A Farewell to Paradise

by Harlan Wolff

  “I’ll need some more money,” the colonel told him as soon as they had their drinks in their hands.

  “I’ve got some in the hotel, I’ll sort it out when you drop me off.”

  “Alright, but I’ll need at least three hundred thousand.”

  “That’s OK, I have no illusions about what things cost. I don’t mind paying if it means I don’t have to go to court.”

  “You will need to be patient, you know how long these things take,” the colonel told him.

  “There’s a slight change of plan,” Carl told him. “I need a couple of weeks without having to show up and answer any more questions. If you can keep everybody off my back for the next two weeks, then I think everything will be alright.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “I have a plan.”

  “You always have a plan,” the colonel said.

  “What will it take to make sure I don’t get disturbed by the major for a while?”

  “I can get my friends to slow down the paperwork, and I can get the prosecutor to help too.”

  “And the major’s brother-in-law won’t be a problem?” Carl said.

  “That doesn’t matter, money still talks. Two weeks shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Good,” Carl said.

  “I’ll need five hundred thousand though,” the colonel told him, fishing for a bigger budget.

  “Done,” Carl said. “There’s one more thing I need you to do too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need your office to issue arrest warrants on the two Serbians, Scarface and his pal.”

  “How do you expect me to do that?”

  “You’re Crime Suppression, so you can make an organised crime case. Fabricate an informant who tells you the Serbian Mafia are setting up in Thailand. Let your investigation lead you South to where two of the gang have already committed murder. Just enough for you to issue arrest warrants for them. We can worry about everything else later.”

  “That’s a bad plan. What’s the point of issuing arrest warrants when the suspects aren’t here anymore?”

  “I think they’ll come back,” Carl said.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Just a hunch,” Carl said with a smile.

  “That’s a stupid hunch,” the colonel said.

  “Humour me anyway,” Carl told him.

  “Look,” the colonel said, “I’ve known you a long time. Long enough to know that even though you sound crazy, your plans have a habit of working out. How? I don’t know, but they do. So this time, I’m not going to argue with you, I’m just going to hope you know what you are doing.”

  “I hope so too.”

  “I can’t run the case myself, because I’m linked to you, so I’ll have to get somebody in the next building to do it. I have a man who always needs money. Gambling problems and young women,” the colonel said.

  “That’s fine.”

  “I’ll offer him three hundred thousand, a hundred up front and two hundred more when he delivers the arrest warrants.”

  “That’s fine too. And I can help. I have a good man on the island. A policeman. We can use him to provide the witnesses you will need, and he can bring them to Bangkok to make statements identifying the two Serbians as the killers that showed up on the beach without anybody in the local station hearing about it.”

  “Are there witnesses?”

  “If my sergeant tells them it’s for me, I think there are people who will say what’s needed.”

  “It seems you’ve thought of everything,” the colonel said.

  “I will give you eight-hundred thousand tonight, five hundred for what you need to do and three hundred for your man to get the arrest warrants, and then I’ll go and do what I have to do and rely on you to take care of everything. I’m going to be busy and may be difficult to reach.”

  “How come you’ve got lots of money to throw around? What have you been up to?” the colonel asked, wondering what he’d been missing out on. He was pleased though, thrilled with the night because he had a healthy profit built into the eight hundred thousand baht. He didn’t even mind that Carl didn’t answer his question about where it was coming from.

  When they got back to the hotel, it was late, and Carl went up to the room and took eight stacks of money out of the safe and put them in a large envelope. He went back downstairs and handed the fat envelope through the car window. The colonel looked at it like it might bite him then he shoved it under his seat.

  Carl went for a nightcap at the bar in the basement of the hotel. He sat alone and drank three glasses of Ardbeg, with no ice or soda. He remembered he was out of local currency and made a note to make another Internet banking transfer to his moneychanger in the morning, and take a fresh delivery of cash. Thailand’s restrictions on moving money only applied to poor people, the rich had their money delivered by men on motorcycles with leather satchels.

  When he got back up to his room, the phone rang. It was Maria making her nightly call. Carl knew this trick because all his ex-wives had done the same thing. Calling the phone in the room every few minutes until he answered it meant they always knew what time he got back from the bars and nightclubs. It was only one o’clock in the morning so Maria wouldn’t think he had been misbehaving.

  “Hi Maria,” Carl said.

  “Oh dear, you sound drunk again,” she told him.

  “It’s all part of the process,” Carl said, “Just a little while longer, and everything’s will be alright.”

  “I hope so,” Maria told him.

  “Trust me,” Carl told her, “I’ll be in Vienna before you know it.

  CHAPTER 37

  “Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.”

  – Jasper Fforde

  Carl was sitting at the desk in a bathrobe, reading a newspaper when Gregor Bosko called him on his Telegram app. Gregor sounded pleased with himself, and he had been busy. “Nadia Bajic had a bank account in Vienna, and guess what?”

  “I suspect there’s a lot of money in it,” Carl said.

