Jake Needham - Killing Plato

I held the little pamphlet up and looked at Anita.

“Have you seen the price?” I asked her.

“Yes, it’s pretty ridiculous,” Nok spoke up before Anita had to say anything. “But Thai banks are completely unrealistic about the value of property. They’d probably take a lot less if you offered cash.”

“It does seem high,” Anita mumbled, but she didn’t look at me.

“Well, my husband and I bought a house from the same bank,” Nok said, still pitching hard. “We offered about half of what they were asking and stuck to it and eventually they took it.”

“That’s still may be a little more than I wanted to spend,” Anita admitted.

“It’s a lot more than I wanted to spend,” I added.

“Did you have a figure in mind?” Nok asked politely, looking at me rather than Anita.

“Yes,” I smiled. “Zero.”

Nok looked puzzled, as she should have.

“I would be buying the property,” Anita explained. “Jack’s not sure it’s a good idea. That what he means.”

Nok started talking to me again, although I wasn’t sure why.

“Phuket is a great place to have a second house, I can tell you that,” she said. “My husband and I have a penthouse in Bangkok and a farm up north of Chiang Mai as well as our place here, but we spend as much time in Phuket as we can.”

That was a lot of real estate, even in Thailand. Now that I thought about it, I realized it would have taken at least a month of my university salary to pay for the simple, but elegant clothing in which Nok was dressed and another six months or so to cover the elaborate, but refined jewelry she wore with it. Now it was my turn to look puzzled. I had never guessed there was so much money to be made selling houses in Phuket.

“Oh, I’m not really a real estate agent,” Nok quickly volunteered, sensing my curiosity. “I just do this sometimes to help out a friend. And for the gossip, of course. Phuket’s just loaded with gossip. When you deal with real estate, you get to hear every bit of it.”

“I’m sure you do,” I nodded.

“Neither my husband nor I really work,” she shrugged.

“You don’t?”

“My husband is an American,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“I’m an American,” I said. “I work.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. My husband sold a business in the United States. I don’t really know what kind of business. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Anyway, he’s retired here now.”

“What’s his name? Bill Gates?”

“No,” she {o, amp;="1em said, not getting the joke, which was okay with me since it wasn’t a very good joke. “It’s Edward Dare. Most of his friends call him Eddie. Do you know him?”

I shook my head.

“You should. You’d like him, and he doesn’t know that many other Americans out here. Maybe we could all have dinner somewhere one night soon.”

“That would be nice.” Anita jumped in to rescue me before the ethnic solidarity routine spiraled completely out of hand. “But I’m afraid we’re going back to Bangkok tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe another time.” Nok seemed genuinely disappointed. “I’m sure he’d really enjoy meeting a couple from back home.”

“I’m Italian,” Anita said. “Jack’s the American.”

“And I live in Bangkok,” I added. “That’s where ‘back home’ is for me.”

“Oh. .” Nok briefly looked disappointed again, but then she abruptly brightened. “Anyway, I hope you’ll think about the house. Phuket is a wonderful place to live and there’re so many prominent people here. It’s just that you never hear about them because everyone is so discreet.”

I rolled my eyes and said nothing, but Anita couldn’t resist.

“Prominent people?” she asked, her voice dripping innocence.

“I don’t like to gossip,” Nok said, “but I hear…”

She bent toward us and lowered her voice, although I had the impression the house was sufficiently isolated we could have set off a low-yield nuclear device without anyone hearing it.

“A cousin of the British royal family secretly owns a beautiful house at Karon Beach through a Cayman Islands company, and there is a very prominent American actor who owns a beautiful villa above Cape Panwa which is in his manager’s name. I’m not permitted to tell you who it is, but…well, I can promise you’ve seen a lot of his movies.”

I struggled to look impressed, but I just couldn’t pull it off.

“And of course our most prominent resident of all has a stunning house up on one of the northern beaches you probably haven’t seen. It’s very private and very isolated.”

I glanced smugly at Anita and then back at Nok.

“Now who would that be?” I asked.

“Ah…” Nok glanced from side to side and lowered her voice even more. “No one knows for sure if he’s here now, but there are these people all over the island. They’re trying to be low-profile, but you can’t do much around here without somebody noticing.”

“Who’s all over the island?”

“You know,” Nok winked at me. “You Americans. The Secret Service, the FBI, the military. Probably even the CIA.”

“So why are they here?” I asked as naively as I could manage.

“I’ll bet you know already.”

“No, I don’t. Really.”

“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

“Okay.”

Nok raised her chin slightly and shifted her eyes first to Anita and then back to me. I could have sworn I actually saw them glitter, possibly with dollar signs.

“They’re getting the house ready for Barack Obama. It’s going to be his secret retreat.”

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. Anita looked embarrassed and a suspicious look crept over Nok’s face.

“Say…you’re not one of them , are you?”

For one wild moment I thought about confessing I was actually the Director of the CIA and then telling Nok I would have to kill her now that she knew, but I let it slide.

In the car on the way back to the hotel Anita floated the topic of the house a couple of times, but I absolutely refused to bite. My guess was she was working up to a suggestion we put in equal amounts and buy the house together in spite of its cost, but there was no way in hell that was going to fly with me. Tennis court or not, a three-million-dollar house in Phuket was a long way out of my league.

Still, Anita’s radar must have been at full power, or maybe she just saw something in my face that I hadn’t realized was there, but it wasn’t very long before I realized I was getting the hard eye from her. That was when she dropped the subject of the house and focused her full attention on wheedling out of me what was really on my mind.

I didn’t even try to resist. It would have been useless.

Taking a deep breath, I told Anita about Marshal Ward and how he had accosted me back in Patong when she was off exploring real estate offices. I omitted only the part about the pictures Ward had left on the table. Somehow announcing to my wife that people were following us around and clandestinely taking pictures seemed to me to be unduly alarmist. Of course, that one photograph of me waving like a madman in front of Karsarkis’ front door would probably have made me look like a real asshole to her, too, but I told myself that had nothing to do with why I was keeping quiet about the pictures. Nothing at all. Really.

“And he wants you to go back to Patong and meet him tonight?” she asked.

“I don’t have to go.”

“But you are going, aren’t you?”

“Well…I guess I’m curious.”

That was embarrassingly lame, of course, but there it was.