Authors: Harlan Wolff
George was suddenly all business-like and he pulled Carl back to reality. Carl didn’t like it.
“Boonchoo and his son were in the noodle shop behind the old office like you asked,” George told him. “Some nasty looking cops showed up, plain clothes boys. They asked lots of questions all round the neighbourhood. Lots of questions about youth gangs and drug parties at that building.”
“And?” Carl asked impatiently.
“After they left, the woman from the dress shop walked around asking everybody what’d been said. Then she went back to her shop and sat talking on her mobile phone for half an hour. What was that all about?”
“She’s the gossip he left behind.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Inman would always have maintained a relationship with the local gossip. A strong relationship with constant contact, presents at Christmas and children’s birthdays. He has a secret in that building so he would monitor the events around it. We can assume he has now been told that the drug squad has an interest in the building.”
“How do you know he would’ve done that?” George asked him.
“Because it’s what I would have done.”
“So what happens now?”
“Now George? Now we eat and drink ourselves silly. I like it here and I intend to be very happy for as long as I can.”
Carl entered the door that led from the deck to the second floor landing and selected a 1953 mono recording of the opera Tosca with Di Stefano and Callas singing their hearts out beautifully. The speakers’ veneers had peeled in the humidity leaving them looking worthless but their sound was excellent.
He went to the kitchen to see what George had brought home in the plastic supermarket bags. There were all sorts of food items including a baguette, walnuts, dried figs, Gorgonzola cheese and spaghetti. He put all of the other items in the fridge. This was going to be very easy, and there were some bottles of Chilean red wine that looked very drinkable.
Carl boiled the pasta al dente and fried the walnuts with a little butter. He would have preferred to use walnut oil but his circumstances required a few small sacrifices. He tossed the spaghetti with the butter and walnuts. Then, as it cooled just slightly, he threw in chopped dried figs and Gorgonzola cheese, tossed the whole lot with some black pepper, and put it all in a serving bowl. He put a bottle of red wine under his arm, grabbed the baguette, plates and two wine glasses, and headed back upstairs. Dinner was served.
Later in the evening they opened a second bottle of wine and George said, “I have just realized something.”
“Pray tell.”
“The worse this situation becomes the more you seem to be enjoying yourself.”
“Other people have said that about me in the past.”
“How does that work?” George asked.
“Buggered if I know.”
They watched the swans majestically manoeuvring around the pond and drank their wine in silence. Carl thought of the life that had brought him here. He thought about the women along the way. But mostly he thought about her. There’s always one.
By eleven o’clock Carl was comfortably numb again. There was nobody within hearing distance so the music had got louder as the empty bottles had accumulated, ceremoniously laid down on the deck like dead soldiers.
When Tosca had thrown herself noisily from the parapet thereby ending the opera Carl decided to stick with Callas and di Stefano and put on La Boheme. The bohemian opera was in its final act by the time the wine was getting difficult to swallow and felt like it was on the verge of coming out of Carl’s ears.
“What is your fascination with Puccini operas?” George slurred.
Carl sat thinking, which was not easy given how drunk he was. “It’s about the real things, the important things; life, love, relationships, loss, death. In real life there are no happy endings George. Happy endings are a con trick. The trick is convincing the audience that the story is over when it isn’t. If you follow any story to its true conclusion it must end badly. All life may begin with a miracle but it must always end with a tragedy. That is the nature of life.”
“You’re a cheerful drinking companion tonight.”
“Sorry George. Don’t ask the question if you think you won’t like the answer.”
Pretty Boy Floyd could be expected to deliver his morning diatribe outside Carl’s bedroom window again so an early night suddenly seemed like a very good idea. Carl stood up and went to the rail where he stood like a latter day Alexander surveying his kingdom. Having committed it to memory he slurred a goodnight to George and left the deck.
Carl went to bed dreaming nostalgic thoughts about spending his future playing a country squire in old Siam. Nostalgic thoughts do not live in a vacuum though so the idyllic country lane became memory lane. Thanks to the vast quantities of wine he had consumed he fell asleep anyway.
Chapter 24
The rising of the sun and arrival of the new day was screeched into Carl’s bedroom by Pretty Boy Floyd. He was perched on the rail of the deck near the bedroom window again, angrily bouncing up and down from the knees with his plumage fully fanned out. Carl was getting rather fond of him and his funny habits.
Carl’s head was fuzzy but he was not unhappy with the early alarm call. The fresh air was having a positive effect on his sense of well-being. It had rained during the night and the air was cool and fresh. Carl went for a walk through the grounds, barefoot on the wet grass. There was life everywhere he looked: small birds, large birds, squirrels, butterflies and bugs. It was good.
Carl returned to the house for an early breakfast with George. He went to the kitchen and made them both what he claimed was a nice health-conscious fry-up. In reality it was a good old-fashioned greasy spoon special. Even the bread was fried. He pointed proudly at a grilled tomato on George’s plate amongst the bacon, sausages, greasy eggs, fried white bread and deep fried potatoes and said, “Vitamin C. That will sort you out.”
After they had finished what was on their plates he asked George if he could check in with the old man sometime in the mid-afternoon, to make sure everybody was doing whatever they were supposed to be doing. There was no room for errors or delays. Everything had to be perfectly synchronized like a circle of white bathing capped Nazi frauleins in a swimming pool. George would supervise all of the teams and technicians personally, so he would be away until the following afternoon.
Carl was planning a lazy day hanging out at his temporary summer palace and doing as little as possible. That would make the day even better. As big as the house was Carl liked it best when it was just occupied by him and the birds. He was still very much a lone wolf.
