Big Mango (9786167611037) (16 page)

“There’s someone following us?” Winnebago
quickly put down the last of his chicken.

“Looks that way.”

“How do you know?”

Bar gave him a tried look. “This guy has his
eyes locked on you and Eddie like you were two naked girls doing
the dirty. He’s pretty hard to miss.”

Eddie glanced involuntarily toward the door,
although he didn’t really expect to see anything.

“What’s he look like?” he asked.

“Fat, obvious, and clumsy.”

“A cop?”

“Not that fat,” Bar smiled. “Besides, he’s a
white guy. There are no white cops in Bangkok.”

“A fed? The FBI or something like that?”
Eddie asked.

“Maybe. I’d guess CIA, but in Bangkok you
always guess CIA.”

“
CIA?”
Winnebago couldn’t believe what
he was hearing. “You think the fucking
CIA
is following us?”
he squeaked.

“Could be.” Bar’s voice was gratingly
cheerful. “Now, you want to tell me the whole story, or should I
just head on back across the street where the naked girls are?”

Eddie toyed with a white plastic spoon,
twirling it between his fingers. He didn’t want to tell Bar
Phillips any more than he had to since he really didn’t know the
guy that well, but he figured the chances of going it alone in a
strange city were getting lousier by the minute. Maybe he would
give Bar a little more. A little more, but certainly not all of
it.

Bar listened carefully while Eddie told him
about the pictures with the red circles, his visit from the man who
called himself Marinus Rupert, and his lunch at the Four Seasons
with the same man, now calling himself the general.

Eddie gently eased past the part about the
$400,000,000. After all, someone could have a whole bunch of other
reasons for wanting to find out about Harry Austin, couldn’t
they?

“That’s it,” he finished, catching
Winnebago’s eye. “Whoever this guy really is, he’s paying me to
find out what happened to Austin.”

“Why you?”

“I guess it’s because I used to know Austin.
Apparently he thinks that’s an advantage.”

“You have no idea at all who this guy
is?”

“No, none.”

“You think the pictures were some kind of
threat?”

Eddie nodded.

“Threatening you over…what exactly?”

“Over trying to find out about Captain
Austin, I guess. What else?”

“No idea who sent them?”

Eddie shook his head.

“We could go and ask the guy waiting
outside,” Winnebago suggested. “Maybe it was him.”

“Nah,” Bar looked off toward Silom Road out
beyond Popeye’s front windows. “Nobody subtle enough to pull that
picture gag would do such a stinking job of tailing you.”

“Military records are easy enough to get,”
Eddie suggested. “A lot of people could have tied us to Austin. But
I still can’t figure out what anyone thinks the two of us know that
makes us worth threatening.”

“Three,” Bar said quietly.

Winnebago looked puzzled.

“Three of you,” Bar repeated. “Not two. Both
your heads were circled in the pictures, you said. And then there’s
Austin.”

“Yeah, but he’s dead,” Winnebago said.

Bar nodded slowly. “My point exactly.”

That brought a very long silence all
around.

“This guy who’s calling himself the general
has got to know more than he’s told you,” Bar finally said. “He
knows what he’s really looking for even if he hasn’t told you.”

“He didn’t know Austin was dead,” Eddie
said.

“Yeah.” Bar leaned back in his chair. “I
don’t get that.”

“Can I count on your help?” Eddie asked.

Bar turned his head away and looked out the
big windows toward Silom Road.

“I need to know,” Eddie pressed.

“Let me think about it.” Bar flicked his eyes
sideways for a moment and then back to Eddie. “It looks to me like
you boys may be about to step on your dicks here, and $10,000 isn’t
really enough to get me to risk mine.”

“You mean you want more money?”

“No, man, that’s not what I mean.” Bar’s face
relaxed into something that was almost, but not quite, a smile.
“Just let me think about it for a couple of days. I’ll call
you.”

“Would you tell me something before you
go?”

“Sure.”

“How can I find out what happened to Austin’s
body?”

