World of Trouble (9786167611136) Page 11

  Shepherd scooped up the iron bar and pushed his back against the truck again. He had just kicked a teenage kid in the balls as hard as he could and the truth was that he damn well hoped he had hurt him. The little shit was trying to take his head off with that iron bar. Shepherd wasn’t a bit sorry for what he had done. Not really.

  But he was thinking about it anyway. And that was why he didn’t see the woman coming.

  She was small and middle-aged and didn’t look very strong. She held a folding chair by its legs, one she had probably liberated from a trashed street vendor’s stand. Still, she was young enough and strong enough to swing it, and that was exactly what she did.

  Because of her height she had to swing the chair in an upward trajectory to get a shot at Shepherd’s head and that took most of the momentum out of her swing. Even then, the blow glanced off his ear and rocked him to his knees. He went down, breaking his fall with his hands. He had the presence of mind to pull up his knees and twist his body to ward off what he assumed would be another blow, but when he looked up from where he lay on the pavement, the woman was gone.

  The green pickup was right next to him and he tried desperately to pull himself underneath it. He clawed at the roadway with his hands like a swimmer doing the breaststroke. His palms scraped over the concrete and they hurt like hell, but he kept stroking. Shepherd’s head throbbed and nausea hit him in waves. Bright lights began to spin behind his eyes. He closed them, which really didn’t help much, and kept swimming.

  He was starting to black out, he knew. That didn’t seem all that bad really, since at least then the pain would stop, but he had to get underneath the truck before it happened or he would be trampled. His right hand came down on something soft and a dozen unpleasant possibilities as to what it might be passed through his mind all at once. Then he opened his eyes and saw his hand had only landed on a woman’s shoe. He kept going.

  Somehow Shepherd made it to the truck and pulled himself underneath. The two hippie chicks were gone and he wondered briefly what had happened to them.

  Then all at once the pain stopped, and he was gone, too.

  NINETEEN

  “JACK, CAN YOU hear me?”

  It was a man’s voice. Shepherd was pretty sure of that much at least.

  “Are you okay, Jack?”

  Slowly Shepherd opened his eyes. He struggled to make sense out of the flashing colors and flickering shapes that were all he could see.

  “How many fingers?” the voice asked.

  What the hell is this guy talking about?

  Shepherd closed his eyes and then opened them again. That helped a little, but not much.

  Finally a man’s face swam into focus. He was bending over and holding three fingers about a foot in front of Shepherd’s eyes. It took another moment or two, but then Shepherd worked out who the man was. He was a Canadian doctor who drank at the Duke. At least he said he was a doctor. In Bangkok, you could never be absolutely certain about claims like that. Still, to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, everybody called him Dr. Mike.

  “How may fingers?” Dr. Mike repeated.

  “Three.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “What city are you in?”

  “Bangkok.”

  “What were those people outside rioting about?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  Dr. Mike snapped his fingers and gave Shepherd a thumbs-up.

  “Not a fucking thing wrong with you, boy,” he grinned.

  Shepherd sat up gingerly. Looking around, he realized he was sitting on the floor at the Duke of Wellington.

  “How did I get here?”

  “Two cops carried you in,” Dr. Mike said. “I guess they figured the logical place to take a white guy in Bangkok is to the nearest bar.”

  Shepherd would have nodded in agreement, but he couldn’t even imagine moving his head.

  “You were lucky,” Dr. Mike added. “I just happened to be here.”

  “That’s not luck. Where else would you be?”

  Dr. Mike squatted back down and took a closer look at Shepherd.

  “The skin’s not broken,” he said. He gently probed at the edges of the swelling. “But you’re going to look like you’ve got an egg stuck to your head for a few weeks.”

  Dr. Mike methodically worked his way over the rest of Shepherd’s body checking for other damage. He didn’t find any until he came to Shepherd’s hands. He examined his scraped and battered palms carefully, twisting them first one way and then the other to catch the light.

  “What the hell is this?” Dr. Mike asked.

  “A swimming injury.”

  Dr. Mike just nodded as if that made complete sense to him.

  “I could put you in for a neurological work up,” he said, “but the local quacks would drive you crazy doing it and it probably wouldn’t be of much use anyway. Instead, I prescribe two large whiskeys and an hour at Titty Twister A-Go-Go and you’ll be right as rain.”

  “Good enough, doc,” Shepherd said. “Help me up, huh?”

  Mike stood up and Shepherd took his hands and pulled himself to his feet. A wave of dizziness briefly swept over him, but then the room resumed its customary place beneath his feet and he decided he was going to survive. A waitress rushed out from behind the bar, pushed a chair under him, and held out a large glass filled with what appeared to be whiskey. Shepherd accepted both the chair and the glass. He sat down. The chair was fine, but the glass turned out to be filled with ginger ale. He drank it anyway.

  “How bad?” he asked Dr. Mike.

  “Scrapes, bruises, and a minor concussion,” Mike said.

  That was disappointing to Shepherd. As lousy as he felt, he figured he at least deserved a major concussion. Finding out it was only a minor concussion somehow diminished the worth of his suffering. Still, that wasn’t what he had been asking Mike about.

