by Harlan Wolff
CHAPTER 2
“Women are made to be loved, not understood.”
– Oscar Wilde
The morning sunlight filling the room was broken up into bars by louvre shutters on the windows, creating a pattern of light and shadows that always reminded Carl of an old black and white German horror film. The absence of curtains had made Carl an early riser, but on this morning he didn’t need the sun to tell him it was time to get up, he had been awake off and on most of the night.
Carl found a cigar and took it outside. He sat on the rattan chair beside his front door and lit up. Who would be looking for him? Whoever it was had come a long way, and that suggested they were serious. Life had taught him that all things were possible, so he understood potentially any rogue elephant could be charging at him from the undergrowth of his past. But what was it this time?
Carl heard Nadia moving around, so he put his cigar in the ashtray and went back inside. “Were you alone with Jenny again last night?” she asked as soon as she saw him. Nadia was sulking as she did most mornings. Carl’s ability to speak Thai threatened her and often left her feeling excluded. The previous evening she had left the Flying Fish in a huff, her standard form of protest at not being the centre of attention.
“I was drinking with George at the bar where she works if that’s what you mean.”
“She wants you! I can tell.”
“Do we have to do this every morning? If you were right and every woman in Thailand was scheming to jump into bed with me, I’d have died from exhaustion by now.”
“You flirt with them when you speak Thai, I can tell by their faces,” she told him.
“I don’t,” Carl said.
“Of course you do. And they can smell your money. Even dressed like a beach bum they can tell you have money.”
“You are getting yourself worked up over nothing,” he told her.
“Pfff! You know what I say, and you know I am right.” She leapt from the bed and crossed the room to the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her. The morning ritual of attention seeking and jealousy had begun.
Carl went next door to George’s hut and announced his arrival with their signal. It was Morse code for the letter V, for victory (as used by the BBC during WWII). When he was on a case, Carl always knocked four times to the beat of the opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth, dot-dot-dot-dash. George hadn’t heard the knock in over a year, and he opened the door with a big smile on his face.
“Can I use your shower?” Carl asked him.
“Has Nadia locked herself in the bathroom again?” George asked.
“I think it’s a Russian thing,” Carl said as he walked past George to wash off the salt from the previous day.
Ten minutes later Carl and George were at the beach restaurant drinking coffee. The resort’s only food outlet was a flimsy corrugated roof on bamboo poles and plastic chairs and tables in the sand. Where Carl had chosen to live was possibly the most rundown resort on the island, but the lack of facilities and the peeling paint kept tourists away and meant it was quieter than everywhere else, and that suited him just fine. Nadia was still sulking in their bathroom, or somewhere, and Carl knew from experience it was best to avoid her for a few hours.
“So, what’s up with Nadia this time?” George asked.
“She thinks I flirt when I speak Thai to women,” Carl said.
“She’s right about that,” George told him.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Carl said.
“How much longer did you stay last night?
“Clouseau came to see me,” Carl said, careful not to lean on the table for fear it might collapse under his weight. “He said some men were asking about me on the mainland.”
“Sonofabitch! Any idea who sent them?”
“Nope, I’ve been retired for almost a year for fuck’s sake, and I can’t think of any reason someone would be setting the dogs on me.”
“Are we leaving?”
“No. Last night I was planning to, but now the booze has worn off it doesn’t make sense to run. If we go to Bangkok, it will only be a matter of time before they show up there.”
George drank the last of the tepid instant coffee in his cup and studied Carl carefully. He had been around him long enough to know when there was trouble coming.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked.
“I’m going over to the mainland to find them before they find me.”
“Of course you are,” George said with a grimace.
“You don’t have to come,” Carl told him.
“I’ll come. What else have I got to do?” George said.
“Good. Clouseau will be here with the boat any time now,” Carl said as he looked past George to the end of the bay, searching for the long-tail boat.
“Does Nadia know you’re going to the mainland today?”
“I thought I would surprise her by my absence.”
“You need to be nicer to her,” George told him.
“It’s not easy to be nice to someone through a locked door.”
“She needs you, it’s obvious she’s had a hard life. Try and be more patient with her.”
“Sure, George, sure. I’ll start when we get back. I’ll be a bloody saint from now on, but right now there are things I need to do.”
CHAPTER 3
“I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.”
– Errol Morris
“Where are your bags?” Clouseau shouted above the engine noise as the long-tail boat pulled up to the jetty.
“No bags.” Carl shouted back, “I’ve decided I’m not ready to go to Bangkok yet.”
The chubby police sergeant stood at the front of the bobbing wooden boat like George Washington crossing the Delaware. He was sweating in his skintight, police uniform, and grinning from ear to ear. Clouseau grabbed onto the wooden jetty so Carl and George could jump onboard. The elderly man at the back of the boat with his hand on the throttle was black from the sun and had a face like old leather. The boatman waited for Clouseau to push off, then turned the boat, pointing it out to sea as he opened the throttle up. The hull bounced off the waves as it headed away from the island, toward the mainland.
“Where are we going?” Clouseau asked, holding tightly onto his seat and shouting over the noise of the screaming engine.
