I try to rustle up a tennis match every now and then to fight the good fight against onrushing decrepitude, but it’s usually difficult to find anyone in Bangkok who wants to play tennis. Men in Thailand mostly play golf. That generally means lolling around a course for half a day drinking beer with your pals while one eighteen-year-old girl scurries around holding an umbrella over you and another drags your heavy golf bag. Breaking a sweat isn’t part of the deal.
Finding a place to play tennis in Bangkok is a challenge, too. Other than the courts at a couple of snobby private clubs where you have to pay a generous bribe to the membership committee to get in, the few tennis courts in the city are pretty crummy. They’re usually not much more than cracked and buckled slabs of concrete wedged between high-rise buildings, not so much athletic facilities as parking lots with nets that generate income for the landowners until they get some financing together to build yet another apartment tower.
So as an alternative form of exercise I try to run a few miles every now and then. The big problem there is that places to run in the city are at almost as much of a premium as tennis courts. That is, unless you have a particular affection for climbing in and out of potholes while playing tag with thirty-year-old Chinese buses driven by teenagers zonked out of their mind on uppers.
Queen’s Park isn’t very big, but it is one of the better places in Bangkok to run. It’s quiet and pleasant, at least it is if you measure it by the standard of the few other public parks in Bangkok, which is pretty modest. Sandwiched between the Emporium, the city’s ritziest shopping complex, and some nondescript commercial buildings including a walled compound belonging to the Iranian Embassy, it amounts to a couple of acres of concrete pathways, a little grass, some trees, and a few fountains with a small lake in the middle of it all. The place actually feels pretty much like a real park, if you don’t think about it too much.
I parked on the street and walked into Queen’s Park from the Sukhumvit Road side, looking around for my usual jogging companion. Near the back of the park, I spotted Jello bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet while he watched some kids playing an energetic if not particularly skillful game of basketball.
Technically Jello was just another Thai police captain and the Thai police had amp;mdroello bounca lot of captains, but as long as I had known him he had also been a senior member of the Economic Crimes Investigation Division. It was a position that gave him a considerable amount of personal clout since ECID was primarily an intelligence operation. Most cops concerned themselves with who was doing what to whom, and occasionally even why. Jello focused more on how much they were getting paid for it and what they did with the money. Since money in Thailand was more important than life, it made him a key player in almost everything of any consequence that went down anywhere in the entire country.
I had never been entirely certain what the source of Jello’s colorful nickname was. For a while I had assumed his rotund physique had something to do with it, the image of his belly quivering like a bowl of jello coming easily to mind whenever we ran together. However lately I had gotten the impression the name might have gone all the way back to his childhood when he had been sent away to a boarding school in Connecticut. I wondered if hidden within it was one of those scarring cruelties most of us could recall from our childhood but would rather not. If there was, he never mentioned it.
Jello must have seen me coming out of the corner of his eye. He glanced back over his shoulder when I was a good fifty feet away and gave me a wave. I tossed out a little salute and broke into a jog toward him.
“You’re late,” he said when I got there.
“I am,” I agreed, jogging in place next to him.
“Aren’t you at least going to say you’re sorry.”
“I am not. Any other preliminaries?”
“Guess not.”
“Then you’re ready for a few miles?”
“Let’s do it.”
“What you think? Five today? Maybe ten?”
“Whatever, old man.”
I knew perfectly well some kind of warm-up routine before running was almost mandatory now that I wasn’t a young hot shot anymore, but most of the time I couldn’t be bothered so I just ran slowly for the first half a mile or so and hoped after that everything would take care of itself.
A pebbled concrete walkway circled the small lake in the middle of the park and we jogged slowly through the first circuit without conversation. Jello was a man of few words, which to my way of thinking made him the perfect companion for a run, maybe the perfect companion for every occasion. On the other hand our sporadic runs together were also a good time to talk about things that needed talking about. Sometimes he had questions for me. Sometimes I had questions for him. The lifeblood of Thailand was favors done and debits accumulated. Jello and I had kept our personal accounts pretty much in balance, but this afternoon it was my turn to apply for a little withdrawal.