Carl had two phone calls to make before he took the rest of the day off. The first was to his favourite journalist, Kenny Burns. He used to be Carl’s second favourite but with Mad Mike’s demise he had been promoted. Kenny Burns was from the school of the Cambodian Killing Fields and was totally fearless. Some of his friends had died in Cambodia back in the 1970s and he had survivor’s guilt that manifested itself in blindly walking into danger as long as he felt it newsworthy. He had a partner, Heinz Fogel, a German cameraman with an extremely large newsman’s camera that he had received in 1975 in payment for a debt from a Russian in Phnom Penn. It was the camera Carl wanted most. It would get plenty of attention.
Carl had not told George that he was planning to break their agreement of not switching any phones on at the house. There were things that George didn’t need to know about. He had seen a couple of new SIM cards in the shopping bags in the kitchen the previous night and he had put them on top of the fridge. Now he went and got one. Having inserted it into his phone he made the call. Carl was beginning to be careless but he knew it wasn’t going to be a problem. Things were moving fast enough now for Carl not to care about leaving some tracks behind him.
Carl had a very difficult job convincing Kenny that he should take his money to run the sham news story he was asking for. Journalist’s ethics and all that. But he was a friend and he eventually agreed. All Carl was hoping was that someone would speak enough English to understand the show that Kenny and Heinz would be putting on.
The second phone call was to Bart Barrows.
“Bart, it’s me,” he said, not using his own name intentionally. Special Branch probably listened to every call Bart made.
“Yeah,” Bart said.
“Bart, remember our deal. I want you to call that bloke and say this and only this, ‘That motherfucker of a PI is making a stink and there’s going to be trouble’.”
“That’s all you want?”
“That’s it.”
“Sounds like a pretty good horse trade to me.”
“I will call you again tomorrow with details of a time and a place for a meeting. I have a solution that I think will work for everybody. After that I’ll keep my promise.”
“It’s a good idea to be sensible and negotiate. Everything is a compromise in Thailand. I was worried you had forgotten,” Bart said unusually intelligently. He would always have his CIA hat on for Carl from then on.
Carl disconnected and switched off the phone by removing the battery. Why was Bart so keen on a peaceful settlement? Perhaps turning a blind eye to the activities of a low life like Anthony Inman to keep the general happy was sticking in his craw. Could Bart be an ally?
At midday Kenny and Heinz arrived at the building on Phetchburi Road and set up the giant camera. Kenny stood with the building as a backdrop and spoke loudly into the microphone in his hand.
“In this ordinary building that you see behind me shocking events have been occurring. In the next few days, stories of CIA operatives, senior military officers, gun running, drug trafficking, and murder will be revealed. Remember the building behind me and remember who brought you the news first. This is Jack Kerouac reporting from Bangkok.”
Later Kenny told Carl that people came out onto the street to see what was going on. Kenny, sweating profusely, complained about the light and sometimes complained about the sound as he repeated the report in front of his growing audience seven times. If anybody in the audience had looked closely they would have seen that the camera wasn’t switched on and hadn’t been for decades. After the seventh take Kenny and Heinz packed up the camera and left the scene of the crime.
By the late afternoon Carl had finished Death in the Afternoon and his hangover had retreated to a safe distance. He took a shower and listened to some Mozart. Carl did a few mental checks and took the gun out from under the mattress where he’d been keeping it. There were five bullets in it and he had no extra ammunition. Five bullets would have to be enough and he would have to live without target practice. It had been many years since Carl had held a pistol.
Carl didn’t like guns. He never had. They are made for one purpose and worshipped by the sort of people that Carl didn’t want as his neighbours. Getting older is a long series of compromises and he had experienced his fair share. Carl tucked the gun in the back of his jeans so it sat in the small of his back where a loose hanging shirt would easily hide it.
He went to the kitchen and made himself an omelette and a very large cup of coffee. He sat at a table beside the pond and under the shade of the deck. It was shelter from the sun and he felt closer to the animals down there. The swans looked at him suspiciously and the ducks moved to the other side of the pond. Carl’s peaceful place as a child had been a duck pond on a local common in south London. He used to go there in all weathers to think. The wooden house made him feel like a child again. He was going to be sorry to leave it.
Carl had made his decision on the inevitable outcome of his case a couple of days earlier. It was dangerous to second guess himself after he had committed to a course of action, but Carl grew up in England and that was typically what English people did. Things were destined to run their course and whatever the outcome there was no going back. Instructions had been given and George would be arranging everybody’s payments.
Anthony Inman had been CIA in Vietnam so there were most likely drugs somewhere in his past as well. He had made his fortune torturing people and then executing them if they couldn’t afford to pay him and his cronies. He must have enjoyed it because he took it up as a hobby and then made it part of his sex life. He had been involved in various criminal activities since his arrival in Thailand. Gun running Carl was aware of and he could guess at the rest. Inman had become Carl’s nemesis through serendipity and his own foolishness. Carl’s enemy was the worst foreigner in Thailand. He had never done things by halves.
Carl retrieved his old Blackberry from the bedroom and took it out to the deck where he placed it on the table and lit a cigar. After an hour of pondering the pungent smoke and the communication device he stubbed out the cigar and turned the Blackberry on. He watched it booting and downloading messages and emails. Then having confirmed it was working properly he took it into the bedroom and put it on the bedside table.
Carl went book hunting again and selected Burmese Days by George Orwell. He went back to the bedroom and lay down on the bed, having taken the gun from the small of his back and placed it on the bedside table. After an hour of reading he realized how little South-East Asia had changed in the last hundred years. Orwell’s world of drunken expatriates and venal bureaucrats rang lots of bells. He put the book on the side table and did something very uncharacteristic – he took a nap.