by Harlan Wolff
Damien smiled. “What’s this endeavour of yours Carl? That’s a very expensive gift you are offering me.”
“It is for a client and my confidentiality was guaranteed in the package as always. Can you help me with this matter Damien? Time’s of the essence.”
“I should have what you need lying about here somewhere.”
“That is a great weight off my mind. Now, Damien, where’s that fucking coffee you cheapskate? And none of that powdered crap please.”
Damien picked up the phone on his desk and asked for two coffees to be sent in with the file on a company called Mayfair Assets. They both sat waiting for the coffee to arrive with huge grins on their faces like two naughty schoolboys who were in the process of getting away with something big.
Chapter 15
The crocodile was meandering down the fifteenth fairway. Crocodile was the name the Thais gave to the unusually large group of caddies and security men that made a long and twisted shape as it followed the biggest of shots whenever they played golf. As usual this crocodile was made up of caddies carrying golf bags, caddies with umbrellas, caddies holding fold-up chairs, caddies who were only there because they were pretty, and armed men sweating in dark safari suits holding two-way radios. Six men were playing slow gambling golf and holding up all the smaller unimportant groups that had become jammed up on the holes behind them. The golf courses didn’t allow six players in a group but this was Thailand and the generals did whatever they wanted.
Anthony Inman was walking beside General Amnuay and they had separated from the rest of the group. They always spoke Thai to each other even though General Amnuay’s English was fluent American.
“Did you have to kill Victor, he was our friend once if you can remember?” General Amnuay asked. “It made a lot of noise. Now the embassy will want a proper investigation.”
“He had to go. More importantly the private detective has to go as soon as possible.”
“Why? Do you owe him money too?” Amnuay stopped walking and laughed loudly at his own joke.
“Look here.” Inman stopped beside him and spoke strongly. “This Carl Engel idiot is a threat to all of us and he has to die now.”
“You mean he is a threat to you. He can’t hurt me.”
“As you say, I need him dead.”
General Amnuay massaged his own face with his right hand. Then he half closed one eye and said, “I have given you the Cat and the Rat to take orders directly from you. They can kill anybody you need killed, even your old friends, so what’s the problem?”
“They can’t find him. I need access to Special Branch again.”
“Special Branch can’t be used for now. Since the coup everybody is trying to spy on everybody else. Even Special Branch is being watched so they will only act in their official capacity until things get back to normal.”
“How can I find this man then?” Inman asked unhappily.
“The Cat and the Rat have their own contacts. He is only a farang, there is no reason they won’t be able to find him.”
“This farang has been here thirty-five years.”
“They are Thai, he is only farang. Of course they can find him.
“I have already cancelled a shipment because of him. He is costing us a lot of money,” Inman said in a last ditch effort to get General Amnuay’s full attention.
“Maybe if you stopped playing your games with the young girls our business would run more smoothly,” the general said and then walked off to find his ball.
Anthony Inman waited for his caddy to catch up, took a five-iron from her, and hit his ball cleanly the remaining one hundred and ninety yards onto the green. He smiled knowing he was in the perfect position to win another hole.
Carl needed to use his Blackberry with his original phone number and list of contacts. It felt like paranoia as he took a taxi to the Thonburi side of the river. Carl knew his enemies were no phantoms and their brief was to put a bullet in his head, so wasting several hours being elaborately careful didn’t feel like a total waste of time.
The other side of the river is different to the Bangkok side. It is like a foreign country and they do things differently there. Carl had asked the taxi driver, much to his amusement, to drive around Thonburi for ten minutes and then take him back over the bridge.
He switched on his Blackberry and it started coughing out beeps as it downloaded messages. There were several e-mails that were not of interest, as he was not taking on any new cases. There were the usual messages from friends asking where he was and did he want to meet up for a beer. There was a message from Duke’s saying people had been in there asking about him. If they were concerned enough to let him know by SMS then they hadn’t liked the look of the people who were doing the asking. There was also a message from Jack, the head of security at the Sukhumvit Grande. He was in a funk because one of his guests had been murdered. Fear took its grip and made Carl feel physically unwell and uncoordinated.
It was logical to assume that Carl was being treated as a missing persons investigation and would be searched for by the standard methods. The trouble was he didn’t think that they were planning to serve papers on him, arrest him, or tap him on the shoulder and tell him he needed to call home. The people doing the hunting were, he assumed, the same people who had gunned down Victor Boyle. Their brief would be the same, get rid of Carl before he talked to too many people. Inman wanted the toothpaste put back in the tube and didn’t care how messy it got.
Carl needed a cigarette. He asked the taxi to pull over and park by the side of the road for a while. Carl stood on the pavement smoking. A foolish habit but compared to how he lived the rest of his life it seemed sane enough. He called the colonel from the pavement.
“Where have you been?” The colonel sounded annoyed. “I can’t reach you on your phone.”
“The fat man outside the Sheraton was my client and now the same people are looking for me.”
