“How are you?” Carl asked him.
“For someone living with the bonfire of their dreams, not too bad I suppose,” he said with his soldier’s face.
They sat in silence for a minute. Then he looked at Carl again and Carl saw how haunted his face was when he spoke.
“The trouble with life is we spend all of our time waiting for a wonderful moment. The problem is, when that moment arrives we don’t embrace it. Instead, we take it for granted and get distracted. Then we promise ourselves that we will get it right the next time and appreciate how valuable it is. That is the human condition, what keeps us going. The belief that there’ll always be another chance and this time we won’t fuck it up and forget that all joy is fleeting. What makes us carry on regardless of the fact that all life ends in tragedy is the undying belief in tomorrow and the possibility that everything will be all right and the hope that we will know what to do the next time. That’s why religion sells. Buy it and everything will work out right in the end. That’s their leverage. The hook is that after death everything will somehow get resolved. What nonsense! I am reading a book about archery, Zen and archery actually. It is about staying in the moment, which is an extremely difficult discipline. You should read it.”
“I would like that,” Carl told him, meaning it.
He liked George and for a while they had laughed all the time. After the ten-wheel-truck had run over his wife’s Vespa the laughter had gone and been replaced by dark existentialism. George had lost people during the war but that was different, it had been expected. When he discovered his wife had been squashed by a heavily laden ten-wheel-truck outside an unlicensed construction site not a stone’s throw from where he was opening a bottle of wine for their dinner, he went to pieces. The driver had fled the scene leaving empty whiskey bottles on the passenger seat and little proof of his identity. George hadn’t asked Carl to look for the driver. Revenge was not his thing. The cremation and the weeks that followed it had been emotional. Carl had done what he could.
“Are you interested in some work?” Carl asked, hoping he would want the distraction from his grief. George watched his back when Carl thought a case might get unpleasant and attract the wrong people’s attention. It was very comforting to know that he was out there keeping an eye on him. Carl never saw him following him but had never doubted that he was always there watching. George was also useful at meetings when a little extra gravitas was required.
“Shit! You have a big case, you’ve got your game face on. I missed that. How sordid is this one?”
“Should be routine. Tracking down a man that may be an evil bastard but is nearly seventy so I’m not concerned. He was some big CIA wheel with the Phoenix Program so he may have some ugly friends in uniform here in Thailand.”
“You need looking after then. He has a big advantage over you.”
“How so?”
“Those guys had no self-doubt whatsoever. You, however, are riddled with it. First thing I liked about you. Yes, my friend. You are right. You will definitely need looking after. I am not going to lose another one.” He looked at the water thoughtfully and then continued. “The CIA was a civilian organization empowered to torture and kill. Being civilians, they chose to prosecute a war against the civilian population of Vietnam. This was deemed expedient as their understanding of military matters was limited and the White House had not adequately supported a military solution by declaration of war. Fighting guerrillas with terror was the strategy of madmen. They gave away the moral high ground and lost us in the military the support of the American people. The entire US military is still hamstrung by that disastrous decision and can no longer take part in a conflict without risking an overly harsh judgment from the people back home. Those warmongering businessmen have a lot to answer for.”Then he was gone as quietly as he had arrived.
Carl felt better knowing the oversized ninja would keep an eye on him. George had a look of Clint Eastwood about him and people tended to behave better when he was around. Carl went back to the house to take a shower and see if the email he had asked for had arrived. He couldn’t wait to see the man behind Las Vegas Real Estate.
He went upstairs and took a cold shower to lower the heat on his skin from the strong sun at the pool. The water felt good and cleared the remaining cobwebs from his head. He put on his fisherman’s trousers, which were like a sarong with baggy trouser legs, typically made of soft cotton. Around the house he wore them all the time, even slept in them. Carl went downstairs and put Bruch’s violin concerto on his old-fashioned tube amplifier with their speakers the size of wardrobes. He selected a medium-sized cigar from a humidor and lit it with a long match. Carl was home.
He sat on the sofa listening to the violin music for a while and then got up and went to his small office off the sitting room. He switched on the computer and waited for it to fire up. Khun Anand, professional as always, had emailed him all the relevant documentation from the Ministry of Commerce regarding Las Vegas Real Estate Co., Ltd. Whenever possible Carl preferred to print everything before he read it. He found it was more tangible when he saw things on paper. His habit was to print everything longer than three paragraphs.
Carl held the printed pages in his hand and he wasn’t pleased. The directors, or in this case the director, was Thai and all the shareholders were also Thai. Annoyed, he emailed the police colonel and asked him to retrieve, scan and email copies of their ID card records. He also asked the colonel for the recent travel records in and out of Thailand for the sole director.
This company director was ruining Carl’s working hypothesis and he didn’t like it. He left his cigar in the ashtray to go out on its own. Havana cigars go out quickly because they are chemical free whilst all other cigars burn evenly like cigarettes. Carl went into the sitting room and let Bruch put him to sleep on the sofa.
When Carl woke it was already evening. The house was silent and he was in total darkness apart from the fine lines of orange light given out by the tubes on top of the amplifier. He checked his phone for messages and found one from the colonel saying he had sent the information to Carl’s email address. Carl turned the lights on and went into the office having picked up and relit the cigar. He switched on the computer and started printing the reports and attachments.
The first document he studied was the ID card printout of the managing director. A Somchai Poochokdee aged sixty-nine. The printout showed the face of an old respectable foreigner. Carl had him! The target had used his money and influence to become a Thai citizen. That was how he had solved his problem of arriving on someone else’s passport.
He would have had to establish himself as a tax-paying businessman and then after a few years of regularly queuing up at the immigration department would have paid his way to speed up the process of becoming a Thai citizen. It would have taken a few years and he would have had to learn to sing the national anthem. Thus his identity problem would have been solved. He’d become a Thai person and so carried a Thai passport. The name he had chosen was Somchai Poochokdee. ‘The ideal man who is lucky’ was the best translation Carl could come up with. It was very corny and yet typical of the sort of Thai name people gave themselves when they applied for citizenship.
The next thing Carl looked at was the target’s travel record that had been attached to a second email. The airport immigration report showed that Somchai Poochokdee made trips to Macau and a lot of them. He was obviously still in the poker game. Macau had become a Chinese Las Vegas and recently opened several new casinos run by large corporations. There were public poker rooms there now and Carl had heard there was a lot of action at the tables. He took the details from the ID card document and started putting together a plan to meet the curious character in Macau.
A further look in his email inbox showed Carl the usual spam telling him he needed an extra-large penis and a pill to keep it permanently hard. He deleted those first, then he deleted the Nigerian scam mails advising him of an unexpected windfall. That left two unread emails. One was from a woman he had known telling him that she was unhappy and her husband was not treating her as well as she had hoped. The other email was an offer of work performing a character assassination of somebody that the would-be client claimed had annoyed him.
Carl ignored both of these emails, as he saw no point in replying. The first was standard Internet flirting from an old flame. Carl’s grandmother had told him never to reheat old romances or dishes containing mushrooms. The second email was from a man trying to buy an attack dog but Carl never chased or fetched sticks.
Then Carl had to do what he had been avoiding. He Google searched the Bangkok murders. Gruesome stories of how several young girls, mostly university students, had left the world. They would have suffered terribly before they died. Whoever perpetrated the crimes was highly skilled in acts of sadism. The final act was always stiletto stab wounds to their lungs through their ribs, causing them to drown in their own blood, followed by the removal of
