Bangkok Rules (16 page)

“I spoke to Victor Boyle last week shortly before he was shot and he told me that you were the third man.” Carl was dragging Graham Greene into the game now. It seemed apt.

“Third man? What’s a motherfucking third man mean?”

“He said that you were their partner in Saigon. That you were in the Phoenix Program together, that and a few extortion rackets on the side and all that kind of stuff. He said that you recommended him to hire me. Would have liked to do it yourself but you told him you couldn’t because we didn’t get on.”

He was bright red, beyond angry. In spite of all his training he was about to fall into Carl’s trap with a little help from his own arrogance.

“Me their fucking partner? Me? I fucking hated them! They had a partner, Colonel Bao from Vietnamese intelligence. He had a share of their money until his car blew up a few weeks before Saigon fell. My best friend investigated their activities in Nam and pointed out that they arrested an unusual number of young girls they claimed were working for the communists. None of these girls were ever seen again after Inman and Boyle had their fun with them. A day after he showed his superiors the math was off the scale and didn’t add up, his car blew up with him in it. This was just days before the fall of Saigon when he would have gone home to his wife and children in Houston alive instead of in pieces in a motherfucking body bag. Fucking Inman and Boyle were the biggest scumbags in the whole of South Vietnam. They were into every racket that they could find. They made millions before they left the agency. Inman supposedly ran off with at least twenty million dollars and the idiot Boyle spent the rest of his life looking for him. Fucking good thing Boyle is dead or I would kill him myself! Me? Their motherfucking partner? Fucking scumbags!” He was contorting his face and spitting saliva as he spoke the last words.

Carl smiled to let him know that he had got what he wanted from him. Art realized what had happened and that Carl had made him lose his temper on purpose. Instead of continuing to be angry he became calm and smiled at Carl.

“What are you really up to Carl? You are not writing a history book on Vietnam I assume?”

“Working on staying alive Art. Mostly I’m just working on staying alive. Your friend was a good investigator. Focus on the young girls Art. You’ll be able to work out the rest from there.”

Carl paid his bill and was getting up to leave. Carl was the centre of attention and all the barflies were interested in the man who had taken on their hero and was still standing.

“If Inman is really out there and knows you are after him staying alive won’t be easy. Take care of yourself Carl and don’t start your car without looking under the hood first.”

“Thanks Art,” Carl said as he stood up and paid his bill.

As he passed Art on his way out he heard him speak into his drink so quietly that only Carl could hear.

“Get that scumbag for me Carl. If he is still alive somebody better nail him. Like permanently, for all the widows and orphans.”

“Don’t forget the grieving parents Art. There are a lot of them too,” Carl said with his back to the audience passing Art at the bar as he pushed through the door into the morning sunlight.

Carl had got what he wanted. He had found out where Victor Boyle fitted into the story and, maybe more importantly, that Boyle had probably been Inman’s sidekick in his murder games. He assumed that Boyle had needed a leader and couldn’t pursue his sport without the senior partner. It begged the question as to what Boyle had missed the most. Had he spent twenty years chasing the money or had he wanted back into Inman’s murder games? Things had started to get interesting. The case was not only about a serial killer; it was also about money, lots and lots of money. Carl would stick with it no matter what. Just because he sometimes believed in good old-fashioned justice didn’t mean that he was above the money.

Chapter 14

It was time for another drink and he needed a safe place where he could sit and think. There was another bar he had used to drink at a little further along Suriwongse Road called Candy’s and it was usually open. Carl briskly walked the hundred meters there. Candy’s didn’t look open to the people passing by and only the handful of people who knew the place well would bother to try the door. As usual the door was unlocked so Carl opened it and went inside.

There were seven members of staff in the bar looking half asleep, and Bob the Australian owner was sitting at the end of the bar on his own. On his left shoulder, as always, was a large white bird that walked backwards and forwards staring angrily around the bar with dark beady eyes. The bird was called Ned Kelly and was famous for his ability to say ‘suck my dick’ in several languages.

Two of the youngest girls were still wearing their pink pyjamas and had faces smeared with talcum powder. These two teenagers were sitting at the sofa furthest inside the bar and near the door to the toilet. This was also the door to the upper floors where the girls slept on mats on the floor. They were eating rice and an assortment of spicy strong smelling things from several plastic plates, picking the food up with rice they had pressed into balls with their hands. The bar was also where they lived.

Two of the older girls in their day clothes got up from the nearest sofa and walked to the bar where Carl was sitting himself down. These would be the two that hadn’t made any money the night before. The girls liked to spread money around so everybody got a chance when they were hungry. There was less fighting that way. Catfights between bar girls were not a pleasant spectacle.

“About time you put in an appearance,” Bob, the owner, said to Carl.

Bob was a thin man from some angles. He had a long face and skinny arms and legs. His belly had betrayed him and was another story. He had the hugely distended middle of a man who had spent most of his existence drinking for a living. As usual he was badly dressed in the cheap copy clothing that was sold in the Patpong night market. Carl wondered how he was able to buy clothing from Patpong as Bob lived upstairs in an apartment on the top floor and, as far as Carl was aware, hadn’t left the building in years. Maybe he sent one of his staff out to buy his clothes. Somebody was obviously robbing him. The clothes he was wearing were the cheapest looking Carl had ever seen. Maybe Bangkok had copied the copies.

“How’s business?” Carl asked him.

“Sydney or the bush, mate,” he replied in Australian.

“Like always then.”

“Fuckin’ right, mate.”

“Where’s the old mamasan?” Carl asked. The old mamasan had worked for Bob and looked after him and his staff for over ten years.