“Okay. What do you need?”
“I need a meeting. Somewhere safe. How about that place we met the informant during the Nigerian case a few years ago?”
“What time?”
“Three o’clock. Don’t think I’m being paranoid but make sure you are not followed.”
“I won’t be,” he told Carl. “I had a strange phone call this morning from a policeman that I don’t know. He said they needed you to do some translation work for them and could I put them in touch. I told them you owed me money and if they found you to let me know.”
“I’ll tell you what is going on at three,” Carl said and disconnected.
After attaching the picture of the men standing behind him at the airport that he had received from George, and messaging it to the colonel, he switched off his Blackberry and got back in the taxi. Carl instructed the driver to take him back to the Bangkok side of the river and deliver him to Sukhumvit Soi 5. The meeting place he had chosen was a large sports pub and restaurant with food, drinks, pool tables, and big-screen televisions so it would be busy enough to feel anonymous in.
Carl got out of the taxi at the top of the street. Soi 5 was a narrow one-way street that became a horseshoe with Soi 7 going one way in the other direction and letting the cars get back to Sukhumvit Road. It had a supermarket, small hotels, and lots of bars. The top end of the street was a hangout for African pimps and drug dealers. Shopping at the supermarket was an unusual experience as you were likely to be whispered to by big African men with offers of ecstasy, cocaine, speed or if that was not your bag they would offer to get you a big African prostitute from around the corner. It was known in Bangkok as little Africa and the police looked the other way.
Carl walked along the street and ignored the yells of, “Hey man,” from the groups of African males outside Foodland supermarket. Carl wasn’t buying. He walked on a little way to the bar opposite the pub he was going to meet the colonel at and found a discreet corner where he could observe the comings and goings across the street. Carl trusted the colonel but did not
know how good his pursuers were. He wasn’t going in there until he knew the colonel hadn’t been followed.
The colonel arrived promptly at three and he was on foot. He was obviously taking the situation very seriously. Not only had Carl never seen him arrive anywhere on time before but, more importantly, he had never seen him arrive anywhere without his Mercedes. He went into the pub, looked around, and when he couldn’t find Carl he picked a discreet table in the corner and waited. He was in civilian clothes but still had his shiny police boots on. The boots were always the first thing people noticed. Everywhere he went they knew he was a policeman. Maybe that was the point.
Carl watched for the next ten minutes until he was sure the colonel hadn’t been followed. If he had, Carl was confident that he would have seen them. In such a small street there were a limited number of positions they could have used to watch what was happening in the pub, and from where Carl was he could see all of them. Feeling reassured he crossed the street, went inside and sat down at the table.
“So tell me what this is about,” the colonel said almost in a whisper.
Carl told him everything, the whole story. The only part that brought a smile to the colonel’s face was how Carl had gone through old direct mailing lists to confirm Inman’s presence in Thailand under the then known alias. Apart from that his face remained deadly serious throughout.
“You are in trouble this time,” he told Carl. “You no longer have a client and anything you do will be seen as a direct attack by this man and his associates. You will not be a service provider, you will be the enemy.”
“Quite.”
“I did a check on his mobile phone. He has some powerful friends in the police and the army. He makes a lot of calls to General Amnuay.”
General Amnuay was the army’s equivalent of a Godfather. He had a reputation of being involved in most of the profitable rackets. As far as Carl knew, he didn’t have a lot of enemies, not live ones anyway. The situation was getting worse on a daily basis.
“Did you get the picture I sent you? They are the ones that followed me from the airport.”
“They are soldiers. I mean they were soldiers. They are well known to the police by their nicknames Cat and Rat. They are from a group of rogue Special Forces. They are mafia for hire to politicians and big shots. They had promising military careers until they got exposed in an FBI case involving Americans smuggling guns to the Yakusa in Japan. They were the suppliers. The guns were being stolen from upcountry Army bases. They were never prosecuted but were kicked out of the Army instead. Now they make their living as muscle for hire.”
“Did they ever get the boss? The one that would have fronted the money and had the overseas connections?”
“No. The FBI only got the mules. They were low rank US marines. They were the people that hand-carried the guns on US military flights to Japan. Nobody else was ever prosecuted.”
“So if Inman was the man at the top it would explain why he has the friends that he does,” Carl said.
“Let’s assume that what you say is true and not another one of your colourful hypotheses. Your man plays golf with very powerful men and is their link to foreign gangsters overseas. He makes the deals and launders the money. This is not a man that you want as your enemy. This man can be fatal if you get in his way. This is all theory though so we need to focus on what we know to be fact.”
“Point taken,” Carl said reluctantly. “We know I was being followed and am now being searched for by ex-soldiers that kill their enemies.”
“Yes.”
“Any advice?”
“Don’t let them find you.”
He pushed something to Carl under the table. It was a gun. Carl didn’t like guns.
“Keep this. It is untraceable to me. It was confiscated during a case and never got filed as evidence. Try not to get caught carrying it. I know you don’t like guns but if these people find you you’ll be glad you’ve got it.”
