The first thing I did when I got back to my office was get a Montecristo out of my humidor and light up. I took a long, full draw, rolled the sweet smoke around in my mouth, and exhaled slowly as I tilted back in my chair and swung my feet up on the desk. Perhaps a cigar struck most people as a peculiar choice of tranquilizer, but it always worked just fine for me.
After a half hour or so of nicely anesthetized reflection, I was no closer to deciding whether Mike O’Connell’s murder had anything to do with me than I had been the first moment I saw the headline in the IHT. I glanced at my watch, then dumped the remains of my cigar in an ashtray, collected my notes, and headed for the elevator. Murder or no murder, I had a three-o’clock class to teach.
My lecture was uneventful, as much for my students as for me, then afterwards I had a string of conference appointments and I manfully slogged through every one. Very few of my appointments had anything to do with wheedling a better grade out of me, which is the way I figured they would usually go back in the States. Instead, the most popular topic with my students by far was how I could help them score a place in a prestigious American MBA program. Since I really didn’t have a clue, those conversations were mercifully short.
By a little after five-thirty the procession ended and I tried again to call Anita to tell her I was going to Darcy’s for dinner. Now there was no answer at all at the apartment and Anita’s mobile number continued to connect me directly to her voice mail. I couldn’t figure out where she was and I was starting to worry a bit. I wasn’t sure why or what I could do about it, but there it was anyway. It was after six by then so I let it go, locked up the office, and headed for Darcy’s house.
Darcy and Nata lived in the oldest part of Bangkok, an area not far from the King’s palace, but there was nothing particularly stylish nor fashionable about the neighborhood so few foreigners ever ventured out there, which I thought was a pity. Around dusk, along the grassy banks of the canals that still crisscrossed the area, food vendors lit their charcoal cooking fires, the cicadas began to rumble in the trees, and a soft purple haze filled the air. In the mid-city financial district, the part of Bangkok where most of the foreign community lived, everything seemed forced. The breakneck conversion of rice fields into a forest of high-rise apartments and acres of glitzy shopping malls felt temporary and superficial, as if it could all be swept aside in an instant and no one would really care. But the old city seemed real somehow, substantial and resistant to time. The colors were brighter, the smells were richer, and the sounds were warmer. As the lights came on in the late twilight of a moist tropical evening, everything about it felt whole and sweet and true.
To get to Darcy’s house, you headed west from the university, crossed the Padung Krung Kasem Canal, and took Wisut Kasat Road toward the river. Then you turned off behind an Esso station and followed a narrow soi between two beat-to-hell shophouses that were once probably white. At the very end of the soi was a green metal gate set in a high ginger-colored wall overgrown with stands of bamboo. I pulled up at the gate and waved toward the security camera. Almost immediately the gate separated into two panels and swung inward.
As I parked in the circular driveway, Darcy stepped out onto the house’s wide front porch. She was a small woman, trim and crisp in a green silk blouse and white sarong, and her silver hair was cut in a tight and vaguely masculine crop. I would have placed her somewhere in her sixties, but that was just a guess. Darcy had looked exactly the same ever since I had known her and I really had no idea how old she was.
“Hey, baby,uo;Hey, ” she called out, giving me a wave.
I waved back as I got out of the car and when I got up on the porch I gave her a hug as well.
“Nata’s not here tonight,” she said before I could ask. “Some kind of family thing.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean you’re cooking.”
Darcy balled up her fist and popped me on the shoulder, then looped her arm through mine.
“I’ve arranged for dinner to be served by the pool. Not too hot outside for you tonight, is it, baby?”
Without waiting for an answer, Darcy led me off the porch and along a graveled walkway that circled around the house. Geraniums outlined the path on both sides, their bright red blossoms so perfectly formed that they might have been made of plastic.
“You have any luck with that disk?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity any longer.
“It’s like I told you before, baby. People underestimate the Thais. They seem stupid and lazy and corrupt, but generally they’re not that bad.” Darcy seemed to reconsider for a moment. “Well, some of them are, but mostly they’re in the government where we can keep an eye on them”
I laughed. Darcy didn’t.
