Bangkok Rules (6 page)

Carl gave her five hundred baht and she went off muttering about the annoying habits of drunks and whores.

“So, Dutchman, what’s this I hear about you and a new woman in your life?”

“Did Pim call her a whore?”

“No, just muttered a lot.”

“You look good,” he told Carl sarcastically.

“Rough night,” Carl replied as he watched both of his shaky hands negotiating with the hot coffee cup.

“I thought you’d given up drinking like an Arab on his first Asian holiday.”

“So did I.”

“When you’re not completely pissed are you still tilting at windmills, saving damsels in distress and all that nonsense?”

“No, just running errands for Thailand’s white collar criminals.”

“To hell with them! Let’s go to Patpong or Soi Cowboy and get nasty drunk. Meet some naked women and smoke some shit. Just like the old days, just like the old days Carl.”

He was at least fifteen years older than Carl but was still living in adult Disneyland. The decades of smoking the coarse Thai marijuana had taken its toll on his lungs. He wheezed when he talked and he wasn’t looking good. He was one of the few men standing from the wild times of the Asian hippy trail in the 1970s but it didn’t look like it would be for too much longer.

They had become close friends in 1979 when they spent a year together smuggling rubies from Calcutta to Bangkok to defeat India’s strict foreign exchange regulations for an Indian moneychanger with an office in Bangkok’s Chinatown. It had been a year of high adrenalin including lots of alcohol and Nepali hashish. They both knew that the fact they didn’t end up in an Indian jail was more luck than good design.

The partnership had ended at Calcutta airport. The Dutchman had lost his nerve and handed one of the two boarding passes to Carl and run off to go through customs alone leaving Carl to smuggle the rubies. This was against their agreement as they had mutually decided that should they end up in an Indian prison they should not go there alone.

Carl was not concerned that he had several packs of very valuable rubies in his shoes that day as he had successfully carried out several smuggling trips by then. Unfortunately when he showed his passport and boarding pass to the Indian customs officer he was immediately accused of attempting to travel under an assumed name.

The Dutchman had handed him the wrong boarding pass. Carl’s name boldly printed on the boarding pass the Dutchman had run off with had obviously not drawn the negative attention that Carl’s possession of his had. The Dutchman was happily sitting at the bar inside the departure lounge sipping on a cold Kingfisher beer. Carl’s documentation was a different matter entirely. Teenage smugglers were always at greater risk of getting caught.

The angry officers started by accusing him of being in the CIA even though Carl explained that he carried a British passport and that the CIA were in fact an American organization. The military moustached men in their shiny customs uniforms did not see that as a relevant argument and continued to insist Carl was spying for the Americans.

The entire Calcutta customs department questioned him for forty minutes. He was frisked three times when they ran out of questions. Fortunately they stopped their search at his ankles every time and he had not been asked to remove his shoes. Carl had always been lucky.

Forty minutes later after his insistence that the girl at the airline check-in desk had handed him the wrong boarding pass, they compared the name on his passport with the flight manifest and he was let go. Which was a great relief as the penalties for smuggling gemstones were more severe than for smuggling narcotics.

He had found the Dutchman half drunk at the bar. “What took you so long?” The Dutchman asked Carl casually. Carl didn’t answer. He had already decided that his smuggling days were over. Decades later, sitting in the Dutchman’s sitting room, Carl found the memory amusing although he hadn’t thought so at the time.

“I don’t do the daytime drinking thing anymore,” Carl told him, ignoring the fact that it was exactly what he had done the day before.

The Dutchman put a vinyl record on his old Technics turntable and lit a joint. Carl recognized it as one of his favourites, ‘Monk’s Music’. The room filled up with marijuana smoke and the sound of Thelonious Monk’s piano. Oh yeah, memories were made of this.

Carl swept away the fog that was taking him back in time. He wasn’t a dope smoking gem smuggler anymore. He was a private detective, a serious person handling serious matters. It occurred to Carl that the previous day he hadn’t been very serious. Yes, he had picked up a twenty thousand dollar retainer, which is as serious as it gets, but he was still drunk before the sun went down.

Carl recognized the rising danger. He was on the verge of attempting to talk himself into something foolish again. That’s the problem with nostalgia; the past is always in front of you. But he was not falling for it that day, he decided, and he changed gear into the 21st century and declared to himself that the party was at least temporarily over.

“You’re well known for never throwing anything away. Do you still have your mailing lists from that direct mail company you ran with your ex-wife?”

“They’ll be somewhere in the garage.”

Carl knew the Dutchman had never owned a car so the garage had always been his warehouse.“Standard stuff I assume. Sports Club, Polo Club, credit card holders, golf societies, chambers of commerce and such?”

“Yeah, that sort of thing. Why are you asking?”

“I have one of those silly clients. The ones that think life is a movie and they are starring in it. Thinks his wife cheated on him when she was first married to him. Mad as a hatter I’m afraid.”

“So why the interest?”

“Someone pays you ten thousand baht for nothing it would be impolite not to take it.”

“He gave you ten thousand baht? That’s not much.”

“Oh, not for a case. Just to find out if the name he heard back then was a real person. Anyway, if someone gives me ten thousand baht to come and visit an old friend it seems like a good day to me.”

“I suppose it is,” he said without a smile.

“So we look at your lists and split the money.”

Suddenly the Dutchman was smiling from ear to ear. If Carl could read minds he would have known the Dutchman was making a mental list of all the girlie bars he was going to spend the money in.

“Wait here,” he said and shot out the backdoor.

The sounds of Monk and the boys playing ‘Well you needn’t’ from the record player washed over Carl. Don’t listen to it Dutchman, he was thinking, yes you need to!

