Authors: Harlan Wolff
“It’s been a long time Carl,” she told him, looking at him with sparkling but disapproving eyes.
“Sounds like the title of a song. How’ve you been?”
“Tall, black, and beautiful mostly. How ‘bout you?”
“Cynical, grumpy, and self-possessed. Same as always.”
“No wonder you’re so irresistible to women.”
“Do you still sing Misty in your sleep?”
“How would I know? Who’s around to tell me?” she said as she signalled the waiter for a drink. “The Dutchman comes here regularly, he told me that you are back. Why didn’t you come and see me?”
“I didn’t think you’d want me to.”
“That’s your most annoying trait, always thinking. Real life is such a mystery to you. I could never work out whether you are an idiot genius or a genius at being an idiot.”
“Me too. I thought about calling you, but eh, you know me.”
“Yeah I know you. Forgiving everybody except yourself. I have to go and sing, will you be around later?” she asked as she leant over and kissed Carl on the cheek. She picked up her drink and walked away without waiting for an answer.
Carl missed her more than he liked to admit. The relationship was not going to be warmed up by him under his present circumstances and he couldn’t tell her why without making her an accomplice. She was going to be handled at arm’s length for a while. Being close to him immediately shaved decades off a person’s life expectancy and she sang far too well to die young. Like dodgem cars that crashed and passed in the night, Carl knew another wedge had just been put between them.
They had only ever had one argument but one had been enough. She had asked Carl what it had been like living in Thailand as a young foreigner during the 1970s and 1980s. He told her that it had been like being a Negro in a Swiss village in wintertime. She was offended and declared it a racist statement. Carl disagreed and told her that racism would be behaving and speaking differently when she was around and that he had no intention of putting a governor between his thoughts and his mouth. She gave Carl a lecture on American style political correctness. Carl insisted that political correctness was just an insidious form of racism, as it required putting on different behaviour for different people. They did not agree and her programming had kicked in. She remained angry with him for quite some time after. Carl could put up with almost anything, but not her disapproval. So he had gone quietly.
She stood in front of the grand piano and sang Misty. She sang the words to him across the crowded bar as if it was only the two of them there. Just like the old days when he used to pick her up at the Brown Sugar late at night. She didn’t sing at Carl again all night and didn’t come back and talk to him. After taking time to think about what she had said, Carl’s money was on just plain ‘idiot’. He would do what he had to do and then go to bed with his bottle of Ardbeg. A marriage made in heaven.
Once, she had confided to the Dutchman that she reckoned some woman had broken Carl’s heart, and how she would like to get her hands on that woman for ruining him for everybody else. The Dutchman said, ‘no, no, no,’ and told her that it was not a woman that had drawn first blood. It was life that had broken Carl’s heart but that had been a very long time ago. The Dutchman’s theory, he had claimed, was based on something he had heard Carl say in India whilst wasted on hashish and booze. Carl thought they were both talking nonsense but then, what did he know?
George got back around midnight and spent a few minutes huddled at a table with Jacqueline. They openly conspired whilst unashamedly glancing in Carl’s direction. They had long ago joined forces believing two heads would be better than one at unravelling the enigma that was their common burden. Carl always let them have their fun; two martyrs were definitely better than one. He paid the bill and waited.
George had brought a discreet midsize Japanese car with him that Carl didn’t recognize and thought it best not to ask about. George got in the driver’s seat and drove the car towards their destination in silence. The traffic was only medium weight even though some of the bars had already begun to send their customers home. The cold gun pressed against Carl’s belly was disturbing but uncharacteristically comforting. As usual, Carl hoped he knew what he was doing.
The car park behind the building was quiet as the grave. The shop houses around the square were all shut for the night. There was nobody to be seen but Carl assumed that some of the people would live above their businesses so windows were relevant and they needed to be careful. They parked the car behind the building and George switched off the headlights.
“What’s next?” he asked Carl. “Was it your turn to bring the ladder?”
“Sad story George. The ladder’s in the pawn shop again.”
“Does that mean we can go home now?”
“We have the advantage of being old and respectable foreigners,” Carl told him. “Being furtive would make us conspicuous whereas walking up to the door and opening it like we own the place shouldn’t draw any attention whatsoever.”
“I assume this wonderful plan is based on my ability to pick the lock so quickly it will appear like we have a key,” he said sarcastically.
“If you’re as quick with a lock as you are quick witted then I have nothing to worry about,” Carl said smiling. “Walk over, stop near the door and light a cigarette so you can know what we’re up against.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“That makes two foolish acts you get to perform in one night. Or is it already three? Do we count car theft?” Carl said as he handed George a cigarette and a lighter.
George got out of the car and walked straight as if he was going to pass the door. He stopped and spent a long time in the shadow of the back of the building performing a wonderful act of trying to light a cigarette with a lighter that kept going out. He gave up after several attempts and resumed his walk away from the car. A few minutes later he had doubled back around the building and was back in the driver’s seat. He handed Carl back the lighter.
“I can pop that lock in reasonable time,” he told Carl as he reached into the glove compartment for a torch.
“Let’s do it then.”
George put the torch in his pocket and they got out of the car. They both walked confidently up to the back door and George got to work on the lock. It seemed much longer to Carl than the minute he actually took to open it. Then they were inside. George switched on the torch and they began to explore the building.
