Jake Needham - Killing Plato

The big Mercedes left the campus and turned north on Phayathai Road. It edged steadily through the heavy traffic between Siam Square and the imposing bulk of the Mah Boonkrong Center, an eight-story concrete bunker with a huge shopping mall inside it through which thousands of people poured every day of the year searching for cheap mobile phones, pirated software, and knock-off designer clothing.

“You going to tell me where we’re headed?” I asked Tommy, but he didn’t answer. Instead he pushed the curtain on his side open again and sat quietly examining a crowd of university girls gathered under a bus shelter.

The driver punched the accelerator to make the light and I saw we were going east toward the Sukhumvit residential district, the area where most of the foreigners in Bangkok lived in a forest of luxury high-rises that had sprouted over the last few years from what had not so long before been only rice fields. Those Thais who had the extraordinary good fortune to be the heirs of the farmers who had owned those rice fields had grown wealthy beyond most people’s understanding of the word. Those Thais whose ancestors had owned fields that were just a few hundred yards away in one direction or another had grown envious beyond most people’s understanding of the word.

“What have you been doing with yourself, Jack?” Tommy abruptly asked. “I mean recently.”

“Teaching my classes. Hanging out with Anita. The usual.”

“No adventures?”

“Not so as you’d notice.”

Tommy smiled.

“Miss the action?” he asked.

“No.”

Tommy chuckled, crossed his legs at the knee, and turned his head back toward the window. “You’re full of shit.”

“Possibly,” I allowed. “But not about that.”

Tommy chuckled again.

“Believe me or not, little man,” I said. “It is so.”

“Don’t give me that crap, Jack. You were a player. And now you’re just…well, what? You teach a little? You do some consulting? And you’re happy? Don’t try to shit a shitter, man. You miss the action. I know you do. I’ll bet sometimes you even wonder if you could still cut it in a big game, don’t you?”

That was a little close to the nerve, so I glanced away from Tommy and concentrated on the back of the driver’s head.

“Shit,” Tommy snorted. “I knew it. Once a player, always a player.”

I took a deep breath and turned toward Tommy, staring at him until he stopped fidgeting and held my eyes.

“Listen very closely, my friend, and make notes if you want to, because I’m going to tell you something you ought to remember.”

I imagine I sounded a bit testy and I didn’t particularly care.

“I have a nice life and a woman who loves me, and I will fight you or anyone who threatens to screw it up for me to the death. You hear me, Tommy? To the very fucking death.”

The Mercedes slowed and moved over to the middle lane. It edged past a handcart loaded with straw brooms that a stooped old woman was pushing along next to the curb. Tom thhe Mercedemy didn’t answer me, but I hadn’t really expected him to. Instead he tilted his head back against the seat and shut his eyes.

Since Tommy didn’t seem much inclined to continue the conversation, I pushed open the curtain on my side and looked out at the street. We were in a residential neighborhood I vaguely recognized, one somewhere between New Petchburi Road and Sukhumvit Road. I hated driving in that area since I always got turned around in the bewildering warren of tiny streets. The problem was that the street signs were all in Thai, which no westerner I knew could read, and there were no other real landmarks to navigate by. The high concrete walls that enclosed the small apartment buildings and huge, unseen estates all looked more or less alike, and the broken glass and sharpened iron spikes that lined the top of most of them gave the whole area an air of secret and no doubt illicit doings.

After a while I gave up on trying to make sense of our route. We were going where we were going and I wasn’t about to give Tommy the satisfaction of showing too much interest.

At one point the street we were traveling on made a right-angle bend between two high walls and the Mercedes came to a complete stop while a green truck with sheets of dark canvas strapped over it slipped past us in the opposite direction. The space between the walls was narrow and the truck came so close to the Mercedes that a bulge in the canvas hit the driver’s mirror. The creak of the mirror folding inward and then the thump of it snapping back into place caused me to flinch, but neither the driver nor Tommy seemed to take any notice.

As we sat there waiting for the truck to pass, my eyes drifted to a black metal gate in the wall at my side of the car. The gate was open a crack and in the gap I could see a tiny girl in a blue and white school uniform who couldn’t have been more than five or six. She was looking out at us, and her huge, deep brown eyes stared at me without expression. I wondered if the proximity of the big car and my white face looking out of it frightened the girl or just tickled her curiosity, but I could read nothing at all in those big wet eyes, not even whether she could actually see me through the dark glass of the windows. I smiled and wiggled my eyebrows stupidly at the little girl just to see what would happen, but I got no response. Then, after a moment, the truck passed by, the Mercedes began to edge forward again, and the little girl was gone.

Less than five minutes later the car stopped at a pair of gates built of close-set green metal bars with gold curlicues on the top. A guard wearing a uniform of some sort walked up to the driver’s window and bent down, and the driver opened the window a crack and said something in a low voice I didn’t quite catch. It must have been the right thing, because the guard whipped out a crisp salute then stepped around in front of the car and pushed open the gates. The Mercedes rolled forward and I saw we were in the courtyard of what appeared to be a small apartment building.

“Okay, Big Jack. We’re here.”

I glanced at Tommy. His head was still tilted back against the seat, but now his eyes were open.

“So does this mean you’re going to cut the crap and tell me what’s going on?”

“Yeah.” Tommy stretched and yawned. “Plato Karsarkis wants to talk to you about something. This place is…”

All of a sudden Tommy’s eyes began to dart around wildly. I knew he had just realized he was about to say the wrong thing, but was stuck for a quick alternative.

I let him off the hook. “Onookt re of Plato’s fuck pads?” I asked.

The corners of Tommy’s mouth flicked up and down a couple of times. “Something like that,” he said.

“So, tell me, Tommy. I don’t really figure I’m this guy’s type. Why am I here?”

“Just shut the hell up for once in your life and have a little patience, would you, Jack?” Tommy looked to me like a man who very much wished he were somewhere else right then. “Let’s go upstairs.”

We got out of the car and I followed Tommy toward the lobby of the building. A man wearing a white jacket and a black bow tie pulled open the glass door and then jumped over and pushed the elevator button. The doors slid back immediately. After we were inside, he leaned in and pushed a button marked PH, which I assumed stood for penthouse, then he pulled his arm back out and bowed slightly as the doors closed again. It was a pretty snappy move, but Tommy was staring hard at the floor and didn’t appear to appreciate it as much as I did.

Neither of us spoke as the elevator hummed upward. When the doors opened I followed Tommy out into a small, marble-floored foyer. English hunting prints decorated the walls and there were two dark green upholstered chairs with a lamp table between them. It might have been the waiting room of a prosperous, but badly underemployed, dentist.