Big Mango (9786167611037) (9 page)

“We’ve looked into your background
thoroughly, Eddie. We know you couldn’t possibly have what we’re
looking for.”

“If you already know I can’t help you, then
what are you doing here?”

“Because you
can
help us, Eddie. Just
not the way you think.”

“We? Us? Who the fuck are you talking
about?”

“This is our proposition.” Rupert bent
forward and lowered his voice, although there was no particular
reason for it. “We understand that you and your company commander
were pretty close. We want you to talk to Captain Austin for us.
That’s it really. Just talk to him.”

Boy, is this guy in for a surprise
,
Eddie thought, but he said nothing.

“We think Austin either has the money himself
or he knows who does. We also think that most of the money is still
intact.”

“Why do you think that?” Eddie asked.

“It’s impossible to get that much money into
circulation quietly, unless of course you possess technical
knowledge and means which we are confident Captain Austin
couldn’t.”

Eddie nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

“That’s why we want you to offer Captain
Austin a deal. We’ve established a completely legal structure for
moving the entire sum very quickly into the international banking
system without attracting any attention whatsoever, and we want to
form a partnership with him for that purpose.”

“What you’re saying is that you can launder
$400,000,000.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got a big laundry.”

“The biggest.”

“Why not just call Austin up and tell him
that yourself?”

“We think that’s a bad risk. Put yourself in
Austin’s position, Eddie. Some stranger rings up one day and says,
‘We hear you probably have ten tons of currency that once belonged
to the Bank of Vietnam and we wonder if you’d like to make a deal
with us to launder it into bank deposits and legitimate
investments.’ What’s he likely to do then? What would you do? If he
panics and runs, we might never find him again. To minimize that
possibility, we think that someone should contact Austin whom he
knows and trusts. You’re the perfect guy.”

The man’s story made more sense than Eddie
had expected it to. It might even have been moderately persuasive,
if he hadn’t known that Captain Austin was already dead, of
course.

“I am here, Eddie, to offer you a fee of
$100,000 for contacting Austin and trying to convince him to do a
deal with us. Your fee will be paid in advance. Even if you fail,
or if it turns out that Austin has nothing and knows nothing, you
keep the money. What have you got to lose?”

A hundred grand?

Eddie’s mind raced. If he just told the man
right now that Austin was dead, there all that money went. If he
didn’t tell him, if he took the fee, crapped around a while, and
then announced that he had stumbled upon a small problem putting
his case to Austin, he would get to keep it, wouldn’t he? That was
what the guy just said. He got the money whether he was successful
or not. On the other hand, if he took the guy’s money knowing that
he couldn’t do anything that was the same as stealing from him,
wasn’t it?

Before Eddie decided what to do, the man
added one more thing.

“Furthermore, if Austin enters into an
arrangement with us, we will pay you an additional $1,000,000.”

For a moment Eddie wasn’t certain he had
heard right.

“How much?”

“$1,000,000.”

“$1,000,000? Are you goddamn
kidding
?”

“You’ll never meet anyone more serious than I
am, Eddie.”

Eddie pushed himself out of his chair and
walked slowly to the window. How many times in his life was
somebody going to walk through his door and offer him $1,000,000 to
do anything, let alone something that he might easily be able to
do? Or could, if Austin were alive. The captain being dead and all
did raise the bar somewhat Eddie had to admit. Raised the crap out
of it actually.

Eddie studied the people down below his
window in Grant Street. He wondered briefly what all those people
were rushing toward. Maybe more to the point, what was rushing
toward them? What was already out there waiting for each of them, a
few minutes or a few days into their futures, the son of a gun
already cocked and aimed right between their innocent, bovine
eyes?

Maybe one was about to stumble on a curb and
break his leg; maybe the bus another was catching would crash and
he would be dead before he could get home; maybe somebody was about
to walk up to a third and offer him a life-altering bag of money
for doing something that sounded simple but was actually
impossible; or maybe nothing at all was going to happen to any of
them.

