by Harlan Wolff
“Beware of nostalgia,” Carl told him, “it’s not what it used to be.”
They were sitting three in a row on the bench seat of Clouseau’s rattling old diesel pickup truck. Clouseau was driving, George was in the middle, and Carl was pushed up against the passenger door. There were no seatbelts, and Carl had spent the thousand bumpy kilometres in the knowledge that if the faulty lock on the door disengaged, he would have been a goner. Belts had been compulsory on all vehicles for over a decade, but Clouseau was a policeman and policemen weren’t concerned with the law. Clouseau had insisted on driving them to Bangkok because as he told George, he was worried the major might be out sprinkling speed pills again. Major Yodsak had not been shy about telling people that he had it in for Carl.
Carl had waited to thank Clouseau for the ride until after they arrived at their destination safe and sound. There was much to think about: the lack of springs and shock absorbers for a start, faulty brakes, worn tires well past their expiry date, and not to forget the ten-wheel truck that had almost ended Carl’s legal problems just outside Surat Thani. That had been a close call, and he still couldn’t work out how a head-on crash had been avoided. Carl had instinctively put both feet against the dashboard and pressed both hands on the roof, ready for what was coming, George yelled “shiiiiit” as loud as he could - then it was over. Clouseau spun the steering wheel with one hand, the other dangling nonchalantly outside the open window, and then they were past the danger and straightening up in their seats as they bounced on down the road like there had never been a ten-wheel truck in their way. Carl couldn’t decide if Clouseau was an excellent driver or a terrible one. Such questions walked a very fine line in Thailand.
Once they’d passed the tollgate to the elevated expressway just outside Bangkok, Carl breathed a sigh of relief and, untypically euphoric over still finding himself in the land of the living, leaned across George and squeezed the policeman’s arm. “You are a star my friend,” he said, and Clouseau smiled broadly. Carl continued, “Welcome home Clouseau, and don’t forget you’re one of us now.”
“What do we do now, it’s almost midnight?” Clouseau asked, beaming.
“You don’t know?” George said, laughing.
“What do you mean?” Clouseau asked.
“Tell him, Carl.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Carl said.
“Where are we going then, Carl?” George asked, laughing.
“Well, after all the day’s excitement I could really do with a drink,” Carl said.
“So now you know,” George told Clouseau.
Clouseau gave a big grin and asked, “Can we go somewhere with girls? Both of my wives are giving me a hard time, and I’d like to talk to a woman who isn’t angry at me.”
“For you Clouseau; anything you want,” Carl said as he looked down from the expressway at the streets rushing by below; streets he knew so well.
“And Carl knows bars where some of the girls smile at both ends. Mind you, the way he throws his money around, they damn well should,” George said.
Carl reached over and fiddled with the radio, and found his favourite station. The song was Many Rivers to Cross by Joe Cocker. Carl turned up the volume, and the truck bounced along the expressway, and into the Bangkok night.
CHAPTER 10
“The piano has been drinking, not me.”
– Tom Waits
The White Tiger could be found in the middle of the infamous alleyway of bars called Soi Cowboy. Its neglected interior was home to the city’s lost souls and career alcoholics. Once inside, it reeked of fug, dead cockroaches, and spilt beer. Like an acid flashback to the seventies, the mood was created by light bulbs behind scratched red and yellow Perspex (there were no windows). The floor was a patchwork of felt carpet tiles that had been replaced over the years by whatever colours were available. Sixteen barstools and eight red leatherette booths had been repaired with duct tape, and country and western music blaring from loudspeakers encouraged chubby lethargic go-go dancers to occasionally shift their weight from one leg to the other like flightless birds in a curious mating ritual. On the brickwork out front, above and to the left of the door, was a small sign: 11/33 Sukhumvit Soi 23, Carl’s official address in Thailand.
The three men walked into the White Tiger just before midnight and, seeing Carl, the mama-san became animated and rushed toward him yelling, “You crazy motherfucker, where you been? So long time, so long.”
Carl and the boys sat down at the bar, and the mama-san clucked and fussed around them. She clicked her fingers and the scantily dressed women, napping in the booths, first raised their heads to see what was occurring, and then slowly emerged from their cocoons until they had surrounded the three men at the bar. The commissions on the drinks Carl was going to buy them would pay for tomorrow’s noodles, and none of them wanted to miss out. The cost of being Carl Engel was damnable, but he had nobody to blame but himself.
“Before we all get drunk I need to ask you for something,” Carl told the mama-san, “I will need you to keep any mail that comes for me. There will be things coming to this address for me, and it’s important I get them. Also, let me know if anybody comes around here asking questions about me.”
“You got trouble again?” she asked.
“I’ve been in trouble all my life,” Carl told her.
