by Harlan Wolff
Carl was planning a lazy day hanging out at his temporary summer palace and doing as little as possible. That would make the day even better. As big as the house was Carl liked it best when it was just occupied by him and the birds. He was still very much a lone wolf.
Carl had two phone calls to make before he took the rest of the day off. The first was to his favourite journalist, Kenny Burns. He used to be Carl’s second favourite but with Mad Mike’s demise he had been promoted. Kenny Burns was from the school of the Cambodian Killing Fields and was totally fearless. Some of his friends had died in Cambodia back in the 1970s and he had survivor’s guilt that manifested itself in blindly walking into danger as long as he felt it newsworthy. He had a partner, Heinz Fogel, a German cameraman with an extremely large newsman’s camera that he had received in 1975 in payment for a debt from a Russian in Phnom Penn. It was the camera Carl wanted most. It would get plenty of attention.
Carl had not told George that he was planning to break their agreement of not switching any phones on at the house. There were things that George didn’t need to know about. He had seen a couple of new SIM cards in the shopping bags in the kitchen the previous night and he had put them on top of the fridge. Now he went and got one. Having inserted it into his phone he made the call. Carl was beginning to be careless but he knew it wasn’t going to be a problem. Things were moving fast enough now for Carl not to care about leaving some tracks behind him.
Carl had a very difficult job convincing Kenny that he should take his money to run the sham news story he was asking for. Journalist’s ethics and all that. But he was a friend and he eventually agreed. All Carl was hoping was that someone would speak enough English to understand the show that Kenny and Heinz would be putting on.
The second phone call was to Bart Barrows.
“Bart, it’s me,” he said, not using his own name intentionally. Special Branch probably listened to every call Bart made.
“Yeah,” Bart said.
“Bart, remember our deal. I want you to call that bloke and say this and only this, ‘That motherfucker of a PI is making a stink and there’s going to be trouble’.”
“That’s all you want?”
“That’s it.”
“Sounds like a pretty good horse trade to me.”
“I will call you again tomorrow with details of a time and a place for a meeting. I have a solution that I think will work for everybody. After that I’ll keep my promise.”
“It’s a good idea to be sensible and negotiate. Everything is a compromise in Thailand. I was worried you had forgotten,” Bart said unusually intelligently. He would always have his CIA hat on for Carl from then on.
Carl disconnected and switched off the phone by removing the battery. Why was Bart so keen on a peaceful settlement? Perhaps turning a blind eye to the activities of a low life like Anthony Inman to keep the general happy was sticking in his craw. Could Bart be an ally?
At midday Kenny and Heinz arrived at the building on Phetchburi Road and set up the giant camera. Kenny stood with the building as a backdrop and spoke loudly into the microphone in his hand.
“In this ordinary building that you see behind me shocking events have been occurring. In the next few days, stories of CIA operatives, senior military officers, gun running, drug trafficking, and murder will be revealed. Remember the building behind me and remember who brought you the news first. This is Jack Kerouac reporting from Bangkok.”
Later Kenny told Carl that people came out onto the street to see what was going on. Kenny, sweating profusely, complained about the light and sometimes complained about the sound as he repeated the report in front of his growing audience seven times. If anybody in the audience had looked closely they would have seen that the camera wasn’t switched on and hadn’t been for decades. After the seventh take Kenny and Heinz packed up the camera and left the scene of the crime.
By the late afternoon Carl had finished Death in the Afternoon and his hangover had retreated to a safe distance. He took a shower and listened to some Mozart. Carl did a few mental checks and took the gun out from under the mattress where he’d been keeping it. There were five bullets in it and he had no extra ammunition. Five bullets would have to be enough and he would have to live without target practice. It had been many years since Carl had held a pistol.
Carl didn’t like guns. He never had. They are made for one purpose and worshipped by the sort of people that Carl didn’t want as his neighbours. Getting older is a long series of compromises and he had experienced his fair share. Carl tucked the gun in the back of his jeans so it sat in the small of his back where a loose hanging shirt would easily hide it.
He went to the kitchen and made himself an omelette and a very large cup of coffee. He sat at a table beside the pond and under the shade of the deck. It was shelter from the sun and he felt closer to the animals down there. The swans looked at him suspiciously and the ducks moved to the other side of the pond. Carl’s peaceful place as a child had been a duck pond on a local common in south London. He used to go there in all weathers to think. The wooden house made him feel like a child again. He was going to be sorry to leave it.
Carl had made his decision on the inevitable outcome of his case a couple of days earlier. It was dangerous to second guess himself after he had committed to a course of action, but Carl grew up in England and that was typically what English people did. Things were destined to run their course and whatever the outcome there was no going back. Instructions had been given and George would be arranging everybody’s payments.
