Bangkok Rules

by Harlan Wolff

  An hour later brought the ‘eureka’ moment. The thinnest file of course, the least likely to succeed, the runt of the litter. It was no more than ten pages.

  “What’s this?” Carl asked the Dutchman.

  “Let me see.” He grabbed it from Carl’s hand. He studied it and started laughing.

  Carl was in mild shock. There it was, the name he was looking for on a yellowing page, shouting at him from the analogue past. He hadn’t expected to find it. It was a case to go through the motions; it’s not like he took such an eccentric client seriously. A private detective may start his career with belief in his fellow man but life will get the better of faith and eventually make him cynical. The industry jargon is ‘paranoid survival’. Meanwhile, Carl was having a Hollywood moment. Fan-bloody-tastic!

  “I had this mistress. The wife never knew,” The Dutchman said with a huge grin. “She was cute, from the North, Loei up by the border. Only Thai girl I ever knew with pink nipples. Can you believe it? Pink nipples.”

  He started rolling a joint from another box, Nepali hashish this time. When he was puffing the pungent smoke he continued. Not smiling but content in that no man’s land of a happy memory.

  “She worked for a travel company in the business district. A very small travel company, she was the secretary. They organized gambling tours to Macau for rich Thai-Chinese, the kind of people that could lose a million dollars in a weekend without having to commit suicide. The company made most of their real money by arranging cash when the clients gambled themselves broke. The currency control regulations in those days made it almost impossible to get large amounts out of Thailand. The company gave a horrible exchange rate and charged interest, all arranged through our old money changer in Chinatown. It took me forever to get her to make me a copy of their client list but I wasn’t going to miss out on having a list of people like that. Last time I sold it was around 1995, to a yacht marina with two million dollar houses for sale. There is a code after the names and information on the back page. Ah, here it is; high stakes poker it says. And here it says a private game on the top floor of the Lisboa casino. Not on public floors, no poker on public floors in those days. Must be rich to have been in a big private game like that.”

  “What about contact details?” Carl asked him.

  “Just an address and phone number.”

  Just an address and phone number! It was all Carl could do to stay calm. He was having a good day, a special day. Like getting a Christmas card from Easter Island that said Happy Birthday.

  “Let me write that down,” Carl said reaching for pen and paper while handing the Dutchman five thousand baht with the other hand.

  Carl was in a hurry to leave. Not that he felt bad; the Dutchman had got five thousand baht for an hour’s work and was more than happy. It would not have been right to tell him the truth. It was necessary for Carl to tell lies for a living but he knew that if it became a lifestyle he would get lost. He understood the fine line between light and darkness because he walked it every day. He liked the light but was drawn to the dark side so he knew that he needed to be careful. Once he let the devil out, the party went on for days. The trouble was Carl liked it.

  Chapter 5

  Carl sent an SMS to the client to remind him he needed the photograph of the grandfather that the target was said to resemble. He also asked for the target’s full real name and date of birth. He told the client he could arrange for the picture to be collected from the client’s hotel whenever it was convenient.

  Carl chose not to mention the morning’s findings. He believed that delivering information in bits diluted the magic and invited interference from the client. The purpose of the message was to let the client know that Carl was already on the case and to put his mind at ease.

  The client messaged back almost immediately; the picture was being couriered from the US and was expected in a couple of days. The full name of his brother was Anthony Andrew Inman, born 12 March 1943. Carl used his Blackberry to send an email to a contact he had in Las Vegas requesting a full background check on an Anthony Andrew Inman.

  The address Carl had got from the Dutchman’s records was, by Carl’s calculations, somewhere around the middle of Phetchburi Road, which was not far from Sukhumvit, almost as long, running parallel to it. Carl had driven there in the unusually light Bangkok traffic without seeing any evidence of floods or coup. Thailand made him doubt his sanity and memory at times. If these major events really happened why couldn’t he see them? Because the veneer was back and the woodworms were asleep.

  House numbers in Bangkok were based on a very fuzzy logic and were typically all over the place. Carl fortunately understood the history of how the numbering had been allotted. The confusion had been created when large plots of land had been broken up into smaller pieces and sold. House number one hundred could be a long way from number ninety-nine and there could be dozens of buildings between them, each individually provided with a complex number at different times during Bangkok’s rapid growth. Carl functioned well in chaos so he found what he was looking for without too much trouble.

  It was a stand-alone building with four floors and a flat roof. The place was deserted and had seen better days. There were unwashed floor to ceiling windows on the front of the building. Carl saw that it was facing the main road but all signs had been removed. Carl concluded that it would have been an office or showroom and not a retail shop. The building was empty and by the look of it had been for some time.

  There were eight parking spaces belonging to the building and Carl parked the Porsche in the first one. Beyond the building’s private parking area there was a quadrant made up of shop houses operating various businesses and an open area where customers parked. As usual everybody looked. Yes Carl, how do you do it in a bright red Porsche?

