by Harlan Wolff
“Yes, I had a bit of luck.”
“You are going to need it to beat a murder charge,” the colonel said, obviously excited by the prospect of being the fixer in such a potentially lucrative case.
“I’ll expect a good deal on this. If it weren’t for the two men you sent to find me, there wouldn’t be witnesses saying I had been talking to gangsters.”
The colonel appeared flustered. “I won’t make any money on this. I wouldn’t charge you, we are like brothers,” he told Carl.
“I appreciate that,” Carl said, trying not to sound sceptical. “Let me know what a Rolex will cost and let’s get it delivered as soon as possible. I can get you two-hundred and fifty thousand baht now, from my room to get you started.”
The colonel didn’t say anything, so Carl went up to the room and came down with the two and a half inches of money he had taken out of the room safe and put in a hotel envelope he had found in the drawer of the desk. He gave the envelope to the colonel who was already standing up, ready to go.
“Tell them we need a few delays,” Carl told him. “It would be good if the prosecutor claimed there was not enough evidence, and sent the file back to the police, at least a couple of times.”
“That won’t be hard,” the colonel said, “there is no evidence, right?”
“Right, but I’d rather make sure, instead of just hoping for the best. I can’t afford to spend the next seven years fighting the legal system. Even if I eventually get found not guilty, it will ruin my life, not to mention what it will do to my bank account.”
“Not guilty won’t help you, because they’ll appeal the not guilty verdict, to avoid being sued for wrongful arrest,” the colonel said laughing loudly. “They will have to find you guilty of something, to save face.”
At times, Carl thought to himself, the colonel has an extraordinary sense of humour.
CHAPTER 12
“I love the combination of the words ‘spies’ and ‘Balkans.’ It’s like meat and potatoes.”
– Alan Furst
The name on the Serbian passport was Nadia Bajic, born in 1981, so she had lied about her age as well. Carl was sitting alone in the White Tiger bar studying the documents. The bar was not open yet, as it was five-thirty in the afternoon. He sat at the far inside booth, near the toilet, so as not to be in the way of the beer deliveries for that night. He pondered the document and the haunting picture of the dead woman, his dead woman, sort of; she had the look of a deer surprised by a car’s headlights in the photo. Passport photographs are notoriously unflattering, so was it just a bad picture or had she been fleeing something when she put in her passport application?
Colonel Pornchai had also provided a printout of her comings and goings from the immigration database. It told Carl she had given up running to the border to get a new visa seven months ago. If you’re going to be an illegal alien, he thought, then blonde hair and a shapely figure probably helped. As long as everybody was looking at her tits they weren’t wondering about the last entry date stamped on her passport. The system had never made sense to Carl; the cost of these border runs was hundreds of dollars, so why not just charge the traveller a few thousand baht a month to stay in Thailand, and use the money to benefit the country, instead of giving the money to their neighbours? Many things about Thailand were a mystery.
Under occupation, she had declared herself a ‘Professor of Russian History,’ which explained why she could pass herself off as Russian. Carl had known she was intelligent but was surprised to find out she was an academic, a professor no less. Her bouts of jealousy and permanent need for attention had stopped him seeing what else was there. Some bloody detective, he thought. Like most people, he didn’t expect people with fancy titles to be emotional wrecks.
Carl put the papers back in his pocket and left the White Tiger. He walked a short way and opened the door to the Two Ladies bar. The Two Ladies was open all day, and they knew how to make an excellent Bloody Mary. They should, it had taken him long enough to teach them. Sitting in the middle of the bar was Bart Barrows with a girl on each arm, Bart was old school CIA, out of Vietnam, Laos, Lebanon, and for the last few decades, Thailand. He was well into retirement age but had been left in deep cover to operate on the agency’s behalf. Deep cover meant he wasn’t declared to the Thai government even though Thailand was a US ally. Carl was one of the few people who knew Bart wasn’t the bumbling redneck pensioner he passed himself off as. Bart had been on the fringe of Carl’s last case; a case that had filled up Carl’s bank account like it had never been filled up before. There had been a serial killer who, thanks to Carl, was now a guest in one of Thailand’s worst prisons. Carl walked down the bar and took a seat.
