Good Friends Page 4

  He listened to some R.E.M. almost as old as he was. He checked his phone for non-existent messages. He watched a jet trace a fluffy contrail on the impossibly blue sky.

  But nothing could improve his mood as he drove south over switchbacking roads, crossing the range of mountains that bisected Phuket. The traffic was brutal. Tour buses, taxis and flocks of kamikaze scooters. It was high season, and package tourists flooded in from colder climes, swelling the population to well over a million on an island thirty miles long and fifteen wide.

  He’d been driving more than an hour when he parked his car on the side of the road that wound down to Patong beach. He took a few breaths and reached for the hard hat on the rear seat and pulled it on.

  He was on a building site overlooking the ocean. A hillside of virgin jungle had been stripped and a massive hotel was rising up from the red soil. Another destination for package tourists from Wuhan, Leeds and Kyiv.

  The hotel would not make Michael’s portfolio. He’d taken it on as a favor to a developer who was building one of his more tasteful and elegant resorts farther down the coast. The architect of this project had baled and gone back to Tokyo, so Michael was helping shove it over the finish line.

  A couple of cranes arced overhead and jackhammers piped him aboard. Stocky Burmese workers of both sexes, dressed in gumboots and baggy clothes, swarmed the site, carrying impossible loads. Their faces were painted in intricate patterns with white paste from the bark of the Tanaka tree, a beauty aid and natural sunblock. They came cheaper than Thais, and lived in a tin shanty town at the bottom of the hill, which would disappear in time for the resort to be landscaped.

  The site supervisor, a genial Dane with a flaxen beard, appeared, carrying a clipboard in one hand and a cup of Starbucks in the other.

  “Morning, Michael,” he said, lifting the cup. “Sorry, if I had known what time you were coming I would’ve sent out for two.” Lars grinned. “But you’ve already had a line of coke, right?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Michael said with forced jocularity.

  “Off the hood of the car?”

  “Nope, out of the navel of a Cambodian pole dancer.”

  Lars laughed. The bad jokes were a familiar routine. Comforting, this world of men, almost free of subtext and subterfuge.

  Well, almost comforting.

  Michael saw the hulking figure of Andrei the Russian engineer approaching, stomping like Rumpelstiltskin.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Michael said.

  “I know. This guy... Just nod and agree and he will go away like a bad stink.”

  “Hey, American,” Andrei said.

  “Morning, Andrei.”

  “Where you go school, huh?”

  He stood too close to Michael, who smelled sweat and corn liquor. The fucker was huge. Six and a half and two-fifty pounds.

  Michael looked up at him and refused to step back.

  “What’s the problem today?”

  “Problem is you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sit and play on computer and ask impossibles from guy like me.”

  “Okay, Andrei, why don’t you put your concerns down in an email and I’ll take a look. Yeah?”

  “Fuck email. Fucking American idiot.”

  Andrei turned and walked back toward the site.

  “Sorry, Mike,” Lars said.

  “You’re the one I feel sorry for. You have to work with that asshole every day.”

  “He is family of an investor.”

  Just for a second Michael entertained the fantasy of opening the cocks on the floodgates of his fortune, of using a proxy to buy out the investor. Of washing the Russian asshole right out of his life.

  He shook it away. It wouldn’t be satisfying. Because what he really wanted to do was the one thing he was too civilized to do.

  He wanted to kick the giant Russian’s ass.

  16

  The vultures were waiting for Liz outside her house.

  They didn't look like vultures, of course. They looked more like mynas, dressed in their dark little suits with their yellowish faces.

  Liz had dropped Caroline off next door, then zoomed home. Pleased to be rid of her. So bland. So repressed. Their resemblance really was only skin deep.

  Liz was hanging for a joint and she felt a spike of annoyance when she saw the silver Honda parked near her front door.

  A Thai man and woman stood in the shade of a banyan tree. Both were short and slender. They waid in unison when Caroline stepped from her car.