  There was a rundown noodle shop a few meters inside the quadrant off the main road that had obviously been in business for a long time. One of the few left in central Bangkok. It had become mostly plastic convenience food service in Bangkok but Carl was pleased to see that on Phetchburi Road that was not the case.

  Carl went and sat at an old wooden table with a plastic tablecloth displaying its array of condiments, cutlery and toilet tissue. Toilet tissue to wipe your mouth had taken some getting used to until Carl realized that he only considered such tissues to have one purpose because an advertising company in Europe had told him so. In Thailand it was just tissue in a roll which was a far more practical attitude to such things.

  Carl ordered an iced tea. He was fond of the Thai black tea, another thing that was becoming extinct because of US cultural products such as the sparkling sugar water that rots your soul. The pungent smell of frying garlic and chili peppers filled the air. It was how Bangkok was supposed to smell and it made Carl happy in spite of his hangover.

  A chubby girl with depression’s flat feet that shuffled across the cement floor brought Carl his glass of tea. She would happily move over to Sukhumvit and work behind the counter of a burger joint in an air-conditioned shopping mall. Thailand’s worker bees were not a happy lot and who could blame them? Corporations had more interest in them than their own people or their government did and treated them better. Women like her wanted a better life and that would require saluting a corporate logo every morning. She wanted the Orwellian future and the future wasn’t pretty.

  He studied the place for a while. The restaurant was no longer fashionable but appeared to manage to stay in business due to there being enough low-paid employees in the quadrant who needed to feed themselves on a tight budget.

  The old man at a table inside the shop house at the far back was obviously the owner. He was the sole collector of all monies, carried to him by the slow-moving solitary waitress. In the more traditional Thailand the true owner of a business was the one who handled the money. All other ownership structure was purely cosmetic. Carl didn’t ask the girl for a bill but walked inside and went directly to the table at the back and paid the old Chinese look
ing man wearing shorts, vest and flip-flops.

  “The tea is wonderful. Much better than that foreign rubbish all the kids drink,” Carl told the old man.

  “Yes, business is bad now, very bad,” he told Carl in Thai with a Chinese accent. He didn’t show surprise that this foreigner was speaking to him in Thai.

  “I haven’t been here for many years. I used to come and eat noodles here all the time. That was fifteen years ago. Everything changes so fast in Bangkok. Great that you are still here.”

  He didn’t show much interest and didn’t answer.

  “Take that building. It used to provide lots of jobs. Now it’s falling apart.”

  “Big houses for rich people,” he said as he fiddled with his abacus.

  “So long ago that I can’t remember. What was it?”

  “Vegas. It was Las Vegas,” he told Carl.

  Las Vegas Real Estate Company. Their advertisements had been all over town, still were. So this was where they had started. Inman knew the real estate business and liked a bet. Las Vegas Real Estate was not overly creative but was probably an effective name in the Thai market. Carl said thanks to the old man and got back in the car.

  The first thing he did once he was comfortable in the air-conditioned car was telephone his lawyer. They had worked a lot of cases together over the years and he was always pleased to hear from Carl.

  “Sawasdee Krab Khun Anand, how’re you? I am going to SMS you a company name. Can you check the ownership information at the Ministry of Commerce? I am looking for any foreign shareholders. Thanks and same to you. Let’s have lunch soon.”

  Carl sent the name Las Vegas Real Estate Company Limited by SMS to him immediately and drove off. The old telephone number wouldn’t be of any use. It was a landline that would have been registered to the building and the building was another of Bangkok’s empty shells. One thing about the rundown building that Carl thought was very unusual was that the electricity meter on the concrete pole was still there in plain view and the heavy cables were still connected. What was an abandoned building doing with electricity and who was still paying the bill after all those years?

  Carl called Colonel Pornchai, more an academic than a policeman. They had been involved in some serious cases together. He would be able to access social security records from the computer on his desk. Should Inman, alias Peabody, receive any form of taxable income he would be on the computer. But it didn’t take Colonel Pornchai long to confirm that he wasn’t on any government computer database.

  Carl drove through the midday traffic to the Oriental Hotel on the river and walked through the lobby to the cigar shop. There was nobody around and the door was locked so he went back to the car and drove to the Grande Hyatt hotel where they also had a cigar shop. The shop at the Hyatt was busy as it had a private room with comfortable armchairs where customers could smoke. Carl asked for a Bolivar Churchill but was told they were out of stock so he bought a Ramon Allones Robusto instead.

  “Do you get much demand for the Bolivar Churchill?” he asked the girl at the desk.

  “We don’t sell many. They have been out of stock for a while now.”

  He went into the smoky room and picked a leather armchair. Carl lit his cigar slowly so as not to overheat it. He took a couple of puffs and leaned back. The room was half full of local businessmen, politicians, and a few of the usual rogues. The rogues nodded at Carl and then went back to their whispered conversation. A large man came in and sat in the armchair opposite Carl.

  “Heard anything about the coup?” he asked Carl.

  “Only that there was one.”

