Bangkok Rules

lifestyle.

Carl assumed that the police were aware that a lot of the students sold sex. He would have been shocked if they hadn’t known. Most of the policemen he had met over the years had slept with enough of them. Unfortunately, if the choice was to have an unsolved murder versus making an admission of the existence of such a sex industry in Thailand, then the decision was preordained. Thailand was not in the habit of peeling back the shiny silk cloth that covered its underbelly and allowing a peek at the eczema underneath.

The next thing he did was type in Somchai Poochokdee. There were no pictures of him, which didn’t surprise Carl. He found a few press releases describing expanding real estate markets and charitable donations. It was an annoyingly superficial portrait of a respectable businessman. One positive find was a business article that included his office address, which Carl had already, and his mobile phone number, which Carl didn’t.

Carl immediately sent a message to the colonel asking for a billing record of the phone number. This would take a few days, as the police would have to send an official request in writing to the phone company before they would release the information. He then sent him another message suggesting they meet at the club at midnight. He didn’t suggest an earlier time as nobody went there early.

George had entered the house through the door on the ground floor, which was where the kitchen was and the maid and the espresso machine lived. The maid liked George so he always climbed the stairs to the second floor with an espresso in his hand. Carl noted that George’s coffee had a perfect head of brown foam, unlike the ones Carl usually got. He sat down in the armchair beside Carl’s desk in the small office and sipped his espresso. He pointed at an eight by ten picture on the bookshelf behind Carl’s chair. The photograph was mounted in an expensive wooden frame. It was a professional shot of an attractive black woman standing in front of a grand piano singing into a microphone.

“How is that going?” George asked.

“Not so well. I call that picture Bye Bye Blackbird.”

“You don’t want her to hear you saying that,” George told him.

“Therein lies the problem.”

“You think it didn’t work out because she was black?” George asked.

“No, not that. The reason it didn’t work out was because she was American.”

“So you are still against political correctness?”

“Of course I am, it is a con. Fake politeness is not flattering, it is patronizing. If a black person walked in here now are we supposed to put a governor on our conversation? That, George, would make us racists by default.”

“It’s America, Carl. The way things are.”

“I don’t have to behave like that and I sure as hell don’t have to agree with it.”

“Bye Bye Blackbird is actually quite funny,” George said with a smile.

“It would be even funnier if it didn’t need to be analysed and dissected before we dared reach that opinion.”

“Do you miss her?” George asked. Carl didn’t answer.

Carl brought him up to speed on the case details and the recent developments. George gave him a rundown on what he knew about the CIA in Vietnam, which turned out to be a lot. He said that he had met some good ones. He called them ‘America’s Dream Team’ due to their high educations and strong beliefs.

He also spoke of a different sort. Men who’d turned the American dream into a nightmare. George said, “They were the corrupt leading the corrupt. Zealots for an imperial Christian America, with the sole purpose of making them and companies back home lots of money.”

George looked around at the old books, oil paintings, worn Persian rugs, and the loudspeakers the size of wardrobes and amplifier from the industrial revolution. He squinted his eyes appearing embarrassed, then looked at the woman in the picture and asked, “She always asked me why you surround yourself with old things, I always wondered about your addiction to nostalgia too.”

Carl pondered for a while and then said, “My theory, for your ears only, is that when a man doesn’t know who he is then he goes back to the time when he thinks he did.”

“Looking around this room, that would make you over a hundred years old.”

“I hope you are not listening to the maid’s theory of reincarnation. She thinks I am a born again arsehole.”

George smiled, finished his coffee, and left by the door from the sitting room to the swimming pool area. Carl spent the rest of the day listening to music and reading the history of Beirut. Recently he listened only to classical music as his passion for jazz was not working any more.

A few kilometres from where Carl lived, Anthony Inman alias James Peabody alias Somchai Poochokdee was not having a good day. He was watching his prey taking her final tortured breaths but he had not enjoyed the process. This was the first time he was not excited by the metallic smell of bloody death or the faeces and urine smell of terror. The bitch had been too courageous and he had not felt the total control over her that would have been the climax of his art.

The little slut had still been spitting blood at him up until a few minutes before she had collapsed. She would die without total capitulation and that had made him very angry. “Fucking little cunt,” he shouted at her loudly but she could no longer hear him.

She had called him pathetic so he had stuck a stiletto blade in her soft belly and she had screamed even louder. Somehow, between the screams, she had told him he was a limp-dicked sexual inadequate. All in perfect English too. So he had cut off one of the cunt’s tits and she had spat blood on him, like a wild animal. She must have bitten off part of her tongue from the agony.

Then he had lost his temper. That was wrong. He’d never lost his temper before. He had gone a little crazy and stabbed her several times with the stiletto. That was why she was dying too quickly and he had wasted hours on her for nothing. “Fuck that,” he said aloud again. Nobody was there to hear him and she had died, she was quiet now. He looked down at her with disgust. “Useless fucking cunt.”

He left her on the floor and went to the bathroom to take a shower. He was covered in blood, her blood, that cunt’s blood. He would leave her there and go home. He could come back the next day and clean up. Nobody would find her in the meantime. This was his safe place.

He hated her so much that he couldn’t stand the thought of being in the same car with her. Never mind, he told himself. Tomorrow he would be better able to deal with it.

He put on some clean clothes and combed his hair with pomade to smooth it and allow a neat side parting. He would go home to tell his wife and daughter that it had been a very bad day. He would tell them how an awful tramp with a tattoo and without the good manners to wear a bra or dress decently had said offensive things to him, and how he had nearly lost his temper.

They would look after him and make sympathetic noises. He would get a foot massage and a glass of aged tequila. They had always looked after him well and he felt blessed to have them. Perhaps he would use it as leverage to get a family Scrabble game going. Anthony Inman alias James Peabody alias Somchai Poochokdee liked playing Scrabble with his family.

Carl arrived at the club just after midnight. The club was a large elevated tubular building with somewhere in the region of a thousand people crushed together inside and queues outside. He had got the colonel the job running the security and put him in charge of keeping the authorities at bay with various financial incentive plans. Carl walked up the steps and was greeted by the bouncers who passed him through the red-roped area, much to the disgust of the long queue of hopeful patrons. He smiled at the girls on the reception desk as he walked past them and they put their hands together and raised them to their faces in the customary wai of respectful greeting.

Carl entered the modern music and light show by a sliding door that was supposed to protect the neighbouring buildings from the club’s noise, but it spent as much time open as it did closed. Fortunately the first