“There’s something you should know,” Eddie
said to the man as he eased himself back into the chair behind his
desk.

“Yes?” Rupert’s voice was empty, waiting.

“Austin’s dead.”

The man didn’t really look all that
surprised, Eddie noticed. Not exactly the reaction he had been
expecting.

“Well, that may make things more
difficult.”

Suddenly Rupert stood up. He pulled an
oversized brown envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and
dropped it onto Eddie’s desk.

“I am still prepared to retain you under the
same terms regardless of that. If you wish to accept my offer, you
must come to Bangkok immediately. In this envelope are an airline
ticket, a hotel confirmation, and funds for your expenses. The day
after you arrive in Bangkok, $100,000 will be wired to any bank you
chose anywhere in the world.”

The stiff set of Rupert’s features suddenly
broke and a surprisingly soft smile spread across his face. “I do
hope you will accept my proposition, Eddie. Bangkok can be rather
fun, you know.”

Then he winked, opened the door, and was
gone.

Jesus H. Christ. What the fuck was that?

First the guy wants to hire him to find
Austin and make a deal to launder ten tons of money Austin may
never have had. Then, when Eddie tells him that Austin’s dead, he
just nods and says that might make it more difficult, but he still
wants to hire Eddie anyway.

Then there was Bangkok again. It was hanging
out there like a tenth planet generating a gravitational field all
its own. It seemed to Eddie like he was riding in a little space
capsule that was locked into an orbit whirring endlessly around the
place. No matter how many times he made the damned circle, no
matter how he tried to get away, eventually the pull would be too
strong and Bangkok was going to reel him right on in. It was
starting to seem utterly inescapable.

On top of all that, there was the way the guy
had left his office. Eddie laughed right out loud. He couldn’t keep
the almost-forgotten lines from rolling through his head.

And laying his finger
Aside of his nose,
And giving a nod,
Up the chimney he rose.

Well, shit a goddamned brick
, Eddie
thought to himself. Who
was
that masked man?

EDDIE
had his feet on the
desk and was poking idly with one chopstick at the remnants of the
moo shu pork he had brought up from the Chinese place downstairs.
Joshua had offered to get it for him, but Eddie had gone himself
because he thought it might loosen him up a little to get out of
the office, even just to walk down one floor.

Ever since the man who called himself Marinus
Rupert left that morning, Eddie had been mostly just sitting around
trying to decide what to do. Almost the entire day had passed now
and other than choosing steamed rice over fried he hadn’t made any
particularly decisive moves. He had even gone Chinese in the first
place because he was hoping his fortune cookie might give him a
subtle nudge in the right direction, but Chung had forgotten to put
one in the bag this time, the bastard.

Was there some kind of hint for him in that?
Eddie considered the possibility for a while. Perhaps he should see
himself as a man without a fortune. Eventually, however, he decided
that was stretching Chung’s pedestrian oversight a little too far
and he let it slide.

Joshua pushed his head into Eddie’s office.
“It’s Jennifer on one.”

Eddie shifted his eyes and glanced at the
white light blinking rhythmically on his telephone.

“No calls means no calls, Joshua.”

“She said it was urgent. Anyway, I told her
you were taking a deposition in the library.”

“We don’t have a library.”

“Take the call or not. Makes no difference to
me.”

Eddie twirled the chopstick in his fingers
for a moment and then arced the white take-out carton toward the
trashcan with his left hand. It hit the rim, bounced into the air
and fell back into the center with a deeply satisfying
plop.

“Okay, I’ll talk to her.”

Joshua nodded silently and closed the door,
but Eddie didn’t immediately pick up the telephone.

The brown envelope had been on his desk all
day, exactly where Rupert had put it that morning, and now Eddie
imagined that it was regarding him with a baleful gaze, impatient
for him to make up his mind. The hundred grand tempted him a lot,
he had to admit, and frankly so did the chance to figure out why so
many people thought he knew what happened to the Bank of Vietnam’s
money. But the picture of Harry Austin’s head split open in a
Bangkok street, still vivid in his mind, was keeping his temptation
under tight reign.

