by Harlan Wolff
Carl checked his email account and saw a confirmation mail from his Singapore bank telling him that twenty thousand dollars had been transferred from a bank in Latvia on behalf of a company called Victory Holdings. Apart from that glorious news all that he found in the inbox was the usual annoying advertisements and a pleasant message from an ex-girlfriend in creative advertising telling him that Alcoholics Anonymous had saved her and how it could save him too. Claiming she was still entitled to an opinion was her creative version of stalking.
All he could think of to say to her was how he belonged to a group he had created himself and had aptly named Alcoholics Unanimous. The solitary rule of this group was that, should any member not feel like having a drink, it was the responsibility of all of the other members to call him up and talk him into it. He didn’t write the email. He never responded to invitations from his past. Life is about moving forward, always forward. That was the theory anyway. He thought it commendable that she had given up drinking. He would have been more impressed if she had given up evangelism.
Carl went into the house to get his phone. It was his habit to leave it upstairs in his bedroom for a while every morning. He had always found it best not to attempt speech in any language until after his second cup of coffee of the day. There were no messages on the phone and he had already seen his emails. Carl called the client’s mobile but there was no answer.
Carl took the computer into the air-conditioned office and performed a deeper Google search of old newspaper stories. There was a story that stated the police were questioning fellow students in order to locate the latest victim’s ex-boyfriend, their prime suspect. They had not taken into consideration the fact that many students moonlighted as cocktail waitresses and massage girls to engage in prostitution as a way to finance a normal lifestyle.
Carl assumed that the police were aware that a lot of the students sold sex. He would have been shocked if they hadn’t known. Most of the policemen he had met over the years had slept with enough of them. Unfortunately, if the choice was to have an unsolved murder versus making an admission of the existence of such a sex industry in Thailand, then the decision was preordained. Thailand was not in the habit of peeling back the shiny silk cloth that covered its underbelly and allowing a peek at the eczema underneath.
The next thing he did was type in Somchai Poochokdee. There were no pictures of him, which didn’t surprise Carl. He found a few press releases describing expanding real estate markets and charitable donations. It was an annoyingly superficial portrait of a respectable businessman. One positive find was a business article that included his office address, which Carl had already, and his mobile phone number, which Carl didn’t.
Carl immediately sent a message to the colonel asking for a billing record of the phone number. This would take a few days, as the police would have to send an official request in writing to the phone company before they would release the information. He then sent him another message suggesting they meet at the club at midnight. He didn’t suggest an earlier time as nobody went there early.
George had entered the house through the door on the ground floor, which was where the kitchen was and the maid and the espresso machine lived. The maid liked George so he always climbed the stairs to the second floor with an espresso in his hand. Carl noted that George’s coffee had a perfect head of brown foam, unlike the ones Carl usually got. He sat down in the armchair beside Carl’s desk in the small office and sipped his espresso. He pointed at an eight by ten picture on the bookshelf behind Carl’s chair. The photograph was mounted in an expensive wooden frame. It was a professional shot of an attractive black woman standing in front of a grand piano singing into a microphone.
“How is that going?” George asked.
“Not so well. I call that picture Bye Bye Blackbird.”
“You don’t want her to hear you saying that,” George told him.
“Therein lies the problem.”
“You think it didn’t work out because she was black?” George asked.
“No, not that. The reason it didn’t work out was because she was American.”
“So you are still against political correctness?”
“Of course I am, it is a con. Fake politeness is not flattering, it is patronizing. If a black person walked in here now are we supposed to put a governor on our conversation? That, George, would make us racists by default.”
“It’s America, Carl. The way things are.”
“I don’t have to behave like that and I sure as hell don’t have to agree with it.”
“Bye Bye Blackbird is actually quite funny,” George said with a smile.
“It would be even funnier if it didn’t need to be analysed and dissected before we dared reach that opinion.”
“Do you miss her?” George asked. Carl didn’t answer.
Carl brought him up to speed on the case details and the recent developments. George gave him a rundown on what he knew about the CIA in Vietnam, which turned out to be a lot. He said that he had met some good ones. He called them ‘America’s Dream Team’ due to their high educations and strong beliefs.
He also spoke of a different sort. Men who’d turned the American dream into a nightmare. George said, “They were the corrupt leading the corrupt. Zealots for an imperial Christian America, with the sole purpose of making them and companies back home lots of money.”
George looked around at the old books, oil paintings, worn Persian rugs, and the loudspeakers the size of wardrobes and amplifier from the industrial revolution. He squinted his eyes appearing embarrassed, then looked at the woman in the picture and asked, “She always asked me why you surround yourself with old things, I always wondered about your addiction to nostalgia too.”
Carl pondered for a while and then said, “My theory, for your ears only, is that when a man doesn’t know who he is then he goes back to the time when he thinks he did.”
“Looking around this room, that would make you over a hundred years old.”