We rounded the house until we came to a courtyard paved with red brick laid in a herringbone pattern. At its center was a rectangular swimming pool. The underwater lights were on, which caused the pool to glow and pulse as if possessed by some otherworldly source of energy. Two places had been set at a round glass table next to a grove of banana trees and the candles on the table flickered in rhythm with the wind.
“You realize, of course, I read what was on the disk, Jack. Can I ask what interest you have in Plato Karsarkis?”
It was a good question, of course, maybe even a better one than Darcy imagined. A girl who looked about eighteen and was dressed in sharply creased dark trousers and a white shirt helped us with our chairs and poured white wine while I thought about what a good answer to Darcy’s good question might be.
“Did you copy the disk,” I asked after the girl had left us alone again, “or just read it?”
Darcy gave me a long look.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That came out wrong.”
“Uh-huh. It did.”
“Obviously you read the file, Darcy. I meant for you to. I’m just asking if you were able to get a hard copy, too.”
Darcy picked up her glass and tried her wine. Apparently it met with her approval because she drank some more of it before she put the glass down and cleared her throat.
“Avoiding the copy restrictions was child’s play,” she said. “I already told you that’s just off-the-shelf stuff. The timer was a little harder. The NIA put a routine on the disk that works like an email destruct timer. You trigger it by opening the file, then you have an hour to read everything before the destruct routine goes active. After it does a simple algorithmic will run and corrupt all the files on the disk by changing the data into random characters. It’s really very clever, very thorough. They wanted to make sure everything disappeared after you read it.”
“But you beat it.”
“Sure, I beat it, darling. You know I did.”
“You get a hard copy?” I asked. “Or just a clean copy on another disk?”
“Got both.”
“Damn you’re good.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
I chuckled appropriately. “Well, Darcy, let me at least tell you I appreciate it.”
“I want you to tell me a lot more than that.”
“I’m sorry?” I asked.
“What I said, darling, is that I want you to tell me more than that you appreciate it. I want you to tell me why the hell the NIA is giving you files about Plato Karsarkis.”
I thought about that briefly.
“Are you just generally curious, Darcy?” I asked carefully when I was through thinking. “Or do you have some specific reason for wanting to know.”
“I don’t think you realize what you’re getting into here, Jack.”
“I’m not getting into anything.”
“The hell you’re not. I read the newspapers. There’s a copy of today’s International Herald Tribune right inside on my desk.”
I played with my wine glass and wondered how much I ought to tell Darcy. She wouldn’t usually ask questions like this, but I suppose I should have been prepared. Plato Karsarkis was hardly a usual subject.
“Look, Darcy, the NIA asked me to do something for them. I told them I wanted to see some of their internal files before I made up my mind whether I would do it or not. They gave me that disk, and frankly I have no idea what’s on it.”
“But you do know it concerns Plato Karsarkis.”
It was a statement, not a question, so I didn’t say anything. I just sat quietly and watched Darcy nod slowly as if she was putting some things together.
“They know where Karsarkis is,” she said after a moment, “but I guess you already realize that.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Uh-huh.”
There was a pause and in the silence I listen to the low hum of the pool pump in the distance and the rhythmic buzzing of the cicadas in the trees.
“I’m worried about you, baby,” Darcy said very quietly after a minute or two had passed. “You’re playing in the big leagues with stuff like this. I’d like to watch your back, but I can’t if you won’t trust me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust, Darcy. I wouldn’t have given you that disk if I didn’t trust you. I just don’t want you to get involved. It can’t be a good thing.”
“Then why are you involved?”
I had no answer for that so we both sat in silence while the young girl returned and served us both from a large wooden salad bowl heaped with greens and slices of chicken topped with croutons and smothered in Caesar dressing. As I cut a sliver of chicken and rolled it through the dressing, Darcy selected a bread stick from a basket on the table.
When Darcy snapped the breadstick, the sound of it cracked in the silence like a shot.