I cut and lit my cigar and I stood there smoking and looking out over the city for a long time.
When people in Washington first began to hear that I was leaving to live in Bangkok and teach at Chulalongkorn University, a few of them jumped to the conclusion I was making a point of some kind, abandoning the land of my birth for reasons that were probably political and no doubt wacky. Others who heard what I was doing-and I noticed this group seemed to be composed mainly of women-attributed my change of address to middle-aged male angst fueled by overly moist fantasies of slim, submissive Thai women serving me brightly colored tropical drinks with little umbrellas in them. Most people, of course, fell into neither of those categories. Most people just assumed that I had lost my damned mind.
Part of the problem was that the whole idea of living in a foreign country was just so strange to most Americans, particularly since very few of them had ever seriously entertained the thought, however fleetingly, themselves. After all, everyone wanted to come to America, didn’t they? Half the population of the earth was fighting to live in Orange County and work in a 7-Eleven, wasn’t it? Why in God’s name would an American even think of living anywhere else?
Before I had made the big jump, back in what now felt to me like another life, Barry Gale and I had both been partners in a large and well-connected Washington law firm. The firm was huge and, in spite of our common occupation, I had run across him only occasionally. Truth be told, I could remember very little at all about Barry Gale.
Except, really, for one thing.
Barry Gale had been both the outside legal counsel and a member of the board of directors of the Texas State Bank in Dallas when it was engulfed in scandal, a hugely psychedelic mess involving a bunch of Russian mobsters from New Jersey who had been using the bank to clean and press their income from a variety of rackets up and down the East Coast. The character at the center of the imbroglio was an Armenian named Jimini Zubokof, who was better known as Jimmy Kicks because he had once, so the legend went, personally taken his gleaming Ferragamos to an FBI informant and kicked the poor bastard to death.
Somehow Jimmy became inexplicably possessed by the idea of shifting his money-laundering operations to Asia-anywhere in Asia, really-and he demanded his people find a compliant bank somewhere that would serve his purposes. Of course, all Jimmy Kicks actually knew about Asia was how to order Chinese takeaway and he wasn’t even very good at that, so in the ensuing upheaval at Texas State Bank offshore accounts and foreign currencies were whizzing all over the place and quite a lot of money disappeared. Tens of millions of dollars, or so the press reports claimed, were lost by the bank through dealing forward contracts in the foreign exchange market, although whose contracts they actually were or how the losses had been incurred was never made entirely clear.
Just as the whole saga was turning into old news, the disappearance of one of the bank’s directors and the suicide of another freaked out the conspiracy buffs and the story jumped straight back onto the front pages. As far as I knew, no trace had ever been found of the director who vanished, but the so-called suicide had been dramatic enough to grab most of the attention anyway.
There was a guesthouse in North Dallas that the bank leased for the use of out-of-town directors. That was where Barry Gale had been found, at the bottom of the swimming pool, pinned to it by a manhole cover tied around his neck with barbed wire.
I drew on my Montecristo and exhaled a slow stream of smoke into the darkness. From somewhere I heard faint music and I listened quietly for a long while as the mournful voice of a young girl sang Thai love songs full of sorrow and loss. Her voice had a quavering, reed-thin quality, and the sound of it drifted over the city like wisps of river fog. The air smelled of ozone and rancid water. Lightning leaped soundlessly between clouds off in the distance, and the breeze cranked up a notch.
While I smoked I studied the city’s skyline in the distance. The towers were brightly lit, etched into the night sky by lights so blindingly white that they seemed to drain the color from everything around them. In the distance beyond the skyscrapers I could just pick out the floodlights on the soaring, golden spires and preposterous-looking green and red tile roofs of the Grand Palace. Once the heart of a dazzling, secret world ruled over by a god-king, this eccentric collection of whimsical structures had lately fallen on less glamorous times. The King had long since decamped for more modern quarters and the Grand Palace was now neither grand nor a palace. These days it amounted to little more than a faintly shabby tourist attraction for the hordes of foreigners that swept over Thailand year-around.
There was a sudden flash of lightning and moments later a single, crunching boom of thunder drove the air out of the night. I dumped my cigar into an ashtray and walked back inside. As I shut the door, the storm hit like a fist.
THREE
Chulalongkorn University is right in the middle of Bangkok and the Sasin School of Business is in the northwest corner of Chula’s main campus. Sasin is housed in two mid-rise buildings that make up for what they lack in construction quality with their mediocre design. My office was on the sixth floor of the larger of the two buildings, around on the south side. It was nothing special, but at least I had a fine view of the golf course at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club and the towers of the Silom Road financial district just beyond it.
I had slept poorly and woken at dawn so I went in on Monday morning a couple of hours earlier than usual. In spite of the rain during the night, or perhaps because of it, the new day was glorious. The sky was so blue it reminded me of Hawaii, and a promising breeze out of the south carried the smell of salt all the way up from the Gulf of Thailand. None of the secretaries had come in yet, so I walked down to the little kitchen at the end of the hall and made some coffee.
Mondays were particularly pleasant days for me since I had only one class scheduled. It was an eleven o’clock lecture course entitled “Legal Aspects of the Regulation of Multinational Corporate Acquisition Finance Transactions in the Countries of the Pacific Rim.” The kids called it “Wheel, Deal and Steal.” The course was a second-year elective that had never been very popular before I took it over, but now the enrollment was well above a hundred and the meetings had been moved to one of the large lecture halls across campus to accommodate the crowd.
My lectures were supposed to focus on case studies of the financing structures of major corporate acquisitions in Asia, but I always made an effort to sprinkle them with a few war stories to lighten up what otherwise would have been a dreary discourse on tax treaties, banking practices, and securities regulations. Almost all of my stories naturally concerned money-frequently very large amounts of it-and I had quickly discovered that money was an even better topic than sex for keeping students absolutely riveted.
The word around campus was that my lectures were entertaining and I suppose they were. Moreover, I was something less than the world’s toughest grader. If you turned up with reasonable regularity, course credit would be yours at the end of the semester without a great deal of fuss. I was a charter subscriber to Woody Allen’s Postulate: at least eighty percent of life is about just showing up.