It had been another monsoon Monday and Sukhumvit Road, the neon artery of boozy expatriate life, was knee deep in foul-smelling water. Carl Engel, Bangkok’s longest suffering private investigator, had taken shelter from the storm in a side street, his car parked a short distance from the main road. He had gone seven weeks without a client and had been forced to sell a hand-carved ivory chess set from Hong Kong that had been given to him by his long dead father. The sale had provided him with enough cash flow to last a couple of months and temporarily alleviated his fear of poverty. Being broke was the only thing that Carl was still scared of. Death had tapped him on the shoulder enough times for him to develop a certain level of immunity but Bangkok was no place for a foreigner to be penniless.
He had left home early and had been lucky not to break down and get trapped in the rising water. This he interpreted as a reward for putting aside his usual pessimism and embracing the possibility of turning the day’s unexpected potential client, an endangered species, into a badly needed cash injection. The early start had left him with time to kill and growing impatience for his appointment with his latest opportunity. Glaring at the clock on the wall was not making the hands move any faster so he stopped but soon found himself looking at his watch instead.
The floodwater had reached the bottom of the doors on his classic 1977 red Porsche, an impractical car at the best of times. It was over thirty years old and impossible during the monsoon season. Women had come and gone in his life but the car had stayed. He was looking at the old Porsche through the window of Duke’s American Bar and Restaurant, one of the few places that opened early enough for breakfast. The rain had been heavy, not cats and dogs, more like elephants and buffalos. Fortunately Duke’s entrance was high enough to keep the water at bay. Whatever happened outside, things inside would carry on as usual and in case of emergency there was a guesthouse with a few cheap rooms upstairs.
Carl had once lived in the guesthouse and called Duke’s home for a few months following the implosion of one of his marriages — a period of loose women, poker and binge drinking, which had come to an abrupt end when the cards ran cold and his money ran out. This was followed by some introspection that had all the comfort of going down a sewer in a glass bottom boat followed by a good scrub and brush up as he re-joined the world of making money as opposed to spending it.
Carl Engel’s dark hair was peppered with grey. He was above medium height and slightly over medium build. His belly had grown with every year since his fortieth birthday so he had a decade of growth to contend with. His height helped him to carry the extra weight but now that he had hit fifty the belly was starting to take charge.
He liked expensive Italian clothes but wasn’t flashy. That day he wore jeans, a black polo shirt and a grey linen sports jacket that wrinkled with wear. To complete the look, he wore soft black leather driving moccasins with no socks. On his wrist he wore a Girard-Perregaux chronograph. It was a valuable timepiece that had somehow avoided the pawnshop and stayed on his wrist through thick and thin. He chose to look chic and successful to camouflage the tidal nature of his finances. His face looked thoroughly lived in but he had always maintained the spark of the undefeated in his pale blue eyes.
In his youth Carl had been fortunate enough to experience all Thailand had to offer. Once upon a time he’d even been an idealistic romantic but his work had quickly put an end to that. Carl had seen the best and the worst of people, mostly the worst. Through experience he had reached the conclusion that nobody ever really knew anybody, as there were always parts that were kept hidden and were exclusively reserved for other people or situations. He could see deeper into people’s souls than most and it left him with no doubt of the duality that existed below the surface. Carl had come to believe that romance required putting someone on a pedestal and he could no longer do that.
He had over thirty years of history with Duke’s American Bar and Restaurant and liked to drop in from time to time for a shot of nostalgia. The customers Carl had known over the years had come and gone. Some of them had left dead and some had left by airplane. Fading eight by ten photographs of a youthful Carl with some of them lined the walls. He had always thought it fortunate that very few people looked at the pictures of his youthful smiling and overtly optimistic face standing beside the long departed. Funny thing about the dead; he still expected them to walk through the door one day. The ones that had left by plane would eventually walk through the door. Bangkok had that effect on people. They always came back.
