Big Mango (9786167611037) (43 page)

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.

LAUNDRY MAN

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.

There was another reason this particular
course drew so well, however, one about which I had decidedly mixed
feelings. My lectures generally featured anecdotes drawn from my
own recollections of the bad old days, of gunslingers that had
bought companies with big gestures instead of money and somehow
gotten away with it for a while. Those stories were obviously
popular with the students and that was what bothered me. I often
got the uncomfortable feeling that they were less interested in
absorbing the moral object lessons I was trying to impart than they
were in figuring out how they could pull off the same kind of crap
for themselves.

Regardless, today I was entirely free of the
need to fret over what my students might make of my tales of greed
and derring-do because I didn’t have to tell any. I was about to
engage in the oldest ruse known to academia, the guest lecturer
ploy. All I had to do today was appear attentive and not get caught
closing my eyes.

I went down to the administrative office
while I waited for Mr. Coffee to finish dripping, gathered the
weekend’s harvest of incoming faxes out of the machine, and picked
up copies of both the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Bangkok Post
. Flipping quickly through the faxes, I found
only one addressed to me, a notice that the board meeting for
Southeast Asian Investment in Hong Kong later in the week had been
shortened from two days to one. That wasn’t particularly welcome
news since I really enjoyed my all-expense-paid junkets to Hong
Kong.

I walked back to the kitchen carrying the fax
and the newspapers, picked out what looked like a clean mug from a
cabinet above the sink, and poured myself some coffee. Then I
returned to my own office, shut the door, dumped the fax on my
desk, and settled back with the newspapers to do some serious
coffee drinking.

TWO NEWSPAPERS AND
three cups of coffee later, I made a preemptive toilet stop, then
strolled across campus to the lecture hall where I found the guest
lecturer for the day waiting outside for me. My designated hitter
was an old Bangkok hand named Dollar Dunne, an American-born lawyer
who had been around Thailand for longer than anyone I knew. As
unlikely as it might seem, Dollar actually
was
his real
name, one hung on him by a mother who either had a strange sense of
humor or, given his ensuing success dealing his way around the back
alleys of Asia, was startlingly prescient.

Dollar and I made small talk until the class
had all taken their seats, then I did a couple of quick
announcements and gave Dollar the kind of effusive and deferential
introduction my guests always said was unnecessary but would have
been mortally wounded not to receive. After that, I settled into a
seat up at the back of the lecture hall and smiled as Dollar leaned
against the podium and launched into what were no doubt wildly
embellished tales of his adventures as a legal mercenary stalking
the commercial jungles of Asia.

Dollar was at least in his mid-fifties, but
his wiry build and the way he wore his thick, silver hair in what
was almost but not quite a Marine Corps buzz cut made him look much
younger. His skin was perfectly tanned and his features still had a
boyish, open quality to them. Instead of the predictable uniform of
expensive suit and a white shirt, Dollar was wearing rumpled khakis
and a green golf shirt that looked faded from many hours in the
sun. His choice of wardrobe said a lot about him. He was probably
happiest when he was doing exactly the opposite of whatever was
expected. I had to admit the image Dollar affected, although a
little studied for my taste, was pretty potent. It gave him a
raffish quality that a lot of people found irresistible.

Dollar and I had first met back when I was
still in living in Washington. Dollar’s firm had been lead counsel
for a company called the Merchant Group that had gone suddenly and
spectacularly belly up and left a good number of Stassen &
Hardy’s banking clients holding embarrassingly empty bags. The
Merchant Group had technically been a Luxembourg corporation with
its operating headquarters in Bangkok, but in reality it was as
Australian as a red kangaroo. Lyndon Merchant was an Aussie and
mostly he ran the organization out of Perth. He called it a private
international merchant bank, but I had never met anyone who could
figure out exactly what that crafty assembly of buzzwords was
actually supposed to mean.

What the company actually did was equally
difficult to divine. It did deals, of course, as the players liked
to say back when the expression was still socially acceptable if
not exactly laudable, but there was no consistent quality to them.
It bought random companies all over the world, mostly with money
borrowed from gullible and greedy bankers whose primary interest
was in pumping up their reported profits with fat fees; then it
either flipped the companies quickly for a fast profit, generally
to some sucker lined up in advance, or it cut the companies up,
pulled the valuable assets out, and dumped what was left.

When Stassen & Hardy sent me out to
Bangkok to fish around in the wreckage of the Merchant Group to see
if anything was left for our clients to claim, it wasn’t long
before I was up to my butt in a morass of untraceable fund
transfers and funny-money loans involving shell companies
headquartered in places like the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga.
The gamy odor of the whole sordid mess was unmistakable, but I
couldn’t develop any solid connections between the Merchant Group’s
operations and the usual suspects in international scams of that
sort: the intelligence agencies, drug traffickers, and arms brokers
who were generally skulking somewhere in the shadows. Dollar, as I
recalled, seemed to find the whole muddle more amusing than
sinister, and working that case with him turned out to be the
finest graduate seminar in Asian commercial skullduggery I could
ever have wanted.

Dollar was right in the middle of telling my
students a few stories about the Merchant Group, winging his way to
the considerable amusement of the class through some of the wilder
conspiracy theories, when he suddenly looked up at the back of the
hall and cut me a wink that was impossible to miss. A few of the
kids twisted around in their seats to check out my reaction. I
reflexively returned a half-smile, but Dollar’s gesture left me a
little unsettled. The wink seemed to imply that Dollar and I shared
some secret concerning the Merchant Group that he couldn’t impart
to the class. If that’s what he thought, I couldn’t imagine what
that secret was supposed be.

I was still thinking about that when the
class started to applaud and I realized that Dollar had finished.
The kids gathered their stuff, slid out of the narrow rows of
theater-style seating that were tiered up off a center aisle, and
began to make their way down to the main floor and out of the
hall.

By the time I reached the bottom of the
steps, the hall was almost empty and Dollar was leaning on the
lectern at the front of the room waiting for me.

LAUNDRY MAN

“WAS THAT WINK
supposed to mean something to me?”

“You’re getting kind of Canadian in your old
age, Jack. Anybody ever tell you that?” Dollar eyed me for a moment
and then he shrugged. “A kiss is just a kiss; a smile is just a
smile; a wink is just a wink. Like that.”