hadn’t intended to get drunk but it never started with that as his plan. In Carl’s vast experience, the kind of bars he had chosen to drink in on that day always provided that end result.
As usual, it had taken getting completely drunk to hit the inspiration he required. He would go and see the Dutchman. That was it! The alcohol charged bolt of lightning had struck. Of course! The Dutchman. It was so simple it would never have come to him if he had been sober but without that restraint it had become clear.
The plan would require a lot of luck but investigations typically turned on luck so it was definitely a sound idea. It was time for Carl to go home, sober up, and pay a visit to the Dutchman. He left Soi Cowboy and took a taxi to Duke’s to collect his car. The car was dry even if Carl wasn’t.
Chapter 4
Waking up on Tuesday morning was a shock to Carl’s system. It reminded him of why he had been avoiding Soi Cowboy recently. Once he had been the youngest detective in Asia and the bars had been his chosen social life. Then he would drink a bottle of vodka, have wild sex, for a price, with two fit dancing girls and get up the next afternoon full of energy and joie de vivre. Now Carl would wake up alone early in the morning feeling like death warmed over, promise not to drink again, and walk around all day like a pit bull going cold turkey.
Carl fiddled clumsily with the Italian coffee machine and managed to make himself a double espresso without spilling too much of the dark frothy liquid. The strong shot of coffee made his belly rumble and his first cigarette of the day brought on a fit of coughing. A dangerous combination so he climbed the stairs rapidly to the toilet to read a chapter of Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Carl had no idea what constipation was and why people complained about it. Thailand had always kept him regular.
Two hours later, shaved and showered — it had taken a while for him to get going — Carl arrived at the Dutchman’s house. Carl hadn’t called first as the aged hippy didn’t have a telephone. But Carl understood his habits well enough to assume he would be home. It was a small house in a medium-sized garden on a lane off a minor street at the suburban end of Sukhumvit Road.
The house was Bangkok old style and had well-matured trees in the garden and a rusty gate at the front. The Dutchman was one of Bangkok’s more famous old eccentric expat characters. He dealt antique Tibetan rugs out of his sitting room; that is to say he was mostly broke and in debt. He had been married once and his wife had foolishly tried to make him respectable.
They had established a direct mail advertising business in the late 1980s, his version of going straight. His ex-wife had been a large round woman, Thai-Chinese and madly, passionately in love with money. Her father had been a mister-fix it army major. A lot of plain brown envelopes stuffed with money had been passed to him under Bangkok coffee shop tables. He was known for having a dark side and would, for a fee, happily give somebody a serious talking to including a slap or worse. His daughter had not fallen far from the tree.
Carl knew the marriage was not a happy one when, around 1993, he noticed the Dutchman on Soi Cowboy every Tuesday falling down drunk. After several weeks of this odd behaviour Carl asked him why every Tuesday brought on such self-destructive behaviour? “Because Tuesday is the night Bla-bla-bla wants to sit on my face!” he slurred unhappily.
‘Bla-bla-bla’ was what he un-affectionately nicknamed his wife whom everybody else politely, and possibly out of fear, called Barbara although that was not her real name. She had chosen it due to an addiction to Barbara Cartland’s novels. Carl sympathized with the Dutchman’s plight. Bla-bla-bla was not the sort of woman that he could imagine in any sort of intimate situation. There was no surprise when the divorce came soon after that. She had gone away and was living in sin with her money in Vienna. He was down and out in Bangkok. It was hard to say which one of them got the best end of the deal.
The Dutchman’s maid ‘Pim’ came to the gate surrounded by ten yapping small dogs. She smiled when she saw Carl. It had been a while since he had been there last. She liked Carl in the way that women with a need to play mother to an unmanageable rogue are fond of the rogues that they do not have to be responsible for. The Dutchman was her project and the more he argued with her and the less he paid her, the fonder she grew. What Carl saw was a case of full-blown martyrdom, a functional relationship in which the Dutchman was the tantrum- throwing little boy, and she the suffering adult. Carl was confident that they would live happily ever after.
“He’s still in bed. Nothing has changed. He is still smoking too much ganja and drinking too much. There is a woman living here, watch out for her she’s another one of his whores. She’ll be gone soon, like the others. When the money runs out again she will leave.” Pim was muttering to herself in Thai as much as to Carl. He had heard it all before.
She opened the door to the house and Carl went in. It was a place he had fond memories of. Everything was old. Even the music collection was vinyl. The house contained piles of antique carpets and the smell of old wood and imported Tibetan dust. The Dutchman lived from hand to mouth even though what he had was highly valuable stock. Deep down he was trying not to sell it, as he’d grown attached to every piece of it. He always waited until the final demand bills came or the collectors were on his doorstep when it became essential to sell one of his treasured items. It became a matter of timing but time didn’t really matter to the Dutchman so he was often in trouble.
“You bloody asshole!” he boomed from halfway down the stairs in pyjamas and bedroom slippers. “Where have you been hiding? I heard your car from up the street. Still driving around like a bloody millionaire then. If you can afford to run that thing you can afford to send out for noodles and beer.” He went straight to the open door. “Pim, Pim, get in here, Carl is giving you some money to get beer and noodles. He’s hungry.”
“You mean you’re thirsty,” she muttered to him as she bustled into the house carrying a tray laden with coffee cups and water glasses.
Carl gave her five hundred baht and she went off muttering about the annoying habits of drunks and whores.
“So, Dutchman, what’s this I hear about you and a new woman in your life?”
“Did Pim call her a whore?”
“No, just muttered a lot.”
“You look good,” he told Carl sarcastically.
“Rough night,” Carl replied as he watched both of his shaky hands negotiating with the hot coffee cup.
“I thought you’d given up drinking like an Arab on his first Asian holiday.”
“So did I.”
“When you’re not completely pissed are you still tilting at windmills, saving damsels in distress and all that nonsense?”
“No, just running errands for Thailand’s white collar criminals.”
“To hell with them! Let’s go to Patpong or Soi Cowboy and get nasty drunk. Meet some naked women and smoke some shit. Just like the old days, just like the old days Carl.”
He was at least fifteen years older than Carl but was still living in adult Disneyland. The decades of smoking the coarse Thai marijuana had taken its toll on his lungs. He wheezed when he talked and he wasn’t looking good. He was one of the few men standing from the wild times of the Asian hippy trail in the 1970s but it didn’t look like it would be for too much longer.
They had become close friends in 1979 when they spent a year together smuggling rubies from Calcutta to Bangkok to defeat India’s strict foreign exchange regulations for an Indian moneychanger with an office in Bangkok’s Chinatown. It had been a year of high adrenalin including lots of alcohol and Nepali hashish. They both knew that the fact they didn’t end up in an Indian jail was more luck than good design.
The partnership had ended at Calcutta airport. The Dutchman had lost his nerve and handed one of the two boarding passes to Carl and run off to go through customs alone leaving Carl to smuggle the rubies. This was against their agreement as they had mutually decided that should they end up in an Indian prison they should not go there alone.
Carl was not concerned that he had several packs of very valuable rubies in his shoes that day as he had successfully carried out several smuggling trips by then. Unfortunately when he showed his passport and boarding pass to the Indian customs officer he was immediately accused of attempting to travel under an assumed name.
