Jake Needham - Laundry Man

“This is the end of the trip, Jacko.” Archie’s voice was flat. “That’s all I’m saying. We’re square now.”

“Just one more thing, Archie.”

He shifted his eyes to mine.

“Did these Chinese generals and politicians get their money before the ABC collapsed?”

The ferry bumped the pilings and we stumbled slightly. Almost immediately I heard the sound of winches squealing followed by the crash of the metal gangway as it hit the concrete pier. The crowd surged forward and Archie turned away and began moving along everyone else, but I stuck to him as if we were handcuffed together. When he finally spoke his voice was so low I could barely pick out the words through the rumble of shuffling feet and the bursts of Cantonese crashing around us like mortar shells.

“That’s the funny part,” he said without looking at me. “I hear it all disappeared without a trace.”

“Do you know where the money went?”

Archie turned his head slightly and shifted his eyes onto mine. “You know how difficult it is to see anything when you look straight at it in the dark, Jacko? The harder you look, the harder it is to see. They tell me that to see something clearly when the light’s bad you ought look at it out of the corner of your eye, like soldiers do when they’re fighting at night.”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Archie?”

Archie watched me as we shuffled forward with the crowd toward the gangway. He looked as if he was waiting for me to say something else, but I couldn’t imagine what it was, and when I didn’t, he slipped back into the rhythms of his Australian vernacular.

“Those Chinese blokes are mean as cat’s piss when it comes to money, Jacko. I reckon that whoever did them is rooted. That’s what I reckon.”

“Rooted?”

“Fucked, Jacko. When they find whoever the poor wanker is who’s got their money, his dick will be in the dirt before he knows what hit him.”

Archie grinned at me then for a second and, entirely unexpectedly, he winked.

“I just hope it wasn’t you, matey.”

Then he took three quick strides over the gangway and disappeared into the crowd as completely as if he had never been there at all.

When I got back to Bangkok on Friday morning, Anita pouted briefly to make sure her displeasure at the extra night I had spent in Hong Kong was officially noted. Nevertheless, harmony was fully restored by evening and when we left for the Polo Club the night ahead was looking pretty promising.

I had the Volvo’s top down as we drove south on Soi Langsuan. Winter in Bangkok can be short but, with luck, the string of temperate days and chilly nights sometimes hangs in through February. This year we had been very lucky. The cool breezes were still drifting south from China and the air remained sweet and balmy, ripe with benevolence.

Anita seemed besotted by the softness of the night. Her head was tilted back against the headrest and her eyes were closed. She was wearing a straight black dress that left her bare legs visible halfway up her thighs. I could hardly force myself to watch the road and my eyes kept drifting over every time the traffic thinned. I was getting another fix when I realized Anita had opened her eyes and was looking straight back at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

Not nothing. That much I was pretty sure of.

“Okay.” She leaned over, knitted her hands together over my shoulder and rested her chin on them. “I like you in a tux, handsome, but remind me again why we’re on our way to a stuffy club tonight wearing these costumes.”

“The Kingdom of Thailand has a new minister of finance and we are honoring him.”

“We?”

“Well… Citibank and Standard Chartered Bank are honoring him. You and I are mostly along for the ride.”

“And exactly why are they honoring him? Has he done something good?”

“Not yet. But we live in hope.”

A red-and-cream bus suddenly changed lanes and cut right in front of us. It was so jammed with people that it looked as if some of them were about to squirt out through the windows. I braked hard and muttered a curse, but Anita didn’t seem to notice.

“Do we have any role in all this honoring?”

“Not really. I imagine they invited me because they thought I’d bring you. We’re more or less decoration.”

“Ah… decoration. I do so love being decoration.”

Anita turned her head away and closed her eyes again.

“Was else is it you have on your mind, Jack? There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“It is to me.”

I hadn’t said anything to Anita about Barry Gale asking me to find the ABC’s missing money and I had also omitted mentioning Jello’s story about Dollar’s apparent connections with some pretty unsavory people. I had initially decided that telling Anita either story would accomplish nothing other than to make her uneasy for me, yet now I wondered why I had looked at it that way. Something about driving through the Bangkok night seemed to transform the dime-novel tales Barry and Jello had spun me into narratives with an almost operatic quality to them, so impulsively I started recounting both stories to Anita in spite of my earlier resolution not to.

I tried to stick strictly to what I actually knew, and it wasn’t all that much so it didn’t take all that long. I finished just as we got to the narrow soi that led into the Polo Club. I slowed at the gate as a uniformed guard saluted and pushed aside his little red-and-white wheeled barrier, but Anita didn’t speak again until I had pulled into an empty parking place and shut off the engine.

“My God, Jack. What have you gotten yourself into?”

“I’m not into anything, Anita. I have absolutely no intention of being involved in any way with Barry Gale.”

“But you’re already involved with Dollar, and if he’s-”

“Jello’s wrong about that. Dollar’s as straight as anybody I’ve ever known.”

“I thought you told me that Jello knew everything that was worth knowing about what happened in Bangkok.”

“He does, usually, but this time he’s got it wrong,” I repeated doggedly. “I know Dollar Dunne and there’s no way in hell he’d launder money for drug dealers. Absolutely no way.”

Anita was shaking her head as I walked around and opened her door. I helped her out and she stood quietly looking at me until I had closed the door again.

“I’ve asked you to be careful, Jack. I’ve asked you over and over. And then you tell me something like this.”

“None of this has anything to do with me, Anita.”

Anita thought about that for a minute and then smiled sadly. “But it will.”

“Look, I already said I have absolutely no intention-”

Anita suddenly reached out with her forefinger and put it against my lips. I stopped talking. She smiled, a little sadly once again it seemed to me and shook her head. We walked under the trees toward the club’s entry and in the silence I listened to the sound of her high heels clicking against the stones that paved the parking lot.

We started up the short flight of brown brick steps that led to the club’s main building and Anita suddenly looped her left arm through my right. “Hey, boy, I’m just a painter,” she said. “What do I understand about stuff like this?”

I always figured she understood plenty.

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Jack. You always do.”

I smiled and pulled her toward me.

I hoped to hell she was right.

The Polo Club is the nouveau offshoot of the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, a notoriously exclusive mid-city club famed for its decades-long waiting list, crummy golf course, and membership roster of old Thais who didn’t much like foreigners. The main building is a low-slung, rambling structure of brown brick set off with wooden trim and surrounded by lush tropical landscaping. Dark-tiled corridors-each with a peaked roof covered in cedar-shakes and open on the sides-link the main building with the half-dozen or so other buildings in the complex. The Polo Club even sports a modest equestrian trail and a handful of horses, probably so the name of the place will make some kind of sense. Occupying a prime block of real estate in the very heart of central Bangkok, the Polo Club seems to rise from the city’s haze like some sort of suburban mirage.