Authors: Harlan Wolff
“Could you reason with him? Do what you usually do and send someone you know of military rank to talk to him on your behalf?”
“I have no value in his eyes so there is nothing to negotiate with,” Carl replied.
“Maybe we can bypass him and just focus on Inman.”
“Trouble is people like Inman with money and powerful friends don’t go to prison in Thailand. The only wealthy people that are in prison are the ones that offended the aristocracy. Apart from that, Thailand is a perfect democracy. Perfect in that everybody does whatever they want to do and gets away with it. Apart from the poor but nobody counts them.”
“I think some of the victims were from relatively middle-class families.”
“Nobody takes the middle-class particularly seriously either,” Carl replied.
“What are we?”
“Middle-bohemian George, definitely middle-bohemian. And none of them like us,” Carl said with a hint of a smile.
George went to the bathroom and Carl poured them both another drink. When in doubt, get drunk. There was a fight somewhere outside the room. From what Carl could work out, one of the girls was beating up a verbally abusive customer. Then more voices as people arrived to break up the fight. Carl didn’t object to the noise. He found noise comforting in his situation. When they came for him he knew there would be nothing but silence.
When George came out of the bathroom he said, “Do you have a plan yet?”
“Maybe,” Carl said sitting back down in the chair. “Obviously we need to nail Inman. If we show the world what he is, all his big friends will have to turn their back on him. They have to, no matter how much money and old CIA business is on the table.”
“His goose is cooked then. He is just a very old and vile foreign criminal and you’ve buried enough of them in your time,” George said hopefully.
“That’s entirely the wrong attitude,” Carl replied. “It is extremely dangerous to belittle your enemy. It leads to unpleasant surprises and, what is worse, it removes all of the justification for fighting them in the first place. We must not underestimate this man. He’s obviously insane but unfortunately he is not stupid. Quite the opposite in fact.”
“So how do we start?” George asked.
Carl was glad George was feeling committed. Carl was a loner but this was not a time that he wanted to be alone.“Well we know where the killings are being done now. There will be DNA everywhere. Unfortunately an investigation into a foreigner in Thailand is never subtle. In fact, it is like a herd of elephants paying you a visit if you know what to look for. Inman will know the signs. He will soon know if he is being investigated.”
“So he could destroy the evidence,” George suggested.
“Worse than that. He would use General Amnuay’s boys to hinder or stop any police investigation. He can certainly intimidate the newspapers enough for them to ignore the story. Once the phone calls started we would never motivate anyone to look at Inman again.”
“You make it sound very bleak.”
“It is fucking bleak George but continue we must. Do you remember old Mike from Glasgow?”
“The horrible alcoholic journalist that I can’t understand a word he says? That Mike?”
“That’s the one. He has been known to go against the local paper’s policy of self-censorship and say what he thinks. If he could write about the murders from the stance of police incompetence and how a foreign serial killer is getting away with murder in Thailand, it may just stir up the necessary hornets’ nest.”
“Then what?”
“Then when the police are defending themselves and claiming it isn’t true we, with a little help from my friends, declare Inman the prime suspect to the media at the Foreign Correspondents Club,” Carl said confidently.
“You think that will work?”
“No I don’t. Not as a solution to the real problem but it will get him off my back for a while. I am hoping he will be too busy sticking fingers in dikes to worry about me and once the cat is out of the bag I will no longer have the sole possession of the information that makes it necessary to kill me. If it’s public knowledge I become less important.”
“I know most of what you know,” George said.
“I suggest we make sure nobody else knows that fact. I will go and talk to Mad Mike tomorrow morning, I mean this morning.”
“Do you know him well?”
“He was a mourner at two of my weddings,” Carl replied.
“What do you want me to do?”
“We need some sleep, we can get about four hours by my calculation. Then, in the morning I want you to find us a safe house. Somewhere we will not be found. This place is too horrible to lie low in.”
