Big Mango (9786167611037) (40 page)

Fuck
, he thought,
it’s
real
.

“I sold the gold a long time ago,” Austin
said in a voice that was not loud but made them all jump in the
silence just the same. “What’s left is mostly American currency,
but there might be some foreign stuff mixed in there, too. All I’ve
found so far is some yen, although I could’ve sworn we put marks
and pounds in somewhere, too.” He thought about it for a moment. “I
just can’t remember where it is anymore.”

Austin’s voice sounded like a man trying to
recall what he had done with his car keys.

“Anyway, be careful if you find it,” he
finished. “The old US currency is still in circulation, but I think
the foreign stuff has been replaced. You’d be pretty conspicuous if
you tried to pass it.”

While Eddie was still pondering that,
Winnebago tugged at his elbow. “Shit, man. What are we going to do
now? We can’t just call a taxi and pile this in the back seat.”

Austin disappeared briefly through an
interior door and returned with a sturdy-looking cart that had been
rigged with an electric motor. He rolled it up to the first of the
crates, wedged its long steel lifters underneath, and hit a button
on the handle. There was a brief buzzing sound and the lifters
ground steadily up and back until they stopped with a snap.

It occurred to Eddie that he was probably
looking at over a half a ton of money, just waiting to be wheeled
away.

“Let me show you something,” Austin said,
rolling the cart back the same way he had brought it in.

Trailing Austin through the door, Eddie, Bar,
and Winnebago found themselves in what looked like a large
storeroom. A pile of empty Carlsberg cases was heaped to one side
and a mismatched collection of old bar furniture was piled up
against the wall. Austin pushed the cart straight across the dim
room, hauled it around until it was in front of another door in the
far corner of the right-hand wall, and then pulled a heavy ring of
keys out of his front trouser pocket.

“You can’t exactly push shit like this down
the middle of Soi Cowboy,” Austin said.

He sorted through the keys, selected one, and
inserted it in the door’s handle. He seemed to drift away for a
moment, almost as if he had suddenly thought about something that
was too personal to mention, then he shook off whatever it was,
flicked his wrist, and clicked the lock open.

On the other side of the door was a long,
well-lit hallway. It looked like a corridor in a modest office
building: plain, white walls; black linoleum floor; and wooden
doors set at irregular intervals along the right-hand side. The
corridor ended about 150 feet away, at a door that looked just like
all the others.

“This runs behind some of my bars. I put the
toilets back here. Saved me a lot of money not to have to build
separate ones in every place.”

Eddie involuntarily glanced toward the
packing case on the cart. He wondered how many toilets Austin could
have built with its contents.

“That door up at the end…” Austin pointed
down the corridor, “will take you out into another building of
mine. Used to be a Tex-Mex joint called Poncho’s, but I couldn’t
get me a decent cook so I finally closed it. Anyway, you won’t have
to go out onto Cowboy to get out of here. You can go right down
there, open the front door of old Poncho’s, and you’ll be on a
sidewalk five feet from soi 23.”

“What do we do then?” Eddie asked. The floor
squeaked as he shifted his weight from one foot to another.

“Fucked if I know,” Austin said. “I can’t do
everything for you, boy. I’ll cover your ass as well as I can from
here, but once you’re out this door, you’re on your own. Now do you
think you can handle that or not?”

Eddie had no idea, not the slightest, but he
nodded anyway. It seemed like the only thing to do.

***

DARKNESS
had fallen over
Cowboy and the crowds were beginning to roll in. A steadily growing
river of sweaty white flesh sloshed up and down the little street
eyeing the action. A glitzy neon sign near the gray shophouse
flickered on—AFTER SKOOL, it read—and a wave of rock and roll music
boomed from a loudspeaker system somewhere inside.

Lek took another slow walk by the gray
shophouse. The men guarding the door paid no particular attention
to her as she passed close by since they were watching a very fat
man slumped on a stool at a nearby open-air beer bar. A thin girl
who looked no more than eighteen unwrapped a white towel from a
plastic bag and wiped the fat man’s face, starting with his
forehead and working her way gently down his cheeks to his neck.
The man suddenly shouted something at her in what sounded like
Swedish, waving his beer bottle in the air, and the young girl
backed away, confused. One of the men by the doorway screwed up his
face as he said something to the other that Lek couldn’t hear. Then
he pulled out a cigarette and lit it, curling his lip and flipping
the match off in the direction of the Swede.