“We’re going to find out what they want,” Carl yelled back.
“You mean you are going to try and find them?” Clouseau asked, surprised.
“Probably best Clouseau. If you want a sensible conversation with these people, it is always best to find them before they find you.”
The sergeant put his hand on his holster to confirm his automatic was there. It was, and he felt reassured by its weight. The police paid for their own guns and were very attached to them. Clouseau didn’t understand what his friend was up to but was still happy to follow him. The last year had been the most enjoyable he could remember. Carl didn’t treat him like everybody else, for some reason he wasn’t scared of policemen, and that was a good thing because other people were friendly only because they had to be. The senior officers in the police force talked down to him, those below him grovelled, and only Carl treated him like an equal. He made him laugh too, and he had never met anyone capable of drinking so much without turning mean or falling off his barstool.
George, sitting beside Clouseau with a smile on his face, put his muscled arm around the policeman’s shoulder and shouted in his ear, “Carl’s back. God help us both now.”
“This is fun,” Clouseau shouted back.
All the police sergeant knew was that life had stopped being dull since this curious Thai-speaking foreigner had shown up on the pier, dropped his battered leather bag, removed his faded Borsalino hat, and asked loudly, “Where can I get a drink around here, and where on earth have you hidden all the women?”
Clouseau had watched Carl’s arrival from a wooden chair, outside his mistress’s noodle shop opposite the pier,
and had seen the man elevate his status with the locals only by the way he spoke and carried himself. What interested the police sergeant most about this foreign stranger was that after successfully making himself the centre of attention, he was not attempting to use it to take advantage of anyone. Everything Carl did was clearly for his own entertainment. Clouseau, though that wasn’t his nickname yet, had found this man very interesting indeed. Now, Clouseau was leaving the island with his friend for the very first time, and he had a feeling it was a significant step forward in their relationship. He leaned forward, tapped Carl on the shoulder, gave him his trademark grin, and pointed happily at the mainland in the distance.
The long-tail boat deposited them on the jetty at ten o’clock, and the three men walked from the pier to the roundabout and clock tower in the middle of town. Carl looked around for possible enemies and seeing none, crossed the street to the only hotel, an oblong building from the nineteen-sixties that had seen better days. The three men entered the hotel’s coffee shop, with its cheap tables and chairs, rough cement floor with a long deep crack that ran the entire length, and elevated wooden stage weighed down by two stacks of loudspeakers. Every night the coffee shop turned into the town’s only pub and would fill up with men drinking the cheap local whiskey to excess as they lustfully applauded the young singers in long dresses and garlands of crisp bank notes around their necks like leis. It was also where the backpackers, in transit to the island, always stayed. Carl had only been there a few times but, as usual, all the staff remembered him.
The waiter, an ex-boxer, once a champion but now old and punch-drunk, crossed the floor toward them, ducking and weaving as he avoided blows from invisible adversaries. When the waiter got to their table he dropped three menus in front of them and bobbed his head, eyes darting left and right.
“Hello, Duronk,” Carl said.
“Uhhh? Oh, it’s you. Where have you been?”
“Living on the island, like I told you last time,” Carl said.
“Yeah, sure. The island. That’s where all the foreigners go,” Duronk said as his mind drifted in and out.
“Have you seen any serious looking men from Bangkok wearing safari suits lately?” Carl asked him with a look of concern because it was obvious time was not helping Duronk’s mental condition.
“I think so. Maybe. Could be people like that here every day, or maybe not.”
“That’s fine, Duronk, don’t worry. We’ll have some shrimp fried rice, and three iced coffees please,” Carl told him.
“Hey Carl,” Duronk said with his eyes looking in the direction of the stage, “if they were here recently I think the big one with the ponytail might like one of the singers: the new chubby girl from Udon, she tells him dirty jokes.”
“You have a new singer?”
“Yeah, cute face, and funny too.”
“Has she been working here long?”
“Just a few days,” Duronk said.
“And the big guy with the ponytail fancies her, does he?”
“Yeah, a lot. He always hangs five hundred baht notes around her neck. People from Bangkok are very rich.”
“This big-spender in the safari suit has a brown birthmark on his left cheek and an unusually deep voice, right?”
“Yeah. That’s him.”
“Thank you Duronk.”
Duronk ducked and weaved his way back to the kitchen. George was watching with an amused expression on his face.
“What was all that about?” George asked.
“Seems the colonel misses me. He sent a couple of his boys to find me. The big one with the birthmark is called Gop, he does the heavy lifting for the colonel, and when he’s not beating people up, he’s a bouncer at the colonel’s nightclub.”
Clouseau didn’t understand all of what he’d heard, but he got the gist of it. “So you know them?” he asked Carl.
“Sure Clouseau, an old friend in Bangkok is looking for me.”
“Funny friends you have,” Clouseau told him and then watched as Carl and George burst out laughing.
“That’s for sure,” George said through his laughter.
