by Harlan Wolff
Chapter 6
Carl went home early afternoon to study his new case and consider his options. His house was a four-story townhouse in a contiguous quadrant of twenty-eight units. The entrance to the complex was a high double wooden gate with a security box and sleepy guard. The security guard was another person on Carl’s payroll. Should any unpleasant characters, with or without uniforms, become interested in him the chances were they would befriend and question the security guard. Carl had made sure that he would be told immediately.
On entering the quadrant there was a ground floor visitor’s car park area. Each unit also had space for one car in front of their ground-floor kitchen door. The second floor of the complex had a swimming pool surrounded by gardens accessible from all of the units through their sitting rooms. It was designed to be a community area but most residents kept themselves to themselves so it was mostly unused. The swimming pool was where Carl often went to think.
He changed into swimming shorts and took his new book to the pool area. The sun felt good and he was pondering taking a swim. The light was too bright for reading and hurt his eyes. He was feeling relaxed and at peace with the world. Carl had his eyes closed and his face pointed towards the sky. There was a small cough-like sound beside him that made him open his eyes and look around. Not a good thing to do as his face was pointing at the sun. Carl squinted at the tall man standing over him.
“Hello Carl.”
It was Carl’s favourite neighbour. George Wilde had a habit of sneaking up on him. He had served in a US special forces regiment and had spent his youth in the jungles of Vietnam sneaking up on the Viet Cong and now out of habit, he sneaked up on everybody. He was a big man with incredibly large hands and piercing eyes. He was around sixty but remained as fit as he must have been back in his military days. Carl liked him. He had liked his wife too, but she had died in a motorcycle accident the previous month. It had left George undermined.
“How are you?” Carl asked him.
“For someone living with the bonfire of their dreams, not too bad I suppose,” he said with his soldier’s face.
They sat in silence for a minute. Then he looked at Carl again and Carl saw how haunted his face was when he spoke.
“The trouble with life is we spend all of our time waiting for a wonderful moment. The problem is, when that moment arrives we don’t embrace it. Instead, we take it for granted and get distracted. Then we promise ourselves that we will get it right the next time and appreciate how valuable it is. That is the human condition, what keeps us going. The belief that there’ll always be another chance and this time we won’t fuck it up and forget that all joy is fleeting. What makes us carry on regardless of the fact that all life ends in tragedy is the undying belief in tomorrow and the possibility that everything will be all right and the hope that we will know what to do the next time. That’s why religion sells. Buy it and everything will work out right in the end. That’s their leverage. The hook is that after death everything will somehow get resolved. What nonsense! I am reading a book about archery, Zen and archery actually. It is about staying in the moment, which is an extremely difficult discipline. You should read it.”
“I would like that,” Carl told him, meaning it.
He liked George and for a while they had laughed all the time. After the ten-wheel-truck had run over his wife’s Vespa the laughter had gone and been replaced by dark existentialism. George had lost people during the war but that was different, it had been expected. When he discovered his wife had been squashed by a heavily laden ten-wheel-truck outside an unlicensed construction site not a stone’s throw from where he was opening a bottle of wine for their dinner, he went to pieces. The driver had fled the scene leaving empty whiskey bottles on the passenger seat and little proof of his identity. George hadn’t asked Carl to look for the driver. Revenge was not his thing. The cremation and the weeks that followed it had been emotional. Carl had done what he could.
“Are you interested in some work?” Carl asked, hoping he would want the distraction from his grief. George watched his back when Carl thought a case might get unpleasant and attract the wrong people’s attention. It was very comforting to know that he was out there keeping an eye on him. Carl never saw him following him but had never doubted that he was always there watching. George was also useful at meetings when a little extra gravitas was required.
“Shit! You have a big case, you’ve got your game face on. I missed that. How sordid is this one?”
“Should be routine. Tracking down a man that may be an evil bastard but is nearly seventy so I’m not concerned. He was some big CIA wheel with the Phoenix Program so he may have some ugly friends in uniform here in Thailand.”
“You need looking after then. He has a big advantage over you.”
“How so?”
“Those guys had no self-doubt whatsoever. You, however, are riddled with it. First thing I liked about you. Yes, my friend. You are right. You will definitely need looking after. I am not going to lose another one.” He looked at the water thoughtfully and then continued. “The CIA was a civilian organization empowered to torture and kill. Being civilians, they chose to prosecute a war against the civilian population of Vietnam. This was deemed expedient as their understanding of military matters was limited and the White House had not adequately supported a military solution by declaration of war. Fighting guerrillas with terror was the strategy of madmen. They gave away the moral high ground and lost us in the military the support of the American people. The entire US military is still hamstrung by that disastrous decision and can no longer take part in a conflict without risking an overly harsh judgment from the people back home. Those warmongering businessmen have a lot to answer for.”Then he was gone as quietly as he had arrived.