By the time the Dutchman came back the record had finished playing. The Dutchman was bringing endless plastic bags into the house, wheezing with the effort. It took him ten minutes of sweating and puffing before he could speak.

“So what’s the name we are looking for?” he asked still out of breath.

“James Peabody, somewhere between 1993 and 1996.”

He was pulling out A4 size soft files that resembled manuscripts. They were lists of everything imaginable and most importantly the names were in alphabetical order.

“You start with this lot,” he told Carl as he started making a pile in front of him and another in front of himself.

Pim came back, clanking beer bottles. She brought beer and noodles in on another tray. She had lots of trays. Fortunately the Dutchman was too busy to care whether or not Carl drank his beer so didn’t notice that the bottle remained full. The noodles with pork were good and the chili peppers did wonders for his hangover. They both pushed the empty bowls and chopsticks into the middle of the table and got back to the task ahead.

The first file Carl picked up was marked with big letters on the front, ‘The Scandinavian Society’. No chance, but he still went through the Ps diligently. It was never a good idea to give the other person an excuse to be sloppy so Carl made sure the Dutchman saw how carefully he studied the pages. Getting people to the racetrack is one thing but spend too much time patting yourself on the back and they’ll never reach the finish line. The next file Carl picked up was a list of subscribers to Bangkok Shuho, a Japanese language newspaper. It was getting ridiculous but he went through it anyway.

An hour later brought the ‘eureka’ moment. The thinnest file of course, the least likely to succeed, the runt of the litter. It was no more than ten pages.

“What’s this?” Carl asked the Dutchman.

“Let me see.” He grabbed it from Carl’s hand. He studied it and started laughing.

Carl was in mild shock. There it was, the name he was looking for on a yellowing page, shouting at him from the analogue past. He hadn’t expected to find it. It was a case to go through the motions; it’s not like he took such an eccentric client seriously. A private detective may start his career with belief in his fellow man but life will get the better of faith and eventually make him cynical. The industry jargon is ‘paranoid survival’. Meanwhile, Carl was having a Hollywood moment. Fan-bloody-tastic!

“I had this mistress. The wife never knew,” The Dutchman said with a huge grin. “She was cute, from the North, Loei up by the border. Only Thai girl I ever knew with pink nipples. Can you believe it? Pink nipples.”

He started rolling a joint from another box, Nepali hashish this time. When he was puffing the pungent smoke he continued. Not smiling but content in that no man’s land of a happy memory.

“She worked for a travel company in the business district. A very small travel company, she was the secretary. They organized gambling tours to Macau for rich Thai-Chinese, the kind of people that could lose a million dollars in a weekend without having to commit suicide. The company made most of their real money by arranging cash when the clients gambled themselves broke. The currency control regulations in those days made it almost impossible to get large amounts out of Thailand. The company gave a horrible exchange rate and charged interest, all arranged through our old money changer in Chinatown. It took me forever to get her to make me a copy of their client list but I wasn’t going to miss out on having a list of people like that. Last time I sold it was around 1995, to a yacht marina with two million dollar houses for sale. There is a code after the names and information on the back page. Ah, here it is; high stakes poker it says. And here it says a private game on the top floor of the Lisboa casino. Not on public floors, no poker on public floors in those days. Must be rich to have been in a big private game like that.”

“What about contact details?” Carl asked him.

“Just an address and phone number.”

Just an address and phone number! It was all Carl could do to stay calm. He was having a good day, a special day. Like getting a Christmas card from Easter Island that said Happy Birthday.

“Let me write that down,” Carl said reaching for pen and paper while handing the Dutchman five thousand baht with the other hand.

Carl was in a hurry to leave. Not that he felt bad; the Dutchman had got five thousand baht for an hour’s work and was more than happy. It would not have been right to tell him the truth. It was necessary for Carl to tell lies for a living but he knew that if it became a lifestyle he would get lost. He understood the fine line between light and darkness because he walked it every day. He liked the light but was drawn to the dark side so he knew that he needed to be careful. Once he let the devil out, the party went on for days. The trouble was Carl liked it.

Chapter 5

Carl sent an SMS to the client to remind him he needed the photograph of the grandfather that the target was said to resemble. He also asked for the target’s full real name and date of birth. He told the client he could arrange for the picture to be collected from the client’s hotel whenever it was convenient.

Carl chose not to mention the morning’s findings. He believed that delivering information in bits diluted the magic and invited interference from the client. The purpose of the message was to let the client know that Carl was already on the case and to put his mind at ease.

The client messaged back almost immediately; the picture was being couriered from the US and was expected in a couple of days. The full name of his brother was Anthony Andrew Inman, born 12 March 1943. Carl used his Blackberry to send an email to a contact he had in Las Vegas requesting a full background check on an Anthony Andrew Inman.

The address Carl had got from the Dutchman’s records was, by Carl’s calculations, somewhere around the middle of Phetchburi Road, which was not far from Sukhumvit, almost as long, running parallel to it. Carl had driven there in the unusually light Bangkok traffic without seeing any evidence of floods or coup. Thailand made him doubt his sanity and memory at times. If these major events really happened why couldn’t he see them? Because the veneer was back and the woodworms were asleep.

House numbers in Bangkok were based on a very fuzzy logic and were typically all over the place. Carl fortunately understood the history of how the numbering had been allotted. The confusion had been created when large plots of land had been broken up into smaller pieces and sold. House number one hundred could be a long way from number ninety-nine and there could be dozens of buildings between them, each individually provided with a complex number at different times during Bangkok’s rapid growth. Carl functioned well in chaos so he found what he was looking for without too much trouble.