  “I didn’t mean me,” he said and pointed toward Silom Road. “I meant out there. How bad is it out there?”

  “Bad,” Dr. Mike said. “Really bad.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Some. It will be worse next time.”

  Shepherd knew Mike was right. He had seen their faces as they tore into each other.

  Dr. Mike went to the bar and came back with his own glass filled with amber-colored liquid. Shepherd was pretty certain it wasn’t ginger ale. Mike pulled up a chair and sat down beside him.

  “What do you think is going to happen to this place, Jack?”

  This time Shepherd did shake his head, although he did it carefully.

  “Do you think foreigners are in any danger?”

  Shepherd reached up slowly with one hand and pointed to the lump on his head.

  “Good point,” Mike nodded. “You think the army will come in?”

  “The army is in,” Shepherd said. “They’re just letting the red shirts do their fighting for them. It looks better that way.”

  “The army’s killing Muslims in the south. Why not just kill the yellow shirts in Bangkok, too?”

  “Because nobody in the whole world gives a shit about the Muslims in the south of Thailand. The army’s been burning and butchering them for years and nobody anywhere has noticed or cared. But if the Thai army starts shooting people in the shopping malls of Bangkok, all of a sudden they’re going to be the lead on CNN and the tourists will get scared and go someplace else.”

  Mike nodded and Shepherd could see him thinking about what that might mean to him. He was right in the midst of an upheaval that was beginning to look very much like a civil war, and he wasn’t weighing the great principles of human rights and self-government that the talking heads on TV went on about. Instead, Shepherd figured Mike probably had a bag packed and a route to the airport mapped out, and he was thinking about how much longer he would risk getting his ass shot off before he decided to run.

  “I’ve got to get to the hospital,” Dr. Mike said after a while and slugged back
the rest of whatever was in his glass. For the sake of his patients, Shepherd really hoped it was ginger ale, but somehow he still doubted it.

  “Don’t worry about me, Mike. I’m fine.”

  “If the dizziness continues or if you have any feeling of nausea, I want you to call me right away. You hear? You got that?”

  Automatically Shepherd started to nod, but he stopped when a wave of pain swept over him.

  “Got it,” he murmured instead, keeping his head as still as he could. “Thanks, doc.”

  Shepherd stayed in that chair for quite a while after Dr. Mike left, sipping his ginger ale and wondering what it was like out on Silom Road right then. As soon as he was certain he could walk to the door without falling down, he got up and went outside to find out.

  In front of the Duke everything looked pretty much like it always looked in front of the Duke. It was as if Shepherd had dreamed everything. Silom Road was open and snarled with traffic as always. The street vendors were back clogging the sidewalks, too, and pedestrians were walking in the street to get around the vendors just as they always did.

  The red- and yellow-shirted people were gone. Only a short time before, they had been beating on each other with metal poles, boards, folding chairs, golf clubs and anything else at hand that could be turned into a weapon. Now they had all simply vanished. In their place, office girls hurried back to work from their shopping breaks, tourists squinted at the fake antiques in shop windows, and the first wave of bar trash headed for the go-go bars of Patpong.

  For a moment Shepherd felt dizzy again. There had been a riot right here, hadn’t there? It had really happened just like he remembered, hadn’t it? He pushed at the bump on his head and flinched as the pain shot through his scalp. Yes, of course it had.

  If the mass of the Thai people has a genius for anything, and that is certainly a fit subject for spirited debate, it is a talent for living day to day no matter what happens around them. It isn’t a show of resilience exactly—at least not in the sense that the Israelis standing up to a barrage of Hezbollah rockets is resilience—it’s more like the repeated invocation of a widespread collective unconsciousness. Thais can turn a blind eye to even the unhappiest of events. The Thais are a people who, after all, mostly managed to ignore World War II. They probably looked at the invading Japanese army as only the latest wave of sex tourists to arrive on their shores, just a bunch of horny guys with money to spend, all of whom happened to be wearing identical outfits.

  Shepherd thought back to the faces he had watched not very long ago right on this very street. Thai faces contorted with rage and twisted in hatred. And he wondered if this time it might be different, if this time all the collective unconsciousness in the world might not be enough. But now, standing there and looking at Silom Road and seeing how quickly it had returned to what passed locally for normal, he was starting to believe again that everything would be all right.

  Nothing in Thailand ever really changed. Mai pen rai, loosely translated as ‘never mind,’ was practically the Thai national motto. Nothing dented the somnolence of Thais for very long.

  ***

  SHEPHERD WALKED SLOWLY back to the Grand and took a shower. Then he turned on the television and sat on the bed naked and stared at it. There was a replay of a Knicks game on ESPN and he watched that for a while, then he switched over to CNN and let the collected anguish of the day slide past his eyes in an uninterrupted parade of miseries.

  The Silom Road riot hadn’t even made the international news. Thailand seldom did, not unless another American pedophile on the lam had been caught there or an elephant polo match was filling out a slow news day. Charlie had been briefly turned into a media star by CNN, of course, but that was because he was a billionaire attacked by terrorists in Dubai, not because he had once been the prime minister of a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map.

