fat latte, and carried them both to a window table looking out onto Ploenchit Road. Someone had abandoned a copy of the
Bangkok Post
on the table and I flipped to the front page to skim the headlines while I ate. Reading an English-language newspaper in Thailand was always an adventure. Reading a Thai-language newspaper was probably an adventure, too, but I couldn’t read Thai nor could any other foreigner I knew, so I wasn’t absolutely sure.

When I first moved to Bangkok, I discovered that the
Bangkok
Post
wasn’t anything at all like an American newspaper. The usual fare of graphic crime stories and breathless accounts of various groups demanding special treatment, preferably at the expense of other groups, was largely if not entirely absent from the pages of the
Post
. Instead, the
Post
seemed to make do with photographs of watch shop openings and incoherent stories about Thai politics, although I was never certain whether it was the stories or the politics that was more incoherent. When I got through reading the
Post,
which seldom took more than ten minutes, I was usually pretty certain that nothing much had happened anywhere in the world that was of any significance at all. That always put me in a good mood.

My head was buried in the sports section when I heard a familiar voice at my elbow.

“Sawadee krap, Ajarn.”
Good morning, Professor.

Jello’s real name was Chatawan Pianskool and I had never been absolutely certain what the source of his nickname was. I always surmised it might have something to do with his physique, but I wasn’t sure. Jello was a big man with a prominent potbelly, which was unusual for a Thai. He was one of those guys a lot of people took lightly when they first met him since he was almost a cartoon of a jolly fat man, but that didn’t seem to bother Jello. On the contrary, it was something he frequently turned to his advantage.

Jello was a Thai police captain and he had been assigned to the Economic Crime Investigation Division as long as I had known him. Whatever Jello didn’t know about what was happening in Bangkok just wasn’t worth knowing, at least when it came to finance and commerce.

“You waiting for someone, Jack?”

“Nope,” I answered, folding the
Post
and tossing it onto the empty table next to me. “Sit down, partner.”

Just then a half-dozen giggling college girls tumbled in through the door and we both glanced over at the commotion. Barelegged and smooth-skinned, they were uniformly so slim that they looked like a clump of reeds waving in the wind. They were all dressed in the customary Thai university uniform: tight white shirts, sling-back heels, very short black skirts, and wide brown belts looped loosely around waists so tiny they looked as if they had to be optical illusions. Even at that age, there was a gliding grace about most Thai women that left men slack-jawed.

Jello and I both paused respectfully to take in the passing procession. In a lot of countries, two middle-aged men watching college girls in a coffee shop meant trouble, but in Thailand it was different. Feminine beauty was the country’s pride, not the humdrum landscape of its countryside. To admire it when you were in its presence was as acceptable as enjoying an ocean view in Hawaii.

When the girls had passed, Jello pulled out a chair and laid two chocolate croissants on a napkin alongside a large coffee.

“What’s new,
Arjan
?” he asked.

“Not much,” I said. “Same old same old.”

I had absolutely no intention of telling a senior ECID cop about Barry Gale. At least not yet.

“You working on anything important for Dollar these days?” he asked.

“Nope, nothing really.”

“Seen Dollar recently?”

“Not for a couple of days. Why are you so interested in Dollar this morning?”

“I heard something a little strange about him.”

I said nothing, but my antenna quickly deployed and made a couple of quick rotations. Jello wasn’t a man for idle gossip. Something was coming.

“I talked to Just John about an hour ago,” Jello went on. “John told me Dollar got beaten up last night.”

“Beaten up?
Oh, come on. John must have been pulling your leg.”

Jello picked up his cup and blew on the coffee before he tasted it. He didn’t say anything and I saw he wasn’t smiling.

“I don’t think so,
Arjan.
He said that Dollar and some client got jumped by two guys when they came out of the office last night.”

“Dollar’s office? Dollar was mugged coming out of the United Center?”

“Yeah, in front of that Délifrance on the ground floor. I hear he put up a flight. Even knocked over one of those tables with the umbrellas when they were all rolling around.”

“What time was this supposed to have happened?”

“About ten.”

I still couldn’t believe it. Jello looked unimpressed by my skepticism, but that did nothing to change my point of view.

“Was Dollar hurt?” I asked.

“Apparently not. He didn’t even bother to report it to the police.” Jello’s mouth was half full and he dribbled a few crumbs of croissant onto the table.

Residents didn’t get mugged in Bangkok, only tourists, and even then mostly Taiwanese tourists for some reason. That approach had apparently become something of a firm rule among muggers since Taiwanese tourists seldom had much interest in returning at their own expense to testify against them, even if the mugger was unlucky enough to get caught—which he almost never was.

“Who was the client?” I asked.

“What client?”

“The one Dollar was with when he was mugged.”

“Oh.” Jello started in on the second croissant and sipped at his coffee again before he answered. “Just John didn’t say.”

It was hard to believe that Dollar could have been mugged coming out of the United Center on Silom Road at ten o’clock at night. That was one of the highest profile spots in Bangkok, and at that time of night the sidewalk should have been crowded with punters going back and forth to Patpong just down the street.

“Why don’t you call Dollar and ask him what really happened?” Jello suggested.

I looked at my watch. Coming up fast on ten. I had to get going or I would be late for my class.

“It all sounds like a lot of nothing,” I said. “I gotta go. I’ve got a class to teach.”

We said our goodbyes and I headed out. As I pushed out through the door, I glanced back over my shoulder.

Jello was still sitting quietly at the table, twisting his coffee cup with one hand and polishing off the second of his chocolate croissants with the other. He licked the last crumbs off his thumb and forefinger and stared straight ahead at the street, apparently thinking about nothing more important than the traffic flowing past on Ploenchit Road.

But I knew Jello and I knew that wasn’t true. Something had just happened, only I couldn’t figure out what it was.