World of Trouble (9786167611136) (6 page)

“Is that why you’re there?”

“Don’t be cranky, Shepherd. It doesn’t become
you.”

“No? Most people think it does.”

Darling puffed on his cigarette and watched
Shepherd without expression. Either he didn’t have much of a sense
of humor or he didn’t think Shepherd did.

“Anyway,” Shepherd went on when Darling
didn’t say anything else, “I wasn’t unhappy and I didn’t run away.
I just decided it was time for a change and Hong Kong seemed like a
place to start a law practice.”

He tossed out his own shrug, not nearly as
good as Darling’s, but then he didn’t have so many role models.

“Do you ever miss Bangkok?” Darling
asked.

“No.”

“Dealing with Thais gets old pretty quickly,
doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

“And yet,” Darling said, taking another puff
of his cigarette, “here you are today.”

“And yet,” Shepherd nodded, “here I am
today.”

“You are a walking contradiction, Shepherd. A
living conundrum.”

Shepherd had the feeling this conversation
was about something. He just couldn’t figure out what it was.

Adnan came back into the room carrying a
thick manila envelope. “These are the documents I was asked to
collect for you,” he said.

Adnan walked over and shoved the envelope at
him. Shepherd took it and nodded. He made a point of not thanking
Adnan.

“There are copies of the statements for all
the accounts at Bangkok Bank and Siam Commercial Bank,” Adnan said.
“Both the corporate ones and the personal ones.”

Shepherd nodded, but he didn’t say
anything.

The expression on Adnan’s face was
transparent. He wanted to know why he had been told to give those
statements to Shepherd.

Shepherd said nothing at all and Adnan was
left with no alternative but either to come right out and ask or to
let the matter go.

He came right out and asked.

“What are you going to do with them?”

“These are copies, aren’t they? They’re not
the originals?”

Adnan nodded. “Yes, they’re copies.”

“Then I’ll destroy them when I’m done.”

Adnan’s eyes shifted quickly to Darling, then
back to Shepherd.

“Done with what?” he asked.

“I’m sure if Charlie wanted you to know, he
would have told you.”

Adnan blinked at that and in the silence that
followed Shepherd heard Darling snort softly.

“Well, gentlemen, I’ll leave you to it,”
Shepherd went on quickly. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“No bother at all, Shepherd,” Darling said.
“You and I ought to have lunch while we’re both in town. Perhaps
get to know each other a little better.”

“Sure,” Shepherd nodded. “Give me a
call.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” Darling said.

Adnan, Shepherd noticed, said nothing at
all.

***

DARLING WATCHED THOUGHTFULLY as the door closed
behind Shepherd. He took a last pull on his cigarette and stubbed
it out in a heavy glass ashtray.

“What do you think?” Adnan asked.

Darling glanced back at the door through
which Shepherd had just left.

“About him?” he asked.

Adnan nodded.

Darling cocked his head. “I’m not sure.”

“I am,” Adnan said. “He’s just another one of
the general’s whims. He doesn’t matter.”

Darling pondered that for a while. He pursed
his lips and let his eyes wander the room.

“I don’t know about that,” he said
eventually. “I have a feeling he just might matter more than you
think.”

OUTSIDE THE OFFICE was a ceramic-tiled terrace
similar to the one outside the villa where Charlie lived. Shepherd
settled into a green cushioned chair, swung his feet onto an
ottoman, and pulled back the flap of the envelope Adnan had given
him. Before he could take anything out of it, Sally Kitnarok sat
down in the chair next to him.

“Hello, Jack,” she said. “Over yesterday’s
excitement yet?”

“Still in recovery.”

“They say you weren’t hurt.”

“They’re right, whoever they are.”

Sally had been married to Charlie for
something like twenty years. Shepherd liked Sally. She was British
born, but had grown up in Indonesia and Thailand where her father
had done something or another with Save the Children. To the
surprise of many, her foreign birth had never weighed on Charlie
politically nearly as much as some of his allies thought it might
when he began his rise to prominence.