Bar reached out and picked up the newspaper
clipping that still lay on the table, studying it silently for a
moment.

“If he was killed where this says he was,
it’s in the Thonglor police district. Any cab driver can find the
Thonglor station. Go over there tomorrow and ask for Lieutenant
Sirapop. Tell him I sent you and he’ll probably be reasonably
helpful.”

“Does he speak English?”

“Enough. Just don’t try to discuss Spinoza
with him.” Bar thought a moment and then added, “There’s one other
thing. You’d better understand how things are done here if you’re
going to fuck around with the local cops.”

He lifted his eyebrows at Eddie, making a
question out of it.

“You’re telling me he’s dirty and that
information will cost me.” Eddie didn’t bother to make a question
out of it.

“They’re all dirty, but Sirapop is pretty
harmless as these guys usually go. He might help you out just
because I sent you around, but if you don’t give him 5,000 baht or
so, he’ll lose face. And if he loses face, I lose face. Give him
the 5,000.”

“Okay,” Eddie nodded.

“Anything else?” Bar asked.

“Yeah.” Eddie shot a quick glance at the
blackness outside the big plate glass windows, wondering again
exactly who was waiting for them out there. “You think this place
has a back door?”

“Shit, man.”

Bar pushed back from the table and
grinned.

“The whole goddamned world’s got a back
door.”

WHEN
Winnebago woke up, he
could have sworn he had the echo of a loud explosion rattling
around in his head but, other than the low hum of the room’s air
conditioner, he heard nothing at all. He decided that he must have
dreamed the explosion and so he just lay there in bed wondering
what time it was and trying to sort through everything that had
happened the night before after they slipped out the back door at
Popeye’s.

He and Eddie had wandered around the Pong for
several hours before coming back to the Oriental; that much he
remembered clearly. He was also pretty sure they had dumped the guy
who was supposed to be following them, but he wasn’t absolutely
certain. Actually, he didn’t know why it mattered. Anyone following
them would surely know where they were staying. Besides, all he and
Eddie had done was go to a couple of bars in the Pong, put away a
few drinks—quite a few, he winced as he felt his stomach pitch
up—and fooled around a little with the girls. He couldn’t imagine
who would care very much about two guys doing nothing more than
that.

The first place they had gone into had been
pretty raw, Winnebago recalled now that his head was starting to
clear a little; so much so that it had made him uncomfortable, or
something close to it. When he and Eddie pushed through the heavy
curtain hanging over the doorway, a pleasant young man in a white
shirt and tie had quickly seated them on stools at the bar and
gotten them bottles of Singha beer.

On a narrow raised runway just behind the
bartender there were a dozen or more girls dancing to ear-splitting
disco music. They all looked pretty young to Winnebago, mostly
teens and early twenties with maybe one or two who might have been
thirty, and in spite of the lethargic way they were shuffling their
feet with no readily discernible relationship to the music, they
all seemed to be having a good enough time. The whole bunch of them
were smiling, giggling and touching, chattering away to each other
like girlfriends out together for an afternoon at the mall.

It embarrassed Winnebago a little that that
he and Eddie were looking up at the girls from such a sharp angle
that he could have seen right up their skirts, that is he could
have if they had been wearing any. Of course, since they were all
completely naked except for their shoes, he had decided that
worrying about whether his view offended their sense of modesty was
pretty much a waste of effort. They were good-looking girls,
mostly, but it had never crossed his mind before that having a
bunch of naked women wiggling around right in front of him could be
so monotonous. There he was, so close to their most private parts
he could have given them a pelvic with a swizzle stick, and he was
half yawning himself to sleep.

Winnebago rolled his head around to confirm
that it was still attached to his neck. Maybe Eddie was right and
they really were getting old. Finding himself first embarrassed and
then bored witless by a room full of naked young girls, not to
mention getting completely wasted on only a few drinks, was not an
encouraging sign.