There was a knock on the door and Carl signalled George to open it as he put his hand on the gun still tucked in the front of his jeans. Carl’s man walked in, much to Carl’s relief, as he felt too tired and drunk to shoot anybody. The man looked around the room and then sat himself down uninvited on the bed facing Carl. As always he spoke Thai to Carl. He began by apologizing about the fight that had happened just outside the door and said he hoped it had not disturbed them. Carl told him it hadn’t. Then the man leant forward and said, “Do you want girls? I have nice girls, very young and all the way from Chiangmai. These girls are very white skinned, the best.” He was assuming that because Carl spoke Thai, his taste in women, or rather, in young girls, would be Asian.
“No thank you, we are a little too drunk tonight,” Carl told him.
“These girls are very skilled and pretty, they can do whatever you ask. They can even make a drunken man happy. They haven’t been working for long and they don’t have many hairs yet. They are new enough to the work that they still feel a sexual need, if you know what I mean.”
Carl knew that these girls would be permanently based in the short-time hotel. They would have been bought and paid for in the North and brought to Bangkok as brothel workers. Many of the older short-time hotels also functioned as brothels. This was the sex slave trade and it was a side of Thailand that usually made Carl very angry. These girls would be totally under the control of some old hag and never dare to question her power. It was a far cry from the go-go bars where the girls were relatively free agents. This was the ugly side of the Thai sex industry. He couldn’t afford to be angry in his predicament so he just smiled and said, “Another night would be better, thank you. We must sleep tonight as we have things to do in the morning.”
The man got up to leave. Then halfway to the door he stopped, turned around, and walked back and sat back down on the bed.“Do you want some boys? Nice young boys,” he said as he studied Carl and George closely.
“No thank you,” Carl told him pointing at George. “You see we have each other.”
The man looked at George and looked back at Carl. He had not thought they were a gay couple. He had just been doing his job when he offered them the boys. He shrugged his shoulders in acceptance that he could not expect everybody’s sexual preferences to be transparent to him even after all the years he had been opening and closing bedroom doors for them. Nothing surprised him anymore. Not in his line of work. He walked out of the room and closed and locked the door behind him.
George checked the door was thoroughly locked, then turned and said, “Phew, that was a close one.” Which got Carl laughing, followed by him coughing up raw whiskey that his laughter had made him swallow the wrong way. George started laughing as well and they both laughed like they had never laughed before until tears streamed down their faces. The man had unknowingly released the dense fog of tension that had been filling the room prior to his arrival. It felt good to laugh out loud. They felt alive.
They drank most of the whiskey then slept, drunk, with their clothes on under the mirrored ceiling.
Chapter 18
Mad Mike was a journalist from the old school and an alcoholic in the grand colonial style, a relic living in a post-colonial world. His pugilist’s nose was crooked, big and red. A colour that matched the sweat-drenched thinning red hair that was permanently stuck to the top of his head and the ruddy face that was a canvas for broken blood vessels. All in all his fair skin and sweat-producing large build were not designed for tropical living. The most unlikely expatriates were always the most committed.
He had few friends because he was a bloody nightmare to be out in public with. His favourite stunt was to pick on the largest and most unpleasant looking man in the bar and say directly to him, ‘See yoo Jimmy, Yoor urr hoomoosexual aren’t yoo? Wee noo, wee noo. Its oolright you can coom oot noo. Yoo can coom oot of the closet noo, becoz wee noo.’ There was always trouble when Mad Mike was around and drinking next to him was likely to make you collateral damage.
Once, briefly, he had been a regular at Oleg’s bar on Soi Cowboy. Carl was there the day Oleg, bathing in the acceptance of such an expat icon, walked up to him and said, “I am so happy that you like my bar so much that you come here every day.” Mike grunted and looked down at him from his slightly superior height and replied, “Can’t stand the fucking place! It’s just that I’ve been barred from every other gin joint on Cowboy.”
Nobody knew how old he was so they just counted all the wars he had reported from. It was hard to tell from his damaged face what was a result of years and what was caused by booze and battles. He was old though; he had been around forever, or, as some people said, maybe it just seemed like it. At some point in his adult life he had worked for and been fired from every English language newspaper that Carl had ever read. His wildly improbable career meant he knew everybody in the newspaper game and that was why Carl was standing outside his house at 8 o’clock that morning.
