Bangkok Rules (21 page)

“You fancy the role of Sancho Panza?”

“Not bloody likely you lunatic!”

“Mike I need to tell you a story, but you need to keep your mouth shut. My survival may depend on it.”

“You know I’m discreet but only in the really important things.”

It was true. Mad Mike was totally discreet in the big things. That’s why Carl was there. So he told him a story. He even made sure that most of it was true.

Mike listened attentively and when Carl was finished he sat in silent thought. Then he leant forward, sipped from his beer, and said, “Bugger of a situation you’ve got yourself in!”

“Brilliant! Mike, absolutely fucking brilliant! I risk life and limb travelling across town with military hit-men looking for me just to hear you speak the bleeding obvious.”

Mad Mike laughed and began speaking in a serious tone. “No paper in Thailand will run it. I may believe you but to the rest of the world it will sound like paranoid ranting from, if I may say it, a foreign private detective with something of a dubious reputation. The only time the press will run the story is if he is arrested, then it goes on the front page. But it doesn’t sound to me like an arrest is in any way imminent or even likely. From what you’re telling me there is not even going to be an investigation into him. The world press won’t have any interest in your claims; they will automatically assume that you are talking nonsense. Why should they take you seriously when the police are showing no interest in this man? You’re the one in hiding and that hardly makes your opinions credible. Should you raise your head above the parapet you won’t make it through the night. Yours is not a funeral I would enjoy, Quixote.”

“Is there a light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t an oncoming train?”

“As an atheist I can’t recommend prayer and as a friend I won’t make promises I can’t keep. You are fighting the patronage system, the mafia and the corruption that they pretend doesn’t exist. You are fighting ghosts. The only enemy you can actually see provides serious income for them so the system will circle the wagons and protect him at all costs. These people have their foot soldiers in the police, army, underworld, and politics. You, on the other hand, are just a farang that they probably think shouldn’t be here in the first place. They make the rules and this is their country.”

“I’m not getting a warm fuzzy feeling Mike.”

“Well you wouldn’t, would you?”

He left Carl alone with his thoughts and went into the house. He returned a couple of minutes later with a full bottle of beer in his hand and sat back in the rattan chair. After making himself comfortable he told Carl, “I never thought I would be suggesting this to you, I always figured you as part of the furniture. But it doesn’t matter how long you’ve called this place home, you are and always will be a foreigner. No way round that. You need to leave Thailand and never look back. Just go! That’s what you tell other foreigners who fall foul of the system here. Start taking your own advice. The system is Kafkaesque when it plots against you. Those are your own words Quixote. You know what you need to do, you are not here to seek advice, instead you are looking for an accomplice. The decision is too large for you to make on your own so you’re trying to get someone else to make it for you. Well, I’ve done what you wanted Quixote, I’ve told you what you already know. Pack your bags and smuggle yourself across the border. I know you know how to do that. And never look back.”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“Don’t wait too bloody long is my advice.”

“You are right as always.”

“You look wrecked. There is a spare room upstairs, go and get some sleep. Nobody knows you are here so you can sleep soundly. Beirut rules my friend; when the bombs are going off never pass up a quiet opportunity to get some quality kip.”

“Thank you,” Carl told him. “I think I might just do that.”

Carl was between the chair and the door of the house when a thought occurred to him. He turned and asked Mike, “The one thing that is really bothering me, the thing that makes no sense is, why would General Amnuay be involved with this stuff? This is street stuff, he should be way above all that by now.”

Mad Mike thought for a moment, then looked at Carl and said, “This is one of those things from history that is not really a secret but just isn’t talked about much. There were thirty-eight thousand Thai soldiers serving in Vietnam under the Americans. They were called volunteers, whatever that means. If memory serves, Amnuay was a very young and very junior officer that was sent to Vietnam in the early 1970s. He came back to Thailand as a wealthy man, which is why he rose from junior officer to the dizzy heights he has achieved. Work on the assumption that he was working for the same people in Langley that your man did all those years ago. If they share a very nasty past there should be no surprise to find out their present activities are not squeaky clean either.”

“Every time I turn around I find another player in this story that used to be with the CIA. Does that mighty brain of yours have knowledge of any active CIA players presently based in Bangkok that I could reach out to, should it become necessary?”

“Of course it bloody does,” Mad Mike said smiling. “You could approach Bart Barrows and let him know that Inman is on his turf, if he doesn’t know already which he probably does. That might cramp Inman’s style and give him some sleepless nights.”

“Bart Barrows is CIA?” Carl blurted out in shock.

“Of course he is, you silly man. Didn’t you ever wonder why every bar where journalists drank in Beirut, sooner or later, you would end up bumping into the dreaded Bart Barrows? What did you think he was doing there, on holiday? Buying bomb-damaged carpets? He’s hardly the type. He’s your man, Quixote,” Mad Mike said laughing. “Carl Engel, super sleuth, can’t spot a Langley man even when he’s standing right in front of him.”

“You are a gentleman and a scholar.”

“And not necessarily in that order, and like I said, don’t tell anyone Quixote.”

“No problem Mike,” Carl said as he left him and entered the house. Mike was right; he was tired and hung over, as usual.

Chapter 19

Carl woke up in Mad Mike’s house to the noises of Bangkok, urban birds, distant traffic, food vendors, and the chatter of maids. They were comforting sounds when you’d been around them as long as he had. Everything around him felt familiar. It reminded him of several houses that he’d lived in when he was young. He was smack bang in the middle of Bangkok expatriate life. He could have been anywhere and during any era from his past. It took him a while to remember where he was and what day it was. Reality soon kicked in and his mind went back into hyper-drive.