  The man sitting opposite Carl ran one of the legitimate stock brokerage companies in Bangkok. He was an elderly English public schoolboy who Carl assumed would have gone to Eton or Harrow. Carl’s money was on Harrow as there was a theory about Harrovians wearing brown suede shoes with everything. Today he was wearing a dark blue suit with his well-worn brown suede shoes. His name was Robert Standish and he was a pillar of Bangkok’s expatriate society.

  “Now come on Carl, we all know you’re a spook. Tell me what the gossip is in your secret world.”

  “But I’m not a spook, I’m merely a struggling consulting detective,” Carl told him affectedly as he ceremoniously puffed on his fat cigar. Carl knew that Robert would see denial as confirmation. Bangkok was full of people claiming to be what they weren’t, so claiming not to be something often got the opposite assumption. Carl liked the game.

  “Very Sherlock Holmes I am sure. But come on old sport, this isn’t the time to hide behind cover. You are needed man. So what have you heard?”

  “Well Robert, it is like this; over the last twenty years the politicians have started to believe that they are actually running this country. That made them even greedier than usual and instead of discreetly feathering their own nests they tried to claim ownership of the whole forest. So, like naughty children, they got given a red card by the self-appointed referee and sent for an early bath. They are officially suspended for a few matches until they have learnt to behave themselves, or at least found the good manners to invite the referee to play on their team. Nobody likes being left on the sidelines. I don’t know when the next game is scheduled but I’m sure they will let us know eventually.”

  “For god’s sake man, this is no time to try and be funny,” Robert Standish told Carl in a low shout.

  Carl believed that foreigners, particularly the clever ones, didn’t understand Thailand because they would not accept its basic venal nature. They felt it an insult to their intelligence to be told that Thailand was not as complex as they imagined. The suggestion that it was simple when they found it so confusing perplexed them. So they chose to keep it enigmatic and inaccessible disregarding its very straightforward foundation of mutual greed and jealousy. To understand Thailand, as a foreigner, the other thing you had to accept was the simple truth that you were completely powerless and your future was in the hands of strangers.

  “You know I can’t tell you more than that,” Carl said in a lower and more serious voice. “You have to read between the lines in the newspaper like everybody else.” Carl leant forward, put a serious expression on his face and whispered conspiratorially, “All I can tell you Robert is that everything will be all right. There’ll be no changes that will have any dire consequences for you personally, or for your company for that matter.” Then Carl put his finger to his lips and said, “Shhhh, your ears only old man.”

  “Good news then. Thank you Carl. You are sure of this? It comes from a very reliable source then?”

  “The highest,” Carl said, thinking that it was the most reliable source he could think of, his own opinion. He was usually right though. That and the fact he had Thailand’s past history on his side. Thailand’s history may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymed.

  Robert Standish was pleased. Like many foreigners, he just needed someone to tell him that everything was going to be all right. If Carl had been able to work out how to charge people for going to their offices and telling them that everything was going to be all right he would have made a fortune. There had always been a demand for such a service. Carl just hadn’t worked out how to bill for it. Yet.

  “Must dash, duty calls,” he told Carl as he got up to leave.

  “Don’t forget that it’s all hush hush,” Carl told him.

  “I won’t tell a living soul Carl. Wouldn’t want you to get into trouble with the ambassador.”

  “That’s right Robert. Always nice to see you,” Carl told him as he left.

  Carl assumed he was in a hurry to go and tell everybody that Carl the spook said there is nothing to worry about. Lots of people doubt religion but they all believed in Hollywood and James Bond. Carl didn’t mind the stories that were made up about him. They were good for business.

  Robert Standish didn’t care if the streets ran red with blood as long as his beloved stock market stayed healthy. In reality he had little to fear. A few generals rattling the
ir sabres and politicians crying ‘freedom’ because they had lost control of the money was not a threat to his industry. Both sides of the conflict were stage managed by extremely powerful and wealthy men. These eagles amongst sparrows on both sides were so heavily invested into the market that allowing it to fail was not an option.

  The cigar lead had not borne fruit. Carl hadn’t expected it to. Luxury retail shops in Thailand are little more than a wonderful advertisement for shopping in Hong Kong’s low cost outlets. The lack of demand for Bolivar Churchills in Bangkok suggested to him that his target might still be flying regularly to Macau for his poker habit. Carl wanted to see Macau again and began to see an opportunity to make it happen.

  Carl finished his cigar and went looking for somewhere to have lunch. He felt like eating in a restaurant where nobody would know him. He left the car and walked along the Skytrain’s public walkway to Paragon shopping centre, the largest shopping complex in Thailand. Carl took the escalators past the high fashion brands from Milan and Paris to the third floor where Bangkok’s largest bookshop was located.

  He browsed the history section and selected a book about Beirut and paid for it at the counter. Book in hand he took the escalator back down to the first floor and walked over the Skytrain’s bridge to Siam Square, the old shopping area. There was a Hard Rock Cafe there and he assumed that nobody he knew would be there as no self-respecting expat liked to sit with the tourists. The place was full of holiday makers providing excellent cover and a burger was just what he needed to go with his new book. He could use one hand for the burger and the other hand to hold the book.