Normally Thais don’t much like other Thais
marrying foreigners. Most of the hostility is normally directed at
Thai women who marry foreign men, and there are a great many of
them. They range from the much-maligned mail order brides to the
daughters of the most prominent families in the country. Sometimes
it seemed to Shepherd that women and rice were Thailand’s only
exports of any value.

For a Thai man to marry a foreign woman, on
the other hand, is something else again. It’s rare, but not unheard
of, and it doesn’t seem to bother Thais nearly as much. The
arrangement even has a whiff of revenge about it, a humiliation of
the foreigners who have carried off Thai women for generations. And
there are few things that make the average Thai happier than seeing
foreigners humiliated, even when that humiliation is just a figment
of their imagination.

“How much longer are you here for?” Sally
asked.

“I’m leaving soon. Probably tonight.”

“For where?”

Shepherd hesitated. Telling Sally that he was
going to Bangkok didn’t seem the right thing to do for some reason.
So he didn’t.

“Home,” he said instead.

Sally sighed. “I wish I could say that.”

“You don’t like Dubai?”

“You’ve heard that old expression, haven’t
you, Jack? When your life is in the toilet, it’s Shanghai, Mumbai,
Dubai, or goodbye.”

“I’ve heard it. I’m just not sure it means
very much.”

“Maybe not,” Sally sighed again. “But Dubai
just isn’t home. Oh, what am I saying? I haven’t got a bloody clue
where home is anymore.”

“That’s a pretty common problem in the
twenty-first century,” Shepherd said.

“Do you miss America?”

Shepherd had never known how to answer that
question. If he said yes, the next question would be why he didn’t
just go back. If he said no, he would be asked why he disliked his
own country. Shepherd had always made ducking the question
altogether something of a personal policy so he turned Sally’s
inquiry back on her.

“Do I gather from that,” he asked, “that you
miss the UK? Or is it Thailand you miss?”

“I don’t know,” she said “but I miss
somewhere. All I really want is a little peace and stability.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever have that again.”

Shepherd knew that was his cue to say
something comforting, but he didn’t know what it ought to be. Sally
was married to a political figure beloved by roughly half of
Thailand and reviled by the other half. No matter what Charlie did
in the future, he would always be a saint to about thirty million
people and a devil to thirty million more. Sally was probably
right. Security and stability were unlikely to be part of her
future.

They sat for a few minutes in a companionable
silence. Although Shepherd wanted to ask Sally if she knew anything
about Charlie’s plans for the future, he wasn’t sure he should.
Trying to pry information out of a wife about her husband felt
unseemly, and there were issues of client confidentiality to
consider, too. On the other hand, if Charlie really was going back
into politics and was being less than honest with him about that,
maybe that excused him from being entirely honest himself.

An old lawyer joke popped into Shepherd’s
mind.
What I really want is a one-armed lawyer, so he can’t say
on one hand but then on the other hand.
Sometimes he had no
problem at all understanding why people loved lawyer jokes so
much.

Shepherd stopped trying to decide if he
should ask and just asked Sally what he wanted to know.

“Is Charlie preparing for a triumphal return
to Thailand?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is he going back into politics? Does he want
to be prime minister of Thailand again?”

“I don’t know. What’s he telling you?”

“He thinks that was what the attack was all
about. He thinks someone was trying to stop him from going
back.”

“Maybe,” Sally said, “but then again maybe it
was just an angry husband.”

Shepherd looked away. It made him
uncomfortable when married people joked about each other’s presumed
infidelities. He had taken that tour and it still hurt far too much
for him to joke along with them.

“It’s not what Charlie’s saying that bothers
me,” Shepherd said, going back to where they had been before
Sally’s little lurch into the inner workings of her marital life.
“It’s the things he’s doing. They’re things that make me wonder if
he’s not preparing for a political comeback.”

“What things?”

Shepherd paused. He felt awkward and Sally
obviously saw it.

“Never mind, Jack. I shouldn’t have
asked.”

Shepherd thought for a moment. If the funds
in Thailand were really family funds as Charlie had claimed, then
they were Sally’s funds, too, weren’t they? So he composed an
answer for Sally that he could at least tell himself skirted the
edge of violating client confidence.