The gate was open and the bell hadn’t worked in years so Carl went in. It was an old duplex house with a small garden. It had been built in the 1960s and was typical of the lower cost houses that were rented to foreigners living on a tight budget. Its continued existence suggested that the patriarch or matriarch of the owning family was still alive as these houses were regularly demolished and the land sold after being inherited by the next generation. A little dilapidated but not an unpleasant place to live. Mad Mike had lived in the house for decades and paid very little rent.
Mad Mike sat perspiring in his usual place, a rattan peacock chair on the small veranda facing the garden. As usual he had a bottle of cold Singha beer in his hand.
“Well, well, Don Quixote, as I live and breathe.” His Glaswegian accent was always mild when there was nobody else present. He didn’t seem to mind Carl knowing that he had an education. To the rest of the world he liked to be perceived as coming from an under-privileged background in some shit-hole in one of the poorer areas of Scotland which left him quite mad and undereducated. Carl knew that was not really the case at all. His modest lifestyle was a result of being disowned by a moneyed family as opposed to the lack of one.
“How is that mad wife of yours then?” Mike asked with a wicked grin.
“Someone else’s mad wife now, I assume.”
“Best thing really. Childhood decides you know. Can’t keep trying to change people’s destiny Quixote. People’s problems belong to them. Stop fighting windmills that don’t belong to you is the best thing. Debauch and drink and dance instead, it is the Asian way. Much better for you I assure you. Fancy a beer?”
“I can’t dance but I could do with a coffee if there’s one going.”
Mike’s maid was hovering inside the house just behind the mosquito door. She was called for and dispatched to bring Carl his morning coffee, much to his relief. Sex hotels aren’t much use for anything else and he had missed his morning caffeine.
“This is unusually early for you. Not in any trouble are you? I haven’t seen you looking stressed and out of bed so early since I bumped into you that morning in Beirut in 1983.”
“That wasn’t stress, that was a combination of alcohol and dysentery. Beirut was one hell of a month.”
“That it was. I was pleased to see that your dysentery didn’t interfere with your drinking. Do you remember that night in the bar with the Swedish girls just ‘round the corner from the Commodore Hotel?”
“I am hardly going to forget. Still got the scars.” Carl touched a small half-moon scar on his right cheek.
“Pissed off the wrong people that night didn’t I?” Mike said laughing.
“Everyone you pissed off in Beirut was the wrong person.”
“Great days Quixote, such wonderful days.”
“All days are wonderful if you get away with it. We were lucky in Beirut.”
“People like us are always lucky Carl. Haven’t you worked that out yet?”
“Always lucky until the day you’re not. That’s how life works.”
“I can’t die and go to hell for a while yet Quixote; I’ve been barred again.” He laughed out loud.
“Can I pick that mighty brain of yours?”
“Just don’t tell anyone where you found it.”
“Deal. I have been looking into a very convoluted case. There is a central character, nasty piece of work. Ex-CIA from Vietnam now a Thai citizen and associate of General Amnuay.”
“Doesn’t have a real estate company by chance, does he?”
“How the hell could you know that?” Carl asked him, shocked.
“I tried to write a story about him years ago.” Mike sat back in his chair and said, “I was looking into a story of guns disappearing from military bases and ending up in Japan. They were written off the army’s inventory after arson that was reported as electrical fires. A shipment of guns was seized en route to Japan. They prosecuted a few small fish but never touched the big boys. I went to this dreadful man’s office, calls himself Somchai. Can you believe that? I asked him why he seemed to have relationships with all the parties involved from Thailand to Japan. He just laughed at me. But the next day Quixote, the next bloody day all hell broke loose. I was looked at through a microscope, by departments you wouldn’t want to know that you are even in the country. Dangerous men, the sort of men you wouldn’t have a drink with at the bar in a brothel. Then visits from Special Branch and Military Intelligence. I have tilted at a few windmills in my time Quixote, but you don’t fight these guys, you just don’t do it. You aren’t are you?”