Big Mango (9786167611037) (18 page)

“You sure you know where you’re going,
Eddie?”

Eddie briefly toyed with the philosophical
implications of Winnebago’s question, but he let them go. “Yeah,
sure.”

After twenty minutes of walking broken-up
sidewalks and trying not to trip, Eddie realized that the building
he had been using as a landmark wasn’t getting all that much
closer. That and the sweat accumulating under his shirt and around
the waistband of his trousers made a good argument for giving up
the idea of walking to the Little Princess and finding a taxi. He
had just turned his head to tell Winnebago that when he noticed
something which bothered him a lot more than either their slow
progress or the sweat in his pants.

He noticed that they had picked up a
tail.

Eddie’s first thought was that it had to be
the same guy Bar Phillips had spotted the night before outside
Popeye’s, but then he saw it wasn’t going to be that easy. This was
a local guy, and Bar Phillips said the man following them last
night was a
farang
.

A Caucasian following them in an Asian city
was about as subtle as tailing somebody across Los Angeles in a
float from the Rose Parade. That had been the point of course,
Eddie assumed last night, for them to know they were being watched.
He could play that game and understand how it worked. Now they had
a local on them, so they were either dealing with somebody else
entirely or the script had changed.

When they stopped at the next traffic light,
Eddie kept his eyes straight ahead and spoke in a voice just loud
enough for Winnebago to hear him.

“There’s somebody following us.”

He glanced over without turning his head and
saw Winnebago go very still.

“Don’t worry about it,” he added. “It’s
probably nothing.”

But Eddie knew it was not nothing. Picking up
a local tail clearly suggested that somebody was getting serious
about something. That didn’t, off the top of Eddie’s head, seem
like particularly good news.

The guy wasn’t too bad and Eddie wasn’t too
good. It was just a coincidence that he spotted the man at all. He
would never have made the guy if he and Winnebago had known exactly
where they had been going but, since they were less than certain,
their tail’s job had been a lot tougher. Eddie had started down a
small side street and, when he realized it went nowhere, he had
immediately turned back in the opposite direction and actually
bumped into the man as he came up behind them. That alone meant
nothing, of course, but when Eddie accidentally spotted the same
man behind them again fifteen minutes later and way too far up
Sukhumvit for it to be just a coincidence, he got the idea
immediately.

The man has probably guessed he was made,
Eddie realized, but he apparently didn’t care. It was Eddie’s
experience that Asians usually thought
farangs
were all more
or less equally hopeless outside of their own countries. He figured
that the guy assumed they were just the usual Caucasian idiots,
lost and confused on the streets of an Asian city and, even if they
thought they were being followed, there still wouldn’t be anything
they could do about it. From Eddie’s point of view, there was only
one problem with their new friend’s reasoning. He was absolutely
right.

Eddie had to find a way to dump the guy or
give up the idea of going anywhere near the Little Princess right
then. That was his only lead to Harry Austin, and he damned sure
wasn’t ready to share it.

“What are we going to do, Eddie?” Winnebago
hissed out of the side of his mouth like a gangster in a B-movie
and Eddie almost laughed out loud. “Try and shake him?”

Eddie nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

“How you going to do that?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “All I know
about losing a tail comes from spy novels and late night TV.”

But then a light rain started to fall and
Eddie suddenly got an idea. He ducked into a doorway and pulled
Winnebago with him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw their tail
do exactly the same thing.

“Why don’t we just get a taxi back to the
hotel, Eddie? If somebody wants to follow us to the Oriental, it’s
fine with me.”

“I want to check out the Little Princess.
Nobody’s going to scare me off this easy.”

Eddie scanned the street as subtly as he
could. He didn’t see anyone else making a similar move so he
decided their shadow was more than likely working alone. Either
somebody was short of manpower or maybe they just thought Eddie was
too much of a jerk to need the full court press.

He hoped, if that was the reason, that
somebody wasn’t right.