  “Yes, serious money, there was nearly a million euros in it.”

  “Was?” Carl asked.

  “Yes, up until last month. That’s when she cleaned out the account.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Slow down Gregor, start at the beginning,” Carl told him as he got up and went to answer the door.

  “After I traced the account, I checked the activity. The last deposit was made over a year ago, and the amount was exactly seven hundred and fifty thousand euros. Nothing came in after that. Before that, there were several deposits over a period of two years, of between twenty and fifty thousand. The total in the account after the seven hundred and fifty was a million, give or take, and then no activity for a whole year, until last month when it was withdrawn. The balance today is only one hundred and fifty-one euros. Carl, any idea why she cleaned out the account?”

  Room service wheeled a trolley into the room, with trays of coffee, orange juice, croissants, and eggs benedict.

  “Hold on a minute, Gregor,” Carl told him and put the phone down.

  The girl took the trays off the trolley and placed them on the desk. Then she handed him a leather folder. Carl took the pen and signed the bill. He took a hundred baht from a pile on the desk and gave it to the girl as a tip. She left, and Carl poured coffee from the pot. Then he picked up the phone and sat down at the desk.

  “Hi, Gregor, I’m back. That was room service bringing breakfast. It must be the middle of the night where you are, what are you still doing up?”

  “I’ve been hitting nightclubs and brothels looking for your two unsavoury characters.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Not so far, but I’m confident that’s where they’ll be. If you’re right and they had a big payday recently, then that’s where I’ll find them. What do you know about all this money Nadia Bajic had in Vienna?”

  “I was aware s
he had money somewhere, but I hadn’t figured on Vienna. I don’t know why she withdrew it though, but I’ve a good idea where it came from. She was blackmailing the men she screwed, with kinky videos, and last year, I heard she caught a whale and retired.”

  “I see,” Gregor said, “that would explain why she had so much money in the account. And you think that was why she was killed?”

  “It’s a good theory,” Carl said.

  “Were you aware of her activities?” Gregor asked.

  “What do you think? Of course I wasn’t bloody aware, it was before I met her. Did you really need to ask?” Carl said.

  “You know I had to ask,” Gregor said.

  “Sure, but I hope you already knew what the answer would be.”

  “You need to be more careful about the women you hang around with,” Gregor told him.

  “I’m not the one brothel hopping in Belgrade,” Carl told him.

  “Maybe you should come and join me. It sounds like a brothel would be safe sex, in your case.”

  “I am reaching the same conclusion,” Carl said. “Maybe you can find me a nice Slovakian girl. One that can cook, and doesn’t know anything about organised crime.”

  “No chance,” Gregor told him, “you wouldn’t know what to do with a nice Slovakian girl.”

  “Can you find out where the big deposit came from? The last one that went in.” Carl asked.

  “I already did. It was remitted from a bank in Hong Kong.”

  “Hong Kong?”

  “Yup, Hong Kong, and the account holder’s name was a Winston Wong.”

  “Winston Wong?”

  “Yeah, do you know him?”

  “Never met him, but everybody out here has heard of Winston Wong. He won’t be hard to find.”

  “So, you reckon he killed her,” Gregor said.

  “Blackmail’s usually a reliable motive,” Carl said.

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand motives, in this case.”

  “It’s a lot of money for a video. I dread to think what he was doing in it,” Carl said.

  “If you find out, do your best not to tell me about it. Such pictures can get stuck in an innocent investigator’s head.”

  “I promise you’ll never need to know.”

  “Much appreciated,” Gregor said.

  “Thanks, Gregor. You’ve done a brilliant job, as always.”

  “For you, my friend, it’s always a pleasure.”

  “Thanks, Gregor, I’ll see you soon.”

  “Does that mean you are coming here?”

  “I certainly am. It’s all part of the plan.”

  “Am I going to like this plan?” Gregor asked, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  “Do you remember what we did in Prague?”

  “How could I forget?” Gregor said.

  “Well, this is even crazier,” Carl told him.

  “Shit! I’d better upgrade my life insurance. See you soon then,” Gregor said.

  “I’ll buy you a slivovitz in the Old Town,” Carl told him.

  “With what I’m going to be charging you, maybe I should buy you one,” Gregor said.

  “I wired some money to you this morning, from my Singapore account. It should be with you anytime now.”

  “Music to my ears. I’ll email you a full report with copies of the transfer documents. I’m in the Belgrade City Hotel so you should book a room here when you come over. Now, I need some sleep, and will let you know as soon as I have some more news.”

  “Get some sleep,” Carl told him.

  “Cheers,” Gregor told him.

  Winston Wong? Winston bloody Wong! That was a turn up for the books. Nadia had her hooks into one of Asia’s most prominent tycoons. He was Hong Kong Chinese but had been in Thailand for a while, building a railway line to Burma, and backed by the Chinese government. No wonder she was in hiding. Nobody in their right mind would blackmail a man like Winston Wong.