  “Sawadee kah, Khun Elizabeth,” the woman said. Even with her jacket buttoned she showed no sign of feeling the heat.

  Liz, by contrast, had pools of sweat under her arms and between her legs, and her hair stuck to her face in damp tangles.

  “Hi,” she said. “What can I help you with?”

  “We are from FirstThai Bank,” the woman said, handing over two business cards.

  Liz glanced at them. The usual unpronounceable Thai names.

  “Uh huh,” she said.

  “We have been trying to contact you, Khun Elizabeth. By email and telephone.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes. There are some problems at the bank.”

  “What problems?”

  “You are more than seven months in arrear on mortgage payments on houses.”

  “Well, my husband died recently. There have been delays winding up his estate.”

  “It is very sad, the death of Khun Jürgen.”

  “Yes. Very sad.”

  “And for so many years he was loyal client of FirstThai Bank.”

  “Very loyal, yes.”

  The woman offered a tight smile. “But Khun Jürgen is dead six months ago.”

  “As I said, his estate is still in probate.”

  “And the bank has been very patient, Khun Elizabeth. But we have heard now from Bangkok. And Bangkok it is not happy.”

  “And what does Bangkok want?”

  “Money, Khun Elizabeth. At least half of outstanding mortgage payments.”

  “I need time.”

  “You have one week.”

  “A week? That’s fucking ridiculous!”

  The pair remained inscrutable.

  The woman said, “If there is not payment by one week’s time then FirstThai have to foreclose. I am so sorry, Khun Elizabeth.”

  Tell your fucking face that, Liz wanted to say but she held her tongue.

  The couple waid and walked to the car. The man held the passenger door open for the woman and she settled herself primly inside. He took his place behind the wheel, started the Honda and drove sedately away.

  Liz rummaged in her bag until she found her keys and let herself into the house.

  She threw her bag on the table, clicked on the aircon and went into the kitchen and splashed her face at the sink.

  Liz opened the freezer and took out the bottle of vodka that lay inside, misted with ice. She uncapped the bottle and poured a generous belt in a shot glass.

  She threw back the icy liquid and poured herself another.

  She’d been expecting some demand from the bank. Just another of the slew of Jürgen’s creditors. But she hadn’t expected to be given so little time.

  Liz didn’t give a flying fuck about these houses. She could turn her back on them without a backward glance, but they played a central role in the bit of theater she was busy creating.

  A bit of theater that promised to be very lucrative.

  She sipped the vodka.

  What the hell, she was a big girl.

  She’d just have to move a little faster than she’d planned.

  17

  Charlie screwed up again. Let his bloody guard down.

  And it was all about aesthetics. He needed a break from the relentless ugliness and squalor that had become the backdrop to his life. The nasty area he lived in with its rows of rooms and peeling breezeblock apartments, surrendering to the heat and the humidity. The narrow streets thick with motorcycles, cars and trucks
spewing gasoline fumes.

  Even his sortie to the God-awful megamall—as ugly, in its own soulless way, as his neighborhood—had resulted in that awkward, unwanted encounter, which had left him feeling exposed and jittery.

  So he’d rescued the Vespa from Central’s cavernous subterranean parking lot, zoomed up the ramp and out into the sun, and headed for the ocean.

  It was easy to lose sight of the sea if you lived, as he did, in the cramped suburbs built on Phuket’s hilly rump. He had to ride for twenty minutes until he arrived at the raffish beach town of Rawai, on the southern tip of the island. It was still possible, if you blurred your eyes a little, to imagine the place thirty years ago.

  He took a seat under an umbrella at a sidewalk cafe right on the ocean, and stared out at the water.

  The booze was extortionately priced, so he made his beer last, and it was warm as tea by the time the sun sagged low, ready to fizzle out in the sea. A vivid palette of oranges and blues worthy of Gauguin.

