I saw the man immediately. The way he was bending into my Volvo, I could hardly have missed him. Still, he was such an unexpected sight it took me a moment to react.
I had left the top of the Volvo down as I usually did when it was parked in the faculty garage and the man was taking full advantage of that. His back was to me and he was leaning over the driver’s door, reaching into the car with both hands. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but it seemed unlikely he was leaving me a winning lottery ticket.
The man was a westerner, and when I thought about it later it seemed to me that his appearance must have been average in every respect because absolutely nothing about it came back to me except for one thing. He was wearing a suit and tie. It was a dark blue business suit, and it would have been unexceptional anywhere else, but it made him pretty conspicuous in Bangkok where the heat made shirtsleeves the usual style for men.
When I stepped out of the elevator and started toward the Volvo, the man must have heard my footsteps on the concrete. He immediately straightened up, and without turning, began to walk quickly away.
“Hey! Excuse me!”
The man didn’t answer. Instead he quickened his pace and angled off toward a stairwell on the opposite side of the building.
“Hey!” I shouted as I broke into a trot.
The sound of my feet echoed loudly in the garage and the man bolted.
The door to the stairwell had been propped open with a concrete block, and in a dozen quick strides he reached it and shoved the block away with his foot. The man disappeared through the door and it clanged shut behind him. I knew from the click it made that it would be locked.
It was of course, and I could only stand and listen as the man’s footsteps clicked down metal steps to street level. Then I heard another door open somewhere below, and after a moment, close.
When I got back to my car I looked it over cautiously but saw nothing unusual. I felt foolish letting the idea of a bomb even cross my mind, but the thought was there and I couldn’t make it go away by pretending it wasn’t.
Seeing nothing obvious in the car’s open interior, I swung back first the driver’s door and then the passenger door. I felt carefully under the front seats, then folded them forward and checked just as carefully in the back seat and on the floor. Finally, I bent down and looked underneath the car like I’d seen people do in the movies. As far as I could tell everything seemed normal enough there, too, so I pushed myself to my feet again, reached in, and popped the Volvo’s hood release.
I stood with my hands on my hips and stared into the engine compartment wondering exactly what I thought I was looking for. I put my hand on a couple of cables and hoses and jiggled them and gave a tentative shake to a black, circular thing on top of the motor that I was reasonably sure was the air filter. I was certainly no mechanic and probably hadn’t had the hood open more than twice since I had bought the car, but I thought everything looked pretty much as it should. At the very least I was certain that there wasn’t a bundle of dynamite hanging off anything. When I started to feel foolish enough, I closed the hood quietly and leaned on it until the catch clicked shut.
Just because some pretty strange things had been happening to me recently it didn’t mean that I had to turn some ordinary-looking guy poking around my Volvo into a car bomber. Probably it was just somebody who liked convertibles, I told myself, and no doubt I scared the crap out of him when I bellowed like a madman as soon as the elevator door opened. Why had I jumped immediately to the conclusion that the guy was up to no good without even giving him the chance to explain?
Jesus, I thought to myself, if I’d thought before that I needed to get out of town for a while, I was absolutely certain of it now.
FOURTEEN
I went into the office late Wednesday morning to collect the stuff I needed for the board meeting in Hong Kong. My Cathay Pacific flight didn’t leave until four in the afternoon and I had nothing pressing to do so when Jello pushed the door open and stuck his head in I had my feet on the desk and was reading the Wall Street Journal.
“Hey, Jack,” he said. “You don’t look very busy.”
“I’m not,” I said, lowering the paper. “Just killing time. I’ve got a flight to Hong Kong later this afternoon.”
“You hungry?”
“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “Not really.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said you’re hungry.” Jello jabbed his thumb over his shoulder toward my door. “Let’s go.”
I folded the Journal and laid it on the desk while I thought that one over. “What’s going on?”
“We need to talk, Jack.”
“I see,” I said, but of course I didn’t. “You want to tell me what this is all about?”
“Not really, but I will.”
Jello looked uncharacteristically somber, so I stopped arguing with him. I swung my feet off the desk and followed him into the corridor, locking my door behind me. There would be plenty of time to come back for my things before I went to the airport.
“Did you talk to Dollar yet?” Jello asked as we walked toward the elevator.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yesterday.”
“So was he really mugged?”
“More or less.”
“What does that mean?”
“He said it was just a couple of kids trying to grab their briefcases.”
Jello grunted slightly, but he didn’t say anything else.
We rode down to the lobby in silence and then walked outside to where Jello had left a brown Toyota parked in Sasin’s circular driveway. He started the car and drove off. I let the silence go on until we had left the campus, passed the Princess Hotel, and turned into Phayathai Road.
“Where are we going?”
“Anna’s.”
Anna’s Cafe was on Soi Saladaeng, a quiet street that cut directly across one of Bangkok’s most venerable residential neighborhoods just beyond the shadows of the office towers bunched together at the south end of Silom Road. I liked Anna’s a lot, partly because the food was good and the surroundings were pleasant, but even more because I thought of it as a kind of monument to the extraordinary adaptability and endurance of Thais.
When the Bank of Thailand gave up trying to support the currency in the mid-nineties, the country’s financial collapse had wrecked almost everybody. Financiers fled the country, corporate executives turned to selling sandwiches, and one particularly luckless investor put a gun to his head in front of the stock exchange and pulled the trigger. He missed. That struck a lot of foreigners as the perfect metaphor for how Thailand had gotten into such a mess in the first place.
Property developers were particularly hard hit. Dependent on loans from local banks to keep all their plates spinning, most of the plates came crashing down when the banks stopped lending in a knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis and starting calling in the loans they had already made. Even now, years after the economy had begun to grow again, Bangkok was still littered with the rotting carcasses of huge structures that had been abandoned by ruined developers who couldn’t afford to finish them. Some parts of the city looked like a movie set being readied for another remake of ‘Planet of the Apes.’
The developer who had owned the site where Anna’s now stood had been luckier than most when the crash came and the bank loans disappeared, having gotten no further than building a sales office touting an improbable high-rise condominium. What to do? An American property developer would no doubt have called his lawyers and sued everybody he could think of. The Thai developer, in happy contrast, had taken the ruined condo’s sales office and turned it into a stylish and profitable restaurant.
We turned between Anna’s gateposts and followed the driveway to the parking area at the back of the restaurant. Jello took the first open spot he found. He got out, slammed the door, and started toward the front entrance without looking back. I followed him wordlessly.