  About 9:00 P.M. Shepherd swallowed three aspirin, turned off the TV and the lights, and pulled the sheet up to his chin. At least now Charlie’s money was winging its way out of the country and the job he had come to Thailand to do was finished. Tomorrow he could go home to Hong Kong and leave the damned Thais to beat each other senseless if they really wanted to. Whether they did or not, it didn’t have a thing to do with him.

  He told himself that over and over until it became a mantra as rhythmic and repetitious as the counting of sheep in a dreamland meadow. It wasn’t true, of course, and no matter how many times he said it he didn’t really believe it, but repeating it over and over did serve at least one beneficial purpose. It put him right to sleep.

  TWENTY

  THE TELEPHONE RANG. Shepherd cleared his throat, shifted his body, and propped himself up on one elbow. The hands of the clock on the bedside table glowed in a green tint that was probably meant to be restful but which was mostly irritating.

  4:37 A.M.

  Shit.

  Shepherd fumbled around until he found his cell phone and managed a successful stab at the answer button.

  “This better be damn good,” he snapped.

  “It is, my friend.”

  “Jello?” Shepherd cleared his throat again. “Is that you, Jello?”

  “Yeah. Did I wake you?”

  “No, I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”

  “That’s a very old joke.”

  “I only know very old jokes.”

  Jello’s real name was Chatawan Pianaskool, but Shepherd had never heard anyone call him anything but Jello. Shepherd had no idea at all what the origin of his nickname was, but Thais often called each other by names that seemed bizarre to Westerners, so he had never asked.

  When Jello and Shepherd first met, Jello was a Thai police captain assigned to the Economic Crime Investigation Division. About a year later he was suddenly promoted to colonel and assigned to the Department of Special Investigations, usually referred to as Special Branch. Shepherd understood enough about the way things worked in Thailand to know that wasn’t a real promotion. Jello had apparently stepped on some powerful toes and made some big players nervous. Special Branch was where all the really nasty cases went, the ones nobody else wanted to touch for fear that they would leave a stain on a promising career that could never be wiped clean. He had no doubt a fair few of Jello’s superiors were probably waiting for one of those kind of cases to mark the end of Jello’s career, but Jello was an uncommonly savvy and nimble fellow. Shepherd’s guess was that they would be waiting for one hell of a long time.

  “I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes,” Jello said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I need for you to look at something.”

  “It’s the middle of the goddamned night, Jello. Can’t this wait for a few hours?”

  “No,” Jello said, “it can’t. Twenty minutes. Outside.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  Shepherd shook his head and fought his way through the cobwebs.

  “How do you know where I am? How do you even know I’m in Bangkok?”

  “I guess all Thais aren’t as stupid as you think, huh, white boy?”

  “That’s not what I meant, man. All I’m saying is—”

  “What are you doing in a shithole like the Grand?” Jello interrupted.

  “The Oriental is all booked up.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Okay, you got me. I like shitholes. I’m just a shithole kind of guy.”

  “Downstairs. Twenty minutes,” Jello repeated.

  Then he hung up without another word.

  ***

  SHEPHERD WAS DOWNSTAIRS in fifteen. Unwashed, carrying nothing but a bad attitude, and willing to kill for coffee. Five minutes after that Jello drove up in a Bangkok cop’s version of a white Crown Victoria, an unmarked tan Toyota so plain it was downright conspicuous.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Shepherd asked as he wrenched open the passenger door.

  “Nice to see you, too, man,” Jello said.

  Jello was wearing a
blue Hawaiian shirt printed with yellow pineapples. It was stretched so tightly across his paunch that it could have passed for a wetsuit. Shepherd got in and sat down. Jello lifted a white Styrofoam cup out of the Toyota’s cup holder and handed it to him. Thumbing off the lid, Shepherd took a hit. It was the worst coffee he had ever tasted. He was still trying to decide whether to swallow it or spit it out when Jello pulled away from the curb and headed toward Silom Road.

  “We found a body,” Jello said. “We think it’s someone you know.”

  Shepherd not only swallowed the coffee, he took another couple of quick gulps.

  “Why do you think I know him?”

  “I didn’t say it was a man.”

  “A woman?”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “Hey,” Shepherd spread his hands, “I know this is Thailand, but chances are still pretty good it’s one or the other.”

  Jello turned left on Silom Road, caught a red light at the next intersection, and stopped. It was not yet 5:00 A.M. and there wasn’t another car in sight. But Jello stopped for the light.

  “Bold move, man,” Shepherd said. “Real guts ball.”

  Jello reached into his shirt pocket and handed Shepherd an old model Motorola flip-phone that was plain black.

  “This was on the body,” he said. “Have a look.”

  The light changed and Jello drove through the empty intersection as carefully as if it were choked with traffic.

  Shepherd took the phone and looked at Jello.

  “Start with the address book,” Jello said.

  It took a minute, but finally Shepherd located the right menu and opened the address book. There were about a dozen numbers, but no names were paired with any of them. The numbers looked local. At least the codes looked like a mixture of Thai landlines and cell phones, but Shepherd supposed they might have been something else entirely. He didn’t recognize any of the numbers. Except one.