Carl was sitting alone at a round table that had wooden chairs for eight people. It had started life as a poker table that had taken pride of place in a Patpong go-go bar run by Texans with ten-gallon hats. Poker was illegal as was all gambling not in the hands of the government so the owners would send the bikini clad girls home, lock the doors at 1 a.m. and play cards until the sun came up. The table’s history went all the way back to the Vietnam War era and had seen a lot of money change hands over the years. When the go-go bar finally closed its doors following the death of the alcoholic owner, the legendary piece of furniture had somehow made its way across town and become a dining table in Duke’s. Carl liked the table.
Two men standing at the bar were looking in the direction of the window and laughing like schoolboys. They were Tom and Gary Downing, known around town as the Drowning brothers because they had made their fortune building and maintaining swimming pools. They were an expatriate success story and Carl had always been partial to a happy ending.
“Hey Carl,” the larger of the two brothers called out. “You know how you do all that undercover stuff? Fixing things and investigating and so on?”
Carl looked up without saying anything.
“We just really want to know something. How do you do all that in a bright red Porsche?”
He knew they were trying to be funny, rather than insulting. He had tracked down the location of a victim held by a highly unpleasant group of foreign gangsters and local Thai police. The gang had kidnapped and tortured the friend of the smaller quieter brother and demanded a million dollars ransom. Carl had been hired to investigate the gang and liaise with local police, which was not without personal danger, as the police typically protected their own.
Carl managed the problem by providing large cash incentives to policemen who were not related to the perpetrators and then feeding the police information he got from working the streets. They found the gang in four days and got the victim back without having to pay any ransom. Carl had managed the ransom negotiations using an alias and bought the police the time they needed to apply for the court warrants and permissions necessary for kicking down the doors that were required for Carl’s plan to work.
A thirty-man metropolitan police commando unit carried out the rescue. The commandos blew off the doors of the townhouse where the victim was being held and went in with guns and stun grenades. It had been a big story. Although Carl had made sure he had not been mentioned in the tabloids, the client knew he had put everything together. Carl knew he knew because he had happily paid Carl’s enormous bill. The police got all the credit, and the client and the victim’s family were sworn to secrecy. Carl liked to stay in the shadows. It would not be healthy to do what he did otherwise.
“You two are starting even earlier than usual. Do your wives know you have escaped?” Carl asked when their laughter had ceased.
“What else is there to do on a rainy day in Bangkok? Join us for a drink?” the big man asked Carl.
“You have to be joking. Last time I drank with you the beer was spiked with vodka and I went to my now ex-wife’s birthday party on rubber legs. It’s a little early for me anyway.”
“I forgot you don’t like to drink when you are leaping over tall buildings in a single bound and wearing your underpants outside your trousers. Anything interesting going on?” the small man asked, assuming that Carl’s life was all high voltage.
“I’m not involved in anything at present, I just don’t feel like drinking.”
“You are not as much fun as you used to be,” the smaller man said.
“Who is?” Carl replied.
They mumbled and went back to their breakfast beers. The brothers were fundamentally decent and Carl liked them both, even though they were prone to playing annoying schoolboy pranks on everybody they knew. Carl was left pondering the island that was his car, and wondered where advertising stopped and vanity started. Mind you, it made a lovely noise when it was dry.
“Better you let them buy you a drink. You’re much nicer when you are drunk,” Pet told him.
Pet was in a foul mood. Her name meant duck and she was his waitress that morning. She had taken a shine to him years earlier and was very angry that her feelings were not reciprocated. In her childlike innocence she could not see beyond her own idyllic vision and begrudged Carl his own interpretation of the future, and whatever else caused him to withhold service. She was clearly the extremely possessive type but Carl had already lived in that nightmare. He wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t hold a candle if she didn’t know where it had been, but some things just couldn’t be translated.
“Why do you read the menu? You always order the breakfast,” she said to him in Thai as she took the menu from his hand and turned on her heels and waddled away.
