Jake Needham - Killing Plato

“That doesn’t mean that’s what they find,” Anita finished, “but it’s still what they’re looking for.”

“Have you been into the cooking sherry again, my dear?” I inquired in what I thought was an arch enough tone to make my message unmistakable.

Too late. The Australian chick was in full flight now. I looked at Karsarkis, who had pushed back in his chair and had an enormous grin spread across his face.

“Doesn’t it just make you sick?” she was saying to Anita who was bobbing her head in earnest agreement. “Sometimes I think these halfwits go around screwing these tiny girls just because it makes their pathetic little peckers look bigger.”

Karsarkis was about to bust a gut, but then I noticed that the other men around the table had gone unnaturally quiet, even the Englishman, who before this had looked as if he might never shut up. I glanced at the former prime minister. The old man had his head down diligently examining the texture of his carrot mousse. I got the distinct impression that he had probably heard all this before.

“You see all these fat, smelly wankers strutting around dragging these poor little girls behind them or riding a motorbike with one propped up on the back. Jesus, they treat those little girls like they were no better than pets who give blow jobs. What’s worse, the silly cows don’t even seem to mind it.”

The Australian woman tossed her head and pushed her hair back. There was something about her face that made me think of a badly drawn cartoon.

“Of course, they’re just doing it for the money.” She looked around the table and drained the rest of her wine. “The silly buggers run out of money and they’re out on their dirty arses before they know what hit them.”

“Serves them right,” Anita nodded, looking straight at me as she did.

Suddenly a mobile phone started to ring and for a moment nobody said anything.

“Excuse me,” I spoke up after the sound had gone on for a while. “That’s probably my Thai girlfriend calling.”

Everyone laughed, particularly Karsarkis, who looked as if he might have a stroke.

The Englishman eventually pulled out his telephone and flipped it open. He glanced at the screen, and then he closed it again without answering.

After dinner, Mia invited the other women to ^at,toed"›

A houseboy wearing a white jacket and black bow tie offered cigars from a Dunhill humidor. The cigars were Davidoffs so naturally I took one, as did Karsarkis, but the others waved the houseboy away with varying degrees of courtesy.

The old prime minister stretched out on a lounge chair and within a few minutes was either dozing or dead. Meanwhile the Englishman and Yuri made vague excuses about telephone calls they had to make and headed off for other parts of the house. In short order I found myself alone with Karsarkis by to the pool and I wondered if that was entirely coincidental.

We busied ourselves in silence for a while cutting and lighting our cigars. When Karsarkis eventually spoke, he kept his eyes on his cigar rather than looking at me.

“May I make a personal observation, Jack?”

I waved my cigar in what I figured was a suitably magnanimous gesture.

“Sure,” I said, “go ahead.”

“You seem to be pretty hostile tonight.”

“Good Lord,” I snorted, flipping my spent match in the direction of an ashtray. “I never would have guessed you watched Oprah.”

Karsarkis chuckled slightly at that, but then he lifted his eyes, cocked his head to one side, and stared at me until I looked away.

“You really don’t like me, do you, Jack?”

“Well…” I sorted through a number of possible responses to that and finally went with the one I thought was most honest. “No.”

Karsarkis shifted his cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right and smiled slightly. “You want to tell me exactly why?”

“Sure. You’re one of the people who get away with it. I don’t like people who get away with it.”

“With what?”

“With whatever you want. You make ridiculous amounts of money any way you like. You brush off any inconvenient laws that happen to get in your way. You let the suckers do the productive work and pay the taxes. You ruin people when they threaten you, maybe you even have a few of them killed every now and then if they get to be real nuisances. And what happens to you?” I raised my arms and gestured around me at Karsarkis’ extraordinary house. “Not a fucking thing. You live like the king of the world, laughing at all the idiots who can’t do a damn thing about it.”

To my surprise, Karsarkis just stood and listened to me, nodding his head slightly as if he were in full agreement.

Then, taking another long pull on his cigar, he exhaled and watched the smoke drift away. “You see me laughing, Jack?” he asked.

“You know what I mean.”

“I know this: I can’t go back to the United States now and I have a daughter there who needs me. Did you know that ?”

I said nothing at first, but then I saw Karsarkis was staring at me as if he actually expected me to answer him so I did.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“She’s nine years old. Living in New York with my first wif c myidn amp;rsquoe. She has leukemia, Jack, and she’s too sick to come here. If I can’t straighten all this out, she’ll die before I see her again. What do you think it feels like to be in exile halfway around the world, living in a country where you can’t read the signs and aren’t sure who you can trust, when you have a nine-year-old daughter back home who’s dying of leukemia?” Karsarkis pushed one of the lounge chairs around with his foot, sat down on the side of it, and looked up at me. “What do you think that feels like, you self-righteous son of a bitch?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

“I think you at least owe me an honest answer to my question, Jack. Do you see me laughing?”

I wanted to say if Karsarkis cared so much about his daughter maybe he should have thought about her back before he started peddling smuggled Iraqi oil to the highest bidder and pissing off the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, and God-only-knew who else. But I didn’t say any of that.

“What’s your daughter’s name?” I asked him instead.

“Zoe. After my mother.”

“Do you talk to her often?”

The silence went on for what felt like several minutes before Karsarkis spoke again.

“No, not often. It’s hard for both of us. She always ends up crying. I don’t deal with it very well.”

Drawing deeply on his cigar Karsarkis stood up and walked slowly over to the edge of the pool and peered down. For a moment I had visions of Robert Maxwell and wondered if I ought to take off my watch and shoes just in case he was about to jump in.

“You have any kids, Jack?” he asked all of a sudden.

“No, but…” I trailed off when I realized I wasn’t at all certain what I had started to say, so I didn’t say anything.

Karsarkis looked back over his shoulder at me with a kind of half smile on his face.

“You were going to say that you and Anita were talking about it, weren’t you?”

“No. I wasn’t.”

But, of course, I was.

“I’ve got a son as well as a daughter,” Karsarkis carried on, letting me off the hook. “Did I tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“Yeah, Frank’s at Columbia. I’m proud as hell of that boy, but I worry about him, too. Sometimes I think we’ve all lost our way. The kind of world we’re leaving for him and the rest of our kids is a less decent place than the one our parents left for us. I’m not sure he’s ready to deal with that.” Karsarkis smiled again, but in a minor key. “Anyway, he got into Columbia. That’s about as good a start as he could get. Maybe he’ll be okay.”