“I hope you are not listening to the maid’s theory of reincarnation. She thinks I am a born again arsehole.”
George smiled, finished his coffee, and left by the door from the sitting room to the swimming pool area. Carl spent the rest of the day listening to music and reading the history of Beirut. Recently he listened only to classical music as his passion for jazz was not working any more.
A few kilometres from where Carl lived, Anthony Inman alias James Peabody alias Somchai Poochokdee was not having a good day. He was watching his prey taking her final tortured breaths but he had not enjoyed the process. This was the first time he was not excited by the metallic smell of bloody death or the faeces and urine smell of terror. The bitch had been too courageous and he had not felt the total control over her that would have been the climax of his art.
The little slut had still been spitting blood at him up until a few minutes before she had collapsed. She would die without total capitulation and that had made him very angry. “Fucking little cunt,” he shouted at her loudly but she could no longer hear him.
She had called him pathetic so he had stuck a stiletto blade in her soft belly and she had screamed even louder. Somehow, between the screams, she had told him he was a limp-dicked sexual inadequate. All in perfect English too. So he had cut off one of the cunt’s tits and she had spat blood on him, like a wild animal. She must have bitten off part of her tongue from the agony.
Then he had lost his temper. That was wrong. He’d never lost his temper before. He had gone a little crazy and stabbed her several times with the stiletto. That was why she was dying too quickly and he had wasted hours on her for nothing. “Fuck that,” he said aloud again. Nobody was there to hear him and she had died, she was quiet now. He looked down at her with disgust. “Useless fucking cunt.”
He left her on the floor and went to the bathroom to take a shower. He was covered in blood, her blood, that cunt’s blood. He would leave her there and go home. He could come back the next day an
d clean up. Nobody would find her in the meantime. This was his safe place.
He hated her so much that he couldn’t stand the thought of being in the same car with her. Never mind, he told himself. Tomorrow he would be better able to deal with it.
He put on some clean clothes and combed his hair with pomade to smooth it and allow a neat side parting. He would go home to tell his wife and daughter that it had been a very bad day. He would tell them how an awful tramp with a tattoo and without the good manners to wear a bra or dress decently had said offensive things to him, and how he had nearly lost his temper.
They would look after him and make sympathetic noises. He would get a foot massage and a glass of aged tequila. They had always looked after him well and he felt blessed to have them. Perhaps he would use it as leverage to get a family Scrabble game going. Anthony Inman alias James Peabody alias Somchai Poochokdee liked playing Scrabble with his family.
Carl arrived at the club just after midnight. The club was a large elevated tubular building with somewhere in the region of a thousand people crushed together inside and queues outside. He had got the colonel the job running the security and put him in charge of keeping the authorities at bay with various financial incentive plans. Carl walked up the steps and was greeted by the bouncers who passed him through the red-roped area, much to the disgust of the long queue of hopeful patrons. He smiled at the girls on the reception desk as he walked past them and they put their hands together and raised them to their faces in the customary wai of respectful greeting.
Carl entered the modern music and light show by a sliding door that was supposed to protect the neighbouring buildings from the club’s noise, but it spent as much time open as it did closed. Fortunately the first section of the bar nearest the door was reserved for the colonel as usual, so Carl didn’t have to fight through the crowd. A bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a bucket of ice, and bottles of soda were already waiting on the section of the bar nearest to the door. He didn’t wait for one of the pretty staff to come over but poured a drink from the bottle and waited for the colonel. The colonel was always fashionably late.
Carl looked around at the all-white room. The first time Carl had met the management was prior to their grand opening to discuss the need for a marriage between security and the local police. He had asked them why everything was all white and had been told in all seriousness that the nightclub was the canvas and the guests were the subject matter. Carl thought it was the last place on earth he wanted to be; there were no shadows anywhere.
The customers were models, trendy tourists, chic secretaries and the children of the rich. Some of the girls were semi-nude in their choice of high fashion and looked wonderful. For this reason Carl found it hard to dislike the place in spite of his incompatibility and the fact that it made him feel old.
The colonel eventually arrived with several young women following behind him and they all took up position at the bar. Viyada was the colonel’s long-time girlfriend and chief accountant so she outranked the others and always took charge of pouring everybody’s drinks.
Carl and the colonel had known each other almost twenty years. They had been involved in some serious situations and complicated cases together over the years. They had once had a gang of Nigerien conmen after them. The gang wanted their heads and not their wallets. After a dangerous battle of wits the gang was prosecuted and put in prison and the streets had become theirs again. The relationship was that of two people who had fought a few wars together. They didn’t make a big fuss about money in their dealings but it was a business and money was the oil in their relationship, so Carl gave him an envelope with thirty thousand baht in it and said, “Tell me when you need more.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I already paid immigration and I gave some to the captain for retrieving the phone record. What’s this case?”
“A seventy year old runaway. Missing person. Client is the elder brother.”