“For you, I do anything,” she said trying to pull a bad-girl face for him. A naughty look, flirty and impish, a plea to the universe that time be stopped, and the decades erased. Carl had known her intimately, but that had been over thirty years ago, and Carl wasn’t going back there. Her transition from nymph to fat mama-san had been a complete success. She adored Carl because he was one of the very few that had been around long enough to remember she had once been young and beautiful. On this transient street where few things lasted longer than a thirty-day tourist visa, the fat mama-san clung to the belief that somewhere in Carl’s head that fit, bubbly, optimistic young girl still danced naked for him. She always thought of herself as that young girl, not as the fat mama-san, and she still carried herself with the same confidence and poise she had back then when all the men that came through the door of the White Tiger desired her more than the other girls. Carl was the last surviving witness to her long lost acrobatic sex life, so she was happiest whenever he was around. If she had known that he rarely thought of her, and when he did he struggled to remember what she had looked like, it would have broken her heart. Of all the women Carl had slept with, or seen without their clothes on, there were only a few that haunted his memory, and the mama-san wasn’t on the list.
“Can you pick a girl for my friend; white skin and baby doll looks?” Carl had a pretty good picture of Clouseau’s taste in women.
A girl from the North was found and brought to Clouseau. She looked about sixteen, but Carl knew she was actually twenty-two and had been around for a while. Her name was Joy, and she knew all the ropes and would have no problem keeping Clouseau happy for a day or two. Joy jumped on Clouseau’s lap and threw both arms around his neck. She wiggled her crotch on his leg and kissed him on the cheek. Clouseau looked pleased, and that was good, Carl needed to keep him in Bangkok for a while.
“Get all the girls a drink,” Carl told the mama-san, with his hand above his head, index finger making fast circles in the air like a cowboy signalling riders to move in and herd cattle.
“For me too? If you not going to fuck me, you buy me drink instead,” the fat mama-san told him.
“Don’t I always get you drunk?”
“But you not come for long time,” the mama-san said, in a way that suggested nobody had been buying her drinks lately.
Carl made sure the drinks kept coming, and that the mama-san got plenty. Carl was back in town, and he was feeling good. Now, all he had to do was stay out of jail long enough to enjoy himself. Around two in the morning, with everybody in the bar the worse for wear, the fat mama-san dragged Carl over to a booth in the corner. Leaning across the
damaged Formica table so she wouldn’t be overheard, she whispered, “Bartender say you murder your wife. She show me on Twitter.”
“I didn’t murder anybody, and anyway, she wasn’t my wife.”
“But it say you kill foreign woman.”
“Twitter also says Donald Trump is a stable genius.”
“How I know what true? You a gangster, and you got policeman following you ‘round again.”
“That policeman is not following me, he’s a friend of mine. And I’m not a gangster, and neither is he.”
“All police are gangsters. You know that.”
“Not this one, and I didn’t murder anybody.”
“But, how I know that?”
“You know because it’s me. You know me. You don’t know the person posting on Twitter.”
“So, you no murder your wife?”
“I didn’t murder any of my wives. Not even the ones that deserved it.”
“That good,” she told him. “All men come here look like they kill their wife, how I know?”
“No, you don’t, but you’ve known me for a long time. You knew me before Twitter was invented. Now, shall we go back to the bar, I need a drink?”
“OK,” she told him.
“OK then,” Carl said.
Clouseau drove the pick-up truck to the Sukhumvit Grande hotel at three in the morning, with Joy sitting on Carl’s lap, drunk and flirtatious. Carl had declined the offers from the other girls but now, bouncing along Sukhumvit road in the pick-up truck with Joy on his lap he was regretting his decision and felt like going back to grab himself some company, any company would do. But he didn’t go back.
The Sukhumvit Grande had been his office, regular meeting place, and refuge when he had been a private investigator in Bangkok. Carl asked for three regular rooms and told the girl behind the counter to put everything on his bill. The front desk and the security all knew him, so the receptionist gave him a VIP fast check-in, despite not having reservations, and how drunk they all obviously were. When Carl got upstairs, he took a bottle of whisky from the minibar, and he half filled a glass and lay on the bed with it balanced on his chest. Now he was alone in his room the demons were active again, and it was going to require him getting far drunker than he already was if he was to get any sleep.
CHAPTER 11
“Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.”
– Adlai Stevenson
There was a knock on the door, and Carl looked at his watch and saw it was eight o’clock in the morning. He had fallen asleep with a glass of whisky balanced on his chest, and it had fallen off during the night and left a light brown stain in the middle of the empty side of the king size bed. He got up, still in yesterday’s clothes and went to open the door.
Standing in the doorway was Jack Burke with the morning newspaper in his hand. Jack was head of hotel security, a loyal British soldier through and through; ex-Cyprus, ex-Northern Ireland, ex-Gulf War (the first one), and ex-Afghanistan, retired. Old friend, and to Carl’s perpetual annoyance, always dressed as a colonial twat, in a short-sleeved white shirt and regimental tie with a tie clip. There was talk going around that Jack slept with a photo of the queen under his pillow, and Carl knew the whole story because he had started the rumour.
“What’s all this then?” Jack asked, holding up the newspaper.
The front page carried the story of Nadia’s murder with a photograph of Carl as the only suspect.
“She wasn’t Russian, she was Serbian,” Carl told him as he turned his back and walked into the room followed close behind by Jack.
“That’s hardly the bloody point,” Jack said as he threw the newspaper on the table. “Bloody hell Carl, this room smells like a distillery.”