The room was old but clean and tidy. He had never thought of Mike as the sort of person to keep a comfortable home. There was a small bathroom door across from the bed. Carl needed a cold shower to get his mind sharp. He turned the water on after confirming that there were soap and towels he could use.

The walls and floors of the house were relatively thin and he heard the sound of Elgar’s Cello Concerto rising from the ground floor. He recognized it as an old recording with Jacqueline du Pre playing cello. Well, it stood to reason; what other recording could Mad Mike have owned? By the time Carl was showered and dressed, Jacqueline du Pre was attacking the second movement. Carl went downstairs. He was ready for coffee and cigarettes.

The music was louder than he had first thought. Maybe the walls were not as thin as he had assumed. Mike’s maid was nowhere to be seen. Which was a shame, Carl had been counting on a cup of that coffee. He went through the front door and saw Mike was still sitting in his grandiose peacock chair on his little veranda. Or, to be more accurate, Carl saw his dead body upright in the rattan chair. Mad Mike’s throat had been cut and the amount of blood on the floor under the white chair and the red stain that entirely covered the front of his white T-shirt left Carl in no doubt that Mad Mike was dead. A half-full bottle of beer was on the table in front of him and Carl could see it was still cold by the consistency of the condensation on the outside of the bottle.

He had most probably been killed during the first movement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, while Carl was upstairs in the shower. Immediately Carl became too focused on self-preservation to mourn for his old friend. He could worry about that sort of thing later. The first priority should be to make sure they didn’t get him too. Carl was still breathing, unlike Mike, so Carl’s own safety was all that he should focus on. Like Mike said, it was time for Beirut rules and Beirut rules said you were to forget the dead and look after the living. The assassins would have gone already, Carl decided hopefully. It would not make sense for them to risk getting caught anywhere near the corpse so they would have had to be long gone. He touched his gun for reassurance.

Carl saw Mike’s maid in the bushes with her neck broken as he hurriedly left the house by the front gate and walked without showing unnecessary speed along the small lane and away from the house. Having balanced the odds between the risk of accidentally bumping into the assassins, or staying at the house and risking the police catching him there with two dead bodies and an unlicensed gun, Carl had decided to leave as quickly as possible. His mind was running too fast and incoherently for him to pay it any attention so he focused solely on getting away as he walked toward the main road.

Carl found an empty taxi and jumped in. He told the taxi driver to take him to Central Department Store at Chidlom Road. He would switch taxis there just in case the taxi was local and would later be asked by the police about fares he had picked up on the day of the murder. Carl was going to impose on the Dutchman and he had no intention of drawing a straight line between Mike’s house and the Dutchman’s.

Once in the taxi he tried to get a grip on his confused thoughts. Did it happen because he was there, talking to Mike? Carl decided no. If they knew he was asleep upstairs then he would be dead too. Could anybody have known Carl was going to meet Mike today? Once again, the answer was no. Nobody in Bangkok even knew they were friends. Being a friend of Mad Mike’s was guilt by association. His bad behaviour in public was because he didn’t approve of people getting too close. Carl played along and kept his distance. So why did they kill Mike? Carl’s only conclusion was that Inman knew that he had been on the journalist’s radar in the past and had decided to remove all loose ends from his present. Inman may have assumed that sooner or later Carl would have compared notes with Mad Mike and that had most certainly put Mike at the top of his hit list.

Fuck! They had come over the wall and slit his throat while Carl was in the shower. Mad Mike would have been too drunk by that time of day to see them coming. There were probably two of them. They would have held Mike still while they used the knife. That’s why he was still in the chair and sitting upright. Two men on the ground. That sounded like the team that tailed Carl from the airport. He felt a cold shiver run rapidly up his back.

Carl could hear Ben Webster’s tenor saxophone as he got out of the fourth taxi that he had used to get to the Dutchman’s house. Carl had expanded on his crooked line theory and had taken the scenic route from Central. The jazz music coming from the house told him that the Dutchman was at home.

Pim opened the gate for him, muttering to herself as usual. Her grumbling was going in one ear and out the other and Carl hadn’t registered a word of it. He tried to smile at her but by her reaction it couldn’t have been a nice smile. What did she expect? He was in shock for fuck’s sake.

Carl removed his shoes and entered through the back door, the friend’s entrance. He could smell the sickly sweet aroma of Nepali hashish smoke. The Dutchman was sitting on the sofa obviously stoned. It made no difference that he was high. The Dutchman was permanently stoned and it seemed to have very little effect on his ability to function.

“You’re back?” the Dutchman said as Carl turned the volume down on the amplifier and went and sat beside him on the sofa.

Carl spoke as calmly as he could, “I am in serious trouble Dutchman. If anybody finds out that I am here your life will be in danger. Is it all right if I stay?”

“My house is your house Carl. Do you remember that cute French girl you met in a discotheque and brought back here late one night because you had promised her a joint? Back when you were the young playboy? You got stoned and screwed her in that closet.”

“I don’t think you understood me.”

“I heard you. My point was that my house has always been your house.”

“Thank you,” Carl said. “I need a safe place to get my breath back.”

“Should you tell me about it?”

“Better give me a while to get my head together. Then I’ll tell you what I can.”

“If that’s what you want. You don’t have to tell me.”

“That’s what I want. A moment.”

“Pim! Carl needs a whiskey. He is white as a ghost,” he bellowed.

Carl gratefully drank the neat whiskey in silence. His brain was still not functioning properly. He needed to give it a little time and a little more alcohol. Carl wanted to call George on his new safe phone. The trouble was he couldn’t remember if it was actually safe. Carl drank some more whiskey and tried to think it through. Yes, it was safe. He took the phone from his pocket and made the call.

“It’s me,” he told George. “Mad Mike’s dead and it wasn’t a heart attack. Do you know the Dutchman’s house? I am holed up here until I work out what to do next.”