She returned with his order ten minutes later and slammed it angrily in front of him. If they’d been married and he had come home the previous night drunk and covered with lipstick her behaviour wouldn’t have been any different.
There had been a drunken night once when he had almost given her cause to have a claim on him. She had cupid lips and her body was willing, firm, brown and cuddly. He thanked God that he had found a moment of clarity and been able to resist her seductive charms. The picture of Carl and Duck Engel that he had was very different to her vision. The other reason was she had the look of a bunny boiler in her sweet eyes.
Carl wondered what she saw in him. He was fifty, ten kilos overweight, and wearing heavy black reading glasses. Women must like ugly men, he concluded, as he was more popular now than he had been when he had been in his twenties. Carl had tried harder in those days, and he had even briefly been overtly romantic. He had become a retired romantic since he had learned the cost involved. She hovered nearby in case he changed his mind.
The doors flew open and Bart Barrows made his less than sober entrance. Soaked through from the rain he trudged to the bar in his baggy shorts and squelching training shoes that could only be bought from the bottom shelf at Wal-Mart.
“Beer!” he demanded loudly.
He didn’t have to name the brand. The bartender knew what he drank. Heineken bottle in hand, he sat opposite Carl at the round table. Bart Barrows was rotund, unkempt and always angry. He had come from Arkansas to Thailand via the war in Vietnam. A grunt who thought he should have ruled the world, a confrontational American in a non-confrontational Thai world.
“Carl, I have been looking for you everywhere,” he half-shouted across the big table as he dripped water into puddles on the floor.
He looked even more dishevelled than usual. Carl guessed he was wearing his gardening clothes. It appeared he had put them on to wade through the floodwater in the rain. This told Carl that Bart had left his house in the morning and had not been out all night. But why would he have left home in the rain when everybody else would have been running for shelter?
“You look like shit,” Carl told him.
“Haven’t slept at all. It’s my daughter, god dammit!”
“Explain,” Carl told him sharply, expecting this was going to be pro bono as people that knew him assumed that all assistance should be free. It made him want to send them copies of his alimony bills.
“She has this boyfriend, Thai boy. She is very secretive and I have no idea who he is, or what they get up to. She didn’t come home last night. These student murders, I mean, it could be him. He could be the killer. The boyfriend dammit! I need you to find her.”
“I am sure she is fine and will be home soon.”
“There, look there.”
He had thrown the newspaper across the table. He was an angry bully. The newspaper ran a story of yet another young female victim of murder, torture, and sexual violence.
Bangkok was not famous for serial killers but they finally had one. They called him The Bangkok Angel Killer and the authorities were said to be clueless. The victims were young and female. They had all suffered hours or days of torture prior to death. Their mutilated young bodies had often been found burned beside rice fields a long way from Bangkok. The paper described sadistic rituals involving missing ears, knife cuts and trauma to joints. It also alluded to the possible involvement of local black magic. Thailand had never had such a case as far as Carl knew, not since he had been reading the local newspapers anyway.
“Did your daughter go out with her boyfriend last night?” Carl asked him.
“Yes,” he replied, “About eight o’clock.”
“Then go home and get some sleep. I’m certain she’ll come home sooner or later.”
“How the hell can you know that? What, you think I can’t pay you?” He was spluttering and getting angry.
“Not that. I’m just certain that her boyfriend’s not the serial killer.”
“How the hell can you know that?” He was starting to get loud.
“Because this devil is definitely an older man, probably foreign. The FBI would classify him as a type IV killer, the worst kind and difficult to catch. A type IV serial killer has no remorse, doesn’t understand the concept. He has what they call an anger-excitation profile. The whole process he performs is his own way to sexual gratification. This man kills for sport. He’s not out of control, quite the opposite in fact. Most importantly, in regard to your daughter’s safety, the rules of his game are that he must murder strangers. He doesn’t kill people he knows. So if your daughter’s with people she knows then she cannot be with the killer.”
He looked at Carl as if the detective were completely mad. It was something Carl had long grown used to.