“Sheet bwoy,” Bart exclaimed on seeing Carl, “I thought you had ridden off into the sunset. Don’t you limeys watch cowboy movies? The hero’s supposed to ride off at the end, never to be seen again.”
“I would have done, but I never learned to ride a horse,” Carl said as he signalled the bartender for a Bloody Mary.
“That’s a godamn shame because if you had ridden away, you wouldn’t be on the front page of all the newspapers today. According to them, you’re as guilty as hell.”
It had never occurred to Carl that Bart might be able to read Thai; he had never heard him speak it out loud. Many years before Carl had found him in the DJ booth of a bar in Patpong during a military coup, listening to the news in Thai on the radio. He thought Bart was drunk and, unable to find the English language radio station, had given up and left it tuned to a Thai language one. It hadn’t even crossed Carl’s mind that Bart might have understood Thai and had a horse in the coup. That was before Carl had found out that Bart was with the CIA. Amongst his many failings, Bart Barrows had atrocious dress sense and an insatiable hunger for young prostitutes, so any bar served him as deep cover.
“I won’t bore you with the details, but I need your help to find out who really killed her, and why?”
“Trouble finds you like flies find shit. There are people in my office think you might just be the most fucked up expat in all of Thailand.”
“If I’d known it would give the CIA such a good laugh, I would have got myself accused of murder years ago.”
“Not so loud. Don’t say CIA,” Bart whispered, “say something else.”
“Alright, I’ll call them cowboys.” Carl leaned over the bar and helped himself to a plastic pen. “I need something from the cowboys,” he said as he scribbled something on the paper coaster from under his glass. “This is a name and date of birth, Serbian. I need whatever you can find out, and I need to locate her next of kin.”
“Call her embassy.”
“There isn’t one in Thailand, and you can get what I need much quicker than some civil servant ever could.”
“You’re asking a lot. Helping you is not a good career move.”
“That’s alright because you don’t have a career, you’re retired, remember? Look, Bart, she was a good kid, as George would say, and she doesn’t deserve to have her murderer walk away scot-free. I was fond of her. She was a mixed up kid, but I was fond of her. Think of it as your good deed for the day. Something to help balance up all that bad karma from waterboarding shepherds in the holy land.”
“You know I can’t use cowboy resources for a civilian.”
“I’ll write my new number at the bottom, and you can think about it.” Carl wrote down his phone number under Nadia’s details and slipped it in Bart’s shirt pocket. Bart left it in his pocket, which Carl knew was a good start.
“Anything been happening in Bangkok while I’ve been away?” Carl asked as a way of changing the subject.
“The whores all got a year older,” Bart told him.
“I’m counting on you,” Carl said, and then he paid his bill and left.
CHAPTER 13
“My mother told me I should be a secretary, but I wanted to be an actress from when I was very young.”
– Barbra Streisand
The following
morning Carl went to the address the colonel had given him. Milos Holdings Company Limited was on the top floor of Sukhumvit road’s plushest office tower. The penthouse was white on white and strictly minimalist. If anybody had dropped a cigarette packet on the floor, somebody would probably put a rope around it and called it art. On the floor to ceiling glass wall beside the glass entrance door, in bold white print, was a list of businesses owned by Milos Holdings. Carl stood at the door memorising them, as best he could. It was an impressive list of bars, nightclubs, restaurants and condominium developments.
Carl pressed the buzzer, and when the electric lock went click, he opened the heavy glass door and walked up to the white reception desk. He gave his best smile to the girl behind the counter. She wasn’t wearing white, and her bright red mini skirt said she was no virgin. She was also very flirty which you certainly don’t expect from the receptionist of a large holding company. Carl put a stack of Bangkok business directories on the counter and handed her a name card that said he was Timothy Crabtree, proprietor of Thailand Business Media. The phone number went to a serviced office in a building around the corner that would back up the story.