“As long as they pay the bills,” he said laughing.
Various people came up to them and they spent the next couple of hours as regular people out for a drink on a work night. Gossip and voyeurism is not the worst way to spend the a.m.
A Russian model with her eye on access to some power and possibly a fast-tracked visa extension turned her charm on Carl. She was beautiful and spoke a little English with a strong Russian accent. She was Hollywood fluff, a Bond girl inclusive of the long legs, tits, and rounded arse. She even came with a sensual enemy accent. A private detective’s dream girl but unfortunately she was probably sixteen years old.
Carl knew the agencies in Russia would send young girls to Thailand as models and provide them with altered dates of birth claiming them to be much older than they actually were. The young models were much easier to sell so it was common practice. Carl politely made it clear that he wasn’t interested. She went off in search of another person who could protect her. She was far too young and rare to be out so late on her own.
It was one of those moments when Carl cursed his seriousness and career choices. The ancient Greeks had been right when they said that knowledge could make you miserable. Better a little misery than the self-disgust that comes from behaving in a manner that stops you from being able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning. That’s what Carl frequently told himself and it seemed to help.
He still watched her naked back as she walked away though. He could just see the start of her muscular buttocks where the sunken back of her dress bounced as she walked. The colonel shook his head in disbelief at what he saw as Carl’s old-fashioned foolishness. The colonel hated seeing a missed opportunity.
By two o’clock everybody was suitably drunk and the colonel and Carl moved off to one side.
“I need something and you won’t like it,” Carl told him.
“Not the first time. What is it?”he said smiling.
“I need case details on the student murders. I think the police are way off on their investigation. It is probably a foreigner and I may be able to point them in the right direction.”
“They won’t give that out. You are talking crazy.” He was not happy but Carl had known that he wouldn’t be.
“It is being handled by Crime Suppression. You have friends there. Just invite them here for a drink and bring it up in conversation after you have plied them with enough to make them drunk. The police are famous for being indiscreet when they’re drunk so they’ll tell you everything.”
“We have an agreement not to interfere in active police investigations. Have you forgotten? Where’s the profit in this?”
“I know, but I really need to know what is going on,” Carl said casually.
“You must be drunk to be talking such stupid things,” he exclaimed. “We should talk about it tomorrow.”
“Ok. Tomorrow when we are sober.”
The problem was solved. By the following day the colonel would do what Carl had asked. When he was sober he would not admit that there was anything he couldn’t do. He always came through for Carl but made a point of letting him know how much trouble it would cause him. He couldn’t help it; he always went for the leverage. Leverage gets paid more. Carl claimed drunkenness and took his leave of the colonel and his harem.
Chapter 8
Carl drove the car a hundred meters and turned left. There was no point in letting the colonel know that he was happier drinking alone in the club around the corner. In Thailand people hunted in packs and Carl’s lone wolf moments were beyond their comprehension. It didn’t matter that they didn’t understand him. He had ceased needing their approval long ago. Carl never followed the crowd for fear of getting lost in it.
If the colonel had known where he was going and that he would rather go there on his own he would have felt a loss of face, which is something that is taken very seriously in Thailand. Face was a big part of being Thai but remained an enigma to foreigners.
Carl had once been asked to explain ‘Thainess’, which had become the fashionable wo
rd to explain everything that was unexplainable to expatriates and tourists. He answered that the foundation of ‘Thainess’ was a desperate ambition to make it from birth to cremation without encountering serious embarrassment. He knew it was an oversimplification and therefore he was doing the Thai people an injustice but the audience had loved it. Carl played to his audiences and knew that they liked the shorter answers.
When the parking boys around the corner saw his Porsche they started shoving cars around until there was a big enough space for him to park. They usually required people to leave their car keys but Carl never did. He handed them a red hundred baht note and went to the back of the building. There were queues of people at the front door and an entry fee so he went through the back door. Carl used a lot of back doors.
Bar on Eleven was very busy and the customers were wall to wall. The club was constructed of smooth grey concrete. The walls were thick to keep in the noise, which made the outside of the building resemble a Second World War pillbox. The ground floor had a DJ and the music to match. The second floor was more laid back. It was not Carl’s kind of music but the downstairs was a mix of actresses, models and high-class prostitutes so he sometimes put up with the noise.
He found a space at the bar that was big enough to stand in as long as he kept his elbows tucked in. Carl made a cramped hand signal for a drink and looked around the bar. The usual crowd was there, plus some ordinary people playing at being movie stars. Men with dyed hair and Botox faces wearing skin-tight Versace shirts and looking for the best love that money can buy. The women had spent the whole afternoon and early evening preparing their appearance in the hope that they might get noticed and win the lottery of life and get somebody to buy them a house. If it was all so wonderful why did so many of them ended up so miserable? Carl knew that they weren’t all as happy as they pretended to be. Some of them had been his clients.
