World of Trouble (9786167611136) (15 page)

In front of the Duke everything looked pretty
much like it always looked in front of the Duke. It was as if
Shepherd had dreamed everything. Silom Road was open and snarled
with traffic as always. The street vendors were back clogging the
sidewalks, too, and pedestrians were walking in the street to get
around the vendors just as they always did.

The red- and yellow-shirted people were gone.
Only a short time before, they had been beating on each other with
metal poles, boards, folding chairs, golf clubs and anything else
at hand that could be turned into a weapon. Now they had all simply
vanished. In their place, office girls hurried back to work from
their shopping breaks, tourists squinted at the fake antiques in
shop windows, and the first wave of bar trash headed for the go-go
bars of Patpong.

For a moment Shepherd felt dizzy again. There
had
been a riot right here, hadn’t there? It
had
really happened just like he remembered, hadn’t it? He pushed at
the bump on his head and flinched as the pain shot through his
scalp. Yes, of course it had.

If the mass of the Thai people has a genius
for anything, and that is certainly a fit subject for spirited
debate, it is a talent for living day to day no matter what happens
around them. It isn’t a show of resilience exactly—at least not in
the sense that the Israelis standing up to a barrage of Hezbollah
rockets is resilience—it’s more like the repeated invocation of a
widespread collective unconsciousness. Thais can turn a blind eye
to even the unhappiest of events. The Thais are a people who, after
all, mostly managed to ignore World War II. They probably looked at
the invading Japanese army as only the latest wave of sex tourists
to arrive on their shores, just a bunch of horny guys with money to
spend, all of whom happened to be wearing identical outfits.

Shepherd thought back to the faces he had
watched not very long ago right on this very street. Thai faces
contorted with rage and twisted in hatred. And he wondered if this
time it might be different, if this time all the collective
unconsciousness in the world might not be enough. But now, standing
there and looking at Silom Road and seeing how quickly it had
returned to what passed locally for normal, he was starting to
believe again that everything would be all right.

Nothing in Thailand ever really changed.
Mai pen rai
, loosely translated as ‘never mind,’ was
practically the Thai national motto. Nothing dented the somnolence
of Thais for very long.

***

SHEPHERD WALKED SLOWLY back to the Grand and took a
shower. Then he turned on the television and sat on the bed naked
and stared at it. There was a replay of a Knicks game on ESPN and
he watched that for a while, then he switched over to CNN and let
the collected anguish of the day slide past his eyes in an
uninterrupted parade of miseries.

The Silom Road riot hadn’t even made the
international news. Thailand seldom did, not unless another
American pedophile on the lam had been caught there or an elephant
polo match was filling out a slow news day. Charlie had been
briefly turned into a media star by CNN, of course, but that was
because he was a billionaire attacked by terrorists in Dubai, not
because he had once been the prime minister of a country most
Americans couldn’t find on a map.

About 9:00
P.M.
Shepherd swallowed three aspirin, turned off the TV and the lights,
and pulled the sheet up to his chin. At least now Charlie’s money
was winging its way out of the country and the job he had come to
Thailand to do was finished. Tomorrow he could go home to Hong Kong
and leave the damned Thais to beat each other senseless if they
really wanted to. Whether they did or not, it didn’t have a thing
to do with him.

He told himself that over and over until it
became a mantra as rhythmic and repetitious as the counting of
sheep in a dreamland meadow. It wasn’t true, of course, and no
matter how many times he said it he didn’t really believe it, but
repeating it over and over did serve at least one beneficial
purpose. It put him right to sleep.

THE TELEPHONE RANG. Shepherd cleared his throat,
shifted his body, and propped himself up on one elbow. The hands of
the clock on the bedside table glowed in a green tint that was
probably meant to be restful but which was mostly irritating.

4:37
A.M.

Shit
.

Shepherd fumbled around until he found his
cell phone and managed a successful stab at the answer button.

“This better be damn good,” he snapped.

“It is, my friend.”

“Jello?” Shepherd cleared his throat again.
“Is that you, Jello?”

“Yeah. Did I wake you?”

