“Involved in what?”
Jello just sat there impassively, looking at me with dead cop eyes.
I shook my head. “Please tell me you’re not saying you think Dollar Dunne and Howard the Roach are working together to launder money for a bunch of Burmese heroin producers.”
Jello didn’t say anything. He just looked at me with what might or might not have been a slight smile. Then he nodded.
What in the hell was happening here? First Barry Gale was in cahoots with the Russian mob and now Dollar Dunne is supposedly moving money for Burmese drug lords? Whatever happened to the good old days when the worst thing you could accuse a lawyer of was ambulance chasing?
“How long have you known Dollar?” I asked Jello.
“Nine or ten years. A little longer maybe.”
“And you’re sitting here now, seriously telling me that all of a sudden you’ve decided he’s the kind of a guy who launders drug money?”
“I think he may be, Jack. God help me, but I think he may be.”
Jello spun the empty Heineken bottle in his big hand.
“Are you willing to help me find out for sure?” he asked.
I should have seen that coming, I thought to myself. I should have seen that coming, but I hadn’t.
“All I want you to do is poke around a little, Jack. Nothing heavy-duty. Just keep your eyes and ears open, really, then let me know what you see and hear.”
“You can’t be serious, Jello. Dollar’s been your friend for a long time. He’s my friend, too.”
“Friendship’s got nothing to do with this.”
“Yes, it does. I’m not spying on Dollar Dunne, Jello. Not for you or for anyone else.”
I pushed back from the table and stood up while Jello watched expressionlessly.
“That’s the end of this conversation, Jello.”
“I can see that.”
“Now I’m going to get a taxi back to my office and you’re going to let me do that without arguing about it. Then I’m going to forget we were ever here today and I’m going to forget about everything you’ve said, and you’re going to let me do that, too. Do we understand each other?”
Jello just looked at me without answering. After a moment I turned my back on him and started walking toward Silom Road.
He didn’t try to stop me, and this time I didn’t look back.
FIFTEEN
Although Thai International had more flights out of Bangkok than any other airline, I was on the Cathay Pacific four o’clock to Hong Kong.
I usually fly Cathay or Singapore Airlines instead of Thai because of something an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had once told me at a cocktail party. He was a man who had to fly a lot and, being a government official, he had no choice but to fly on Thai. Making small talk at the party, I had asked the man how he thought Thai compared to other airlines. “Whenever you fly Thai International,” he told me with a glum expression, “always remember that your pilots got their jobs exactly the way everyone else in Thailand got their jobs.”
I’ve never quite forgotten that. So I fly Cathay Pacific.
The man sitting next to me introduced himself even before I had my seatbelt buckled. In spite of my best efforts not to, I learned in short order that he was a microchip importer from San Francisco and that he was going to Hong Kong to meet with a financial consultant after attending a trade show of some kind in Bangkok. This financial consultant, the man explained to me, was going to reorganize his entire company using offshore banks so that he could completely avoid paying any taxes. The scheme had something to do with utilizing offshore deposits to guarantee loans made to him through California banks, but I was paying as little attention as possible and that was all I got. The guy was reading a book to prepare for his meeting and he held it up for me to see. I glanced over politely and had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing out loud. The book was called Offshore Money Havens: How to Live Tax Free for the Rest of Your Life.
When the guy asked me what kind of work I did, I thought fast. We were going to be sitting together for the next three hours and telling the truth seemed to be an absolute guarantee that every one of them would be hell on earth. I briefly considered telling him I was an Internal Revenue Service agent on overseas assignment, but that would have been just plain cruel. Instead, I said I was a life insurance executive from Minneapolis, which was the dullest thing I could come up with at short notice. It must have been a good choice because the man didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the trip.
Why was it that so many Americans look at offshore banking as some sort of occult wizardry? I had a sudden vision of huge airplanes stuffed with microchip importers from San Francisco whizzing endlessly around the globe in search of a fabled and mystical land called Offshore, a place forever beyond the reach of greedy governments, combative creditors, and vengeful ex-wives. I myself have always pictured Offshore as a land ruled by Peter Sellers, but now that he was dead, I imagine that Rowan Atkinson must have taken over the throne. I wondered what people spend their days doing in Offshore. What do they eat? What do they wear? Do they have sex? Well, I could guess the answer to that one. Not with all that money around. Money is so much more interesting than sex for almost everyone.
My flight landed in Hong Kong exactly on time. Southeast Asian Investments had sent a driver to the airport and the fellow made the trip to the venerable Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Connaught Road in what must have been record time. Still, it was after nine when we got to the hotel. That was too late to do anything in particular, but too early just to sit in my room. Watching Hong Kong television was too awful a thought even to consider.
I stuck my head in the Captain’s Bar off the Mandarin’s lobby, but the place was filled with middle-aged Englishmen entertaining their Chinese daughters. It was a depressing scene and I didn’t go in. I had skipped the meal on the plane so I briefly considered the possibility of a late evening snack in one of the hotel’s restaurants, but eventually I gave up trying to make a decision and just set out walking to see where I would end up.
I liked walking in Hong Kong. In winter the climate was balmy and the humidity was low and in every season the intensity of the place was overwhelming. Bangkok was a tropical city. No matter how busy it might be, there was always a languor in the air you could never quite shake. Hong Kong, on the other hand, was all energy all the time. It was like being inside a pinball machine.
Leaving the Mandarin, I turned right and walked east toward the Wanchai district or, as it had been dubbed by the American troops who took their R amp;R there during the Vietnam War, the Wanch. The Wanch had a history, but like a lot of history most of it was made up. From the day William Holden first came to Hong Kong, moved into a hotel filled with good-hearted whores, and fell in love with Suzie Wong, it was the Wanch which became the real Hong Kong in the eyes of the world.
Nightlife in the Wanch never attained the status of Bangkok’s, of course, not even at the height of the Vietnam War when thousands of fresh-faced kids from places like Nebraska and Ohio flooded its streets, all of them looking for a Suzie Wong of their own. Most of the bargirls in the Wanch were more like bar grandmothers who put on their make-up with a garden trowel, but maybe that wasn’t so important when you were nineteen years old, it was three in the morning, and the ninth bottle of San Miguel had just gone down so smoothly and, best of all, stayed down.
I circled around the golden glass-clad bulk of the Admiralty Centre, its bronze-mirrored surface twisting and shimmering with the city’s garish nighttime light show. Heading up Queensway, I fought my way through the crowds still jamming the sidewalks even at this hour. Almost entirely Chinese, the throng pulsed and surged as if driven by some otherworldly energy source.