Ducking from doorway to doorway, trying to
stay as dry as they could, Eddie and Winnebago worked their way up
Sukhumvit until Eddie found what he was looking for. The office
building across the street and up a block on their left was
plain-looking and about a dozen stories high. It was perfect.

Waiting until the traffic was at its
heaviest, Eddie grabbed Winnebago’s elbow. “Let’s go!”

Dodging across the street, they headed
straight into the building’s lobby. As they shook off the rain,
Eddie glanced quickly around and saw that he couldn’t have hoped
for better. The lobby was empty and there were only two elevators.
One was just opening right in front of them and, according to the
lights above the doors, the other elevator was nearly at the top of
the building.

Tugging Winnebago behind him, Eddie jumped
into the open elevator. When the door slid shut behind them, he hit
the red button on the panel that turned it off; then he pulled his
key ring out of his right-hand trouser pocket and flipped open the
tiny blade of the nail clipper that he carried around attached to
it. Slipping the point under the bottom edge of the control panel,
Eddie twisted it in a little and then pushed down on it as hard as
he could. Somewhat to his own surprise, his makeshift pry bar
worked just fine and the panel popped out far enough for him to get
his fingers under it and give it another tug. When he did, the
whole thing came out in his hands. He pulled it toward him, turned
it over, and examined the back.

“I see what you’re doing!” Winnebago shouted
so loudly that Eddie put a finger to his lips and gave him a hard
look. “I saw this in a Disney movie once. Flipper or Son of Flipper
or some fucking fish movie. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Eddie nodded without taking his eyes away
from the back of the panel.

“The good guy got into an elevator and shut
it off,” Winnebago said, “then he turned the lights on and off on
the little thing outside to make it look like he was going up. When
the bad guy went up in the other elevator, Flipper—or whoever the
Christ it was—turned the elevator back on and ran off.”

“Flipper was a fish.”

“Whatever. But that’s still what you’re going
do, isn’t it, Eddie?”

Eddie continued to examine the back of the
control panel. “Do you think it will work?”

“That was a movie for kids. This is a crappy
office building in Bangkok. I think you’ve got no goddamned
chance.”

It had seemed simple enough in the movie, but
maybe Winnebago was right. Perhaps he had been tired or drunk when
he saw it because now that he had the plate out all he could see
was a mass of wires. He didn’t have the first idea what to do with
any of them. Eddie figured he had a couple of seconds at most to
think of something smart because the man who had been following
them would soon be standing in front of the elevators looking at
the indicator lights, if he wasn’t already.

He still had his nail clipper in his hand
and, having no better idea what to do with it, he stuck it against
the back of the bottom button just to see what would happen.

Eddie was so delighted when the light clicked
on that he almost dropped the panel, but he didn’t. He could only
hope that the light outside had come on just the same way. He
pulled the clipper out and stuck it against the back of the next
button and it clicked on, too. After repeating the process all the
way up to the top floor, Eddie held the clipper against the back of
the last button for a long time to give their pursuer the best
possible opportunity to take the bait and get himself well
upstairs. Then he pocketed his nail clipper and pushed the panel
back into place. Taking a deep breath, he turned the elevator
on.

The doors opened onto an empty lobby and they
stepped out and looked up at the indicator lights blinking over the
other elevator. When the light reached the top floor and stopped
flashing, they both laughed out loud.

“Well, son of a bitch.” Eddie grinned and
punched Winnebago on the shoulder.

“You are a god, Walt Disney,” Winnebago
intoned respectfully as they walked briskly across the lobby and
back out into the street. “You are a motherfucking god.”

THE
rainy season in Bangkok
begins in June and doesn’t end until at least November. During
those six months everyone survives day to day, never knowing when
the heavens will open and the city will slosh into chaos.

Bar scratched at his cheek and watched the
rain from the library on the fourth floor of the Bangkok Post
Building. It was coming down so hard that the sound of water
crashing into the windows hurt his ears and the salvos of thunder
made Bangkok seem like a city under siege.