Carl left George and Clouseau in town and found the two heavies by midday. They were sitting in the town’s only seafood restaurant, which was beside the river and quite a long way from the sea. Gop was a large man for a Thai and had a body full of monotone tattoos that showed where his shirt was open at the neck. His companion looked like a weasel and had the attitude of somebody that didn’t approve of foreigners. Opposite Gop was a young, pretty, chubby, girl that Carl assumed was the singer from Udon Thani, the one who told dirty jokes. Carl thought she was funny too: she was carrying a small parasol with tassels, and wearing a big floppy straw hat, thin cotton jeans, a long-sleeved pink polo shirt, and white lace gloves. She was clearly petrified of being touched by the sun and was going to great lengths to avoid it.
“How did you find us?” Gop asked Carl sheepishly.
“I followed the trail of empty whiskey bottles and deflowered virgins,” Carl told him roughly.
“You will tell the colonel that we found you, won’t you? You know what he’s like. I don’t want him thinking we took the expense money and had a holiday.”
“Don’t worry Gop, I’ll tell him you are Thailand’s greatest detective,” Carl assured him.
Gop looked happy, and the weasel grunted. Carl was used to types like the weasel. Some Thai men dislike foreigners intensely and blame them for everything that’s wrong with their lives.
“Oh shit,” Gop blurted out, “I almost forgot, the colonel sent you this.” He handed Carl a cheap mobile phone. “He said to tell you it’s a present and if you can’t afford your own phone, then he will buy one for you.”
The colonel enjoyed communicating with Carl in mild insults. It was his manner, and typically a result of not always getting things his own way. Carl opened the phone and saw the colonel had put his phone number in memory using his title and full name. Carl pushed the call button and waited for the colonel to answer.
“Where the fuck are you? I thought you were dead,” the colonel barked at him.
“I’m not the dying kind,” Carl said.
“Whatever you say. When are you coming back to Bangkok?”
“Why, what’s up?”
“What do you mean what’s up? What about our fucking business? Did you win the lottery and retire without telling me, or something?”
Or something, Carl thought to himself. He had walked away from his last case with some serious money in his pocket and, for the first time in his life, he was not under financial pressure. Eleven months of lazing about on a tropical island was all well and good, but he knew that even a million dollars wasn’t going to last him forever.
“I’ll be back in town and ready to do something soon. Maybe I should open my own nightclub,” he said to tease the colonel.
“Fuck, Carl, I know your new girlfriend is pretty but don’t tell me she’s rich as well.”
“Unfortunately not,” Carl said.
“How did you find a Serbian girl while you’re hiding in the middle of nowhere?” the colonel asked him.
“She’s Russian actually,” Carl said.
“Bullshit! She’s a Serbian. Don’t you even know who you are fucking anymore? I have a copy of her passport on my desk, right here in front of me,” the colonel told him.
Carl looked over at Gop, who was busy whispering sweet nothings in the ear of the singer. Gop would have got a copy of the passport from the hotel in the town, where Nadia had been staying before she met Carl. The colonel had been thorough.
“Funny, she told me she was Russian,” Carl said.
“Your new friends aren’t as good as your old friends by the sound of it. She’s lying to you. Come home Carl, Bangkok is full of foreigners with pockets full of money and nobody to fix their problems for them.”
“Alright, I won’t be long now.”
“So, tell me when?” the colonel asked.
“
Soon,” Carl told him.
“OK, whatever you say,” and the colonel hung up. When the colonel wasn’t getting what he wanted he always hung up without saying goodbye.
Carl took his leave of the pretty girl and the two ugly thugs. He saw Gop was not happy because he would now have to say goodbye to his chubby, white-skinned singer. The money he was spending on her was not his, it was the colonel’s, and he couldn’t lose face by telling her he lived on a nightclub bouncer’s wages. No, he would never tell her that, because he wanted to always be remembered as the rich big shot from Bangkok. The truth would not be as much fun as the lie, so his fling with the singer was over. Carl figured he’d eventually get blamed for that too.
CHAPTER 4
“Don’t despair, not even over the fact you don’t despair.”
– Franz Kafka
Clean-shaven and relaxed from an hour in an antique barbershop chair, Carl walked to the jetty where George and Clouseau were waiting for him. It had been a while since he had been without a beard and his first proper shave in almost a year had left him feeling uncharacteristically optimistic. There was a spring in his step now.
“You’re not so ugly anymore. When you were young you must have been quite handsome,” Clouseau told him in his direct Thai way, unaware he was delivering Carl an incredibly backhanded compliment.
“What’s with the sea?” Carl asked.
“Don’t know, it was like this when we got here. Clouseau says he’s never seen it flat like this before,” George told him.
The sea was eerily still, and there was no noticeable wind in the air. The boatman stood on the jetty with his hand on the post the boat was tied to. He looked like a man who had seen a thousand scorching summers, and he didn’t look worried, so Carl wasn’t either.
“What’s with the sea today?” Carl asked the boatman.
“The monsoons are over now, and this is the lull between the rainy season and the cold season,” the old boatman said in the Southern dialect that Carl was only just beginning to understand. The cold season in Thailand is like summer in Timbuktu, it’s still hot enough to fry an egg. It means the beginning of the high season for tourism, and the imminent arrival of herds of peeling sun worshippers cemented Carl’s decision that his island days were numbered.
