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.