  Charlie fired up a little cheroot, black as a stick of licorice, an indulgence he allowed himself only rarely. He sighed smoke, lamenting how insalubrious his accommodations had become of late.

  Thirty years ago, when his looks and low cunning had allowed him to escape his grandmother’s filthy flat, he’d sworn that he would live his life in luxurious and exotic locales.

  And so he had. The Greek islands. The Med. Spain. The Caribbean. Bali. Even his first months here on Phuket.

  Then had come the reversals, and his luck had seemed to evaporate under the unblinking glare of the sun.

  He’d come to feel trapped. Caught in a loop of failure. Like the dancing chicken he’d once seen long, long ago.

  When he was eight or nine years old, on a rare outing with his father who’d been enjoying one of his infrequent sojourns out of prison, Charlie was taken to a sad little fairground. It was drizzly and muddy and miserable and his father was drunk and menacing.

  They came upon a tent manned by a tattooed gypsy who played a frantic jig on a ukulele while a live chicken danced manically on a little metal table. The other onlookers laughed and threw coins into the gypsy’s hat, but Charlie’s father grabbed the bird by the throat and lifted it from the table. Smacking away a cover, he revealed the gas flame that made the metal surface molten, forcing the poor bird to raise its burnt feet in a horrible parody of a dance.

  Darling dad then broke the ukulele over the gypsy’s head and dragged him to the table, forcing his left cheek down onto the searing metal.

  As long as he lived Charlie would never forget the stink of the burning flesh.

  Stubbing out his cheroot in an ashtray Charlie was jerked savagely back into the now when he saw the beefy form of Murray Muldoon lumbering across the road toward him.

  He sprang to his feet, upsetting his chair and sending the beer bottle crashing to the tiles as he ran for the Vespa.

  Muldoon was blocked for a moment by a minibus taxi and this allowed Charlie to stow the kickstand and start the Vespa.

  It fired first time, the little beauty, and he zipped off into the traffic.

  He was starting to relax when he checked his mirrors, and saw Muldoon, astride a snarling dirt bike, gaining on him.

  18

  The glass house was big enough for Caroline and Michael to each have a room to work in.

  His room was used every day.

  She was seldom in hers.

  And she wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing in there now.

  Caroline sat in the ergonomic chair behind the wooden desk and looked out the huge windows at the ocean reflecting the mauve of dusk.

  As she watched the sky turned black, an unfamiliar star blinking just above the horizon.

  She clicked on the Anglepoise lamp, swiveled the chair and removed a book from the nearly empty shelves.

  It was a hardcover copy of her only published work, a book of short stories called Confections.

  She turned it over and looked her photograph on the back cover, taken five years ago. Sitting by the window of her study in their house in Newton, smiling at the camera, she looked heartbreakingly young and hopeful.

  In the years since she’d made several faltering attempts at a novel which she’d finally abandoned after the accident.

  When Michael had suggested the move to Thailand she’d gone along with his assurance that a change of scene would spark her to begin a new book.

  In truth, she knew her writing days were behind her.

  All she’d ever had to say she’d said in those twelve stories.

  And the accident had left her with an emptiness that no words could fill.

  Caroline slid the book back into its place and ran a finger over her closed laptop.

  Her fingertip came away a little dusty and she wiped it on her pants.

  She opened the computer and powered it up, humming a few bars of an old song she couldn’t quite remember as the laptop chugged and churned itself awake.

  She expanded the browser and googled Jürgen Keller Zürich.

  Caroline looked at the list of results.

  She was pretty sure Liz’s Jürgen had not been a professor of divinities nor a bespoke furniture maker.

  And three were too young.

  But a well-fed man with a pugnacious jaw, a smug smile and the hooded eyes of a voluptuary, fit the bill.

  She clicked on a link and, with a little help from Google translate, read about the financier who had met his end when his cigarette boat had flipped at high speed on the northern end of Lake Zürich.

  It seemed that Jürgen Keller had gone to his death a troubled man.

