That stopped me.
“What do you mean?”
“Now I’m not absolutely sure about this, Jack, but my guess is the transfers you found are all forgeries.”
I blinked at that.
“Not even particularly good ones,” Darcy continued. “My guess is that your man had a pressing need to show somebody that he had purchased a whole hell of a lot of property that he hadn’t, so he manufactured these title deeds to show where a whole bunch of money had gone.”
I thought about that and said nothing.
“Look, I got some real hot stuff running today, so I’m afraid I’ve got to leave all this with you for now. Why don’t you have a look at that address book and see if anything jumps out at you, then we’ll talk again in a few days.”
I thanked Darcy and we said our good-byes and hung up.
After going down to the coffee room and refilling my mug, I logged onto the university email system and retrieved the address book Darcy had sent me. It turned out to be a single file she had converted to plain text so I was able to open it easily enough. I started reading through it, but my mind was mostly on those title deeds and I figured it was probably a waste of time.
I didn’t get any further than the second screen before I realized just how wrong I was.
The fifth entry down the second page was neatly typed all in capitals.
Asian Bank of Commerce.
Next to the name was a number-a phone number, I assumed, since it had seven digits-but there was no address and no country or city code. It could have been a Bangkok number, but it just as easily could have been a number in Teaneck, New Jersey.
What really stopped me, however, was something that appeared in parentheses immediately following the telephone number.
It was a name.
Arthur Daley.
My mind clicked straight back to Took Lae Dee when I had been perched on a stool studying the Hong Kong ID that Barry Gale had handed me.
Christ, I thought. Jimmy Kicks’ gangster bank and the name on Barry Gale’s phony Hong Kong Identity Card were both right here in Dollar’s computer address book.
What could that possibly mean?
Okay, I lectured myself in a stern voice, don’t jump to any conclusions here. Think this through clearly.
So there might be some kind of connection between Dollar Dunne and Barry Gale. That was all Dollar’s address book was actually telling me, wasn’t it? Finding the ABC and the name on Barry’s phony ID in Dollar’s address book certainly didn’t prove that there was also some kind of a connection between Barry Gale and Howard Kojinski’s body twirling away under the Taksin Bridge, did it? And it absolutely didn’t prove there was any connection between whatever might be going on here and my own relatively minor involvement with Howard and Dollar or with Barry Gale’s effort to recruit me to help him find the money missing from the ABC. Right?
Horseshit. Who was I trying to kid?
How much longer was I going to sit there looking at Barry Gale’s cover name in Dollar’s computer address book and tell myself that it might only be a coincidence? How long was I going to try and convince myself that it really meant nothing, and more importantly, that it had absolutely nothing to do with me?
Over the last few days two big trains had been rumbling through my life-one carrying Barry Gale and Jimmy Kicks, and the other carrying Dollar Dunne and Howard the Roach. I had felt both of them gathering speed, relentlessly building momentum toward something, although I hadn’t had the slightest idea where either one was headed.
But now I knew. Both trains were barreling right down the same track, heading straight for each other.
And I was standing directly between them.
I NEEDED HELP before I got crushed, and Stanley Ratikun was the only guy I could think of to go to with something like this. For a couple of decades Stanley had been the managing partner of one of Bangkok’s oldest international law firms. Then he retired and became director of the Sasin Institute of Business Administration at Chulalongkorn University, which made him more or less my boss. At least technically.
It was a post of considerable prestige, although Stanley really didn’t need the prestige. He had been born in New York, but his grandmother was obscurely related to the Thai royal family and he still had his Thai passport. That was one of the two reasons that his law firm had represented just about every significant international corporation that did any business at all in Thailand after the mid-sixties. The other was that Stanley and the other members of his firm were all first-rate lawyers.
Stanley and I had never exactly been pals, of course, and I hadn’t really even known him all that well back when he persuaded me to abandon the real world for Bangkok and join the faculty at Chula. Still, I had come to know him pretty well since then and in particular I respected the old-fashioned sense of righteousness against which he seemed to test everything he did. Stanley was hardly the sort of guy you hung out with at the Titty Twister ogling the go-go dancers and talking crap while you chugged back the Singhas, but he was a guy I trusted.
I was pretty sure Stanley would play it straight with me when I asked him flat out about Dollar. He wouldn’t necessarily tell me everything he knew just because I asked him to, but I didn’t think he would exactly lie to me either.
When I walked up two floors to Stanley’s office I saw through his half-open door that he was on the telephone. I gave him a little wave and leaned against the wall outside his office waiting for him to finish his conversation.
After Stanley hung up, he smiled broadly and gestured at me to come in.
THIRTY
I told Stanley almost everything. I told him about my telephone call from Barry Gale and I told him about what had happened afterwards. Nothing I said seemed to surprise Stanley very much. He did lean forward once and steeple his fingers. The gesture came about the time I was describing the man in Dollar’s office who had claimed to be an FBI agent named Frank Morrissey, and I thought I saw a flicker of something like dismay cross his face at the same time, but I might have been mistaken.
All I left out was the part about my ferry ride with Archie Ward in Hong Kong and Archie’s intimations that the Asian Bank of Commerce had been a front for Chinese bribe money rather than the Russian mob operation that Barry had claimed it was. I didn’t think I had the right to drag Archie’s name into whatever was going on here, and more to the point, I wasn’t absolutely sure I really believed him. To do that I would also have had to believe Barry either didn’t know the Chinese were involved with the ABC or had made up the whole business about Jimmy Kicks just to mislead me, and neither of those possibilities made any sense at all.
I wound up by telling Stanley about the reference I had found in Dollar’s address book to the Asian Bank of Commerce and the notation next to it of the name on Barry’s phony Hong Kong ID. Then I fell silent.
Stanley’s only response was to purse his lips slightly. “That’s it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, not bothering to hide my disappointment. I had just told Stanley what I thought was one hell of a story and he was sitting there like I had strolled into his office and asked to borrow a cup of Nescafe.
Stanley got up and walked to the window and stood with his back to me for a time. Eventually he turned around and leaned against the sill, his arms folded in front of him.
“I don’t see how any of it explains why this client of Dollar’s was killed, even if everything you say is true, Jack.”
“I think Howard stumbled over something he shouldn’t have. Maybe it involved the ABC and maybe it didn’t, but I think whatever it was scared him badly enough to make him tell someone about it. And I think the person he told was Dollar.”
Stanley’s face was impassive.
“If Howard started talking to Dollar,” I continued theorizing, “maybe that’s why he was killed. It would certainly explain why Dollar looked so shaken up when Howard’s body was found and why he went to ground so fast after that.”