We picked up our pace on the second circuit and were moving pretty well before I finally broke the silence.
“Want to play word association?” I asked.
Jello turned his head slowly and looked at me, but he didn’t say anything.
“It works this way-”
“I know how it works,” he said.
“Okay, good. Then I’ll say a word, and you tell me the first word that comes into your mind.”
Another slow back and forth swivel of Jello’s head. Another silence.
“Herey"›quo;
A nanny in a white uniform was pushing a baby carriage down the middle of the walkway and I dodged around her, glancing quickly at Jello to see if he had noticed my phenomenally graceful sidestep. If he had, he was concealing it nicely.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Stop asking if I’m ready.”
“Okay, then, here’s the word,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis.”
“That’s two words.”
“Think of it as one and you’ll be okay.”
“Still two words.”
“Don’t be a fucking pedant, Jello. Just tell me the first thing that comes into you mind when you hear the words Plato Karsarkis.”
We ran on for several minutes after that without either of us saying anything else, which was pretty much exactly what I thought would happen. Flocks of pigeons had taken up residence on the walkway ahead of us and as we bore down on them they rose into the air and dispersed like puffs of brown-gray smoke, their cooing and flapping barely audible in the rumble of the city around us.
“So,” Jello eventually said, “I gather you’ve heard.”
“You’re supposed to give me the one word that comes into your mind, man. That’s five words.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s two-”
“Just lay it out,” Jello interrupted. “You’ve got something to tell me about the guy or you wouldn’t have brought him up.”
A heavy woman with an appalling blonde dye job walked straight into us swinging her elbows so wildly she nearly pushed us off the pavement. I gathered she was a tourist since she was wearing a conical-shaped straw hat she had apparently bought in some street market along with a red hill-tribe vest. No local would ever wear a get-up like that.
“I hear Karsarkis is in Phuket,” I said.
“Bullshit, Professor. You’re fishing.”
“That’s what I heard.”
“From who.”
“From Plato Karsarkis,” I said, keeping my voice as empty as I could. “When Anita and I went to his house for dinner.”
Jello ran on after that as if I hadn’t said anything worth commenting on. I used two slowly moving girls in high school uniforms to screen off a group of boys who were kicking a soccer ball and then slipped back into stride alongside him again.
“You don’t believe me,” I said.
“How’d you work that out?”
“I’ve got finely honed instincts for subtle human responses.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “You do.”
We passed the fountain and started around the lake again.
“So,” I said, “know what’s going to happen next?”
“Nope.”
“I do. I’ve got finely honed instincts for predicting the future, too.”
“Is that right?”
“It is. We’re going to do one more mile after this le o;
one, then we’re going to walk across the street to the Bull’s Head. When we get there, you’re going to buy me a large Carlsberg draft, and when I’ve had about half of it you’re going to turn to me and you’re going to say, ‘So, Professor, what the fuck you talking about?’“
“That’s what’s going to happen next?”
“That’s it.”
“Huh,” Jello said. “Imagine that.”
The Bull’s Head was unusually quiet when we got there and Jello and I took a table in the back where there was no one else within earshot. After we had each drunk about half of our Carlsberg drafts in silence, Jello wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned toward me.
“So, Professor” he said, “what the fuck you talking about?”
I took my time about it, but I told Jello more or less everything about my encounter with Plato Karsarkis in Phuket, including the dinner at his house. I even told Jello about the dangle from Karsarkis to do some work for one of his companies.
“Did you know Plato Karsarkis was in Phuket?” I asked when I had finished.
“I think I heard something like that.”
“So what are you guys going to do?”
“Do?” Jello sipped at his beer. “About what?”
“About Karsarkis.”
“Why should we do anything?”
“You’re not going to arrest him?” I asked.
