Born Slippy by Tom Lutz

Author:Tom Lutz [Lutz, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912248650
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

2013

He sprang for business class on Lufthansa rather than wait until the next day, and talk about a different world. It left LAX at midnight, and he had a free Manhattan and a Xanax, then wine with a pretty good dinner, then more wine, then a Baileys, ate another Xanax, laid full out and took a drooling nap, then another Baileys, dozed on and off watching a movie, ate some little petit fours, wandered around stoned in the dark, wrote a draft of a probably useless email with everything he might have forgotten to tell his office manager, maybe had another Xanax and Baileys, fell back asleep with a mask on and woke up to breakfast with model airplane glue for a brain. He continued the self-medication with a Bloody Mary. He was either depressed, or nervous, or mentally ill, or all three.

After a couple hours googling around on the laptop at LAX he had put together the basic facts. No one was taking responsibility for the bombing, and the reports were a little vague about what kind of bomb it was, or if it even was a bomb rather than a gas leak or something else. The explosion happened at 11am, give or take a few minutes, and so the building was full. The police identified some fifty bodies, they had parts of as many as another fifty, and estimates were that there might be as many again vaporized by the blast. The Taipei Times listed the presumed dead, including Dmitry. A corporate picture of him accompanied the article, since he was the head of the firm, and Frank couldn’t help but think he had been within days of his extraordinarily early retirement. They’d take out your whole village to get you, he had said.

The usual suspects — Islamists, Marxists — were cycled through the speculative machinery alongside a series of competing business interests. Murder was a not an entirely uncommon business strategy in that part of the world, and there had been a number of similar bombings in the last few years in Bangkok, suspected to be perpetrated by security companies attempting to discredit their rivals. None of those, though, had been quite so big a blast, none had killed as many people, and none had involved a major foreign corporation. Unless something more plausible came along, he had to assume that whatever trouble Dmitry had got himself into had cost not just his life but that of more than a hundred innocent people. Maybe being so close to retirement was not a coincidence — maybe whoever it was figured it was their last chance. The idea filled him with something like dread, or guilt, like he was somehow responsible, like he should have warned someone.

On the off chance that Dmitry had missed the blast and was hiding, Frank had g-mailed him right away, but got no response. It was the only contact he had, no home phone and his cell was always different — burner phones

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