section of the bar nearest the door was reserved for the colonel as usual, so Carl didn’t have to fight through the crowd. A bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a bucket of ice, and bottles of soda were already waiting on the section of the bar nearest to the door. He didn’t wait for one of the pretty staff to come over but poured a drink from the bottle and waited for the colonel. The colonel was always fashionably late.
Carl looked around at the all-white room. The first time Carl had met the management was prior to their grand opening to discuss the need for a marriage between security and the local police. He had asked them why everything was all white and had been told in all seriousness that the nightclub was the canvas and the guests were the subject matter. Carl thought it was the last place on earth he wanted to be; there were no shadows anywhere.
The customers were models, trendy tourists, chic secretaries and the children of the rich. Some of the girls were semi-nude in their choice of high fashion and looked wonderful. For this reason Carl found it hard to dislike the place in spite of his incompatibility and the fact that it made him feel old.
The colonel eventually arrived with several young women following behind him and they all took up position at the bar. Viyada was the colonel’s long-time girlfriend and chief accountant so she outranked the others and always took charge of pouring everybody’s drinks.
Carl and the colonel had known each other almost twenty years. They had been involved in some serious situations and complicated cases together over the years. They had once had a gang of Nigerien conmen after them. The gang wanted their heads and not their wallets. After a dangerous battle of wits the gang was prosecuted and put in prison and the streets had become theirs again. The relationship was that of two people who had fought a few wars together. They didn’t make a big fuss about money in their dealings but it was a business and money was the oil in their relationship, so Carl gave him an envelope with thirty thousand baht in it and said, “Tell me when you need more.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I already paid immigration and I gave some to the captain for retrieving the phone record. What’s this case?”
“A seventy year old runaway. Missing person. Client is the elder brother.”
“As long as they pay the bills,” he said laughing.
Various people came up to them and they spent the next couple of hours as regular people out for a drink on a work night. Gossip and voyeurism is not the worst way to spend the a.m.
A Russian model with her eye on access to some power and possibly a fast-tracked visa extension turned her charm on Carl. She was beautiful and spoke a little English with a strong Russian accent. She was Hollywood fluff, a Bond girl inclusive of the long legs, tits, and rounded arse. She even came with a sensual enemy accent. A private detective’s dream girl but unfortunately she was probably sixteen years old.
Carl knew the agencies in Russia would send young girls to Thailand as models and provide them with altered dates of birth claiming them to be much older than they actually were. The young models were much easier to sell so it was common practice. Carl politely made it clear that he wasn’t interested. She went off in search of another person who could protect her. She was far too young and rare to be out so late on her own.
It was one of those moments when Carl cursed his seriousness and career choices. The ancient Greeks had been right when they said that knowledge could make you miserable. Better a little misery than the self-disgust that comes from behaving in a manner that stops you from being able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning. That’s what Carl frequently told himself and it seemed to help.
He still watched her naked back as she walked away though. He could just see the start of her muscular buttocks where the sunken back of her dress bounced as she walked. The colonel shook his head in disbelief at what he saw as Carl’s old-fashioned foolishness. The colonel hated seeing a missed opportunity.
By two o’clock everybody was suitably drunk and the colonel and Carl moved off to one side.
“I need something and you won’t like it,” Carl told him.
“Not the first time. What is it?”he said smiling.
“I need case details on the student murders. I think the police are way off on their investigation. It is probably a foreigner and I may be able to point them in the right direction.”
“They won’t give that out. You are talking crazy.” He was not happy but Carl had known that he wouldn’t be.
“It is being handled by Crime Suppression. You have friends there. Just invite them here for a drink and bring it up in conversation after you have plied them with enough to make them drunk. The police are famous for being indiscreet when they’re drunk so they’ll tell you everything.”
“We have an agreement not to interfere in active police investigations. Have you forgotten? Where’s the profit in this?”
“I know, but I really need to know what is going on,” Carl said casually.
“You must be drunk to be talking such stupid things,” he exclaimed. “We should talk about it tomorrow.”
“Ok. Tomorrow when we are sober.”
The problem was solved. By the following day the colonel would do what Carl had asked. When he was sober he would not admit that there was anything he couldn’t do. He always came through for Carl but made a point of letting him know how much trouble it would cause him. He couldn’t help it; he always went for the leverage. Leverage gets paid more. Carl claimed drunkenness and took his leave of the colonel and his harem.
Chapter 8
Carl drove the car a hundred meters and turned left. There was no point in letting the colonel know that he was happier drinking alone in the club around the corner. In Thailand people hunted in packs and Carl’s lone wolf moments were beyond their comprehension. It didn’t matter that they didn’t understand him. He had ceased needing their approval long ago. Carl never followed the crowd for fear of getting lost in it.
If the colonel had known where he was going and that he would rather go there on his own he would have felt a loss of face, which is something that is taken very seriously in Thailand. Face was a big part of being Thai but remained an enigma to foreigners.
Carl had once been asked to explain ‘Thainess’, which had become the fashionable word to explain everything that was unexplainable to expatriates and tourists. He answered that the foundation of ‘Thainess’ was a desperate ambition to make it from birth to cremation without encountering serious embarrassment. He knew it was an oversimplification and therefore he was doing the Thai people an injustice but the audience had loved it. Carl played to his audiences and knew that they liked the shorter answers.
When the parking boys around the corner saw his Porsche they started shoving cars around until there was a big enough space for him to park. They usually required people to leave their car keys but Carl never did. He handed them a red hundred baht note and went to the back of the building. There were queues of people at the front door and an entry fee so he went through the back door. Carl used a lot of back doors.
Bar on Eleven was very busy and the customers were wall to wall. The club was constructed of smooth grey concrete. The walls were thick to keep in the noise, which made the outside of the building resemble a Second World War pillbox. The ground floor had a DJ and the music to match. The second floor was more laid back. It was not Carl’s kind of music but the downstairs was a mix of actresses, models and high-class prostitutes so he sometimes put up with the noise.
He found a space at the bar that was big enough to stand in as long as he kept his elbows tucked in. Carl made a cramped hand signal for a drink and looked around the bar. The usual crowd was there, plus some ordinary people playing at being movie stars. Men with dyed hair and Botox faces wearing skin-tight Versace shirts and looking for the best love that money can buy. The women had spent the whole afternoon and early evening preparing their appearance in the hope that they might get noticed and win the lottery of life and get somebody to buy them a house. If it was all so wonderful why did so many of them ended up so miserable? Carl knew that they weren’t all as happy as they pretended to be. Some of them had been his clients.
The girls were dressed to kill. These were women and not the young girls you saw on Patpong, Nana and Soi Cowboy. They were hand polished, wore skimpy designer clothing, mostly bi-lingual and well-travelled. Carl called them the Bangkok Hurricanes because they arrived with a lot of sucking and blowing and when they left they took your house. Most of the Bangkok Hurricanes didn’t like him very much. Carl had been around way too long for their