“Good afternoon,” he said with the confidence of a television evangelist.
“Can I help you?” the girl asked. She wasn’t used to unexpected visitors, but she flashed her long eyelashes and pouted a come on with her cupid lips that were covered in thick lipstick that matched the colour of her mini skirt. Carl identified her as, what in Thailand is known as a Pretty, typically a failed actress or model, more comfortable sprawled across the bonnet of a sports car at the Bangkok International Motor Show in a skimpy bikini than working in an office. She didn’t fit the job she was in, and Carl found that intriguing.
Carl went into a rehearsed pitch about the benefits of a full-page advertisement in his business directory, what he was showing her had been bought from the bookshop across the street only minutes earlier. She listened politely but wasn’t buying it.
“Only Mr Milos decides on such things, but he’s not here right now,” she told him.
“Oh, that’s wonderful. Can I have a phone number or email address for Mr Milos?”
She was studying him now like she recognised him but couldn’t remember where they had met. They hadn’t met, Carl would have remembered. She had forgotten she had seen his picture on the front of the Thai Rath newspaper that very morning; the very paper that was now folded over and in front of her on the counter. She gave up trying to place his face, probably some nightclub or other, she thought to herself.
“Oh no, Mr Milos doesn’t talk to the public, Mr Milos is a very important man.” By important, she meant rich.
“Oh dear. That’s a shame,” Carl told her.
“Sorry I can’t be of help,” she said and crossed her arms, signalling that she was not going to change her mind.
“I’m surprised I have never heard of him, has he been in Bangkok long?”
“A few years,” she replied getting more nervous.
“German?”
“He’s from Hungary,” she said, clearly not happy he was still there.
“I don’t think we have many of those in our directory,” Carl told her. “Such a shame we can’t include him.”
Then the penny dropped. She remembered his face now, as the face of the murderer she had seen on the front page of the newspaper. This was the man who murdered the pretty blonde girl. She squeezed her pelvic muscles to stop from peeing in her racy lace knickers, an undesirable reaction because they had cost her a week’s pay and she always kept them pristine. She wanted to scream, but she was the only one there, and nobody would come to save her. She couldn’t flee either as this hideous man was between her and the door. Running further inside the large deep office was not appealing either. What if he got her in one of the rooms and locked the door. She was frozen to the spot, shaking uncontrollably. She no longer cared that her tiny, bright red, frilly knickers from Milan were fast absorbing drops of urine.
Carl worked out what had happened as soon as he had seen her jaw drop. He thought about waiting for her to calm down, but she clearly wasn’t going to anytime soon. She was on the verge of tears, and possibly just about to scream.
“Just one last questions before I go. Was Mr Milos away from Bangkok last week?”
“Please go, please, please leave now. I’ll call the police.” She was whining and tearful, unable to keep up appearances.
“Tell me where Mr Milos was last week and I will leave. Otherwise, you can make me a cup of coffee, and we can wait together. Won’t that be cosy?”
She had no idea what to do next. A foreigner who murders women showing up in the office was not something she’d ever felt the need to prepare herself for. She had no doubt she was to be his next victim. “Tuesday and Wednesday he wasn’t here. Why do you want to know?” she screamed as tears of mascara ran down her cheeks making semi-circles and giving her the look of a sad but beautiful clown.
Wednesday was the day Nadia died. The flashy office was a front for a criminal enterprise, he had no doubt about that, and he assumed the receptionist was only there to service the daytime sex needs of her criminal boss. Her boss was behind the hit on Nadia, Carl was sure of it. Carl turned to leave, but a dark mood had come over him, and as an afterthought, he looked back at her just as he reached the entrance, and asked, “So does this mean a fuck is out of the question?”
