Jake Needham - Killing Plato

A woman who looked tired and didn’t smile much put a cheeseburger down in front of me along with a plate filled with onion rings. She took my nearly empty tea glass away and handed it over the bar where another woman refilled it.

“What did this guy look like?” I asked.

“Oh, hell…” Doug twisted his eyes toward the ceiling and seemed to think about it. “American, I guess. Average size. Wore glasses. Shoot, man, I don’t know how to describe people.”

The woman walked around from behind the bar and put the fresh glass of tea next to my cheeseburger. Then Doug stood up and stuck out his hand.

“Hey, enjoy your burger,” he said. “I gotta go. Playing golf this afternoon.”

“In this heat?” I asked as we shook hands again.

“Yeah, well, we got all them little girls to carry umbrellas and keep us in the shade while we’re walking around,” he winked. “Some of them’s not half bad.”

Doug took a couple of steps away and then stopped. He looked back over his shoulder and pointed his forefinger at me.

“There was one thing,” he said. “This guy who was asking about you was a black guy, and he was dressed all in black, too. Looked pretty weird if you ask me, man.”

“A black guy dressed all in black?”

“Yeah, I almost pissed myself laughing after he got out the door.” Doug gave me a little wave. “See you, man.”

I reached for the mustard, lifted the top of my burger bun, and shook out a generous dollop. I piled on some onions, a slice of tomato, a couple of pieces of lettuce, sprinkled salt and pepper over the whole mess, and closed it back up. I pushed down and crunched the burger together until it was about the right size for my hands, then I lifted it and paused as I always did to savor its profoundly American aroma.

Well, damn, I thought to myself as I took a big whiff. That sounds an awful lot like Marcus York, doesn’t it?

I wondered if it really had been York and, if it was, if he had been snooping around about me entirely on his own or if CW had put him up to it for some reason. And regardless of whose idea it was to start asking aroundasking a about me, what the hell was the reason for it?

I skimmed through the sports section of the IHT while I ate and I thought some more about what Marcus York might have been up to, but nothing obvious came to me. Then when my plate had been cleared away and I had a cup of coffee in front of me I turned to the front page to read the real news. The white ceramic mug was up to my lips and I was just about to take my first sip when I spotted the story.

Plato Karsarkis Associate Killed in Bangkok Shoot-Out, the headline read.

Just below the headline was a picture of Mike O’Connell.

The photo had obviously been taken when O’Connell was much younger, and he was ducking away from the camera as if he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about being photographed, but it was the Mike O’Connell I knew. No doubt about it.

I put my coffee down and spread the paper out on the table. Taking it slowly, I read the story through once and then I went back and read it again.

According to a wire service report from the Agence France-Presse , about eight on the previous evening O’Connell had been leaving an apartment building in the Sukhumvit Road section of Bangkok. He was walking from the door of the building to a waiting car when a shot from a sniper rifle entered his left eye and exploded in his skull killing him instantly.

No one had heard the shot, which suggested strongly that the rifle from which it was fired was silenced, and it appeared likely that the shooter had been several floors up in a neighboring apartment building since that was the only place from which anyone would have had a clear field of fire down into the courtyard where O’Connell’s car was waiting. A Thai security guard had drawn a weapon, apparently a handgun, although the story was vague on the point, and he had gotten off three shots in the general direction of the building, although apparently he hadn’t hit anybody and it wasn’t even entirely clear what he might have been aiming at.

The rest of the story was sketchy and provided no other useful details about the shooting. It consisted mainly of speculation as to what O’Connell might have been doing at an apartment in Bangkok with an armed security guard, and whether that meant Plato Karsarkis himself was in Bangkok, perhaps close by or even in the building O’Connell had been coming out of when he was shot.

It was hardly necessary for me to speculate, of course. Tommy and I had left that same building only a few minutes before Mike O’Connell was murdered.

If a sniper lying in wait in the building next door really had shot O’Connell, he would certainly have already been there when Tommy and I had come out of the building ourselves. No doubt he must have been watching us, too. He would have been checking us out, tracking us with the crosshairs of his telescopic sight as we got into Tommy’s Mercedes.

I rubbed a hand across my face. Good Lord, was a silenced sniper rifle tracking me when I walked across that courtyard outside Plato Karsarkis’ apartment? I took a deep breath, let it out, and read the story a third time.

Not surprisingly, when I finished it nothing had changed. Mike O’Connell was still dead and the Thai police still had no clue who the shooter was. The taste of hamburger in my mouth slowly changed into something sour and metallic.

The first thing I did when I got back to my office was get a Montecristo out of my humidor and light up. I took a long, full draw, rolled the sweet smoke around in my mouth, and exhaled slowly as I tilted back in my chair and swung my feet up on the desk. Perhaps a cigar struck most people as a peculiar choice of tranquilizer, but it always worked just fine for me.

After a half hour or so of nicely anesthetized reflection, I was no closer to deciding whether Mike O’Connell’s murder had anything to do with me than I had been the first moment I saw the headline in the IHT . I glanced at my watch, then dumped the remains of my cigar in an ashtray, collected my notes, and headed for the elevator. Murder or no murder, I had a three-o’clock class to teach.

My lecture was uneventful, as much for my students as for me, then afterwards I had a string of conference appointments and I manfully slogged through every one. Very few of my appointments had anything to do with wheedling a better grade out of me, which is the way I figured they would usually go back in the States. Instead, the most popular topic with my students by far was how I could help them score a place in a prestigious American MBA program. Since I really didn’t have a clue, those conversations were mercifully short.

By a little after five-thirty the procession ended and I tried again to call Anita to tell her I was going to Darcy’s for dinner. Now there was no answer at all at the apartment and Anita’s mobile number continued to connect me directly to her voice mail. I couldn’t figure out where she was and I was starting to worry a bit. I wasn’t sure why or what I could do about it, but there it was anyway. It was after six by then so I let it go, locked up the office, and headed for Darcy’s house.

Darcy and Nata lived in the oldest part of Bangkok, an area not far from the King’s palace, but there was nothing particularly stylish nor fashionable about the neighborhood so few foreigners ever ventured out there, which I thought was a pity. Around dusk, along the grassy banks of the canals that still crisscrossed the area, food vendors lit their charcoal cooking fires, the cicadas began to rumble in the trees, and a soft purple haze filled the air. In the mid-city financial district, the part of Bangkok where most of the foreign community lived, everything seemed forced. The breakneck conversion of rice fields into a forest of high-rise apartments and acres of glitzy shopping malls felt temporary and superficial, as if it could all be swept aside in an instant and no one would really care. But the old city seemed real somehow, substantial and resistant to time. The colors were brighter, the smells were richer, and the sounds were warmer. As the lights came on in the late twilight of a moist tropical evening, everything about it felt whole and sweet and true.