both of their ears. Carl then did a search on the Nevada murders. There was not much there as so much time had passed. However, what he did find was striking in similarities. Also of interest was the fact that authorities had questioned a Tony Inman, real estate broker.
The next thing Carl did was Google search Las Vegas Real Estate, Bangkok. The search revealed a medium- sized company that was active in the market and with an office located on Silom Road at the heart of the business district. All this information was available on their website. There were no pictures of the management on the site. Carl was not surprised.
The early part of Silom Road is where you can find Patpong Road. Patpong was the more famous red light district and was born in the latter part of the Vietnam War. Carl wondered how he had never crossed paths with this man, but in reality Carl had stopped being a permanent fixture at the bars of Patpong several years before Inman had arrived in Thailand. If Inman had been a regular visitor from Vietnam it would have been a few years prior to Carl’s arrival in Thailand. Carl was pleased with the information he had gathered. It was enough for him to get started.
Surveillance in Thailand never worked the way it was depicted in foreign films and television programs. It was typically a series of failures: watchers not getting where they were supposed to be at the correct time, losing the target in traffic, and not being able to enter the same places as the target due to their speech and dress reflecting their lowly place in Thai society. It was also relatively expensive. Surveillance was the only service that Carl had provided that led to demands of fees being refunded. Something Carl was loath to do, and rarely did.
Carl sometimes used a team of plain-clothes detectives from his local police station who would do a reasonable job of following someone, but they were expensive and clumsy, often putting them at risk of being spotted. So Carl opted for loose surveillance provided by a man he knew who had his own taxi. With the help of his son, he could tail almost anybody. The taxi was never noticed among all the other taxis on Bangkok’s streets and the son was there to jump out and follow on foot when necessary.
Carl telephoned his man and told him he had a printed picture, a home address from the ID card record and an office address and when could he start? Boonchoo said he could start immediately. He always said he could start immediately. Carl paid well and he liked people who appreciated it; not many do.
Next Carl called the colonel. Colonel Pornchai always behaved towards Carl as if he was doing him a favour as opposed to doing business. The colonel dragged his feet and complained about every requirement and Carl pretended he didn’t know he was paying double what he should. That was how the game was played and the men in uniform always had it their way, or they simply changed the rules. Carl understood the rules and had learnt to play the game well.
He didn’t mind paying more money to the colonel instead of contacting his less expensive immigration contact directly. It brought the colonel into the game and that gave Carl access to a larger network that could be called on for protection if needed. They were not the types to let anything happen to somebody foolish and naive enough to pay them double market price. They agreed on the inflated budget to check the immigration computer twice daily despite the colonel’s protestations of how difficult it was under the military government. Carl would be informed almost immediately the next time Somchai Poochokdee boarded a plane to Hong Kong or Macau.
Carl enlarged the target’s picture from the ID card record printout and hand wrote the relevant details, which he put in a brown envelope and took downstairs and gave to his maid telling her it was to be collected by Khun Boonchoo or his teenage son.
His maid was a hag and he allowed as little contact with her as possible. She had come with the rented house and as much as he wanted to get rid of her he assumed she had nowhere else to go. She had worked there for at least twenty years and was expecting to be there after Carl moved on. She took his tolerance as weakness and had become even more impossible to deal with. The thought of her sleeping under a bridge had started to appeal to him.
“You no nice to Thai lady. You no have wife you, because you no smile. You too old wait. Must marry. Thai lady very nice but only like man who smile.”
Although he was fluent in Thai she always spoke to him in her incoherent broken English. She was feigning concern for his lack of female company so she could act superior and remind him that all Thai people are better than foreigners. Carl did smile sometimes, just never when she was around.
He went back upstairs and spent the rest of Tuesday night lying on the sofa watching television. He fell peacefully asleep before midnight. He never remembered having bad dreams and had never been scared of the dark. A famous old Thai fortune-teller had claimed it was because the spirits enjoyed watching his antics and found him amusing, so they left him alone. Mind you; she also said he would be rich and famous after he turned forty. Nobody can be expected to be right about everything.
Chapter 7
Carl woke up Wednesday morning with the television still pouring out mediocrity. He turned it off and went quietly downstairs to the ground floor trying to avoid his maid and get his morning espresso. The maid was waiting for him. She told him that the taxi driver had collected the documents and gave him another irritating lecture on why he should learn to smile and adopt a whole rice farming community by marrying one of its daughters. Carl was pleased to hear that the target was already under surveillance. He almost smiled.
He went up to the sitting room on the second floor and carried the coffee and the laptop computer outside where there was a table and a couple of chairs. Carl looked around the garden and pool and saw that it was empty as usual. He looked at the buildings towering over the oasis and wondered why nobody seemed to use it except for him and George. Thai people typically spend their entire day hiding from the sun. This is not an easy thing to do as the sun shines almost all of the time.
The online news was mostly about Thailand settling down to its version of normal life under a military government. There was one story that got Carl’s attention, the grief of the mother of one of the murdered girls. She had lost her temper at police inactivity and struck out at an unsympathetic junior police detective and been arrested for assault. She had been let go hours later when wiser senior officers stepped in to appease the Thai language tabloids.
The old, not so quiet Americans had told Carl on his first visit to the bars of Patpong that if he was looking for sympathy in South-East Asia he could find it in the dictionary between ‘shit’ and ‘syphilis’. They told him that he had a fat chance of finding it anywhere else. At least some things could be relied on never to change. The family members of the killer’s young victims would be left permanently traumatized. There wouldn’t be any counselling and not much chance of any justice. They weren’t rich or important enough to justify any serious effort or expense.
Carl checked his email account and saw a confirmation mail from his Singapore bank telling him that twenty thousand dollars had been transferred from a bank in Latvia on behalf of a company called Victory Holdings. Apart from that glorious news all that he found in the inbox was the usual annoying advertisements and a pleasant message from an ex-girlfriend in creative advertising telling him that Alcoholics Anonymous had saved her and how it could save him too. Claiming she was still entitled to an opinion was her creative version of stalking.
All he could think of to say to her was how he belonged to a group he had created himself and had aptly named Alcoholics Unanimous. The solitary rule of this group was that, should any member not feel like having a drink, it was the responsibility of all of the other members to call him up and talk him into it. He didn’t write the email. He never responded to invitations from his past. Life is about moving forward, always forward. That was the theory anyway. He thought it commendable that she had given up drinking. He would have been more impressed if she had given up evangelism.
Carl went into the house to get his phone. It was his habit to leave it upstairs in his bedroom for a while every morning. He had always found it best not to attempt speech in any language until after his second cup of coffee of the day. There were no messages on the phone and he had already seen his emails. Carl called the client’s mobile but there was no answer.
Carl took the computer into the air-conditioned office and performed a deeper Google search of old newspaper stories. There was a story that stated the police were questioning fellow students in order to locate the latest victim’s ex-boyfriend, their prime suspect. They had not taken into consideration the fact that many students moonlighted as cocktail waitresses and massage girls to engage in prostitution as a way to finance a normal