Anthony Inman had been CIA in Vietnam so there were most likely drugs somewhere in his past as well. He had made his fortune torturing people and then executing them if they couldn’t afford to pay him and his cronies. He must have enjoyed it because he took it up as a hobby and then made it part of his sex life. He had been involved in various criminal activities since his arrival in Thailand. Gun running Carl was aware of and he could guess at the rest. Inman had become Carl’s nemesis through serendipity and his own foolishness. Carl’s enemy was the worst foreigner in Thailand. He had never done things by halves.
Carl retrieved his old Blackberry from the bedroom and took it out to the deck where he placed it on the table and lit a cigar. After an hour of pondering the pungent smoke and the communication device he stubbed out the cigar and turned the Blackberry on. He watched it booting and downloading messages and emails. Then having confirmed it was working properly he took it into the bedroom and put it on the bedside table.
Carl went book hunting again and selected Burmese Days by George Orwell. He went back to the bedroom and lay down on the bed, having taken the gun from the small of his back and placed it on the bedside table. After an hour of reading he realized how little South-East Asia had changed in the last hundred years. Orwell’s world of drunken expatriates and venal bureaucrats rang lots of bells. He put the book on the side table and did something very uncharacteristic — he took a nap.
Chapter 25
The Cat and The Rat came after midnight pushing their motorcycle the last half-kilometre so as not to be heard. They hid the bike in the bushes not far from the large wooden gate and paused to take a smoky hit of speed burnt on tin foil. Since having to leave the army they had developed a taste for yah bah, crazy pills in English, and had both developed the sunken cheeks and vacant eyes of the habitual user. They checked their automatic pistols and military knives before climbing over the gate into the darkness.
They both landed quietly on the driveway, legs bent like springs as they had been taught by a stern sergeant major prior to being pushed out of an airplane during their military training. Having read the terrain they both went left into the orchard and hid amongst its trees while their eyes became acclimatized to the pitch black provided by the canopy of branches and leaves that kept out the light from the moon and the stars.
In the distance they were relieved to see lights on at the house telling them that he was there. They slowly made the
ir way through the orchard. When they got close to the house they saw there was an open lawn between them and the side of the house. This open area was well lit by the moon and the lights coming from the windows of the house.
“We must cross it,” the Cat told the Rat.
“Together and quickly,” the Rat whispered.
They both moved rapidly carrying the top half of their bodies low until they reached the teak house. They stood with their backs to the house listening for any tell-tale sound that would mean they had been seen crossing the open lawn. No sound came.
“Look how this farang lives, like a prince. I will enjoy killing him,” the Rat whispered in the Cat’s ear. The Cat smiled.
They made their way slowly around the house to the back where the pond was and slid along the wall under the deck to the back door, which they were pleased to find was open. The Cat looked through the crack at the side of the door and signalled that Carl wasn’t downstairs. They entered the house with the stealth that had become their second nature. After checking there was nobody in the kitchen they slowly began to creep up the wooden stairs.
The second floor was well lit and there was a half-finished whiskey bottle and an empty glass on a round table at the centre of the landing between the three bedroom doors. Only one of the bedrooms had lights on but they quietly checked the two dark bedrooms as they had been trained. Having confirmed they were empty they took up positions on each side of the occupied bedroom door.
They communicated by hand signals then opened the door and went in together, one high one low, with guns drawn as they had been taught. The room was empty. There was the Blackberry with its signal that had led them to the house and an open book lying face down on the bedside table and there were clothes strewn on the floor but no Carl. The Cat and The Rat sat on the bed, guns casually on their laps but pointed at the door, and evaluated their situation.
“Do you think he’s in the garden?” the Cat asked the Rat.
“We would have seen or heard him.”
“What do you think is going on?” the Cat asked.
“Who knows what these farangs do?”
“Let’s get out of here and kill him on the street tomorrow when he goes out.”
“Do we have enough stuff for a stakeout?”
“I have six pills.”
“OK. Then we will kill him tomorrow in daylight. Maybe the ghosts are protecting him here and that is why we can’t see him.”
“That is probably it. Only a stupid farang would live in a haunted house.”
Under their dark green military combat jackets and T-shirts they were both covered in the religious black ink tattoos that they believed protected them from all of the dangers of their chosen profession, the most important two of which were ghosts and bullets. The tattoos ran from their waists to their necks both front and back and had taken years of enduring pain from hand-tapped needles to complete. Their protective tattoos were the reason they had reluctantly agreed to enter the haunted house that had been made famous on television.
They slowly retraced their steps back down through the house and across the lawn to the orchard. They sat for a while and watched the house for any movement but there wasn’t any so they made their way through the orchard and climbed back over the gate.
“Where’re the pills?” the Rat asked. “I hate ghosts.”
“In the bike. I’ll get one for you.”
