by Harlan Wolff
“You are a gentleman and a scholar.”
“And not necessarily in that order, and like I said, don’t tell anyone Quixote.”
“No problem Mike,” Carl said as he left him and entered the house. Mike was right; he was tired and hung over, as usual.
Chapter 19
Carl woke up in Mad Mike’s house to the noises of Bangkok, urban birds, distant traffic, food vendors, and the chatter of maids. They were comforting sounds when you’d been around them as long as he had. Everything around him felt familiar. It reminded him of several houses that he’d lived in when he was young. He was smack bang in the middle of Bangkok expatriate life. He could have been anywhere and during any era from his past. It took him a while to remember where he was and what day it was. Reality soon kicked in and his mind went back into hyper-drive.
The room was old but clean and tidy. He had never thought of Mike as the sort of person to keep a comfortable home. There was a small bathroom door across from the bed. Carl needed a cold shower to get his mind sharp. He turned the water on after confirming that there were soap and towels he could use.
The walls and floors of the house were relatively thin and he heard the sound of Elgar’s Cello Concerto rising from the ground floor. He recognized it as an old recording with Jacqueline du Pre playing cello. Well, it stood to reason; what other recording could Mad Mike have owned? By the time Carl was showered and dressed, Jacqueline du Pre was attacking the second movement. Carl went downstairs. He was ready for coffee and cigarettes.
The music was louder than he had first thought. Maybe the walls were not as thin as he had assumed. Mike’s maid was nowhere to be seen. Which was a shame, Carl had been counting on a cup of that coffee. He went through the front door and saw Mike was still sitting in his grandiose peacock chair on his little veranda. Or, to be more accurate, Carl saw his dead body upright in the rattan chair. Mad Mike’s throat had been cut and the amount of blood on the floor under the white chair and the red stain that entirely covered the front of his white T-shirt left Carl in no doubt that Mad Mike was dead. A half-full bottle of beer was on the table in front of him and Carl could see it was still cold by the consistency of the condensation on the outside of the bottle.
He had most probably been killed during the first movement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, while Carl was upstairs in the shower. Immediately Carl became too focused on self-preservation to mourn for his old friend. He could worry about that sort of thing later. The first priority should be to make sure they didn’t get him too. Carl was still breathing, unlike Mike, so Carl’s own safety was all that he should focus on. Like Mike said, it was time for Beirut rules and Beirut rules said you were to forget the dead and look after the living. The assassins would have gone already, Carl decided hopefully. It would not make sense for them to risk getting caught anywhere near the corpse so they would have had to be long gone. He touched his gun for reassurance.
Carl saw Mike’s maid in the bushes with her neck broken as he hurriedly left the house by the front gate and walked without showing unnecessary speed along the small lane and away from the house. Having balanced the odds between the risk of accidentally bumping into the assassins, or staying at the house and risking the police catching him there with two dead bodies and an unlicensed gun, Carl had decided to leave as quickly as possible. His mind was running too fast and incoherently for him to pay it any attention so he focused solely on getting away as he walked toward the main road.
Carl found an empty taxi and jumped in. He told the taxi driver to take him to Central Department Store at Chidlom Road. He would switch taxis there just in case the taxi was local and would later be asked by the police about fares he had picked up on the day of the murder. Carl was going to impose on the Dutchman and he had no intention of drawing a straight line between Mike’s house and the Dutchman’s.
Once in the taxi he tried to get a grip on his confused thoughts. Did it happen because he was there, talking to Mike? Carl decided no. If they knew he was asleep upstairs then he would be dead too. Could anybody have known Carl was going to meet Mike today? Once again, the answer was no. Nobody in Bangkok even knew they were friends. Being a friend of Mad Mike’s was guilt by association. His bad behaviour in public was because he didn’t approve of people getting too close. Carl played along and kept his distance. So why did they kill Mike? Carl’s only conclusion was that Inman knew that he had been on the journalist’s radar in the past and had decided to remove all loose ends from his present. Inman may have assumed that sooner or later Carl would have compared notes with Mad Mike and that had most certainly put Mike at the top of his hit list.
Fuck! They had come over the wall and slit his throat while Carl was in the shower. Mad Mike would have been too drunk by that time of day to see them coming. There were probably two of them. They would have held Mike still while they used the knife. That’s why he was still in the chair and sitting upright. Two men on the ground. That sounded like the team that tailed Carl from the airport. He felt a cold shiver run rapidly up his back.
Carl could hear Ben Webster’s tenor saxophone as he got out of the fourth taxi that he had used to get to the Dutchman’s house. Carl had expanded on his crooked line theory and had taken the scenic route from Central. The jazz music coming from the house told him that the Dutchman was at home.
Pim opened the gate for him, muttering to herself as usual. Her grumbling was going in one ear and out the other and Carl hadn’t registered a word of it. He tried to smile at her but by her reaction it couldn’t have been a nice smile. What did she expect? He was in shock for fuck’s sake.
Carl removed his shoes and entered through the back door, the friend’s entrance. He could smell the sickly sweet aroma of Nepali hashish smoke. The Dutchman was sitting on the sofa obviously stoned. It made no difference that he was high. The Dutchman was permanently stoned and it seemed to have very little effect on his ability to function.