The rain never bothered Thais as much as it
did the foreign residents of Bangkok. Thais just took off their
shoes, pulled pairs of rubber thongs from their bags, rolled up
their pants, and went about their business as if having surf in the
city’s streets was the most natural occurrence in the world.

Bar firmly believed that it was the Buddhist
thing that caused Thais to accept the annual monsoons so stoically.
If Christianity could be summed up in one line, it would be, ‘Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ If Thai Buddhism
could be summed up in one line, it would be, ‘Shit happens.’

Bar had been paging through recent copies of
local newspapers for almost three hours looking for any mention of
the name Harry Austin, but so far he had nothing. He could always
just ask around, of course, but Eddie Dare’s whole story had such
an odor that he didn’t want to get close to it until he knew
something, at least enough to guess what Dare was really up to.
Right now he didn’t know anything.

Ten grand was ten grand, but living in
Bangkok had taught him to be cautious of foreigners who showed up
touting grand schemes and dangling enticing propositions. He had
seen a pretty good truckload of them over the years. These guys
floated in and out again and resident
farangs
rash enough to
get involved with them were usually left to clean up a mess with
the locals, which frequently got a little touchy.

Bar had to be careful, he knew, but
still…

He glanced out the windows again and saw that
the rain had eased off, so he pushed the stack of newspapers away
with a sigh. Gathering his things and taking the elevator down to
the lobby, he headed out to the line of motorcycle taxis waiting in
front of the Post Building. As he walked down the steps, he saw a
slim woman in a yellow silk suit talking to two men. She saw him at
the same time, gave a quick wave, and bounced toward him, high
heels clicking on the pavement.

Her name was Worawanna Subhasawasdikul,
improbable though that might seem to anyone other than another
Thai, and she had recently been assigned to Bar as his assistant.
Wor had graduated from the University of Delaware only the year
before and sometimes it bothered Bar a little that Wor’s English
was not only better than his Thai, it might even be better than his
English. In spite of that, Bar had quickly developed the same sort
of easy relationship with Wor that he had with most women he wasn’t
sleeping with, which included almost all of them.

“Mr. Bar, did that messenger boy find
you?”

He loved that. Wor had called him Mr.
Phillips at first, but he insisted she just call him Bar. She
wasn’t comfortable with that, she said, so they finally settled on
Mr. Bar.

“What messenger boy?”

“I told him you were in the library. He said
he knew what you looked like.” Wor giggled. “You’re a very famous
man, I think.”

Bar waved away the compliment. “Nothing
important, I’m sure. Probably just some press release.”

The Thai postal service was so unreliable and
motorcycle messengers were so cheap that everything, even junk
mail, was sent around Bangkok by hand.

“Okay, Mr. Bar. Anything else I can do before
I go?”

“Not unless you’ve heard of a guy named Harry
Austin.”

Wor made a thinking face and Bar watched,
enjoying it.

“Does he work here?”

“No. He’s dead.”

“Oh.” She looked startled for second. “Then I
don’t know him. I don’t know anybody who’s dead.”

Yeah, that’d be right, Bar thought, briefly
considering how indecently young this woman was. Sometimes he
thought
most
of the people he knew were dead, or at least
they looked pretty damn close to it.

He watched Wor as she clicked off toward a
bus stop wondering what she did when she wasn’t at the Post. She
was Thai-Chinese, attractive, energetic, and well dressed. Other
than that, he knew practically nothing about her, not if she was
married, or had children, or spent her nights jerking off Japanese
tourists in a massage parlor.

Well, he doubted that.

Bar sometimes rode buses himself, but the
most efficient way to negotiate Bangkok’s clogged streets,
sometimes the only way, was on the back of a motorcycle. A skilled
rider could weave one of the whining little beasts between the
vehicles tangled in the gridlocked streets and arrive at almost any
destination long before any other vehicle. On the other hand, there
was a downside. You still got stuck in the traffic sometimes
anyway, and sitting on the back of a motorbike in 95-degree heat
sucking on the exhaust pipe of a clapped-out Chinese bus was not
everyone’s idea of a good time.