Finally Eddie sighed, picked up the
telephone, and stabbed at the blinking button. “Hello,
Jennifer.”

“Sorry to bother you, Eddie. I tried you at
home first and you didn’t answer, so I thought you might be at the
office. I guess if you’re working late like this you must be busy,
so I’m sorry to—”

“Jennifer,” Eddie quickly cut into her stream
of consciousness before she got up to critical mass, “I don’t mean
to be rude, but I’ve got a lot on my mind. Why are you
calling?”

“I want you to talk to Michael.”

“I do talk to Michael, Jennifer. I talk to
him all the time. I talked to him just a few days ago.”

“No, I mean right now. I want you to talk to
him now.”

“Has something happened?”

“No. Well, yes.”

“Okay. Which is it?”

“He’s got a gun, Eddie.”

For an instant, Eddie flashed on a picture of
Jennifer and Franklin sitting rigid on the sofa while Michael waved
a pistol at them and announced his demands.

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s got a gun, Eddie. Some kind of pistol.
A black one. I found it in his room yesterday.”

“You searched his room?”

“Of course not.” Jennifer hesitated. “Well,
he’s been acting funny lately, so I was just looking around. I
thought maybe he was trying out drugs. You know, I just didn’t know
what to do so—”

“You searched his room,” Eddie finished.

“Don’t be a fucking lawyer with me!” Jennifer
snapped. “I don’t need a warrant. I’m his mother.”

She stopped talking and Eddie stayed silent
and listened to her breathe.

“And you’re his father,” Jennifer went on
after a moment in a calmer tone. “I want you to talk to him.”

“Have you asked him about the gun?”

She exhaled heavily. “He said it’s no big
deal; sometimes he takes it to school.”

“He’s taking a gun to school?”

“That’s what he says. He claims a lot of the
kids do.”

“I have a little trouble believing that very
many kids in the Seattle suburbs carry handguns in their backpacks,
Jennifer.”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Eddie,
but we live in the real world up here, not in San Francisco. It’s
probably true.”

After Jennifer had moved away, she got in her
digs about San Francisco whenever she saw an opening. Still, the
thought gave Eddie pause this time. Maybe he really was losing
touch with whatever was happening out in the normal world, out
there on the other side of the wall.

“Is this some kind of gang thing?”

“No. At least I don’t think it is. Michael’s
too much of a loner for that. I didn’t think I’d ever be grateful
he inherited that trait from you, but I guess I am now.”

Jennifer wanted to blame somebody for this
and she was trying hard to target Eddie, even if she didn’t quite
know how to do it in a way that made any sense. He didn’t bite.

“Where is the gun now?”

“Michael took it somewhere. He won’t tell me
where.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, Jennifer, if you
can’t do it yourself, get Franklin to take it away from him.”

There was a long pause. “Franklin’s in
France. He won’t be back until Friday.”

“Wonderful,” Eddie said. “Is Michael there
now?”

“He’s upstairs. I’ll get him.”

While Eddie waited, he tried to think things
through. Was this nothing but idle teenage posturing and blossoming
machismo? Or was it something else? And if it was something else,
how was he going to get Michael to tell him what it was? The
father-son thing had been drifting a while now for reasons he was
already having difficulty understanding. It seemed an impossibly
tall order to find out why Michael had suddenly decided to cart a
gun around while he was coping with everything else, too.

“Yeah?”

The deep resonance of the voice startled
Eddie and for a moment he even wondered fleetingly who had picked
up the phone. Michael used to sound like his mother over the phone
when he was younger. Once, to his great embarrassment, Eddie had
mixed them up when he called and Michael’s feelings had been badly
hurt by that. At least he guessed it wouldn’t be hard to tell them
apart from now on.

“I hear we’ve got a problem, Mike.”

“I don’t have a problem. You might. But I
don’t.”

“Carrying a gun’s dangerous, Mike, not to
mention illegal.”