He was slowly raising his wrist to check his
watch when a fusillade of thunder crashed into the room and
Winnebago realized that was probably the noise that had waked him
in the first place. It sounded like Bangkok was about to get
hammered by one of those rainstorms that he remembered so well from
Vietnam, the kind that hurled down sheets of water and lightning
until you felt helpless and just sat very still until it
stopped.

He was trying again to read his watch, hoping
its face would swim into focus, when he realized that there was
another sound in the room, something other than the dying echoes of
the thunder. It was a tapping noise and, after a few moments of
intense concentration, he finally identified it as a persistent
knocking on his bedroom door.

Winnebago called out something that he
gathered was at least vaguely intelligible because the tapping
stopped. Slowly sitting up on the edge of the bed, he collected his
wits. When he finally made it across the room and got the door
open, Eddie stepped inside and closed it behind him.

“Are you alone?” Eddie’s eyes worked their
way quickly around the room, eventually coming back Winnebago whom
he regarded dubiously for a moment. “You look like shit.”

Winnebago was certain that under other
circumstances he could have said something heart-stoppingly funny,
but a sort of grunt was the best he could manage right then. He
took a couple of faltering steps and sat back down heavily on the
edge of his rumpled bed.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“A little after nine.”

Winnebago shook his head, willing it to feel
smaller. “Why are you here, man?”

“To wake you up.”

“But didn’t we just go to bed?”

“I got one of the girls at the front desk to
call that police station and ask for Lieutenant Serpico—”

“Sirapop,” Winnebago corrected Eddie,
startling himself a little with his clear recall of what Bar
Phillips had said the night before.

“Whatever. Anyway, this guy’s supposed to be
coming in at ten and I want us to go over there and catch him
before he leaves again.”

Winnebago tried to absorb that.

“Over where?” he finally managed to ask.

“Thonglor police station. I’m going back to
my room to make a call while you get yourself together. We’ll grab
breakfast somewhere on the way.”

Eddie took another close look at
Winnebago.

“You really do look like shit. How much did
you drink last night?”

Winnebago didn’t bother to answer. Pushing
himself reluctantly off the bed, he tossed off a salute and
stumbled away in the general direction where he thought he had left
the shower.

***

BACK
in his own bedroom
Eddie tried to work out the time difference between Bangkok and the
West Coast while he dialed.

Making calls across the International Date
Line always left him feeling muddled no matter how many times he
did it. He was reasonably certain this time that he had it, that
nine o’clock on Monday morning in Bangkok was six o’clock the
previous Sunday afternoon on the West Coast. If he was wrong and it
was really four in the morning or something like that, he was
confident Jennifer would tell him all about it as soon as she
answered.

“Hello.”

Eddie was mildly surprised when Michael
picked up the phone instead of Jennifer, although he really wasn’t
sure why he should have been.

“Hey, Mike.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah. How are you?”

“Okay.”

Michael didn’t say anything else and they
both sat and listened together to the hum of the international
connection for a moment.

“This line sounds funny. Where are you?”
Michael finally asked.

“I’m in Bangkok.”

Eddie wondered what Michael’s reaction to
that would be.

“Oh,” Michael mumbled.

That’s it? Your father tells you he’s
calling from some unimaginably exotic city halfway around the world
and all you can say is, ‘Oh’?

“Listen, Dad. Could you talk to Mom? She’s
messing me around about my allowance again.”

Eddie lifted the telephone away from his ear
and let it sag slightly.

Who was this person he was talking to? If
this was really his son, and he had always lived by the assumption
that Michael was indeed his son even if he sometimes wondered how
that could be, why would he have so little interest in his father
that he wouldn’t even bother to ask what he was doing in Bangkok?
Was life in Seattle so endlessly fascinating that his father being
in Bangkok seemed perhaps, by comparison, commonplace?

“In a second, Mike. I just called to tell you
about Bangkok.” Eddie juiced himself up a little and tried to add
the right note of between-us-guys to his voice. “This is a really
weird place. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

“That’s cool, Dad, but would you talk to Mom
now. I gotta, like, go out pretty soon and I need my money.”