Checking his solid gold Longines watch: 7:35 in the morning, which is the time Samson Lee likes him to start. In Bangkok it is twelve hours later, she’s probably started dancing already in that seedy bar, nearly naked in a G-string and flimsy bra — though sometimes she starts late. It is just possible she is sitting in an Internet café hoping to hear from him. In response to more prodding from his loins, he logs on again to Yahoo Mail. Yep, there it is, a message from Naronsip Wiwatanasan, a.k.a., Lalita:
Yes, teelak means darling in Thai. Yes, I am waiting for you. Can you send me a photo?
A cool positive? McKay smiles. That’s exactly how he would have replied if he had been in her position. Clearly, she is a master of the game, like him. The secret to McKay’s success: He never fools himself; lawyers are whores too.
As it happens, his laptop includes a digital camera. He takes a snap of his face turned slightly to highlight the manly strength of his jaw, and zings it off to her.
Just then the laptop telephone beeps. This is McKay’s secret number which he gives out to no one except Samson Lee. Lee has an Asian addiction to video conferencing.
McKay’s only important client appears on the monitor, looking a lot more Chinese than Thai, with eyes so slit McKay wonders how any light ever gets in there: a vast moon face with near-circular wrinkles, small flat nose, cheap off-the-peg sweater.
“I can’t see you,” Lee snaps. McKay switches the movie camera function on. “That’s better.”
“Good morning, Mr. Lee,” McKay says with a big, bright, yes-I-do-love-to-suck-your-bum smile. He tried using “Samson” once at the beginning of the relationship, but it didn’t work for either of them. Lee is very conservative in the Confucian tradition. His sons are his slaves and his daughters marry whoever he tells them to marry. The Lees are certainly a centralized family, if not a close one.
“You’re going back to Bangkok on the next plane,” Lee says.
McKay maintains self-control, at the same time congratulating himself on his usual good luck. He is simply one of those hyper-neat guys who kind of constellate everything around them so that, even without his thinking about it, events conspire to conform to his will. The journey is twenty hours plus, and he can probably get on a flight that morning if he kicks ass. In other words, Lalita — naked — will be servicing him again in less than a day.
Keeping a straight face: “Certainly, Mr. Lee. What’s the problem?”
Lee looks directly into his digital camera. By making certain adjustments on his laptop McKay can enlarge those heavily lidded eyes until they almost fill the screen. He’s done this many times, out of curiosity. It never makes any difference. Even magnified as much as ten times, Lee’s eyes still have no life in them.
“It’s wet,” Lee says.
McKay pales somewhat and experiences a hundred-and-eighty degree mood swing. Maybe his luck isn’t so good today, after all. Wet?
“Well, now, Mr. Lee...” McKay begins.
“I already know what you don’t do,” Lee says.
This is a reference to something McKay witnessed at the beginning of their relationship. Shaken, he found a way to explain that it was very counter-productive for Lee to implicate his main and most trusted lawyer-fixer in that kind of thing. Lee had agreed, to his relief.
McKay doesn’t mind bending the rules for a benevolent billionaire, but he is not a sadist. Like every successful man and woman on the Street, he believes in dictatorship by the filthy rich, but as a civilized American he sees himself as a benign despot.
Question: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?
Answer: I have not the faintest idea, my culture forgot to tell me.
Yes, he has a sensitive side. Both parents were pious English Literature teachers martyred by the functional barbarism of these times. Without respect, money, power, or direction, they both hit the bottle. When they started having fist fights, they all knew the barbarism had won. His father jumped from a high window and his mother, unable to live without him, took an overdose.
In a nutshell, whatever kind of crook he was at heart, he was totally white collar. Whatever kind of crook Lee was, it was not white collar. That was why Lee was so rich: He took the barbarism all the way, sucked it all up. Even Magnus didn’t know how much dough Lee had. Officially, only thirty percent of the trillions of trillions of dollars washing around the international banking system every minute was illegal drug money, but that was certainly disinformation designed to keep the sober majority from panicking. The true figure was probably more than fifty percent, perhaps as much as seventy. Maybe everyone worked for Samson Lee without knowing it? Maybe that was why they would never legalize recreational drugs? Nobody loves Prohibition more than Al Capone. If not for criminalization, Lee would be selling secondhand automobiles.
“I still don’t do wet,” McKay says.
“The Spics have grabbed my son Hercules,” Lee says, as if relating an irritating but predictable occurrence.
McKay’s heart sinks: war. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr. Lee, but I don’t see—”
“Emerald Buddha Corporation,” Lee says. “Forty-nine percent. Sign before you get on the plane, or I’ll FedEx the docs to you in Bangkok if you prefer.”
McKay knows Lee is watching his face closely on the giant monitor hanging on a wall in his Long Island mansion. McKay knows Lee saw him swallow immediately on hearing the name. The EBC is Lee’s respectable front. Well, it is only semi-respectable since it smuggles illegal Buddha heads and other priceless icons stolen from Ankor Wat, but Lee keeps it scrupulously apart from his other businesses. It is his “face” for official America, and as such he’s been obliged to spend quite a few tens of millions on stock, which is not exclusively Khmer, but includes some museum-quality jade pieces; they look identical to world-famous missing items, once the property of the last emperor of China. McKay has hinted more than once that a good way for Lee to reward his extra, secret, and professionally life-threatening efforts on behalf of his master would be for Lee to simply hand over a chunk of EBC stock. McKay knows Lee has been keeping EBC for a rainy day, when he will ask McKay to go even deeper into hell as his legal representative. Well, today it’s raining.
McKay doesn’t know he’s been holding his breath until he breathes out: Did the man say forty-nine percent? That is worth about twenty-five million, but the best of it is: The little firm actually makes a very healthy profit, averaging more than sixteen percent net per year of stock value. Sixteen percent of twenty-five million is four million. That would almost exactly triple his average yearly income. He supposes he will get drunk or something to see him through Tallboy’s elaborate vengeance strategy, whatever it is. He sure will need a night with Lalita afterwards, though.
“Okay,” McKay says, “but why?”
“Because I can’t go myself and Tallboy is losing it. He has tactics but no strategy. He spends his time drinking whiskey and screwing whores. He doesn’t have your discipline. You don’t have to do anything — he’ll take care of the wet side — you just have to tell him when to start, when to pause...” Lee himself pauses at this point to lick his lips “... and when to stop.”
“I see.”
“I want Hercules back alive, not sliced up like a lump of salami. If he’s dead or crippled his mother will never stop bitching.”
“I understand that,” says McKay. Then, as an after-thought: “Which Colombian did you grab after you heard they’d grabbed Hercules?”