Chapter 3
Carl had spent two hours thinking in a bar around the corner from the hotel. The Two Ladies bar was open in the afternoon and seedy enough to dissuade most people from entering. The place smelt of drains and mould with a dash of Thai fish sauce. It was the oldest bar in the infamous red light district known as Soi Cowboy which is a narrow lane connecting the side-road Sukhumvit Soi 23 with the thoroughfare of Soi Asoke.
Cowboy had been a tall slim black American serviceman who had come to Bangkok from Vietnam in the mid- seventies and set up a go-go bar called Loretta’s with his first Thai wife. When they fell out he opened his own bar opposite Loretta’s called Cowboy’s. The street quickly became known as Soi Cowboy. The new name was soon adopted by its customers and by Bangkok’s taxi drivers until it stuck. He was charming, loud, irresponsible, and a world-class bullshit artist. He died broke in the 1990s many years after having the street named after him. Cowboy and Carl had drunk a lot of whiskey together over the years.
Carl had always found it easier to think in public places. Bars had always been his places of choice for his brainstorming sessions. Carl’s investigations began with a hypothesis and then a plan to prove his theory wrong. Carl strongly believed in this method as trying to prove a hypothesis correct is dangerous, as the detective’s own theory will decide what he sees. Carl’s working hypothesis was that his client was full of shit. All he needed after that was a plan to try and prove that he wasn’t.
The Two Ladies Bar was as good a place as any to be alone with his thoughts. Putting on the right attitude and tipping well was essential to his requirements. Unfortunately the customers were not as easy to train as the bar girls. An overly garrulous tourist type had overhead Carl ordering a drink in Thai and tried to start a conversation with him. The tourist defended his exuberance by explaining to Carl that he hadn’t been in Bangkok for very long. Then he asked Carl how long he had been in Thailand.
“So long that I tip the girls here not to play with my dick,” Carl said coldly.
He was left alone after that. Being the grumpy old Bangkok hand may not be the most sought after reputation but it suited Carl just fine.
The problem he was wrestling with was how to establish if the passport of the homeless man James Arthur Peabody had been used to enter Thailand in 1992 or 1993. It was avery well-kept secret that the immigration department didn’t keep information on their computer beyond two years. In Carl’s previous cases it had taken one phone call to an immigration policeman that he had a special financial arrangement with to get full details on a person’s comings and goings. When they arrived and when they left the country, where they left from and where they went. But what Carl was looking for was almost twenty years old and so the computer was not an option.
He was aware that there was a warehouse somewhere with all the past records in hard copy and he had been told that potentially it was feasible to retrieve information from there. But by Carl’s calculations it would require a police case, paperwork between departments, and take several weeks. He didn’t have that much time, as he needed to impress the client. Clients needed to be convinced, shown a little magic trick or two. Otherwise they could lose interest and, god forbid, ask for their money back.
It occurred to Carl that he was assuming that the target would not have kept his initial identity, would not have renewed the passport and would not still be traveling on it. Thoroughness would require confirming this.
Carl finished his drink and stepped outside for a cigarette. He had learnt the hard way to never leave a drink on the bar when he was going to the toilet or briefly stepping outside for a cigarette. He would always finish the drink and order another one when he came back. The Two Ladies was safe, they knew him and they wouldn’t let a stranger near his drink, but it was a discipline he had learnt the hard way, so he gulped down the remaining liquid.
Opening the door of an air-conditioned bar in the middle of the afternoon was always a thermal shock. The curtain of hot thick air hit him and brought back the memory of the first day when he had stepped off a Bangladesh Airlines DC-8 at Don Muang airport and felt Thailand for the first time. The sign on the wooden hut of the bucket shop at Earl’s Court train station in London had said, ‘The Cheapest Air Tickets in London’. The sign had caught the eye of the teenage Carl Engel. That was the day he decided to see the world but then never made it further than Bangkok. That had been over thirty years ago and in another lifetime. Carl always drank in the afternoon back then, vodka by the bottle, Stolichnaya if they had it. But, having aged and become less familiar with daytime drinking, the hot air made him feel drowsy.
Carl was pleased to see that the floodwater was already less than a foot deep and would be gone in a few hours. He made the call to his contact at immigration to run a check on recent travels to and from Thailand of US citizen James Arthur Peabody. Carl finished the cigarette and went back inside the bar in search of his second wind.
The tourist that Carl had driven off earlier came and sat next to him. He tried to order a drink from the girl behind the bar in Thai but failed miserably and reverted unhappily to English. He was obviously drunker than the last time he had spoken to Carl.
“Look,” he said slurring, “I ain’t wanting to bother you, I just wanna know how to talk Thai like you.”
“Why?” Carl asked him.
“Well, see, it’s like this. I have this girlfriend and we get on OK but I always had this, like, ambition of speaking to her in her own language.”
“And what makes you think if she has nothing to say in your language that she could possibly have something to say in her own?” Carl snapped.
The tourist was turning red and his body had stiffened. He looked like he wanted a fight but obviously thought better of it and moved to a safe distance further inside the bar, near the toilets. Carl didn’t have anything against him but he was not in the mood to adopt him and become his tour guide to the Bangkok red light experience. He was getting less tolerant of people with every passing year.
Carl exhibited all the symptoms of Expatriate Bubble. When old Bangkokhands have had enough, they retreat into their anger-powered Expatriate Bubble where they can control contact with the outside world and avoid being hit by the flying bullshit. In Carl’s opinion this was not a healthy way to live but he had ended up there anyway.
The cool and windowless place made him forget that it was a bit early for his drinking habit and he quickly got back in the swing of it. After all, he hadn’t actually received payment and so was entitled to take the rest of the day off. After the fifth drink Carl always found an excuse to avoid work. It would be a couple of hours before he expected to be called back by his man inside immigration so he decided that he might as well kill some time and enjoy himself.
An older waitress with a reasonable English vocabulary was talking to an obvious tourist. He was besotted with a young girl with the more voluptuous figure of the new generation that had grown up on dairy products. Foremost company of the US had a plant in Thailand during the Vietnam War making reconstituted milk, yogurt and ice cream under contract to the US military. When the troops pulled out they had no customer base, as most Thais were lactose intolerant. By the 1990s they had weaned the younger Thais onto their products.
The girl was under twenty years old so would have got the full calcium, protein, and cow fat package. It may not have been as healthy as the original Thai diet but it had given her a body by Michelangelo, which was fine by Carl. She was too young for him unfortunately. Children had never been Carl’s thing. He still looked though. The love-struck tourist was a bit older than Carl and he seemed to think her age was perfect. She looked bored and disinterested.
The older English-speaking waitress left the amorous barfly and the voluptuous girl together and came over to Carl and said in Thai, “He likes her a lot.”
“Who wouldn’t? She’s very beautiful and very young.”
“She is beautiful but still stupid. She’s my daughter and I am teaching her to be clever. All she wants is to be with young people but I told her, young people have no money. She’ll learn though, I must make sure she learns. She looks up to you. Maybe you can take her for a few days. You could teach her what makes men happy.”
“What makes you think I’m happy?”
“You spend lots of money and get drunk a lot.”
Then she took the frustration off her face, put on a smile, and walked back over to her daughter.
When the phone rang over two hours later Carl was in alcohol’s happy middle phase and surrounded by half- naked women. He was entertaining them with Thai jokes, which are always of a sexual nature. Unfortunately his repertoire was limited and it signalled that it was time for him to leave the party. After having been drunkenly playful and having a dozen or so girls rolling around laughing for half an hour Carl could hardly sit in silence again.
