Jake Needham - Killing Plato

“Your secretary’s gone home,” he said. “There wasn’t anyone to announce me.”

“So naturally you just barged right in.”

“Naturally. Occupational habit.”

I had known Tommy for several years. His real name was Tommerat something or another, but everyone I knew just called him Tommy. In the face of all provocation he stuck cheerfully to the story that he held some position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Regardless, if there was anyone in Bangkok who didn’t know that Tommy actually worked for the National Intelligence Agency, I had never met him.

The first time I had introduced Tommy to Anita, she had been terribly amused at the idea of meeting a Thai spy and had tossed out a couple of pretty snappy one-liners on the subject. I tried to explain to her later that there was absolutely nothing amusing about Tommy, and certainly nothing to laugh about, but I don’t think she really believed me.

Tommy settled into one of the guest chairs in front of my desk without being invited.

“You got any more of those?” he asked, pointing to the cigar I was smoking.

I waved vaguely at the humidor on my desk. “Help yourself.”

Tommy leaned forward and with his index finger carefully lifted the lid of the Dunhill humidor Anita had given me as a wedding present.

“Just these crappy Montecristos?” he asked, inspecting its contents suspiciously. “No Cohibas?”

“Hey, you don’t like ‘em, don’t smoke ‘em.”

Tommy looked genuinely annoyed with me, but he took one of squthe Montecristos anyway. “It’s all you got, Jack. What choice do I have?”

My heart wasn’t in it, but we made polite chit-chat while Tommy cut the cigar, lit it, and puffed it into life.

“You don’t look so good, Jack,” he said after he was done. “Everything okay?”

“Fine, Tommy. Never better.”

“Good,” he said. “Good.”

Tommy nodded and drew on his cigar. I nodded back and drew on mine. My office was fast filling up with nods and smoke.

“Why are you here, Tommy?” I asked when it became apparent he wasn’t in any hurry to tell me. “Is there something specific on your mind, or are you just trolling for gossip?”

“Well…look, Jack, you want to go out? Maybe get some dinner or something?”

“No thanks.”

“There’s a new steakhouse at the Marriott that everyone says is great. All imported American beef, not that Australian shit.”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

Tommy fiddled with his cigar and then abruptly stood up.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist, Jack.”

I took the cigar out of my mouth and leaned forward. “I’m sorry?”

“Hey, if I were you I wouldn’t want to come with me either, but there’s somewhere you need to be. I’m here to deliver you.”

“Whoa.” I dumped the remains of my cigar in the ashtray and put both hands flat on my desk. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Tommy looked grave. “You need to see somebody, Jack, and he can’t come here. You’ve got to go to him.”

“Who is it?”

“Just come with me, Jack.”

Tommy pointed to the ceiling with his right forefinger and cupped his left hand around his ear in a listening gesture.

“Trust me a little here,” he added in the most inane stage whisper I had ever heard a grown man use.

I leaned back in my chair and rolled my eyes. “You’re out of your goddamned mind, Tommy. Do you seriously expect me to believe that my office is bugged?”

“Who knows? Anyway, better safe than sorry, I always say.”

I segued from rolling my eyes into shaking my head. My personal experience with guys in the intelligence business was that most of them eventually went around the bend in one way or another. It looked like it might be time to wave bye-bye to Tommy.

“What have you got to lose, Jack?” he went on before I could say anything else. “Are you in such a big a hurry to get home tonight that you can’t spare an old friend an hour?”

Not surprisingly, Anita had resurrected the issue of the house in Phuket and for the past couple of days had been expressing her unhappiness over my rejection of BankThai’s cream-puff deal in quite colorful terms. I shot Tommy a look to see if his reference to my home life was just a coincidence. His expression gave nothing away so I couldn’t tell. Regardless, he had a point. I certainly wasn’t in all that big a hurry to get home tonight.

“Okay, I surrender.” I raised buo;ave nothoth my hands, palms out. “I’ll go quietly, officer.”

“Good, good,” Tommy nodded.

I collected some books and papers, mostly at random, and jammed them into my briefcase. Then I shut off my office lights and followed Tommy out into the hall.

“Give me the address and I’ll meet you there,” I said as I locked the door behind us.

“It would be better if you rode with me. I’ll bring you back to get your car when we’re done.”

I gave another shrug and followed Tommy down the hall to the elevator. Why not? After what has already happened in the last week, how many surprises could be left in one man’s lifetime?

Later that night, looking back on what happened next, I made a mental note never to ask myself a question like that again.

A black mercedes was waiting in the circular driveway when we emerged from the building. The driver jumped out and opened the back door for Tommy. While he was getting in, I walked around to the other side of the car and joined him in the back seat. I accomplished that by opening and closing my own door. It really wasn’t all that hard.

“You know, Tommy,” I said as we pulled away, “I’ve never been absolutely clear just what a Thai spy actually does.”

“I’m shocked, Jack. Shocked. I’m not a spy. I’m merely the deputy to the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

The Mercedes had pearl-gray curtains on its side windows and I pushed the one on my side of the car back and forth on its chrome rails a few times, trying it out. The car’s windows were already so dark I probably could have fired off a flare gun inside without anyone seeing it, so the curtains seemed a bit much. Still, when they were closed I had to admit that the whole effect was very pleasant. The Mercedes became a dim, cool submarine sliding silently through the debris of the Bangkok streets.

“So anyway, Tommy, what does a Thai spy really do?”

Tommy sighed and seemed momentarily absorbed in studying something outside his window; then he sighed again and jerked his curtain closed.

“Thailand is in an unusual position as nations go, Jack. We are small and unimportant in the great scheme of world politics, and yet not entirely a joke. Much of what matters in the world seems to pass through us in one way or another. You should think of Thailand this way: we are like a hallway.”

“A hallway ?”

“No one really cares about a hallway. It’s not a significant room in any building. It’s just a way to get back and forth between the places where the important things happen. But you know, if you stand quietly in a hallway, sometimes you can hear and see extraordinary things. Sometimes you can learn more standing in the hallway than if you’re invited right into the rooms.”

I didn’t quite know how to respond to Tommy’s moving tribute to the importance of hallways, so I just sat and watched his soft, almost pink face in the glow of the lights from outside the car.

Tommy wasn’t very tall. He was slightly overweight and he wore a conservative gray suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. He could be anybody, I thought to myself. If someone told me Tommy was really a Canadian grocery store owner or a Portuguese real uo;av shestate developer, I would have had no reason at all to doubt them. That was exactly what made Tommy such an effective spy.