“I didn’t kill her, Jack. Sure, I was living with her, but I didn’t murder her. Of course I bloody well didn’t. For fuck’s sake Jack I was miles away at the time, not even on the island, George was with me all the time.”
“That changes everything. The poor girl was living with you? Have the police considered suicide?”
“I’m not laughing, Jack.”
“It says here, you had been arguing with her after several months together in a troubled relationship?”
“She was a troubled woman. All my women have been troubled women. Show me a woman in Bangkok who isn’t troubled! I didn’t bloody well kill any of them, did I?”
“I told our general manager that it couldn’t be true. He’s still no fan of yours though, and he said we shouldn’t have a murderer staying at our hotel.”
“Alleged murderer, alleged! Just because the police would rather accuse the boyfriend than do a proper investigation, it doesn’t make it true.”
“So what do I tell the GM? He still doesn’t like you.”
“Tell him what he deserves, tell him to go fuck himself.”
“Are you going to be alright?” Jack asked.
“That depends what happens when I find the cunts that killed her.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You could keep that Swiss Nazi, Freysinger off my back.”
“I’ll try, but he’s in charge around here.”
“Do the best you can Jack, tell him I’m up here shagging the owner’s sister if you want.”
“And I’ll tell housekeeping to change the bedding. You can get drunk breathing in here,” Jack said as he left, closing the door behind him.
Carl took a shower and put on fresh clothes, and went downstairs. His island attire was not suitable for Bangkok so he would ask George to get his clothes out of storage. After breakfast, he’d go pick up his car; reclaiming a part of his old life was one positive thing he could do while the rest of his life went to hell.
That afternoon Carl drove back to the hotel in his red 1977 Porsche and parked it in one of the VIP spaces fully aware that would upset the general manager, Freysinger. The garage that had looked after his car for the last year had kept it in good working order; they’d charged plenty for the service, but Carl hadn’t been in the mood for an argument, because he knew a good mechanic in Bangkok was as rare as rocking horse shit.
Up in his room, Carl found two suitcases at the bottom of the bed. George had put all Carl’s household goods in storage before he followed him to the island, so he had spent the morning signing papers and paying storage fees. Carl changed into a Canali shirt and some light cotton twill Zegna trousers. Then he rummaged through the second suitcase until he found his comfortable Aldo Brue leather moccasins. In a zip pocket, hidden amongst some socks, was his Girard-Perregaux watch. He found the wristwatch, wound it, and set it to the right time. Then a final rummage gave up the bags greatest treasure: a medium size briar pipe, and an unopened tin of Dunhill London Mixture.
He had scheduled a meeting in the library with Colonel Pornchai for four o’clock, and it was time to go. He found the colonel sitting in the far corner of the hotel library looking uncomfortable. He was in his uniform and fiddling with both of his telephones.
“What’s up with you? You look as nervous as a whore in church.”
“You’re all over the newspapers. I mustn’t be photographed with you,” the colonel told him.
“That’s why I picked this place. We’ll be alright here. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry? Nowhere is safe! Not since they put cameras in mobile phones. Now everybody thinks they’re a private detective or worse, a journalist.”
“Another reason I want to retire.”
“You’re too young to retire, and I need you to get the business back on track. My wives and car payments are killing me.” The colonel’s love of small women and big cars was no secret.
“I’m back now, so there’ll be money coming in again,” Carl told him.
“Good, when do we start?”
“First you need to keep me out of prison.”
“I have a friend of mine, he’s the chief of the station, and I gave him a call. He do
esn’t think you did it, but the case is in the hands of a major, and it would look bad for my friend to interfere. Nobody likes this major but he is protected, so they mostly leave him alone. He runs security on the underground casino down there. The casino is owned by the local member-of-parliament, and that makes the major hard for my friend to control.”
“Can we get the case reassigned to someone else?” Carl asked.
“No chance. My friend won’t get in an argument with him. The last chief did and got moved to a post where he has to live only on his salary, and you know what that means.”
“Yeah, it means he’s completely fucked.”
“Exactly!”
“Did you get any phone numbers for me?” Carl asked.
The colonel took a bunch of papers out of his pocket and put them on the table. There were two mobile numbers handwritten at the top of the first page and a photocopy of Nadia’s passport.
“Where did you get the passport stuff from? I assume you got it from the hotel. Or rather, Gop did.”
“It was the hotel,” he said.
“What about these phone numbers?” Carl asked pointing at the scribbled numbers at the top of the first piece of paper.
“These are the only two numbers that logged on and then off the towers during the time you asked about. They weren’t on the island before that time and disappeared after. The top one is a pre-paid phone card, but the bottom one is a regular number registered to a company called Milos Holdings (Thailand) Company Limited.”
“Do we have an address?”
“It’s written on the back of the paper.”
“Thanks.” Carl folded the papers and put them in his pocket.
“I want you to make contact with the prosecutor’s office in Trang province,” Carl said softly, leaning forward so they would be sure nobody could hear.
“Buy the right person a Rolex watch and tell him we need a very good friend.”
“You seem to have a lot of money since I saw you last,” the colonel said, with more than a little interest.