“Arai na krap?” What?
“I said I’m Jack Shepherd. Not Jay Shepherd.”
There was a hint of puzzlement in the man’s nod.
“Krap. You wait please.”
The man stepped back outside, but just as I was standing up to follow him the new minister of finance walked in.
“Mr. Shepherd,” he nodded pleasantly. “Sit down. Please.”
I sat down.
The minister stood in the doorway studying me for a moment, a half-smile on his face, and then he walked over and sat a few feet away on the same bleacher where I was. He settled himself comfortably, crossing his legs at the knee, and then he leaned forward slightly and laced his fingers together, resting his hands in his lap.
He was an average-sized man, probably in his sixties. His patent leather shoes gleamed even in the low light and he wore his tuxedo like a man who was accustomed to wearing a tuxedo. He had a full head of silver-gray hair, hard black eyes, heavy-rimmed glasses, and the patient air of a traveler forced to camp out temporarily with barbarians.
“It is a very dull party, isn’t it, Mr. Shepherd?”
“It was until about thirty seconds ago.”
The minister chuckled appreciatively, then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and extracted a black leather Dunhill cigar case. Pulling off the top he held it out to me and I saw the brown and white bands even before he spoke.
“Cigar, Jack? Montecristos are your brand, aren’t they?”
I glanced from the cigars to the minister’s face, but he was expressionless.
“No? You must have picked up all you needed when you were in Hong Kong.”
The minister selected a cigar for himself, closed the case, and returned it to his jacket. Then he dipped into a side pocket and removed a cutter and a box of matches. He inspected the Montecristo, clipped the end, and lit it. I noticed he took his time about doing it.
“I think I’m getting the message here, Minister,” I said quietly as he drew on his cigar.
“No, Mr. Shepherd, we haven’t gotten to the message yet. All I’ve done is convey that we know a great deal about what everyone around here is doing. Including you.”
“Who’s we?”
The minister took another puff on his Montecristo, then resumed, ignoring my question.
“We know, for example, that you made some inquiries in Hong Kong concerning the Asian Bank of Commerce. May I ask why you were you pursuing that particular line of inquiry up there, Mr. Shepherd?”
“I thought you already knew what everyone around here was doing. Including me.”
The minister laughed, apparently genuinely.
“We do, Mr. Shepherd, but sometimes we have a little trouble understanding why they do it.”
I said nothing.
“Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I don’t suppose it matters. My message to you tonight is the same regardless of your motives.”
The minister took another puff on his Montecristo, but he kept his eyes locked on mine.
“You must stop asking questions about the ABC.”
“And why is that, sir?”
“You might embarrass someone, Mr. Shepherd. If names happen to come up in the course of your inquiries-names of people who are, let us say, politically prominent and might have had some small, perhaps even accidental involvement with the ABC-you might cause them to lose face. You know Asia well, I am told. Surely you must know how bad a thing it is to lose face.”
“Accidental involvement? I don’t understand.”
The bleachers squeaked as the minister shifted his weight.
“You Americans have become obsessed with what you insist on calling transparency in government, Mr. Shepherd. But those of us who actually do the work of governing understand that we must occasionally engage in undertakings that we would not particularly like to become public. Frequently, those activities involve financial arrangements, and naturally those arrangements are generally routed through helpful banks like the ABC. It’s just the way things are done in Asia, Mr. Shepherd. It has always been so, and it will always be so.”
“Just for the sake of conversation, Minister, what do you suppose might happen if some of these arrangements you’re talking about looked as if they might become public?”
“Oh, I don’t really know, Mr. Shepherd.”
The minister waved his Montecristo in a little zigzag motion.
“But we have a saying here in Thailand that you might do well to remember: When the elephants move, the grass is trampled.”
The minister slowly stood, rolling his shoulders and stretching slightly.
“I always thought that was an African expression,” I said, watching him.
His eyes flickered for a moment, met mine, and then looked away. With his left hand in the front pocket of his jacket and his head tilted down, he walked toward the door that led back out of the squash courts. When he reached it, he took his hand out of his pocket, put it on the knob, and looked back over his shoulder.
“Actually, Jack, I think you’ll find it’s an old Icelandic proverb.”
Then he pushed through the door and was gone.
TWENTY ONE
I didn’t sleep sleep very well that night and predictably woke up way too early on Saturday morning. I lay quietly for a while, one hand resting lightly on the smooth skin of Anita’s thigh, replaying in my mind the way her body felt under my hands the night before. Anita was still sleeping deeply so I slipped quietly out of bed and padded into the kitchen to make some coffee.
My meeting with Dollar was looming in only a few hours and I pushed Barry Gale and the ABC into an unused corner of my mind while I dumped coffee into the filter and filled the coffeemaker with water. Before I saw Dollar I had to decide what I was going to tell him. Was I going to ask him about my conversation with Jello and the suspicions Jello had voiced about what Dollar and Howard might be doing together, or was I just going to let the whole thing slide?
While the coffee dripped I went back to the bedroom and pulled on some running shorts and a T-shirt and laced up my Nikes. Then, after draining two mugs and flipping half-heartedly through the Post, I drove over to Lumpini Park in the mood to do a little running and a lot of thinking.
I parked the Volvo on Soi Sarasin just in front of a strip of bars shuttered tightly against the morning but still smelling vaguely of cigarettes and spilled beer. It was the beginning of another cool day and I wondered vaguely if some kind of cosmic invoice for our pleasant weather was going to be presented to the city later in the year. If it ever arrived, I figured it would be a doozy.
Crossing the street and threading my way among the food venders half-blocking the park’s north gate, I broke into a lope on the broad walkway just inside. In front of me, off through a gap in a grove of banyan trees, patches of early morning sunlight were glistening on the lake and a light breeze rattled the fronds of the spindly palm trees that lined the walkway. In a few minutes I reached the edge of the lake and moved onto the grass. I found my rhythm quickly and I adjusted my stride and paced myself for a longer run than usual since I had a good deal to think about.
I knew I either had to tell Dollar immediately what Jello had said to me or I could never tell him at all. If I kept quiet today and then said something about it later, Dollar would read my hesitation as having at least half-believed Jello in the first place-and of course, he would be right.
I had done a fair amount of work with Dollar and I had never seen anything that would suggest he was involved in money laundering; but I didn’t know Howard nearly as well and I could hardly claim to have the same conviction with respect to him. Either way, Jello had put me in a real bind. If what he said turned out to be true and I somehow ended up helping Dollar and Howard do their laundry, no matter how inadvertent my participation might be, Jello would be able to point out that I had done it in spite of being on notice as to what they were involved in. That would put me a long way up my own personal shit creek, and I would unquestionably be lacking the proverbial paddle.