The Cat went to the bushes where they had stashed the bike and Carl walked out from the dense foliage and shot him in the chest. Carl kept walking forward firing at the Rat. He knew he wasn’t a great shot so he made sure he got closer every time he fired. He saw two out of three bullets hit him in the middle of his body and saw him drop like a stone. When he turned around he saw that the Cat was still alive, breathing bubbling red foam but trying to stand up. He walked back to where the Cat was trying to use the bike to pull himself up from the ground.
“Who are you? They said you were an ordinary person. How come you shot us?”
Carl put the gun to his head and said, “I’m very ordinary until people start killing my friends.” Then he shot him with his last bullet, point blank, and saw the brains vomited out of the back of his head.
Carl had spent the late evening digging a hole in the far corner of the orchard by the beam from a torch. It was back-breaking work and he hurt all over from it. He opened the gate and dragged the bodies one at a time and dumped them in the hole. Then he went and got the torch that he had placed on the ground behind their motorcycle, where he had been waiting for them to give up the hunt and do what was inevitable and return to their means of transportation. He closed the gate and walked back to the corner of the orchard and buried them by torchlight. Two hours later he patted down the earth and carried the shovel back to the house. He needed a drink badly but for a change the drink he craved was water.
He sat under the deck watching the swans and the fireflies and drank a litter of cold water straight from the bottle. The gun was on the round marble table beside him and he picked it up and threw it in the pond, much to the disapproval of the two swans. He had no more bullets and so the pistol was of no further use to him. The colonel had said it was untraceable so it would make no difference if it was found one day and linked to the bodies in the grave in the corner of the orchard.
Carl was counting on the bodies not being found for a long time, putting distance between him and his brief stay at the house. George had used an alias so given time they would not link a Hollywood film crew to the time of the shooting of two known assassins and there would be no way of putting Carl or George in the area. They probably wouldn’t try, as it would offend them to believe mere foreigners had killed such notorious assassins.
He closed up the house for the night and took a shower and went to bed. He was totally exhausted. He had had a very long day. As he was going to sleep he thought to himself that it was a good thing he was moving out the next day. It wasn’t that he hadn’t fallen in love with the place; he had. It was that it had suddenly occurred to him that if there weren’t any ghosts before there sure as hell were now!
Chapter 26
It was already noon when Carl heard the car coming up the dirt driveway. He had slept seven hours and was still in bed. He had been so sound asleep that even Pretty Boy Floyd had been unable to wake him in spite of giving it his best vocal effort to date. Carl rallied his aching body and went out to the deck. The clear blue sky and bright sun alleviated some of his aches and pains. It looked like it was a very nice day.
A few minutes later George came and sat at the table. He seemed excited.
“What’s up George?”
“Boonchoo went to the court building like you asked him to. This morning was his second day there. As you told him to expect, there were arguments over the application for a search warrant on the Phetchburi Road address. The drug squad boys were in and out of the court since yesterday afternoon. There were strange people sitting around since early this morning. They called someone on their phone and told them what was happening. Boonchoo said they must’ve been talking to someone very important. Lots of grovelling was taking place from what he could hear.”
“Good.”
“What does it mean?” George asked.
“It means they’ll be circling the wagons and so you have to tell the owner of the house that Hollywood is not interested at present. We are leaving today. I’m going to miss this place.”
“Where are we going?”
“It’s time to end this. Everything should be ready and there is work to be done. I assume everybody showed up and did what was asked?”
“They did.”
“How were Damien’s Finns?”
“Speaking techno babble in three languages as usual.”
“You paid them well?”
“Just like you told me to. It may not have been necessary; they are still grateful for what you did for them with their visa problem at immigration.”
“It is always impor
tant to pay people well.”
“Maybe that’s why you are always broke.”
“And Damien doesn’t know what they are doing?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Not that it would make much difference,” Carl said. “Better for him if he doesn’t know.”
“They’re professionals and have IQs through the roof. They said they could meet your time requirements and I saw no reason to doubt them. They said to tell you not to worry, they won’t let you down.”
“That’s good. Then we need to pack up and leave. We’ll wipe the house down for fingerprints before we go.”
“Is that necessary?” George asked.
“You can never be too careful,” Carl told him and went to the bedroom to pack his belongings back into their shopping bags. He wasn’t going to tell George about his revenge on the two assassins. The trick to getting away with murder is not telling anybody.
They left the house late that afternoon. Carl watched through the rear window of the car until he couldn’t see the Thai roof any more. After a while the car left the rough laterite and they were driving on smoother asphalt. The car was making good time towards Bangkok. When they reached the early evening traffic on the outskirts of the city their progress slowed to a snail’s pace. Carl wasn’t worried about the gridlock. He knew that they had plenty of time.
He picked up his phone and called Bart Barrows.
“You need to get General Amnuay to Inman’s old office on Phetchburi Road tonight at midnight. You can tell him that I’m ready to make a deal. If he doesn’t show up tell him he will be able to find me at the Foreign Correspondents Club buying drinks for foreign journalists.”
“What makes you so sure I can get him there?” Bart asked.
