Authors: Harlan Wolff
Inman looked at Carl curiously but did not answer. He continued to watch Carl as the game continued. Another hour passed with several dramatic hands but none involving Carl who had decided to play very tight and hold on to his money.
Then he looked down and saw a 7-8 of clubs, not much of a hand but he was the big blind so last to act before the flop. Inman raised his usual amount of two thousand and Carl was the only caller. The flop was spread in the centre of the green baize. It was a 5 of clubs, 6 of clubs, and a Jack of diamonds. Carl bet six thousand and Inman raised the bet to twenty thousand.
Carl had a monster draw. He assumed Inman had a hand like Ace-Jack, which ruled out the possibility of him having a larger flush draw than Carl. So, that meant that any 4, any 9, or any club should win it for Carl. The 4 or 9 of clubs would give him a straight flush but that seemed like overkill. There were probably fifteen cards in the remainder of the deck that would win Carl the pot. With two cards still to come that made him a sixty per cent favourite to win the hand. That, plus what was already in the pot made it a good bet, a good raise to be more precise. However, Carl still had HK$100,000 in front of him and did not want to lose it all on one hand. Carl, unlike Inman, had limited funds to play with, so he just called the bet.
The turn card was a 4 of hearts giving Carl the highest straight possible. He wanted all of his chips in the middle now! Carl decided to be patient and therefore he checked to Inman. Who, without hesitation, bet HK$36,000 and Carl happily pushed all of his chips out in front of him.
“All in,” Carl said as calmly as possible.
Inman immediately called his bet making the total in the pot HK$217,000. The huge pot that Carl had already assumed was his already.
Carl showed his hand and Inman turned over a Jack-Jack giving him three Jacks. This was not what Carl had wanted to see. There was another card to come and if that card paired anything on the table Inman would make a full house. There were lots of hands that would have had Inman drawing dead but unfortunately this was not one of them.
There were nine cards that would win him the hand, not ten as the 4 of clubs would have made his full house but given Carl a straight flush. Carl would win four out of every five times in this position. The problem was Carl couldn’t afford to lose and continue to play. If he got unlucky and lost a pot of HK$217,000 which is about one million Thai baht, he would have had to leave the game. The altitude was going to put Carl at a disadvantage if he tried to continue with scared money. The air was thin and he was already getting dizzy.
The dealer seemed to take forever to turn up the final card. He looked around the table to make sure everything was in order. It was the biggest pot of the night and he had to make sure he was not at risk of being berated by the loser. He pulled the top card and burnt it, which is what they call throwing it into the muck with the other discarded cards. A tradition going back to the Wild West where cheats often used marked cards. By throwing away the top card the dealer negated the advantage of a player knowing what it was. He then swiped the second card, let it hover for a while and then flipped it face up on the table for all to see. It was the Queen of hearts, which was a safe card for Carl. He had won the pot.
Carl had his head down, arms outstretched, pulling the enormous pile of chips towards him. The table was quiet, unusually silent. Carl looked up and saw him. Inman’s face was white, his lips had become thinner, and his eyes shocked Carl. He had read books that had described a person as having hatred in their eyes. Carl had seen anger before but not such absolute hatred, nothing like this. The ice-cold eyes were projecting total rage. They were the eyes of a devil.
“You got very lucky Carl,” he snarled.
What a voice, like something from somewhere else. The voice didn’t fit the situation. And, fuck. He knew Carl’s real name.
“But that is the last bit of luck you will ever have,” he continued.
Carl kept stacking his chips.
“You will need that money Carl. You will need it to run. Thailand is that way and you want to be going the other way.” He jerked his bony finger up and pointed west. “Try to run very fast and very far away. Life, as you know it is over. Amateurs don’t last long in my jungle.” He stared across the baize card table waiting for a reaction. He didn’t get one. Carl was patiently stacking chips.
“You are beginning to bore me now. I do hope you are leaving,” he said to Carl in a fake upper class British accent.
Then his face returned to normal. He dismissed Carl with his eyes and was done with him. The other people at the table hadn’t understood the depth or the meaning of what he had said. They must have put it down to a temper tantrum resulting from hitting a dream hand of three Jacks and still losing over HK$100,000. Which was sort of what had happened.
The game resumed. He ignored Carl completely. Carl finished putting his chips in plastic racks and carried them to the cashier’s window. He glanced back at the table and caught Inman looking at a nasty-looking Chinese male sitting at the bar. He was wearing a safari suit, had short cropped hair, a very square build, and a general look of mid-rank officialdom. Immediately after Inman had looked at him, he had looked directly at Carl. Carl converted his chips to cash and left the casino.
He directed the taxi to take him back to the street where his hotel was. Carl got out a hundred meters before the hotel and walked on the opposite side of the road to a restaurant directly across from the entrance. He was nervous and the hairs on the back of his neck were dancing the tango. Carl didn’t have long to wait. Within a few minutes a car pulled up outside the hotel and parked illegally. Two men in safari suits got out and walked into the hotel. They were cops. Carl knew what cops looked like.
He expected them to have taken up position inside the lobby waiting for him to walk in. They would be certain he would show up eventually as he had not checked out and his luggage was still in the room. Fortunately his passport was in his jacket jockeying for space with the stacks of cash he had spread between all of his pockets.
In such a situation Carl found it was always essential to establish what adversaries were expecting him to do and then do the total opposite. Carl could live without his luggage so he pulled up the collar of his jacket, left the restaurant and walked, face down, up the street away from the hotel. He would head straight to the sea terminal and pay cash for a ticket on the first boat to Hong Kong. The same boat he had left Macau on all those years before.