“Some bloke who made loads of money working the mines in Australia came in, rooted her rotten and buggered her senseless, so she married him. He was my best customer and I really miss him,” Bob said laughing loudly. “They bought a house in Pattaya and filled it with sex toys from eBay.”

“Glad to see romance is still alive and well and living at Candy’s bar.”

“My bloody oath. They should call me Cupid. It is fucking hard to run a business when the silly cows keep falling for the customers and running off and marrying them. If you knew how many marriages this place is responsible for,” Bob said, minus his laugh. “Do you know Carl, every man, no matter how old, ugly, or stupid he is, has some silly cow somewhere that is just waiting for him to walk up to her so she can fall in love with him?”

“Guess that means we will eventually be all right then Bob.”

“Women! Don’t bloody understand them.”

The girls started massaging Carl’s arms in the hope that he would buy them a drink. The problem was he couldn’t even hold a drink as his arms were being held firmly by the massaging girls. He ordered drinks anyway, one for him and one for each of the girls.

“Sorry to hear about your car,” Bob told him.

“What about my car?’ Carl asked.

“There were two plain clothes policemen in here last night looking for you. They said they needed to let you know that someone had crashed into your Porsche in a Patpong car park.”

“What did you tell them?” Carl asked in a put-on calm voice.

“I told them the truth, that I hadn’t seen you in almost a year.”

“Then what happened?”

“They buggered off of course. I don’t like police in my bar.”

“Were they in uniform?”

“No, mate, like I said, undercover blokes. Safari suits with a bulge at the waistband. You know; carrying heat.”

“If they come back don’t say you saw me.”

“You in trouble, mate?”

“Pissed off some rich bastard by shagging his wife,” Carl lied fluently.

“So nothing new then, sport,” he said with great amusement.

Carl moved one of the girl’s hands to his back so he had a free hand to lift his drink. Carl felt the need to drink come over him again as he had been given yet another thing to think about. He had been feeling the need to drink a lot lately. One of the girls smiled at him and moved her hand down to massage his balls. They could rub him anywhere they liked as long as they kept their hands off the pockets with the stacks of money in them.

“Do you want a blowjob?” she whispered in his ear.

Carl imagined himself with his trousers around his ankles, back to the wall and facing the door as his hunters crashed into the bar. It wasn’t so much the thought of a shootout whilst half naked that bothered him. What really worried him was being posthumously infamous. Carl imagined the headline, ‘The Stiff with a Stiffy’ or ‘He Died with his Boots On’ or ‘Private Detective Blown Away’. It was vanity but that was really not how Carl wanted to be remembered.

“I can’t,” Carl told her, “I am a Rotarian.”

“You can,” she replied hungrily, “all the other Rotarians do. They come here every Thursday afternoon.”

There was no answer to that so he ignored the original question. He might change his mind after a few drinks anyway. Your reputation becomes less important when you are drunk, or so he had heard. The trick was to keep drinking and talking normally in spite of his erection, not always an easy thing to do as her hand was massaging all the right parts. So Carl thought about a bullet in the back of the head and ordered everybody another drink.

“What I always wanted to ask you is how did you find that gang last year?” Bob asked.“Four days wasn’t it, that it took you to find them?”

“I did what I always do Bob.”

“And what’s that, mate?”

“I stuck a pin in a map,” Carl said with a grin.

“Fuck you,” Bob said angrily.

“I thought that was her job,” Carl replied nodding his head in the direction of the girl that was making eyes at him whilst rubbing his dick and balls.

The owner pointed at a sign behind the cashier’s head. It said, “Whores are people that do well for money what other people do badly for love.” He laughed out loud again at his own wit.

“No chance you will be getting married then,” Carl told him.

“My bloody oath mate. But seriously, I want to know how you find people that nobody else can find.”

Carl thought for a while before he answered. “I think it is more empathy, more getting my hands dirty and a lot less Hollywood than other investigators.”

“I still don’t get it,” were Bob’s final words regarding the matter. He had resigned himself to being a brothel keeper and accepted that he would never reach the dizzy lows of being a Bangkok private inquiry agent.

Bob had the life he wanted. He owned a bar around the corner from Patpong. He got drunk with his friends every night and could always find a woman or two to look after him in his drunken stupors. He thought he was in heaven. Maybe he was, but then why did so many people in his line of work drink themselves to death? Carl always wondered if they brought the unhappiness with them or picked it up later. Carl occasionally liked visiting the Patpong life but had long ago stopped wanting to live there.

“Speaking of marriage Carl,” Bob said, laughing again, “When are you planning your next famous disaster?”

“I’m done with marriage. It would be doomed to failure anyway. I don’t like Pattaya and I don’t have an eBay account.”

“You’re better off single mate. There’s lots of perks to being free. Take little Ann there, she can suck start a Harley Davidson and she never says no to anybody.”

“I will bear that in mind.”

Meanwhile, it was decision time, and Carl didn’t want to walk out onto the main street with an erection. He gave the girls a hundred baht each and thanked them. It was a polite way of saying, ‘get your hands off me please’. He asked for the bill hoping it wouldn’t arrive too quickly. He needed time to get back to normal before he walked out into the daylight.

His erection problem was solved. It was immediately demolished when Bart Barrows crashed through the door and took a seat next to him at the bar. The two girls in pink pyjamas had gone upstairs, the other two were eating at the table they had vacated, and the only remaining girls were gathered around Carl.

“What’s going on here Bob and what’s that white bird?” Bart asked as the bartender put his brand of beer in front of him.

“You know what it is. It’s a cockatoo,” Bob told him.

“Pity it’s not a cunt or two or you might be doing some business in here,” Bart barked as he looked around the bar unhappily.