World of Trouble (9786167611136) by Jake Needham Read Free Book Online

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