Chapter 12
Carl landed in Bangkok late Sunday morning on a Thai Airways flight from Hong Kong.After queuing for the standard visa formalities and an unchecked walk through customs green channel he took a limousine from the airport to the city. The car’s radio was playing North East Thailand’s version of country music. Limousine drivers, just like the taxis, played their music whether they had a passenger or not. The traffic was unusually light and the sun was shining. Carl felt good to be back in Bangkok.
Carl was contemplating spending the next couple of days by the pool when the phone rang. The screen said ‘George’ so he answered the phone immediately.
“You picked up a tail at the airport,” he told Carl.
“What kind of tail?” Carl felt a cold wave go up his spine. This wasn’t the first time he had been followed but Carl had a premonition that this time was different.
“Looks like police to me,” George said clinically.
“What kind of police?”
“Like undercover types. Nasty undercover types! The type of policemen that would stick a knife in your back, then arrest you for carrying a concealed weapon. I’ve got a picture of them on my phone, I’ll send it to you.” He sounded concerned and that bothered Carl.
“Okay I will see if I can lose them.” Carl hung up.
At the early part of the twenty-first century, anonymous plainclothes police units had been executing suspected drug dealers as government policy. Police spokesmen admitted the body count to have been in the thousands. The executions had stopped after a shocked world had reacted loudly. There was no doubt that some of the executioners had killed people for their own profit or advancement in the criminal underworld. Many of the executed had not died well as the hit squads had tortured them for information and access to their money prior to dispatching them. The killings had stopped, or at least there was no overt government assassination policy anymore, but Carl knew the execution squads must still have been there, keeping a low profile somewhere in the police force. Carl hoped that the group following him was not from that background.
The phone buzzed and vibrated telling Carl that a message was coming in. He opened the attachment and looked at the picture of two men standing behind him as he queued at the airport desk to book the limo. They both wore safari suits, the Asian thug’s uniform. He didn’t know them and one look told him that he didn’t like them. Carl put the phone in his pocket and told the limousine driver that there was a change of plan and to take him to the Hyatt hotel instead of his home address. Carl promised the driver a nice tip for the extra distance.
The next half hour had Carl feeling stressed. The mind did strange things when fear was thrown into the equation. He wasn’t scared of death as much as the majority of people in the world. His life experiences had provided a certain level of immunity. The problem was being stuck in the car. The adrenalin wouldn’t kick in until he was on the move. Then Carl knew he would stop feeling like throwing up and do what was required. It wasn’t like this was going to be his first dance.
Carl asked the limousine to stop about fifty yards short of the hotel. He tipped the driver, as promised, and got out of the car. Carl walked casually into the lane that led to the car park and entered by the side door of the hotel. Just inside the door he loitered at the dry cleaning counter as if he was there to do his laundry.
Carl observed the car arriving with the two men inside. They would have been harder to lose if they had been on a motorcycle but the car was their only option for an airport job because bikes cannot enter the elevated expressway from the airport to the city. An airport job requires a car. Carl watched one of them jump out of the car and walk towards him while the car drove off to enter the underground car park.
Carl walked past the hotel’s trendy noodle restaurant, turned left and sat at one of the small tables outside the bakery nearest to the front of the hotel. A few minutes later both men walked into the bakery area and took up positions at the furthest table from where Carl was sitting. It was time to go as Carl had achieved what he was hoping for and got them both away from their car. Carl walked fast, almost running, to the street level front entrance. Past security, out the front doors and then a few yards dash into the street. There was a metal barrier the length of the hotel between the pavement and the road. Carl jumped over it and ran out into the road looking for a taxi with its sign lit up. He spotted one, stopped it in the middle of the road, jumped in and told the driver to take him to Patpong. Then he was moving away from the hotel. Carl saw through the back window of the taxi that his pursuers were still standing on the pavement outside the hotel. They were too surprised to have followed him over the barrier. Maybe they had been slow coming out of the hotel and didn’t see him. It didn’t matter. Carl was gone. Now he would get time to think.
On arrival at Patpong Road Carl went straight to the Madrid bar. It was a small bar in a single shop house with a heavy wooden door. The theme was built around oil paintings of Spanish bullfights and dark mysterious nudes. The Madrid was the only bar he knew that hadn’t changed since the 1970s and it was a quiet place to have a drink in the afternoon. He badly needed a drink. Carl had to go through the usual pleasantries with the staff, as he was well known there. After his drink arrived the staff left him alone. They knew the rules. If he had wanted to talk he would have sat at the bar. As usual Carl was sitting in a booth.
As soon as he had started on his drink George walked in and sat opposite him in the horseshoe booth.
“How the hell didn’t I lose you?” Carl asked.
“You did. Nice move, I saw it but was in the wrong place to follow you,” George told him. “I just figured that you would probably come here.”
“Thank God you’re on my side,” Carl said seriously.
“Yup.” He replied laughing and then Carl started to laugh too.
George ordered an orange juice and waited for the waitress to leave before he spoke again.
“Might be a good idea if you told me what’s going on,” he said.
Carl brought him up to date. George’s eyebrows went up when Carl told him about the demise of Victor Boyle and what happened in Macau.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said after a moment’s silence.
“I have to nail the bastard!”
“What about right now? It would appear that you are homeless.”
Carl thought for a minute and replied. “I will get a new SIM card for the phone. They can tell where my phone is by triangulating the towers it uses whenever it is switched on. I will call you on this phone later and give you a number, deduct 500 from the number I give you and that will be my new phone number. Actually, it is better for me to get a new phone; otherwise they can track down the new number from the IMI code on the old phone. Then I will check into a short-time hotel, one of the older ones with the curtains that pull over the parking spaces in front of the rooms. Not that I’ll be using a car but these places don’t require the usual registration process so I won’t have to show ID. Those two things first, I need time to think.”