“No, I had to get up to answer the phone
anyway.”

“That’s a very old joke.”

“I only know very old jokes.”

Jello’s real name was Chatawan Pianaskool,
but Shepherd had never heard anyone call him anything but Jello.
Shepherd had no idea at all what the origin of his nickname was,
but Thais often called each other by names that seemed bizarre to
Westerners, so he had never asked.

When Jello and Shepherd first met, Jello was
a Thai police captain assigned to the Economic Crime Investigation
Division. About a year later he was suddenly promoted to colonel
and assigned to the Department of Special Investigations, usually
referred to as Special Branch. Shepherd understood enough about the
way things worked in Thailand to know that wasn’t a real promotion.
Jello had apparently stepped on some powerful toes and made some
big players nervous. Special Branch was where all the really nasty
cases went, the ones nobody else wanted to touch for fear that they
would leave a stain on a promising career that could never be wiped
clean. He had no doubt a fair few of Jello’s superiors were
probably waiting for one of those kind of cases to mark the end of
Jello’s career, but Jello was an uncommonly savvy and nimble
fellow. Shepherd’s guess was that they would be waiting for one
hell of a long time.

“I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes,” Jello
said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I need for you to look at something.”

“It’s the middle of the goddamned night,
Jello. Can’t this wait for a few hours?”

“No,” Jello said, “it can’t. Twenty minutes.
Outside.”

“Wait a minute.”

Shepherd shook his head and fought his way
through the cobwebs.

“How do you know where I am? How do you even
know I’m in Bangkok?”

“I guess all Thais aren’t as stupid as you
think, huh, white boy?”

“That’s not what I meant, man. All I’m saying
is—”

“What are you doing in a shithole like the
Grand?” Jello interrupted.

“The Oriental is all booked up.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Okay, you got me. I like shitholes. I’m just
a shithole kind of guy.”

“Downstairs. Twenty minutes,” Jello
repeated.

Then he hung up without another word.

***

SHEPHERD WAS DOWNSTAIRS in fifteen. Unwashed,
carrying nothing but a bad attitude, and willing to kill for
coffee. Five minutes after that Jello drove up in a Bangkok cop’s
version of a white Crown Victoria, an unmarked tan Toyota so plain
it was downright conspicuous.

“What the fuck is going on?” Shepherd asked
as he wrenched open the passenger door.

“Nice to see you, too, man,” Jello said.

Jello was wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt
printed with yellow pineapples. It was stretched so tightly across
his paunch that it could have passed for a wetsuit. Shepherd got in
and sat down. Jello lifted a white Styrofoam cup out of the
Toyota’s cup holder and handed it to him. Thumbing off the lid,
Shepherd took a hit. It was the worst coffee he had ever tasted. He
was still trying to decide whether to swallow it or spit it out
when Jello pulled away from the curb and headed toward Silom
Road.

“We found a body,” Jello said. “We think it’s
someone you know.”

Shepherd not only swallowed the coffee, he
took another couple of quick gulps.

“Why do you think I know him?”

“I didn’t say it was a man.”

“A woman?”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“Hey,” Shepherd spread his hands, “I know
this is Thailand, but chances are still pretty good it’s one or the
other.”

Jello turned left on Silom Road, caught a red
light at the next intersection, and stopped. It was not yet 5:00
A.M.
and there wasn’t another car in
sight. But Jello stopped for the light.

“Bold move, man,” Shepherd said. “Real guts
ball.”

Jello reached into his shirt pocket and
handed Shepherd an old model Motorola flip-phone that was plain
black.

“This was on the body,” he said. “Have a
look.”

The light changed and Jello drove through the
empty intersection as carefully as if it were choked with
traffic.

Shepherd took the phone and looked at
Jello.

“Start with the address book,” Jello
said.

It took a minute, but finally Shepherd
located the right menu and opened the address book. There were
about a dozen numbers, but no names were paired with any of them.
The numbers looked local. At least the codes looked like a mixture
of Thai landlines and cell phones, but Shepherd supposed they might
have been something else entirely. He didn’t recognize any of the
numbers. Except one.