Carl took it, pulled his shirt outside his trousers, and tucked the cold metal into the front of his belt. The shirt and his expanding belly would hide it.
“Did you find out anything about the student murders?” Carl asked.
“Not much that the newspapers are not already aware of, like the missing ears they put in every headline. The only thing the papers don’t know yet is that all the murdered girls were active on computer dating sites. Not the ‘will you marry me’ ones, but the students looking to fuck a foreigner for money ones.”
“You mean prostitutes?”
“Certainly not. They were not from poor families.”
The colonel believed that only the rural poor were to be classed as true criminals. Anybody whose family owned anything in Bangkok larger than a shop house was just being clever when they profited from an illegal or immoral act. Clever people and the money they spent played an important part in the local economy.
Internet sex negotiation had become very big. It entailed explicit sexual conversations online with the intention of meeting for immediate sex. This enabled people to have sex with a stranger with less risk of embarrassment as the flirting process had already taken place. It also pre-qualified them as having similar sexual tastes.
As appealing as it occasionally sounded Carl had never tried it. There was a lack of something, romance probably. But more than that, Carl’s awareness of the duality of people killed any possibility of taking strangers at face value. Every time he thought he was being unnecessarily judgmental, something, like dead people in morgues, would prevent him from changing his mind.
“Have they traced the last person any of the victims had been chatting to?”
“Not really. It can be very anonymous. A lot of the men are married so not posting a picture is quite normal. They did some Internet tracing but all they got was public wireless areas in shopping centres. If the killer had a device that he only used for this one purpose then there is no way of linking it back to him. Unless he logged on using it in his own home or place of work, which he didn’t.”
“But they believe that the killer is a foreigner?” Carl asked him.
“Either that or a Thai pretending to be a foreigner.”
“No,” Carl said with total certainty. “This killer is a foreigner.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Can you point the investigators in the right direction? Tell them to look into Inman, I mean Somchai Poochokdee? I know he is the killer.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to avoid eating in busy restaurants.”
“Apart from that?”
“I will work on gathering evidence that can later be passed on to the police.”
“It won’t be easy to get a proper investigation into a man that plays golf with the generals.”
“If I prove he is killing teenage girls somebody must be willing to lock him up,” Carl said.
“How can you be so naive?” the colonel asked him angrily.
“That’s always a good question.”
“We’ve been here long enough,” the colonel said as he stood up.
Carl agreed with him and they left the pub separately.
Late afternoon on busy lower Sukhumvit Road was probably not a good place for him to be. Carl cut through the backstreets from Soi 5 to Soi 3, an area that is known as the Arab Quarter as it was the centre for middle-eastern restaurants and cafes offering hubbly-bubbly pipes. He came out at the Nana intersection. An even worse place to be, as it was where the popular Nana bars were, and at that time of day they would be full of foreigners who knew Carl.
A taxi was looking for a fare and Carl quickly slid in the backseat. He needed clothes so he told the taxi to take him to a department store on the other side of the river, Thonburi again. All Carl needed was a Levis outlet, and he would be able to find one at the old department store across the river. It was a long way to go in Bangkok traffic but he had nothing better to do. Carl had decided that he would give up shaving and wear
nothing but blue jeans for a while.
Chapter 16
Carl was wearing the clean clothes he had put on at the department store. He dropped the rest of the shopping off at the room. The need for creature comforts had overruled common sense on the return journey and he had made the taxi stop at the Hyatt Hotel so he could buy books, a bottle of Ardbeg single malt, and a box of Cuban cigars. He was starting to feel himself again, to hell with enemies.
On his way out he slipped his man some more money and let him know there was luggage in the room, failing to mention that it was in paper and plastic shopping bags. The attendant didn’t ask any questions or show any interest in what was going on. As long as he remembered to slip him some money every day Carl could have been screwing his way through a circus troupe, animals and all, or running an opium den for all the attendant cared.
By early evening Carl was sitting in one of Bangkok’s famous and trendy bars. He was inconspicuous as his blue jeans and three-day beard were perfect camouflage amongst Bangkok’s middle class drinkers. Brown Sugar was a jazz pub on the street that ran behind Lumpini Park. It had opened in the 1980s when Carl was a relatively young man and its murky and relaxed atmosphere where Thais and foreigners mingled was a novelty in the Bangkok of that time. It suited his mood that night as he craved something familiar. The frontage was mostly glass so Carl had gone straight to a table at the very back where there was the least light.
He had called George from the taxi and given him a cryptic clue to where he was going; the Rolling Stones like it in their coffee. He was confident that George would be able to solve it; he had taken great interest in Carl’s daily battles with the Bangkok Post’s cryptic crossword. George was reliable as always. Carl was only on his third beer when he arrived and sat down opposite him.
“I took the long way here to make sure I wasn’t followed.”
“I figured you would,” Carl told him as he ordered him a beer.