“What for?”
“What for? To turn him over to the Americans, of course.”
“They haven’t asked us to do that.”
“Oh, come on. Karsarkis has got to be on the Interpol watch list.”
“Yeah, he is. There’s a red notice out.”
An Interpol red notice was a request to any country that found Karsarkis to detain him.
“Thailand isn’t going to pay any attention to it?”
Jello looked at me over the rim of his glass for a long moment, but he didn’t say anything.
“Oh, it’s like that,” I said.
Jello gave a little shrug with his eyebrows, but he stayed silent.
“What if the American Embassy files a formal request for Karsarkis’ arrest?”
“We don’t have to think about that until they do it.”
“How very Thai of you.”
“Thank you.”
Jello slugged down the last of his beer and waved to one of the waitresses. She came over and gave him a smile that would have melted the McMurdo Ice Shelf.
“One more?” she asked.
“Two more. One for me and…” he poked a thumb in my direction, “one for my dad.”
The girl suppressed a giggle and flashed him another thousand-watt smile before she moved away.
“How come you get the big-eye, goo-goo routine and she ignores me completely?” I asked Jello.
“Women radar stuff. They know whenThew come yo you’re already hooked up and aren’t available.”
“I’m willing to lie.”
“Wouldn’t do you any good,” he said. “They know.”
We sat in silence until the waitress had replaced our empty glasses with freshly drawn drafts, during the course of which I had to endure another round of her flirting with Jello and ignoring me.
When she had gone I cleared my throat and told Jello about meeting Marshal Clovis Ward. Then for good measure I described our night out together in Patong and repeated CW’s appeal for intelligence on Karsarkis’ security.
“You have a funny habit of ending right in the middle of all kinds of shit, don’t you, Professor?”
“It’s a talent.”
“That’s one way to look at it, I guess.”
“So…did you know the US Marshals were in Phuket?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“And it doesn’t bother you they’re there without the embassy having filed an official request to detain Karsarkis?”
“What bothers me isn’t the point,” Jello said.
I shoved my beer glass around in a circle on the tabletop and it left a thin trail of water on the heavily lacquered wood. I reached out and traced the water with my forefinger.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked after a while. “Let the marshals kidnap Karsarkis and hustle him out of the country?”
“It’s not going to come to that.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Look, Professor, whenever your guys think the time is right, I’m sure they’ll make a request for extradition to the prime minister.”
“If they do, what will the prime minister say?”
“No idea.”
“Right.”
“Really. I have absolutely no idea.”
I reached out and tapped my forefinger on the table in front of Jello. “You and I both know Karsarkis didn’t get where he is by being stupid,” I said.
Jello glanced at me, but his eyes bounced off without sticking. Still, there had been a flash of embarrassment there and I had caught it full on.
“Karsarkis isn’t just rolling the dice,” I said. “He wouldn’t be here if he weren’t absolutely certain he has the Thai government in his pocket.”
“Doesn’t really matter,” Jello said, without looking at me. “If your guys really want him, you’ll get him.”
“Watch that, would you? It’s the second time you’ve said it. They’re not my guys. I’m not in involved in any of this.”
“Then just keep it that way, Jack. There’s a lot going on here you don’t understand.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“That’s because it’s always true.”
“Maybe I know more than you think.”
“Doesn’t look that way to me.”
Jello was right, oo wnow morf course. I knew damned near nothing about the intrigues that were no doubt churning like a tornado around Plato Karsarkis’ presence in Thailand, which was exactly why I was sitting with Jello right then trying to bait him into telling me something.
“A United States Marshal trying to recruit me as a spy makes me uneasy,” I said. “I don’t want to find myself in the middle of an international incident.”
“Your guys will come to their senses before they do anything stupid.”
“And if they don’t?”
“We’re not going to fight a gun battle with them at the airport, Professor, if that’s what you’re asking me.”
That wasn’t what I had been asking, of course. All the same, it was good to know.