His.

“Aw crap,” Shepherd said.

Jello took Silom Road past the Holiday Inn,
then turned left on Charoen Krung Road toward the Taksin Bridge.
The Taksin Bridge over the Chao Phraya River is one of Bangkok’s
main arteries and links Sathorn Road, where many of the largest
foreign embassies are located, with the city’s western
districts.

“A lot of people probably have my cell
number, Jello. Just because it’s this phone doesn’t mean I know the
guy.”

“You look at the notes?” Jello glanced over.
“Push the button with the notebook on it.”

Shepherd pushed the button Jello described.
The address book disappeared from the little screen and was
replaced by a cream-colored background that was apparently supposed
to look like a notepad. The page was entirely blank except for
three lines at the top.

EK418

Wednesday, 1805

Grand Hotel

“That’s your flight number, your arrival
time, and the hotel where you’re staying, isn’t it?” Jello
asked.

Shepherd nodded slowly. EK was the
international airline code for Emirates Airways and 418 was the
number of the flight he had taken to Bangkok. The day and time of
his arrival and the name of his hotel were right, too.

“What’s going on here, Jello?”

“I was sort of hoping you could tell me. Who
knew which flight you were on?”

“Nobody. I booked it myself.”

Jello shrugged and inclined his head toward
the black Motorola Shepherd was holding. “Try again.”

Shepherd thought about it as he looked out
the window at the sidewalks of Charoen Krung Road. Even at this
hour, street vendors were setting up their carts and stoking their
cooking fires. In another hour the sidewalks would be crammed with
office workers grabbing a quick bite on the way to work.

“I didn’t tell anybody, Jello. But if someone
knew I was flying from Dubai to Bangkok yesterday, it wouldn’t have
been too hard to guess which flight I was on. There aren’t that
many and this is the one with the best schedule and the private
suites in first class.”

“You fly first class?”

“Just until they invent something
better.”

Jello shook his head. They drove another
block or two in silence, then Jello turned right on to Sathorn
Road.

“How many people in Dubai knew you were
flying to Bangkok yesterday?” he asked.

“I don’t know. A few. It was no secret.”

“General Kitnarok knew?”

“Of course.”

“Anybody else?”

“Like I said, a few people. Maybe a lot of
people. I just don’t know for sure.”

“What about the hotel?” Jello asked. “Who
knew where you were staying?”

“Nobody really. But I lived at the Grand for
several months last year and I haven’t stayed anywhere else since.
You know that. Anybody who knows me knows that.”

“Why are you in Bangkok, Jack?”

Shepherd hesitated. That was a tricky one. He
didn’t want just to flat out lie to Jello, but he wasn’t
particularly keen on telling him the truth either.

“Then let’s try it this way,” Jello said,
while Shepherd was still trying to make up his mind what to say.
“Who did you come to Bangkok to see?”

Shepherd had just met with a senior executive
of Bangkok Bank through whom he had arranged to bribe a deputy
governor of the Bank of Thailand to allow him to move hundreds of
millions of dollar offshore. Not something he really wanted to
share with a high-ranking officer from Special Branch.

“Nobody,” he finally said. “Just stopping
over for a few days on the way back to Hong Kong.”

Jello cut his eyes at Shepherd. It was plain
what he thought of that story. Shepherd couldn’t blame him. It
smelled like horseshit to him, too.

Then the obvious occurred to Shepherd and he
wonder why he had been so slow to see it. He had come to Bangkok to
meet Tanit and get Charlie’s money out of the country. So Tanit
knew he was coming to Bangkok, and maybe somebody had given him the
flight number and he had somehow guessed the right hotel.

Was he about to meet Woody Allen again, but
this time neatly laid out and very dead? If so, he could hardly
stick to that ridiculous story he had just told Jello. He would
have to tell him something that was a little closer to the truth
without telling him everything. That wouldn’t be easy.

And if the body really
was
Tanit’s,
that put another uncomfortable question on the table as well. Who
would have wanted to kill Tanit the night after Shepherd had met
with him about getting Charlie’s money out of Thailand?