She screamed like a banshee, feet stuck firmly to the floor, unable to move them, and she kept yelling and screaming while Carl stood in the corridor outside the door waiting for the lift. It was not how he had expected it to go. He clearly hadn’t adjusted to being famous yet, or was it infamous? He laughed as he got in the lift. Carl wasn’t in the habit of making girls cry, but if she didn’t want him to give her a rough time, then she shouldn’t work for the kind of person to murder his friends.
CHAPTER 14
“The only way you can beat the lawyers is to die with nothing.”
– Will Rogers
George arrived at the law firm of Tongdee & LeRoy in the late afternoon. Don’t tell Carl I’m coming to see you, was all he had told Louis on the phone. No mention of what it was about, but the lawyer already had a pretty good idea. Even crooked lawyers read the newspapers.
When George arrived, Louis LeRoy was sitting at his desk in his goldfish bowl of an office from where he kept watch on his vast legal empire, and by always watching, imagined he was preventing conspiracies hatching between the lawyers working at the small desks outside. Louis was sitting in a throne-like leather chair trying to look busy on his computer, but in reality, he was playing online poker and had been all afternoon.
“Come on in George, take a seat, I’ll be with you in just a minute.”
Pretty girls were floating all over the office, and when Louis wasn’t playing online poker, he diligently watched them all. Sometimes, when watching stopped being fun, he would recruit one of the secretaries to be his next (very temporary) mistress. He played on the belief, winning his heart would make them the part owner of a big Bangkok law firm and all that came with it. Some wanted to play, and some didn’t, but there were enough that did to keep him fully occupied.
Louis had come to Thailand from Louisiana just twenty years earlier but had amassed a fortune in cash and real estate from billing white-collar criminals for legal services and protection. Protection, because he had a network of influential men on retainers, always ready to jump in whenever one of the ‘clients’ got into trouble. Sometimes his clients made him a shareholder in their operations as added insurance. Louis knew lots of people, was highly intelligent, had an excellent sense of humour, drank like a fish, and was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg: the perfect Bangkok lawyer. The day he discovered Thailand, he had sworn it was heaven on earth and, in his own words, “If they don’t throw me out, I ain’t never leaving.” He was middle-aged and skinny as a temple dog. Weekends were spent playing golf, sailing, or lying by his pool working on his tan
, and the rest of the time he could be found in front of a mirror practising a perfect smile. Louis had the best set of false teeth money could buy. They were movie star’s teeth.
“So, George, what can I do for you on this fine Bangkok morning?” Louis asked as he flashed his porcelain smile.
“It’s about Carl, I need your opinion on something.”
“Stop right there,” Louis told him raising his palm to make the point. “Does Carl know you’re here?”
“I didn’t mention it,” George said.
“Probably better not to, he’s a moody son of a bitch. Any advice I provide must stay between us. Are you in agreement?”
“Sure Louis, sure thing,” George said.
“Okay. Please begin.”
“Carl has legal problems coming up, and I am worried he’s not taking them seriously enough.”
Louis stuck out his palm again. “I know the whole story, allegedly he murdered his girlfriend. The police did what they always do and grabbed the nearest thing they could find and announced they had the murderer. Now they want to make it stick; otherwise, they’ll lose face.”
“It seems they’d rather send an innocent man to jail for life than admit they were wrong and the murderer has got away,” George told him.
“Seems, ain’t got nothing to do with it. This is Thailand; of course, they’d rather prosecute Carl than do an investigation. Shit, George, you’ve been here long enough. There’s no way to make money from somebody that ran away, so of course, they grab Carl.”
“Will Carl be able to reason with them? It’s obvious he didn’t do it.”
“No, George, that dog won’t hunt. He’s been named and shamed already; it’s about saving face now.”
“So that’s it? You think he’ll get arrested?”
“Sooner or later, yes, he’ll have to fight it in court. Unless Carl delivers the murderer to them, with the smoking gun and a confession pinned to his chest.”