“Charlie asked me to reorganize the funds you
have in Thailand.” He tapped his palm against the brown envelope on
his lap. “To get it all out of the country immediately.”

Shepherd knew he shouldn’t have said even
that much, but he wanted to see Sally’s reaction. He was
disappointed when she didn’t give him one.

“I don’t know anything about that, Jack. That
kind of thing is way over my head.”

He doubted that, but there seemed to be no
reason to say so.

“Does Charlie think something is about to
happen in Thailand?” he asked instead.

“I really don’t know. Charlie hasn’t said
anything specific to me.”

Sally’s eyes shifted slightly down and to the
left. It was a classic tell. There was more, but she wasn’t going
to say what it was. Still, that was fair enough, Shepherd thought.
What a man tells his wife should remain between them.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Sally. “I shouldn’t
have asked.”

Sally leaned across and put her hand on his
arm.

“You’re our friend, Jack. You can ask
anything you like. If I knew, I’d tell you.”

Shepherd just nodded at that. It wasn’t true,
of course. He knew it and he was sure Sally knew he knew it, but it
would have been churlish of him to say that so he just let it
go.

“Are you finally over that ex-wife of
yours?”

The change of subject was so naked that
Shepherd wondered briefly how Sally had managed it without laughing
out loud.

“Yeah,” he said. “Absolutely.”

Sally gave him a look brimming with sympathy,
the sort of look people gave to beggars in wheelchairs.

“Charlie and I care about you, Jack. You’re
our friend and we want you to be happy. You don’t deserve what
happened to you. You need to meet somebody new. You have to open
your heart to someone else.”

Suddenly the conversation was turning into a
visit with Oprah.

“Do you keep in touch with Anita?” Sally
asked before Shepherd could leap to his feet and flee.

“Anita and I were married,” he said. “She
found somebody she liked better, she left me, we got divorced. End
of story. What do we have to keep in touch about?”

“Charlie and I keep thinking that maybe
you’ll get back together. You and Anita were a wonderful
couple.”

“Apparently not.”

“Yes, you were. And surely Anita knows that,
too.”

“It must have slipped her mind there for a
few minutes.”

“Give her a chance, Jack. Things change, you
know.”

“Not this thing.”

“Never give up, Jack. Never.”

Shepherd really didn’t want to talk about
Anita any longer. Love never comes to anyone logically and there is
certainly nothing logical about the way it vanishes. He’d had that
discussion before with too many other people already and it had
never taken him any place he wanted to go.

Shepherd found a way to excuse himself as
quickly as possible after that, gave Sally a goodbye kiss on the
cheek, and walked out to where the hotel driver was waiting for him
beyond the security gate. He got into the car, leaned his head
against the thick cushions of the back seat, and closed his
eyes.

It felt good to be alone again.

ON THE WAY back to the hotel Shepherd got out his
phone and checked the flights to Bangkok. There were no seats until
the next day and he thought for a moment of calling Charlie and
telling him he had changed his mind about using one of his jets.
But he knew Charlie would give him a lot of crap and he didn’t want
to hear it, so he just let it go and booked himself on an Emirates
Airways flight that left the next morning. The major problem there
was that then he had the rest of the afternoon and the evening to
kill in Dubai, which as far as Shepherd was concerned was like
scoring free time in Dallas. It was a windfall he could live a long
time without.

Shepherd didn’t really feel like going back
to the hotel, but he didn’t know what else to do. That was when it
occurred to him he hadn’t had a decent meal since he left Hong
Kong. The idea of getting a little comfort food suddenly seemed
pretty appealing so he told the driver to take him to the Dubai
Mall.

The Dubai Mall has millions of square feet of
space, maybe tens of millions; several hundred stores; miles of
marble-floored corridors; an Olympic-sized ice rink; and even the
world’s largest aquarium, one three stories high, fifty yards long,
and filled with sharks. Shepherd wondered if anyone else in Dubai
saw the sharks as ironic. Probably not. He doubted Dubai was a
place where irony played particularly well.