“Go home,” Carl told him. “Keep trying to call her mobile. Everything’s going to be all right.” He put on his firm ‘this meeting is over’ face.
“Damn kids! No respect, acting like whores. Just my mother fuckin’ luck for knowing the laziest PI in the whole of South-East Asia,” Bart said as he got up.
He paid his bill with wet notes and left noisily. Carl could hear him splashing his way up the street. He did feel sorry for Bart. He was genuinely upset and confused by his loss of control over his child. The one Carl felt really sorry for, though, was his daughter. If Bart Barrows had been Carl’s father he wouldn’t have wanted to come home either.
Carl finished his coffee and started on the breakfast. A large cooked breakfast with real coffee made from coffee beans was one of the few things that made Carl momentarily forget where he was. However, he was rarely up in time and had no intention of making it a regular event. He only got up before noon when he had a big case and that didn’t happen often enough to become habit forming.
Carl took his time eating his breakfast: he had once walked Sukhumvit Road for three days without any food due to lack of funds and although that had been a long time ago, such memories linger. He had weighed sixty kilos in those days and could easily have qualified for a job on the Burma railway. Had he been offered a job laying railway track in the jungle between Thailand and Burma for Japanese psychopaths he would have probably taken it, times being what they were. Carl had put on thirty kilos since his really hungry years, which at the very least gave him the air of being wealthy. He read the paper for a while and then paid the bill and said goodbye to the dark smouldering waitress and the Drowning brothers. They wished him a good day; the waitress didn’t.
Carl stood outside and surveyed the flood. It was still slightly above knee deep and the murky water was not going anywhere for a while. He was going to have to leave the car and pull up his trouser legs. He had received a call on Sunday afternoon. Someone needed help and was Carl available? That immediately made him a very potential client. The best clients don’t ask the cost on the phone, they are quite rare and not to be taken lightly. Carl never knew how long he might have to wait for the next one. So he needed to go and listen to a story and to do that he was going to get wet.
Carl rolled up his trouser legs and found a taxi that, for a fare higher than for a run to the Cambodian border, would take him where he was going. He was going to arrive a little damp but mostly presentable. He ran a mental checklist and concluded that he was prepared for the meeting.
The taxi’s radio was tuned to one of the local news channels. Saturday had brought a coup at sunrise. The tanks had rolled into Bangkok in the early hours passing the old airport to the north of the city, as they always did. The morning television had been martial music and generals, admirals, air marshals and police chiefs displaying crisp uniforms and chests full of medals. Carl wondered, as he did during every coup, what all the medals were for; there hadn’t been a war. Maybe they got them for showing up on time to the previous coup.
By Sunday the military coup had made the front page of newspapers around the world and Carl was explaining long distance that there was no reason for concern. The western media always made it sound like the sky had fallen, but that had never been the case. A coup d’etat in Thailand was like a no confidence debate with tanks and had little effect on the general population.
From time to time, Thai people went out on the streets and taunted the army, which was an almost certain way of getting themselves shot at. It was not typically their idea, but mobs in Thailand were easily led. The majority of the population would stay at home for a few days and let the military storm pass. The true effects were felt months later when the political power struggles started. The old politicians smelling a possible election in the air created chaos as leverage to get a cabinet post under a military led ‘democratic’ government. This was Thailand and they had their own way of doing things.
The program on the crackling taxi’s radio was mostly martial music broken up by partisan panel discussions providing justification for the military coup. The general in charge was reported to having said it was unacceptable that certain politicians had been making billions of baht. Carl wondered how much was acceptable but wisely kept the thought to himself. The taxi driver, thrilled and amazed that Carl spoke his language, was complaining about the military’s action.
After a while Carl asked him, “How does it make you feel that those politicians have so much while you have so little?”
The driver shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Don’t you understand that they must have done something good in their previous life to get so much in this one?”
Carl nodded even though he didn’t understand and probably never would.