The ground floor was four shop houses wide and one of the four had a large metal roll-down shutter that opened to the pavement of the main road. These rusty roll-down doors were standard on shop houses all over Bangkok. The rest of the front of the building across three units was floor to ceiling glass. Inside the metal shutter there were tire marks on the dusty floor surrounded by footprints of various sizes. Only one set of footprints appeared to be male. Someone had been parking their car on the ground floor recently and he had been bringing guests with small feet.
They took the open stairs against the wall up to the second floor where there was a large teak door leading into what had obviously been the boss’s office. The door was heavily ornate and the room behind it was very large, taking up most of the entire second floor. There were well made wooden shelves and cabinets behind a place that a very large desk would have once been. It looked like an ordinary deserted office building until you looked closer, and there was an unusual metallic smell to the air. Carl took George’s hand and directed the torch around the room.
“Shit. He kills them here George. This is where it happens,” Carl whispered. His knees were trembling and his voice was shaking.
“What do you see?” George asked him in a whisper.
“The windows have two layers of curtain, light reflective silver underneath and thick black curtain material so no one can see in when they are closed. The windows are more recent than the rest of the structure, very expensive thick double-glazing. The bathroom in the corner has all the requirements for taking a thorough shower. If you look at the walls and door they are soundproofed. And, just up there, where I am pointing the torch there is a metal ring attached to the wall, strong enough to restrain somebody. The brown patches on the wall are probably dried blood, see how it is smeared and pale brown like somebody tried to wash it off. You recognize that metallic smell George. This whole place smells like an abattoir.”
“I’ve seen places like this in Vietnam,” he whispered. “This is an evil place.”
“Very evil indeed. Did you notice that all the female footprints point in the direction of this room? There are none pointing back downstairs. I want to get out of here, I think I’ve seen enough.”
“Me too.”
Carl took a quick look in the bathroom and noted the heavy duty cleaning fluids. Under the sink he saw a pile of rags, abrasive cleaning cloths, duct tape and a roll of black plastic sheet. Beside that was a box of tools and knives. Above the sink and under the mirror there was a box of Bolivar Churchill cigars. Carl opened it and with the light from the torch counted that sixteen cigars were gone.
“Fuck! Either he is a chain smoker or he has had a lot of victims in here.”
“I hope he is a chain smoker,” George said.
“Unfortunately I doubt that. There have been at least three rooms like this. There was one in America, one in Vietnam and now this one. Our devil is probably one of the most prolific serial killers of all time.”
They both retreated very carefully smearing their footprints in the dust as they went backwards down the stairs. They had a quick last look before they left the building. There was nothing more to see but they had seen more than enough.
Back in the car George said, “I didn’t really believe all this until just now.”
“We can stop whispering now, George,” Carl told him so he would appear more in control than he really felt. “I didn’t totally believe it either. Now it is real, horribly real, and for some strange reason fate has made it our problem.” Carl spoke softly, which was only slightly louder than a whisper.
“What the fuck do we do now Carl?” He said as softly.
“Go back to my room. There is a decent bottle of whiskey there. We need to talk this through.”
George very carefully, annoyingly slowly, drove the car past the building and out onto the main road. It was as if he was trying not to wake the ghosts. Carl didn’t mind. He didn’t want to wake them either.
Chapter 17
They went back to Carl’s short-time room and opened the bottle of Ardbeg. The adrenalin was pumping so hard that the neat whiskey tasted like water. George was sitting on the bed and Carl was in the room’s only chair. They poured themselves another shot from the bottle on the bedside table before either of them spoke. They had not said a word throughout the drive back, not even when they stopped at a 7/11 store and Carl had jumped out to buy bottled water and cigarettes.
George opened the conversation. “What do we actually know about General Amnuay?”
Outside the room they could hear car engines, doors slamming and drunken arguments between people who did not speak the same languages. There was laughter too as a lot of the working girls enjoy themselves as much as the customers. Thais love a party. The Russian prostitutes are very different to the local girls though. From somewhere close to the door of their room they heard the cold professional accent from that part of the world telling an Italian who hardly spoke any English that, with the Russian girls, it was always money up front and she didn’t care how the Thai girls did it.
“Amnuay is a very scary character,” Carl said as he sipped his whiskey. “The army’s Mr. Big of the underworld. He is rumoured to be behind illegal casinos, massage parlours, drugs, and now we can assume, gun running to Japan. I read once that heavyweight politicians and certain men in uniform have their own camps for housing assassins, hit-men’s holiday homes. They use these camps to hide the assassins from the authorities between jobs. The article was written at the height of the Red Shirt and Yellow Shirt conflict when people were telling journalists things that are historically never spoken of in Thailand. It sounded very credible at the time,” Carl said softly as, if they could hear the comings and goings from outside, then the people outside could hear them too.
“I didn’t think the people that tailed you from the airport were boy scouts,” George replied, also speaking softly.“They had the empty eyes of men that have killed without personal motive.”
“They weren’t police either. They are ex-soldiers that got caught running guns to the Yakusa on behalf of Amnuay and Inman.”
“Why aren’t they in prison then?” George asked.
“Because nobody in Thailand went to prison, the only men charged were US marines that smuggled the guns on military flights between countries. The ones that got caught red-handed. Even though the case was thoroughly investigated by the FBI and the US military police, none of Amnuay’s people were touched. That shows the power such men wield. The ex-soldiers that are looking for me have become guns for hire. The colonel described them as Ronin.”
“He watches too many movies.”
“General Amnuay is a lousy enemy to make. I have avoided crossing paths with people like him all of my life. I hoped men like him would never even know my name. He makes the situation a little too complex for my liking.”