Jake Needham - Killing Plato

I had no doubt the murder of Mike O’Connell was very much on Kathleeya’s mind right then, but she didn’t mention it. Instead she asked questions about my classes and she showed an apparently genuine curiosity as to the subjects in which university students now had the most interest. From there the conversation rambled effortlessly into slightly more personal territory. I told her some of my stories and she told me some of hers.

We made the two-hour drive from Bangkok to Pattaya in one hour flat. When the driver left the expressway and slowed down to make his way into town, it felt as if the car had come to a sudden stop. He took South Pattaya Road toward the beach and, passing the Marriott on the left, cut across to Pattaya Beach Road and turned south when we reached the water.

To our left was an unbroken strip of tacky cafes, open-air shopping areas, tourist hotels, go-go joints, beer bars, and shabby souvenir stands. To our right, across a narrow strip of coarse, hard-packed sand was Pattaya Bay, flat and brown in the afternoon light. Pattaya may have been world famous for a great many things, but glamorous buildings, great beaches, and sparkling water were not three of them.

After a few hundred yards we came to the entrance to Walking Street, a narrow road running right along the water. After dark, when it was completely closed to all traffic, Walking Street turned into a mile or so of uninterrupted debauchery, but during daylight hours the area was a bit more benign. The car stopped in front of one of the street’s vast seafood restaurants, one that was built on a large but rickety pier extending out into the bay. It was the sort of place popular in Thailand where glass tanks displayed live fish, shrimp, crab, and lobster to prospective customers. You inspect the day’s selections, pick what you want from the tanks, and describe to a hovering attendant exactly how you want it cooked. Normally places like that aren’t really among my favorites. Looking a fish in the eye, pointing to it, and saying, “Kill that one,” had never struck me as a particularly appealing way to begin a meal.

The tables out on the pier were covered in pink fabric of some uncertain type and the chairs were green and looked like lawn furniture. Plastic palm trees lined the railings, although with so many real palm trees around I wasn’t sure why they were really necessary. After Kathleeya and I had ordered the deaths of several species of seafood, a woman who looked Chinese led us past the kitchen and all the way across the pier to a table by the rail, one that was well awaywas well from the entrance. I asked her for a Heineken and looked around while Kathleeya examined the wine list.

The sky was overcast and the breeze from Pattaya Bay blew in gentle ripples over the pier, which made the hot afternoon almost comfortable. The oily waters of the gulf sloshed rhythmically against the pier’s pilings and from somewhere I heard a boat engine start up. It knocked badly with a throaty rasp that reminded me of a smoker too many packs gone. After a while the engine caught and settled into a steady rhythm and I listened to the hypnotic putt-putt sound, counting the beats to myself as I watched Kathleeya’s driver and security man cross the pier and sit down a table positioned on a direct line between us and the entrance.

Kathleeya consulted with the Chinese woman and ordered a bottle of some Australian chardonnay I had never heard of. Then my Heineken arrived and the sound of the boat engine faded into the distance.

“You’re not a wine drinker, Mr. Shepherd?”

“I’m not really much of a lunchtime drinker at all,” I said. “One drink in the middle of the day and I’m ready to go straight to bed.”

Kathleeya smiled and looked away.

“I think,” I said, “that may have come out wrong.”

That kind of conversation could go nowhere good, so I changed tacks as quickly as I could.

“Every time you call me Mr. Shepherd I feel about a hundred years old. Would you mind just calling me Jack from now on?”

“I wouldn’t mind at all, Jack. And, please, call me Kate. Not Khun Kate. Just Kate.”

Khun is a polite form of address used by Thais, mostly among each other. It is prefixed as a gesture of courtesy to the first names of both men and women alike, indicating that the person being addressed is roughly equal in stature. Like most indicators of status used by Thais, and there are a great many of them, the basic rules sound simple enough, but the concepts are nuanced in so many ways that westerners are usually helpless to grasp anything but the simplest variations. Asking me to abandon the use of Khun altogether was Kate’s way of telling me we were about to have a western conversation, not a Thai one. I was both pleased and relieved at that, but now even more curious what the subject of our little chat would turn out to be.

“Thank you for coming today,” Kate said. “I know this isn’t a particularly good time for you.”

I didn’t ask her how she knew that, and I certainly didn’t ask her exactly what it was she thought she knew.

“I’m glad you called me,” I said instead, leaving it at that.

Then I went straight to the subject that so far we had both been circling like two airport guards around an abandoned suitcase.

“What do you know about Mike O’Connell’s murder?” I asked her.

“You do get to the point, don’t you, Jack?”

“I try to.”

“Did you read the files on the disk I gave you?” Kate asked.

“Yes.”

“What do you think?”

“Probably what you want me to think.”

“Which is?”

“That the marshals aren’t here to arrange for Karsarkis’ extraditquo; extion, or even to kidnap him. They’re here to kill him.”

Kate nodded slowly. I wondered fleetingly if she was agreeing I was right, or just agreeing I was indeed thinking what she wanted me to think.

“Is that why O’Connell was murdered?” I asked when I got bored with her nodding. “Are they starting with Karsarkis’ people and working up to him? Or did somebody mistake O’Connell for Karsarkis and just screw up?”

Before Kate could answer, a young boy materialized beside us carrying a metal tray as big as he was. A woman in a rumpled blue sarong and a white blouse rushed over and began transferring pink plastic plates from his tray to our table. There were half a dozen of them and they all seemed to contain either fish or prawns in some form. I assumed these must be the dishes we had ordered when we had run the gauntlet of fish tanks on our way in, although to tell the truth I wasn’t absolutely sure. The woman completed her task by placing a plate of rice in front of each of us, and then she and the boy withdrew as quietly as they had come.

Kate reached across, took my plate, and spooned small portions of each of the dishes around my rice. Then she set the plate back in front of me, lifted her own plate, and served herself. The gesture really meant nothing in particular-Thai women frequently did that sort of thing whether they were dining with men or even with other women-but the sheer gracefulness of it still charmed me every time I experienced it.

“We don’t know exactly what happened, Jack. Mike O’Connell could have been killed by mistake, or it might have been intentional.”

“Do you think the marshals shot him?”

While she considered the prospect, Kate chewed thoughtfully on a bite of something that was unidentifiable, at least to me.

“Possibly,” she said after a moment. “But it’s hard for me to see a US marshal coldly murdering someone with a silenced sniper rifle.”

Kate glanced at me as if she was asking me to confirm her impression of what United States government agents might or might not do. I kept my features neutral. If she wanted to presume the essential morality of the kind of guys I had known back in Washington, that was okay with me, but she was on her own.