“You’re back?” the Dutchman said as Carl turned the volume down on the amplifier and went and sat beside him on the sofa.
Carl spoke as calmly as he could, “I am in serious trouble Dutchman. If anybody finds out that I am here your life will be in danger. Is it all right if I stay?”
“My house is your house Carl. Do you remember that cute French girl you met in a discotheque and brought back here late one night because you had promised her a joint? Back when you were the young playboy? You got stoned and screwed her in that closet.”
“I don’t think you understood me.”
“I heard you. My point was that my house has always been your house.”
“Thank you,” Carl said. “I need a safe place to get my breath back.”
“Should you tell me about it?”
“Better give me a while to get my head together. Then I’ll tell you what I can.”
“If that’s what you want. You don’t have to tell me.”
“That’s what I want. A moment.”
“Pim! Carl needs a whiskey. He is white as a ghost,” he bellowed.
Carl gratefully drank the neat whiskey in silence. His brain was still not functioning properly. He needed to give it a little time and a little more alcohol. Carl wanted to call George on his new safe phone. The trouble was he couldn’t remember if it was actually safe. Carl drank some more whiskey and tried to think it through. Yes, it was safe. He took the phone from his pocket and made the call.
“It’s me,” he told George. “Mad Mike’s dead and it wasn’t a heart attack. Do you know the Dutchman’s house? I am holed up here until I work out what to do next.”
“I’m on my way,” he said and hung up.
“Mad Mike is dead?” the Dutchman asked.
Carl nodded. “He’s gone.”
“Oh, my God!” the Dutchman yelled. “He was the funniest man I ever met. A dreadful drunk but a brilliantly intelligent and entertaining man.”
It wasn’t much of a secret after all, Carl thought to himself. He immediately looked for something to dive
rt his attention away from the mourning process. He could do all that later. Carl walked over to the sideboard and poured himself another shot of whiskey and lit a cigarette. It was what Mike would have expected him to do.
“George will be here in a couple of hours,” Carl told The Dutchman.
“Where the hell is he coming from? Pattaya?”
“No, Dutchman, he is close by, but he’ll take the long way here.”
“Jacqueline stopped by late last night, after Brown Sugar closed. She said she was worried about you and thought you were in trouble. She said you had that look about you. When I asked her what look she meant, she said, your scared look. She really knows you Carl, I’ve known you forever and I have never seen you look scared.”
“Everybody gets scared, it’s the price for being alive, she told me once. Jacqueline was always right about most things.” She knew Carl far too well for his liking. He didn’t let people get too close. Maybe that was the root of their problem, he thought.
George arrived slightly less than two hours later. He brought news from the old man.
“Carl, the old man says he lost the target. He gave them the slip by jumping on a long-tail boat at the Oriental Pier. He had dinner at the Oriental Hotel and then came out of the hotel around 10 p.m. He went next door to the public pier and took the only boat there at that time. They watched him go up-river but had no way of following him. He hasn’t gone home and he has not been to his office.”
“So he gave the order to hit Mike and then disappeared the night before it was due to happen,” Carl said.
“You don’t think he was there, do you? Shook off the surveillance so he could be there for the kill,” George asked Carl.
“He is certainly evil enough and sadistic enough so it would certainly be a possibility.”
“Shit!” George said.
‘Shit’ was right. Inman may have been in the garden watching his men murdering Mike while Carl was upstairs in the shower. If that was the case he had missed his chance to win the war. Carl decided he would make sure Inman lived to regret that oversight.
The thought that he probably planned to be there to watch him die as well, the same way he had probably watched Mike die, somehow made Carl feel worse about the danger he was in. Imagining somebody killing him for money was one thing. Picturing somebody getting extreme pleasure or sexual gratification from watching him die made him feel like throwing up. Carl’s world had lost its charm and all he felt was darkness.
The Dutchman looked up at them from his sofa and said, “I have heard enough to know how much trouble you are in. Hide out here until you have a way back to safety. But do try to avoid getting me killed if you can. I like my life.” The Dutchman’s face was happy and serene. Not because he liked the situation but because he was stoned out of his skull. He looked down and started to roll another joint.
George looked at Carl and asked, “So what’re you planning to do?”
“I’m planning to get angry.”
“It’s about time.”
Chapter 20
Three heavyset men with New York accents sat in a stolen car watching the offices of Las Vegas Real Estate on Silom Road. They hadn’t shaved, showered, or checked into a hotel, and all three of them were bad tempered and tired. The floor of the car had the debris of breakfast cheeseburgers and coffee. The air inside the car reeked of cigarettes, BO and fried food. They had arrived in Bangkok early that morning and making their flight had been a last-minute rush after receiving emergency instructions by long distance phone call. There was a recent photograph of Anthony Inman taped to the dashboard under the air conditioner.