Lek stopped in the shadows not far away. It
would be easy enough to take them now, she thought, but it would
probably be better to wait just a little longer. In another hour,
Cowboy would be running full. The street, the bars, and the food
stands would be crammed with the kind of customers who wouldn’t be
distracted by a little ruckus. Bombs could be going off and
small-arms fire rattling in the street, she thought to herself, and
the old
farangs
who hung around Cowboy would just keep on
swilling beer, buying drinks for the girls, and searching the night
for a little hope.

Another hour, Lek decided. Give it one more
hour and we’ll go in.

***

“COULDN’T
you let us have a
couple of days to get the logistics worked out, Captain?” Eddie
asked. “I’m sure we’d find a way to move this stuff without any
problem, but we’ve got no way to do it right now.”

“Jesus Christ, you still don’t get it, do
you?” Austin snapped, waving a finger at Eddie. “Those guys at the
Little Princess weren’t the fuckin’ welcome wagon. You stand here
much longer farting around and somebody’s going to be so far up
your ass you’ll need a grappling hook to pull them out.”

Eddie winced at the image, but it was very
persuasive. “We’ll have to find a truck or a couple of vans
somewhere,” he said.

“I’ve got an old Nissan out there some
place,” Austin volunteered. “It’s a van, but it’s a piece of shit.
Won’t take any weight.”

Eddie looked at Bar. “What do you think?”

“The Ambassador Hotel is near here and the
resident manager’s a friend of mine,” Bar said. “I think they’ve
got a couple of Toyota Hiaces they use for hauling tour group
luggage. But he would probably lose his job if they were gone more
than a couple of hours.”

Eddie looked at the stacks of American
currency visible in the open crate, and then he looked back at
Bar.

“I think I see your point,” Bar nodded.

Bar pulled out his mobile telephone and began
to dial. The outlines of a negotiation were already beginning to
form in his mind.

Eddie turned back to Austin. “You can go with
us, Captain.”

“No thanks, Eddie. I’ve been here so long I
might as well stay a little longer.”

“If Lek finds you, and you’re right about
her…” Eddie left the thought unfinished.

“Doesn’t matter,” Austin shrugged. “There’s
not much she can take away from me anymore.”

“She’ll hurt you, Harry.”

“Not if I see her first.”

Bar snapped his telephone shut. “Done deal.
He and another guy are going to drive the vans around and pull them
up on the sidewalk outside Poncho’s. He says he knows the
place.”

“What did you tell him?”

Bar grinned. “Told him I was repossessing the
fixtures from a club that owed me money.”

“And he believed that?”

“Shit, no. But I said I’d give him $5000 to
park the two vans on soi 23 with their keys in the ignition and not
report them stolen till tomorrow. He believed
that
.”

***

LEK
checked her watch again.
It had been almost an hour and no one had entered or left the gray
shophouse. The two men flanking the door were still there, smoking
and waiting patiently, doing nothing until somebody gave them
instructions. That was something at which Thais were particularly
good.

It hadn’t taken long after nightfall for
Cowboy to soar into full flight. A man in baggy shorts without a
shirt walked by wearing a tiny, black bra wrapped around his bald
head like a sweatband. Two young girls with golden skin watched
him, laughing out loud. They wore red, pleated school skirts, black
and white saddle oxfords with white socks, and white blouses
unbuttoned to their waists. They had nothing on underneath.

Across from where she sat, Lek counted the
farang
men pushing through a curtain into a bar named Long
Gun. Each time the curtain swung open, she caught a flash of the
young girls inside. Most were slim, dark-skinned, and naked except
for G-strings. They twirled through a forest of silver poles on an
elevated stage, shuffling their feet to uncertain rhythms. Rock
music throbbed into Soi Cowboy, its volume rising and falling as
the heavy curtain opened and closed.