  There were reports of fraud, insider trading and even tantalizing allusions to a Ponzi scheme.

  Liz Keller was photographed at the funeral, looking very chic and European in dark glasses and a black Lagerfeld dress.

  Caroline heard Michael’s car, and as his headlights swept the room she closed the computer and walked downstairs.

  19

  Charlie rode the Vespa hard, leaving Rawai behind him. It was night now, darkness falling like a fire curtain here in the tropics, the winding coastal road unspooling in the yellow beam of the scooter.

  He’d darted up a couple of side roads back in the town, and thought he’d shaken Muldoon, but now he saw a bright single beam in his mirror and felt his innards turn to water.

  He’d never outrun the big bike. He spotted a track off to his left, probably leading to a remote beach, and killed the lights on the Vespa.

  He swung the scooter up the track, riding under a canopy of trees that obliterated the moon. Still running without lights he bumped to where the track petered out into a footpath and stopped the Vespa and cut its engine.

  At first the only sound was the scratch of cicadas. Then he heard the roar of the dirt bike, and saw its beam as it passed the mouth of the track.

  Charlie realized he was holding his breath and released it.

  He sucked air when he heard the snarling bike again. It slowed, idling at the turn, then plunged toward him, the bright beam jouncing.

  Charlie felt terror and was surrendering to the impulse to run when a sudden calmness took hold of him.

  No. Fuck it. No more running.

  He lifted the seat of the Vespa and removed the crash helmet he never wore. Only kept it on the scooter in case of police roadblocks. He grabbed it by its strap and held it at his side.

  The beam of the dirt bike found him and he blinked, but stood his ground.

  The bike slewed to a dusty halt and the Australian was off it, advancing on him.

  The headlight of the dirt bike threw Muldoon’s giant shadow onto the ground as the Australian broke into a loping run, thundering toward Charlie.

  Charlie waited, then with the grace of a matador he sidestepped and let the Aussie stumble. He lifted the helmet and brought it down hard on Muldoon’s right temple.

  The big man dropped like a felled tree.

  He cursed and tried to get up.


  Charlie swung the helmet again and again and again until the man lay unmoving.

  He flung the crash helmet far into the jungle, disturbing a night creature who screeched its displeasure.

  Charlie bent down and felt for a pulse in Muldoon’s neck. Nothing. He took a cell phone and wallet from the pockets of the dead man’s khaki shorts and stowed them beneath the seat of the Vespa. Then he grabbed Muldoon by his hairy ankles and dragged him deep into the bush.

  He walked back to the dirt bike and it took him a few attempts to get it started. It surged beneath him like an unbroken horse compared to the sedate Vespa. Slowly he rode it off the track and into the trees, taking it as far as he could before vines and roots barred his way. He wiped the keys on his shirt and hurled them far into the scrub. Then he cleaned the handlebars.

  Returning to the Vespa he lifted its seat again and found his flashlight. He clicked it on, and followed the foot path. After a minute he heard the slur and fizz of the ocean. He passed through palm trees and stood on a small, desolate beach.

  Retracing his steps, he tore off a palm frond and held onto it as he started the Vespa. Riding one-handed, he used the palm frond to wipe away the tracks that the two bikes had left.

  He tossed the frond away and paused at the turn, making sure there was no traffic. As he accelerated onto the blacktop he frisbeed Muldoon’s phone into the bush.

  20

  Liz Keller had gotten a little drunk. Gotten a little stoned. And now, in the kitchen rustling up a bruschetta with basil and tomatoes and lashings of garlic, she considered breaking out the Ambien.

  Because that’s just what you do when the water gets choppy, baby.

  Her phone chirped and when she saw which number was ringing she lunged for it.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” she said. “What the fuck was that shit at Central today?”

  Charlie Hepworth said, “There’s a situation—”

  “You were meant to watch her! Not become her fucking BFF!”

  “Listen to me,” Charlie said. “Some mopping up needs doing. Urgently.”