I left the envelope with Darcy and Nata and slipped away quickly, pleading fatigue. Back at the apartment I took the coward’s way out and slept in the guest room, then went to my office early on Monday morning. Barely halfway through my first cup of coffee, Darcy called.
“Nothing all that dramatic after all,” she said when I answered the telephone.
It was unnecessary, of course, for Darcy to tell me what she was referring to.
“I’ve emailed you a copy of what was on the disk, but you’re probably going to be disappointed. It was a backup all right, but it was just an address book. Nothing else. Might be something there for you, but…” Darcy trailed off.
“Was it encrypted?”
“Yeah.”
“So how’d you open it?”
“I used the password.”
“But how did you know what Dollar’s password was?”
“People are pretty predictable. When they pick a password, they always use something they won’t have any trouble remembering. That’s why nearly everyone picks just some ordinary word, or maybe a phrase that’s pretty well known. Either that, or they pick a combination of numbers that represent a date or something they can easily remember.”
I listened, making a mental note to change my ATM code as soon as we hung up.
“First we tried a random number crack of four through eight digits. When that didn’t work, we ran the file against English, Thai, French, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries and then for good measure against a database of a few hundred thousand proper names, places, and phrases that people sometimes use for passwords. It only took about twenty minutes to crack Dollar’s password.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“Berghof. That mean anything to you?”
“Doesn’t it have something to do with World War II?” I thought about it briefly. “That’s what Hitler called his vacation house in the Bavarian Alps, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. It seems an odd choice of password for Dollar. Was he a World War II fanatic?”
“Beats me,” I shrugged. “How about those documents I gave you, the ones in Thai?”
“Those might be a little more useful to you. They were property transfers.”
“For what?”
Darcy hesitated, and from something in the way she did it I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever it was coming next.
“You really can’t tell very much from a Thai title deed until you compare the property description with a detailed map of the area where the transfer took place but, as nearly as I can tell, these transfers all involved large tracts of land in Phuket.”
That might explain all those American Express receipts Dollar had from Phuket, it occurred to me.
“Maybe Dollar was working on a hotel development there,” I said. “Who were the transfers made to?”
“They were all corporate, and all the names looked to me like shelf companies. It’ll take a while to find out who’s really behind them. You know that better than I do.”
“But I still don’t see why Dollar would throw title deeds away. Whoever the property was transferred to, the title deeds themselves are still important documents in Thailand.”
“These weren’t originals. They weren’t even complete. My guess is that they were just copies that were attached to something else he was working on, probably as exhibits of some kind just to prove that the transfers had actually taken place.”
“I still don’t see it, Darcy. A man who’d go to the trouble of encrypting his address book wouldn’t just toss copies of transfers like that into the trash. There’s too much information on them. He’d shred them first.”
“He would if they were real.”
That stopped me.
“What do you mean?”
“Now I’m not absolutely sure about this, Jack, but my guess is the transfers you found are all forgeries.”
I blinked at that.
“Not even particularly good ones,” Darcy continued. “My guess is that your man had a pressing need to show somebody that he had purchased a whole hell of a lot of property that he hadn’t, so he manufactured these title deeds to show where a whole bunch of money had gone.”
I thought about that and said nothing.
“Look, I got some real hot stuff running today, so I’m afraid I’ve got to leave all this with you for now. Why don’t you have a look at that address book and see if anything jumps out at you, then we’ll talk again in a few days.”
I thanked Darcy and we said our good-byes and hung up.
After going down to the coffee room and refilling my mug, I logged onto the university email system and retrieved the address book Darcy had sent me. It turned out to be a single file she had converted to plain text so I was able to open it easily enough. I started reading through it, but my mind was mostly on those title deeds and I figured it was probably a waste of time.
I didn’t get any further than the second screen before I realized just how wrong I was.
The fifth entry down the second page was neatly typed all in capitals.
Asian Bank of Commerce.
Next to the name was a number-a phone number, I assumed, since it had seven digits-but there was no address and no country or city code. It could have been a Bangkok number, but it just as easily could have been a number in Teaneck, New Jersey.
What really stopped me, however, was something that appeared in parentheses immediately following the telephone number.
It was a name.
Arthur Daley.
My mind clicked straight back to Took Lae Dee when I had been perched on a stool studying the Hong Kong ID that Barry Gale had handed me.
Christ, I thought. Jimmy Kicks’ gangster bank and the name on Barry Gale’s phony Hong Kong Identity Card were both right here in Dollar’s computer address book.
What could that possibly mean?
Okay, I lectured myself in a stern voice, don’t jump to any conclusions here. Think this through clearly.
So there might be some kind of connection between Dollar Dunne and Barry Gale. That was all Dollar’s address book was actually telling me, wasn’t it? Finding the ABC and the name on Barry’s phony ID in Dollar’s address book certainly didn’t prove that there was also some kind of a connection between Barry Gale and Howard Kojinski’s body twirling away under the Taksin Bridge, did it? And it absolutely didn’t prove there was any connection between whatever might be going on here and my own relatively minor involvement with Howard and Dollar or with Barry Gale’s effort to recruit me to help him find the money missing from the ABC. Right?
Horseshit. Who was I trying to kid?
How much longer was I going to sit there looking at Barry Gale’s cover name in Dollar’s computer address book and tell myself that it might only be a coincidence? How long was I going to try and convince myself that it really meant nothing, and more importantly, that it had absolutely nothing to do with me?
Over the last few days two big trains had been rumbling through my life-one carrying Barry Gale and Jimmy Kicks, and the other carrying Dollar Dunne and Howard the Roach. I had felt both of them gathering speed, relentlessly building momentum toward something, although I hadn’t had the slightest idea where either one was headed.
But now I knew. Both trains were barreling right down the same track, heading straight for each other.
And I was standing directly between them.
I NEEDED HELP before I got crushed, and Stanley Ratikun was the only guy I could think of to go to with something like this. For a couple of decades Stanley had been the managing partner of one of Bangkok’s oldest international law firms. Then he retired and became director of the Sasin Institute of Business Administration at Chulalongkorn University, which made him more or less my boss. At least technically.
It was a post of considerable prestige, although Stanley really didn’t need the prestige. He had been born in New York, but his grandmother was obscurely related to the Thai royal family and he still had his Thai passport. That was one of the two reasons that his law firm had represented just about every significant international corporation that did any business at all in Thailand after the mid-sixties. The other was that Stanley and the other members of his firm were all first-rate lawyers.
Stanley and I had never exactly been pals, of course, and I hadn’t really even known him all that well back when he persuaded me to abandon the real world for Bangkok and join the faculty at Chula. Still, I had come to know him pretty well since then and in particular I respected the old-fashioned sense of righteousness against which he seemed to test everything he did. Stanley was hardly the sort of guy you hung out with at the Titty Twister ogling the go-go dancers and talking crap while you chugged back the Singhas, but he was a guy I trusted.
I was pretty sure Stanley would play it straight with me when I asked him flat out about Dollar. He wouldn’t necessarily tell me everything he knew just because I asked him to, but I didn’t think he would exactly lie to me either.
When I walked up two floors to Stanley’s office I saw through his half-open door that he was on the telephone. I gave him a little wave and leaned against the wall outside his office waiting for him to finish his conversation.
After Stanley hung up, he smiled broadly and gestured at me to come in.