Carl felt better knowing the oversized ninja would keep an eye on him. George had a look of Clint Eastwood about him and people tended to behave better when he was around. Carl went back to the house to take a shower and see if the email he had asked for had arrived. He couldn’t wait to see the man behind Las Vegas Real Estate.
He went upstairs and took a cold shower to lower the heat on his skin from the strong sun at the pool. The water felt good and cleared the remaining cobwebs from his head. He put on his fisherman’s trousers, which were like a sarong with baggy trouser legs, typically made of soft cotton. Around the house he wore them all the time, even slept in them. Carl went downstairs and put Bruch’s violin concerto on his old-fashioned tube amplifier with their speakers the size of wardrobes. He selected a medium-sized cigar from a humidor and lit it with a long match. Carl was home.
He sat on the sofa listening to the violin music for a while and then got up and went to his small office off the sitting room. He switched on the computer and waited for it to fire up. Khun Anand, professional as always, had emailed him all the relevant documentation from the Ministry of Commerce regarding Las Vegas Real Estate Co., Ltd. Whenever possible Carl preferred to print everything before he read it. He found it was more tangible when he saw things on paper. His habit was to print everything longer than three paragraphs.
Carl held the printed pages in his hand and he wasn’t pleased. The directors, or in this case the director, was Thai and all the shareholders were also Thai. Annoyed, he emailed the police colonel and asked him to retrieve, scan and email copies of their ID card records. He also asked the colonel for the recent travel records in and out of Thailand for the sole director.
This company director was ruining Carl’s working hypothesis and he didn’t like it. He left his cigar in the ashtray to go out on its own. Havana cigars go out quickly because they are chemical free whilst all other cigars burn evenly like cigarettes. Carl went into the sitting room and let Bruch put him to sleep on the sofa.
When Carl woke it was already evening. The house was silent and he was in total darkness apart from the fine lines of orange light given out by the tubes on top of the amplifier. He checked his phone for messages and found one from the
colonel saying he had sent the information to Carl’s email address. Carl turned the lights on and went into the office having picked up and relit the cigar. He switched on the computer and started printing the reports and attachments.
The first document he studied was the ID card printout of the managing director. A Somchai Poochokdee aged sixty-nine. The printout showed the face of an old respectable foreigner. Carl had him! The target had used his money and influence to become a Thai citizen. That was how he had solved his problem of arriving on someone else’s passport.
He would have had to establish himself as a tax-paying businessman and then after a few years of regularly queuing up at the immigration department would have paid his way to speed up the process of becoming a Thai citizen. It would have taken a few years and he would have had to learn to sing the national anthem. Thus his identity problem would have been solved. He’d become a Thai person and so carried a Thai passport. The name he had chosen was Somchai Poochokdee. ‘The ideal man who is lucky’ was the best translation Carl could come up with. It was very corny and yet typical of the sort of Thai name people gave themselves when they applied for citizenship.
The next thing Carl looked at was the target’s travel record that had been attached to a second email. The airport immigration report showed that Somchai Poochokdee made trips to Macau and a lot of them. He was obviously still in the poker game. Macau had become a Chinese Las Vegas and recently opened several new casinos run by large corporations. There were public poker rooms there now and Carl had heard there was a lot of action at the tables. He took the details from the ID card document and started putting together a plan to meet the curious character in Macau.
A further look in his email inbox showed Carl the usual spam telling him he needed an extra-large penis and a pill to keep it permanently hard. He deleted those first, then he deleted the Nigerian scam mails advising him of an unexpected windfall. That left two unread emails. One was from a woman he had known telling him that she was unhappy and her husband was not treating her as well as she had hoped. The other email was an offer of work performing a character assassination of somebody that the would-be client claimed had annoyed him.
Carl ignored both of these emails, as he saw no point in replying. The first was standard Internet flirting from an old flame. Carl’s grandmother had told him never to reheat old romances or dishes containing mushrooms. The second email was from a man trying to buy an attack dog but Carl never chased or fetched sticks.
Then Carl had to do what he had been avoiding. He Google searched the Bangkok murders. Gruesome stories of how several young girls, mostly university students, had left the world. They would have suffered terribly before they died. Whoever perpetrated the crimes was highly skilled in acts of sadism. The final act was always stiletto stab wounds to their lungs through their ribs, causing them to drown in their own blood, followed by the removal of both of their ears. Carl then did a search on the Nevada murders. There was not much there as so much time had passed. However, what he did find was striking in similarities. Also of interest was the fact that authorities had questioned a Tony Inman, real estate broker.
The next thing Carl did was Google search Las Vegas Real Estate, Bangkok. The search revealed a medium-sized company that was active in the market and with an office located on Silom Road at the heart of the business district. All this information was available on their website. There were no pictures of the management on the site. Carl was not surprised.
The early part of Silom Road is where you can find Patpong Road. Patpong was the more famous red light district and was born in the latter part of the Vietnam War. Carl wondered how he had never crossed paths with this man, but in reality Carl had stopped being a permanent fixture at the bars of Patpong several years before Inman had arrived in Thailand. If Inman had been a regular visitor from Vietnam it would have been a few years prior to Carl’s arrival in Thailand. Carl was pleased with the information he had gathered. It was enough for him to get started.
