There was another reason this particular course drew so well, however, one about which I had decidedly mixed feelings. My lectures generally featured anecdotes drawn from my own recollections of the bad old days, of gunslingers that had bought companies with big gestures instead of money and somehow gotten away with it for a while. Those stories were obviously popular with the students and that was what bothered me. I often got the uncomfortable feeling that they were less interested in absorbing the moral object lessons I was trying to impart than they were in figuring out how they could pull off the same kind of crap for themselves.
Regardless, today I was entirely free of the need to fret over what my students might make of my tales of greed and derring-do because I didn’t have to tell any. I was about to engage in the oldest ruse known to academia, the guest lecturer ploy. All I had to do today was appear attentive and not get caught closing my eyes.
I went down to the administrative office while I waited for Mr. Coffee to finish dripping, gathered the weekend’s harvest of incoming faxes out of the machine, and picked up copies of both the Wall Street Journal and the Bangkok Post. Flipping quickly through the faxes, I found only one addressed to me, a notice that the board meeting for Southeast Asian Investment in Hong Kong later in the week had been shortened from two days to one. That wasn’t particularly welcome news since I really enjoyed my all-expense-paid junkets to Hong Kong.
I walked back to the kitchen carrying the fax and the newspapers, picked out what looked like a clean mug from a cabinet above the sink, and poured myself some coffee. Then I returned to my own office, shut the door, dumped the fax on my desk, and settled back with the newspapers to do some serious coffee drinking.
Two newspapers and three cups of coffee later, I made a preemptive toilet stop, then strolled across campus to the lecture hall where I found the guest lecturer for the day waiting outside for me. My designated hitter was an old Bangkok hand named Dollar Dunne, an American-born lawyer who had been around Thailand for longer than anyone I knew. As unlikely as it might seem, Dollar actually was his real name, one hung on him by a mother who either had a strange sense of humor or, given his ensuing success dealing his way around the back alleys of Asia, was startlingly prescient.
Dollar and I made small talk until the class had all taken their seats, then I did a couple of quick announcements and gave Dollar the kind of effusive and deferential introduction my guests always said was unnecessary but would have been mortally wounded not to receive. After that, I settled into a seat up at the back of the lecture hall and smiled as Dollar leaned against the podium and launched into what were no doubt wildly embellished tales of his adventures as a legal mercenary stalking the commercial jungles of Asia.
Dollar was at least in his mid-fifties, but his wiry build and the way he wore his thick, silver hair in what was almost but not quite a Marine Corps buzz cut made him look much younger. His skin was perfectly tanned and his features still had a boyish, open quality to them. Instead of the predictable uniform of expensive suit and a white shirt, Dollar was wearing rumpled khakis and a green golf shirt that looked faded from many hours in the sun. His choice of wardrobe said a lot about him. He was probably happiest when he was doing exactly the opposite of whatever was expected. I had to admit the image Dollar affected, although a little studied for my taste, was pretty potent. It gave him a raffish quality that a lot of people found irresistible.
Dollar and I had first met back when I was still in living in Washington. Dollar’s firm had been lead counsel for a company called the Merchant Group that had gone suddenly and spectacularly belly up and left a good number of Stassen amp; Hardy’s banking clients holding embarrassingly empty bags. The Merchant Group had technically been a Luxembourg corporation with its operating headquarters in Bangkok, but in reality it was as Australian as a red kangaroo. Lyndon Merchant was an Aussie and mostly he ran the organization out of Perth. He called it a private international merchant bank, but I had never met anyone who could figure out exactly what that crafty assembly of buzzwords was actually supposed to mean.
What the company actually did was equally difficult to divine. It did deals, of course, as the players liked to say back when the expression was still socially acceptable if not exactly laudable, but there was no consistent quality to them. It bought random companies all over the world, mostly with money borrowed from gullible and greedy bankers whose primary interest was in pumping up their reported profits with fat fees; then it either flipped the companies quickly for a fast profit, generally to some sucker lined up in advance, or it cut the companies up, pulled the valuable assets out, and dumped what was left.
When Stassen amp; Hardy sent me out to Bangkok to fish around in the wreckage of the Merchant Group to see if anything was left for our clients to claim, it wasn’t long before I was up to my butt in a morass of untraceable fund transfers and funny-money loans involving shell companies headquartered in places like the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga. The gamy odor of the whole sordid mess was unmistakable, but I couldn’t develop any solid connections between the Merchant Group’s operations and the usual suspects in international scams of that sort: the intelligence agencies, drug traffickers, and arms brokers who were generally skulking somewhere in the shadows. Dollar, as I recalled, seemed to find the whole muddle more amusing than sinister, and working that case with him turned out to be the finest graduate seminar in Asian commercial skullduggery I could ever have wanted.
Dollar was right in the middle of telling my students a few stories about the Merchant Group, winging his way to the considerable amusement of the class through some of the wilder conspiracy theories, when he suddenly looked up at the back of the hall and cut me a wink that was impossible to miss. A few of the kids twisted around in their seats to check out my reaction. I reflexively returned a half-smile, but Dollar’s gesture left me a little unsettled. The wink seemed to imply that Dollar and I shared some secret concerning the Merchant Group that he couldn’t impart to the class. If that’s what he thought, I couldn’t imagine what that secret was supposed be.
I was still thinking about that when the class started to applaud and I realized that Dollar had finished. The kids gathered their stuff, slid out of the narrow rows of theater-style seating that were tiered up off a center aisle, and began to make their way down to the main floor and out of the hall.
By the time I reached the bottom of the steps, the hall was almost empty and Dollar was leaning on the lectern at the front of the room waiting for me.
FOUR
“Was that wink supposed to mean something to me?”
“You’re getting kind of Canadian in your old age, Jack. Anybody ever tell you that?” Dollar eyed me for a moment and then he shrugged. “A kiss is just a kiss; a smile is just a smile; a wink is just a wink. Like that.”
I knew Dollar wasn’t normally one for empty gestures. Regardless, he obviously wanted to let this one slide, so I didn’t press the point.
“Anyway, forget that,” Dollar said. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”
“Maybe we should move this outside, Dollar.”
The man’s voice came from behind me, and when I turned I saw John Hanratty slouched down in a seat in the front row right next to the entrance to the lecture hall. I hadn’t noticed John come in and I wondered what he was doing there. John wasn’t a lawyer, not as far as I knew anyway, although he worked for Dollar’s law firm in some capacity. I had never been absolutely certain what John actually did for Dollar’s firm, but I gathered he functioned as a sort of greeter for out-of-town clients when they came to Bangkok, something most of them were happy enough to do whenever they could come up with an excuse that their wives would buy. Clients were always flying in for what were euphemistically called conferences, only to spend most of their time on a stool next to John at one of the city’s justly famed go-go bars.