Lek decided she’d had enough.

So much for the legendary Asian virtue of
patience that Westerners mythologized, it was time to do some
damage. Stealth and guile had their place, but maybe her male
counterparts were right. When you came right down to it, violence
and pain were what you could count on to deliver the goods.

She nodded at one of her soldiers squatting
nearby. He stood up, walking slowly toward the gray shophouse, and
one of her men at the other end of the soi mirrored his movements.
After they both worked their way into position, dawdling at a
vendor’s cart near the building’s entrance, Lek approached the men
sitting by the doorway.

She appeared hesitant and confused. One of
the men flipped his cigarette away and snapped something at Lek in
Thai as she approached. She pretended not to understand and
addressed him slowly and carefully in English, as if speaking to a
child.

“I lost maybe.” Then she looked at the other
man. “Is this right place?”

“What you want?” he snapped.

“I here for Harry Austin.”

The mention of Austin’s name surprised the
two Thais, as it was meant to, and they looked at each other,
neither knowing quite what to do. But since the Vietnamese men
moved so quickly, they didn’t have long to worry about it.

There were two almost simultaneous noises,
hardly louder than coughs, and each of the guards took a single
silenced round in the head. The Vietnamese swept both boys from
their chairs, folded them onto the ground as if they were drunk or
sleeping, and quickly filled their places. In the uproar of Cowboy,
no one noticed.

Lek was through the door even before the two
Thais were on the ground. She crouched in the shadows just inside
and silently drew a long bladed knife with a serrated edge from a
scabbard under her blouse. Remembering the bag of weapons she had
found back at the Little Princess, she waited, silent and
motionless, letting her eyes adjust to the semi-darkness.

IT
had taken barely a half
hour to wheel the crates out of the Green Latrine, down the back
hallway, and into the empty shell of Poncho’s. Within another half
hour, Eddie, Winnebago, and Bar had them all loaded into the two
white Toyota vans with AMBASSADOR HOTEL LUGGAGE SERVICE painted on
their sides. Bar had found Harry Austin’s old Nissan and pulled it
up on the sidewalk in front of the Toyotas to block the line of
sight between them and the eastern entry to Soi Cowboy. In most
cities, Bar knew, parking on the sidewalk made you conspicuous. In
Bangkok, you just fit right in.

Eddie and Bar had talked about where they
would take the crates while they were hoisting them up into the
Toyotas. After considering and discarding several possibilities,
Bar had suggested a motel that a friend of his owned in Pattaya, a
moldy beach resort on the Gulf of Thailand about seventy miles
south of Bangkok. Eddie eventually agreed that sounded fine, at
least for starters. It would be a place where no one asked too many
questions and they could hide the vehicles in two of the
traditional curtained parking bays until he figured out what to do
next.

Eddie knew that cash in large amounts was a
major headache to deal with. You couldn’t exactly wheel a couple of
hundred million bucks in hundred dollar bills into Citibank and
open a checking account without drawing a fair amount of
undesirable attention. With a couple of good nights sleep and a
little time to think, however, Eddie was pretty sure he could come
up with something cute. He had handled enough money laundering
cases in his career to have picked up a few tricks of the trade.
Actually, he had a couple of pretty decent ideas already.

Eddie wanted to take one more try at
persuading Austin to go with them before he called it quits, but
when he looked around he noticed that the captain had disappeared.
He had apparently slipped back inside while they were loading, so
Eddie walked back through Poncho’s and up the hallway to the Green
Latrine. When he discovered that Austin had locked the door to the
storeroom behind him, he was a little surprised, but he assumed it
must have happened by mistake so he went back outside. While the
others hooked the security straps around the crates and then
cinched them to the U-bolts welded into the frames of the vans,
Eddie walked up soi 23 to get around to the Latrine’s front
door.

He slipped past a food cart from which a
smiling woman was doing a brisk business selling plastic bags
filled with an unidentifiable yellow liquid, and then he turned
right into Soi Cowboy. He took a few steps, slowing while his eyes
searched out the front of the Green Latrine. Then he stopped
abruptly, and blinked quickly a few times trying to absorb what he
saw.