  CHAPTER 38

  “In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It’s not as if people don’t know what is going on.”

  – Thomas Frank

  By the time the sun had gone down, Carl knew a lot about Winston Wong’s habits. Google and Facebook were the best things that had happened to private detectives since the invention of the trench coat. People put their whole life online now, without any consideration of consequences. In Winston Wong’s case, there was even a photograph of him at a pool party in one of the big hotels, with his arm around Nadia. They looked happy. At least it wasn’t going to be possible for him to deny knowing her.

  Winston Wong’s office was in the building beside the Intercontinental Hotel, and his Facebook activity told the story of his daily routine, and at the end of his working day, he would smoke a large Havana cigar in a room that looked like an aquarium, just off the lobby of the hotel. Carl got there just after six and found Winston in an armchair with a Churchill cigar in one chubby hand, and a cocktail in the other. The Hong Kong businessman was in his early sixties, with dyed black hair, he was short and firmly fat and round in a way only the very rich are. Carl sat down in the armchair opposite him.

  “Good evening Mr Wong, I’m very sorry to intrude, but I need to speak to you on a very important matter,” Carl told him. He was wearing his jacket and didn’t look out of place, so the tycoon didn’t object.

  “I am intrigued,” the tycoon told him.

  “It’s about Nadia,” Carl told him, and he saw the man immediately stiffen.

  “Go on,” he told Carl.

  “I believe she was blackmailing you, and I was wondering if it was you that had her killed.”

  “I know who you are now, you’re that boyfriend from the newspapers. I heard it was you that killed her.”

  “You know better than to believe anything you read in the papers,” Carl told him. “It certainly wasn’t me, Winston, that I do know. Everything else about this case is very confusing, but that’s the one thing I am actually sure of.”

  “That makes two of us because it wasn’t me either,” Winston told him.

  “You had a strong motive though,” Carl said.

  “I did?”

  “Seven hundred and fifty thousand motives, I believe.”

  The fat old Chinese gentleman laughed and said, “I suppose you think that’s a lot of money.”

  Carl just shrugged and didn’t answer. The tycoon studied him for a while, and said, “I don’t think we have anything further to discuss.”

  “I can see how you would feel like that if you killed her, but if you didn’t, then I think we have a lot to talk about.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “Well, you’re the only person with a clear motive for a start. You transferred seven hundred and fifty thousand euros to her bank in Austria. If the police and the newspapers get hold of that information, it’ll certainly put you in the frame, and I suspect that will not be good for business, or your relationship with the Thai and Chinese governments, for that matter.”

  “Are you saying, if I talk to you then that information doesn’t have to reach the police and the media.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. The alternative is I walk out of here and cross the road to the Foreign Correspondents Club bar, and start singing like a canary.”

  “I see,” the fat man in the armchair said, still studying Carl. “You are a very persuasive man.”

  “So, what do you think?” Carl said.

  “Why should I trust you?” the tycoon asked him.

  “Because it’s better than the alternative,” Carl said.

  The man sat for a while, puffing on his cigar. Then he spoke, “She was a beautiful woman, and she had an amazing body, but you know that already. I met her at a party and fell for her. In bed, she was an animal, and I would have made her my wife if I didn’t already have one.”

  “So, what happened?” Carl asked him.

  “My wife lives in Hong Kong with
my children, so I let Nadia move into my penthouse in Bangkok. Life was good for a while: champagne, parties, dinners, and weekends away together, and then one day, she told me she had wired the penthouse for video and sound. She had a recording of a meeting I held at my dining table. This was a meeting with very big people, high up, you understand? And money was discussed openly, payments regarding the train project, you understand?”

  “And she demanded money from you, to hand over these recordings?”

  “Yes, that’s about it, and I had no choice but to pay her. It was not fear of the authorities, you understand? The men at the meeting were the authorities, so I had no fear of the law; it was fear of scandal. A scandal would have killed the project. You’re a big boy, I’m sure you understand how these things work.”

  “So, what happened next?”

  “Nothing. I paid her off and never saw her again.”

  “You will understand why I’m not convinced?”

  “Let me explain something, it wasn’t a lot of money. Compared to what I pay out to make a project like this happen, it was a drop in the ocean. Almost irrelevant.”

  “Did she come back and ask you for more?”

  “She couldn’t. I made her sit down with my lawyers and sign an agreement that there were no more copies, and she wouldn’t come back and ask for more money. You understand that by signing it, she incriminated herself. She was demanding a million euros, but the lawyers got her to take seven hundred and fifty. My lawyers charge a lot, but they’re worth every penny. And, when the deal was done, we couldn’t hurt each other anymore. My lawyers called it, a mutually assured destruction agreement.”

  “And she signed it?”

  “She wanted the money, and that was the only way she was getting it. She had to deal with my lawyers if she wanted to get paid. When it was all settled, if she’d ever released the tapes, she would have convicted herself of blackmail.”