Surveillance in Thailand never worked the way it was depicted in foreign films and television programs. It was typically a series of failures: watchers not getting where they were supposed to be at the correct time, losing the target in traffic, and not being able to enter the same places as the target due to their speech and dress reflecting their lowly place in Thai society. It was also relatively expensive. Surveillance was the only service that Carl had provided that led to demands of fees being refunded. Something Carl was loath to do, and rarely did.
Carl sometimes used a team of plain-clothes detectives from his local police station who would do a reasonable job of following someone, but they were expensive and clumsy, often putting them at risk of being spotted. So Carl opted for loose surveillance provided by a man he knew who had his own taxi. With the help of his son, he could tail almost anybody. The taxi was never noticed among all the other taxis on Bangkok’s streets and the son was there to jump out and follow on foot when necessary.
Carl telephoned his man and told him he had a printed picture, a home address from the ID card record and an office address and when could he start? Boonchoo said he could start immediately. He always said he could start immediately. Carl paid well and he liked people who appreciated it; not many do.
Next Carl called the colonel. Colonel Pornchai always behaved towards Carl as if he was doing him a favour as opposed to doing business. The colonel dragged his feet and complained about every requirement and Carl pretended he didn’t know he was paying double what he should. That was how the game was played and the men in uniform always had it their way, or they simply changed the rules. Carl understood the rules and had learnt to play the game well.
He didn’t mind paying more money to the colonel instead of contacting his less expensive immigration contact directly. It brought the colonel into the game and that gave Carl access to a larger network that could be called on for protection if needed. They were not the types to let anything happen to somebody foolish and naive enough to pay them double market price. They agreed on the inflated budget to check the immigration computer twice daily despite the colonel’s protestations of how difficult it was under the military government. Carl would be informed almost immediately the next time Somchai Poochokdee boarded a plane to Hong Kong or Macau.
Carl enlarged the target’s picture from the ID card record printout and hand wrote the relevant details, which he put in a brown envelope and took downstairs and gave to his maid telling her it was to be collected by Khun Boonchoo or his teenage son.
His maid was a hag and he allowed as little contact with her as possible. She had come with the rented house and as much as he wanted to get rid of her he assumed she had nowhere else to go. She had worked there for at least twenty years and was expecting to be there after Carl moved on. She took his tolerance as weakness and had become even more impossible to deal with. The thought of her sleeping under a bridge had started to appeal to him.
“You no nice to Thai lady. You no have wife you, because you no smile. You too old wait. Must marry. Thai lady very nice but only like man who smile.”
Although he was fluent in Thai she always spoke to him in her incoherent broken English. She was feigning concern for his lack of female company so she could act superior and remind him that all Thai people are better than foreigners. Carl did smile sometimes, just never when she was around.
He went back upstairs and spent the rest of Tuesday night lying on the sofa watching television. He fell peacefully asleep before midnight. He never remembered having bad dreams and had never been scared of the dark. A famous old Thai fortune-teller had claimed it was because the spirits enjoyed watching his antics and found him amusing, so they left him alone. Mind you; she also said he would be rich and famous after he turned forty. Nobody can be expected to be right about everything.
Chapter 7
Carl woke up Wednesday morning with the television still pouring out mediocrity. He turned it off and went quietly downstairs to the ground
floor trying to avoid his maid and get his morning espresso. The maid was waiting for him. She told him that the taxi driver had collected the documents and gave him another irritating lecture on why he should learn to smile and adopt a whole rice farming community by marrying one of its daughters. Carl was pleased to hear that the target was already under surveillance. He almost smiled.
He went up to the sitting room on the second floor and carried the coffee and the laptop computer outside where there was a table and a couple of chairs. Carl looked around the garden and pool and saw that it was empty as usual. He looked at the buildings towering over the oasis and wondered why nobody seemed to use it except for him and George. Thai people typically spend their entire day hiding from the sun. This is not an easy thing to do as the sun shines almost all of the time.
The online news was mostly about Thailand settling down to its version of normal life under a military government. There was one story that got Carl’s attention, the grief of the mother of one of the murdered girls. She had lost her temper at police inactivity and struck out at an unsympathetic junior police detective and been arrested for assault. She had been let go hours later when wiser senior officers stepped in to appease the Thai language tabloids.
The old, not so quiet Americans had told Carl on his first visit to the bars of Patpong that if he was looking for sympathy in South-East Asia he could find it in the dictionary between ‘shit’ and ‘syphilis’. They told him that he had a fat chance of finding it anywhere else. At least some things could be relied on never to change. The family members of the killer’s young victims would be left permanently traumatized. There wouldn’t be any counselling and not much chance of any justice. They weren’t rich or important enough to justify any serious effort or expense.