An old man matching their photograph came out of the Las Vegas office building and walked with characteristic short quick steps along the pavement of Silom Road towards New Road where he was planning to have lunch followed by a cigar beside the river at the Oriental Hotel, as was his daily habit. He was in a fairly good mood; his stupid ex-partner was dead and the unexpected joker Carl Engel would also be as soon as he showed his face. The Cat and The Rat had dispatched Victor Boyle and Mad Mike with excellent efficiency and he looked forward to when they would catch up with his final annoyance.
The meddling private detective had proved to be a bigger problem than anticipated so he wanted him dealt with sooner rather than later. The sooner the better as he had recently ceased web communication with a wonderful prospect with round breasts and milky skin. Voluntarily letting his prey escape was not something he enjoyed doing but there were times when being prudent outranked all other requirements.
The thought of the man that had caused his recent setbacks altered his mood; Victor had always been a loser. In Vietnam he had become a hanger-on who did what he was told but always got overly excited by the blood and the screams of the victims, which was an embarrassment. He was such a weakling that he didn’t know how to find girls on his own so had followed Inman around like a starving puppy waiting for him to drop him some leftover meat. When Inman had become totally bored with him and left Nevada with all of their money he hadn’t expected Victor to be able to find him though he knew he would try. How had they found him? They never could before. Yes, watching Carl Engel die was going to bring him great pleasure.
Two men got out of the car and walked briskly along Silom Road until they caught up with their quarry. As the third man drove the car slowly along the road beside them they zapped the slick-haired old man with a stun gun that they had purchased from a street vendor’s stall on lower Silom that morning. They had been pleasantly surprised to find that a full array of weapons was openly available for purchase from the street vendors in the tourist area of Bangkok. One of the men opened the back door of the car and the other man bundled the body onto the back seat. It was over in a moment and none of the local people showed any interest in the car or the foreigners as they sped away.
The old man regained consciousness in a room without daylight. He had been injected with something to put him to sleep in the car. Then later he’d been injected with something to wake him up. His mouth was dry and his head was frustratingly fuzzy. He was tied to a chair and saw there were three men in masks standing in front of him. The masks were the rubber Halloween kind that can be found in the toy sections of department stores. As the fuzziness in his head began to clear Anthony Inman realized he was completely immobile and naked. The man with the grey hair, he assumed the oldest of the three, leant forward and said, “You shouldn’t have killed the fat man. He promised us a lot of money.”
Anthony Inman looked at the grey-haired man and said nothing. The masked man with the fully grey head of shoulder-length hair pulled a chair across the floor from the other side of the room and sat down facing the prisoner. The naked Inman was shaking, this couldn’t happen, he was the one with godly power and being made powerless was not a possibility that he had ever considered.
“You are Anthony Inman?”
Anthony Inman did not reply. He had been trained for such situations and was supposed to gather information and not provide it. His training had not prepared for him for how scared he was feeling though. He decided he must outsmart his captors. That was it, he told himself not to forget that he was the most intelligent being in the room. Even gods were tested from time to time.
The ghoul with the 1970s haircut sighed and sat back in the chair. He stared coldly at his captive with steely dark eyes. Then he leant forward again and put the coldest eyes Inman had ever seen close to his face and said, “This is only about the money. If the fat man lied and there’s no money I’m going to be very pissed off. You won’t like it if I get angry.”
He sat back again and stroked his chin in contemplation. The grey-haired ghoul then took his fingers from his chin and clicked them above his head. The other two in their gory masks carried over a table, camping gas, a frying pan, a small bottle of olive oil and a clove of garlic. After the table was set up the grey-haired ghoul took a Swiss army knife from his pocket and opened it showing the small blade.
/> “Here is the way it’s going to be. You get to keep your property and your stock investments. We get the loose cash in your bank accounts. Fail to communicate immediately and I’ll remove one testicle and fry it with garlic and then I’ll force you to eat it while it’s still hot. The fat man told me you like watching girls eat their own genitals so don’t think this is an idle threat. Then I’ll do the same with the other testicle. Once you have become a eunuch I’ll give you ten minutes before I cut your throat. Your only way out of here and back to your life is to make a fast deal. I’ve no patience for psychological torture techniques so you need to understand that this is a straightforward ultimatum. As you know, an ultimatum is pointless without the will to carry it out. It would be foolish to doubt my will. Now I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette. When I come back you can make a deal with me or you’re eating your testicle fried in garlic.”
The grey-haired ghoul took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and left the room. Inman sat naked in the chair shaking and sweating as the two remaining masked men stood calmly in the corner of the room watching him. His mind was racing and he had no idea what he was supposed to do. He had been trained in counter interrogation and torture techniques but he had no idea how to deal with such a shocking ultimatum from a grey-haired ghoul.
He heard the door open and close behind him, telling him that the grey-haired ghoul was back in the room. The man slowly and deliberately turned on the camping gas and lit it with a disposable lighter. He poured a little olive oil into the frying pan and put it on the heat. With the blade of the Swiss army knife he opened and sliced a clove of garlic, which he put in the bubbling hot oil, filling the room with the pungent cooking smell.
“No salt and pepper?” he barked at his accomplices. “He should have salt and pepper on it.”
The grey-haired ghoul then sat in his chair, leaned forward, and took the naked man’s testicles in his left hand, and with his right hand he held the small penknife to the side of the sack.