The Dutchman had handed him the wrong boarding pass. Carl’s name boldly printed on the boarding pass the Dutchman had run off with had obviously not drawn the negative attention that Carl’s possession of his had. The Dutchman was happily sitting at the bar inside the departure lounge sipping on a cold Kingfisher beer. Carl’s documentation was a different matter entirely. Teenage smugglers were always at greater risk of getting caught.
The angry officers started by accusing him of being in the CIA even though Carl explained that he carried a British passport and that the CIA were in fact an American organization. The military moustached men in their shiny customs uniforms did not see that as a relevant argument and continued to insist Carl was spying for the Americans.
The entire Calcutta customs department questioned him for forty minutes. He was frisked three times when they ran out of questions. Fortunately they stopped their search at his ankles every time and he had not been asked to remove his shoes. Carl had always been lucky.
Forty minutes later after his insistence that the girl at the airline check-in desk had handed him the wrong boarding pass, they compared the name on his passport with the flight manifest and he was let go. Which was a great relief as the penalties for smuggling gemstones were more severe than for smuggling narcotics.
He had found the Dutchman half drunk at the bar. “What took you so long?” The Dutchman asked Carl casually. Carl didn’t answer. He had already decided that his smuggling days were over. Decades later, sitting in the Dutchman’s sitting room, Carl found the memory amusing although he hadn’t thought so at the time.
“I don’t do the daytime drinking thing anymore,” Carl told him, ignoring the fact that it was exactly what he had done the day before.
The Dutchman put a vinyl record on his old Technics turntable and lit a joint. Carl recognized it as one of his favourites, ‘Monk’s Music’. The room filled up with marijuana smoke and the sound of Thelonious Monk’s piano. Oh yeah, memories were made of this.
Carl swept away the fog that was taking him back in time. He wasn’t a dope smoking gem smuggler anymore. He was a private detective, a serious person handling serious matters. It occurred to Carl that the previous day he hadn’t been very serious. Yes, he had picked up a twenty thousand dollar retainer, which is as serious as it gets, but he was still drunk before the sun went down.
Carl recognized the rising danger. He was on the verge of attempting to talk himself into something foolish again. That’s the problem with nostalgia; the past is always in front of you. But he was not falling for it that day, he decided, and he changed gear into the 21st century and declared to himself that the party was at least temporarily over.
“You’re well known for never throwing anything away. Do you still have your mailing lists from that direct mail company you ran with your ex-wife?”
“They’ll be somewhere in the garage.”
Carl knew the Dutchman had never owned a car so the garage had always been his warehouse.“Standard stuff I assume. Sports Club, Polo Club, credit card holders, golf societies, chambers of commerce and such?”
“Yeah, that sort of thing. Why are you asking?”
“I have one of those silly clients. The ones that think life is a movie and they are starring in it. Thinks his wife cheated on him when she was first married to him. Mad as a hatter I’m afraid.”
“So why the interest?”
“Someone pays you ten thousand baht for nothing it would be impolite not to take it.”
“He gave you ten thousand baht? That’s not much.”
“Oh, not for a case. Just to find out if the name he heard back then was a real person. Anyway, if someone gives me ten thousand baht to come and visit an old friend it seems like a good day to me.”
“I suppose it is,” he said without a smile.
“So we look at your lists and split the money.”
Suddenly the Dutchman was smiling from ear to ear. If Carl could read minds he would have known the Dutchman was making a mental list of all the girlie bars he was going to spend the money in.
“Wait here,” he said and shot out the backdoor.
The sounds of Monk and the boys playing ‘Well you needn’t’ from the record player washed over Carl. Don’t listen to it Dutchman, he was thinking, yes you need to!
By the time the Dutchman came back the record had finished playing. The Dutchman was bringing endless plastic bags into the house, wheezing with the effort. It took him ten minutes of sweating and puffing before he could speak.
“So what’s the name we are looking for?” he asked still out of breath.
“James Peabody, somewhere between 1993 and 1996.”
He was pulling out A4 size soft files that resembled manuscripts. They were lists of everything imaginable and most importantly the names were in alphabetical order.
“You start with this lot,” he told Carl as he started making a pile in front of him and another in front of himself.
Pim came back, clanking beer bottles. She brought beer and noodles in on another tray. She had lots of trays. Fortunately the Dutchman was too busy to care whether or not Carl drank his beer so didn’t notice that the bottle remained full. The noodles with pork were good and the chili peppers did wonders for his hangover. They both pushed the empty bowls and chopsticks into the middle of the table and got back to the task ahead.
The first file Carl picked up was marked with big letters on the front, ‘The Scandinavian Society’. No chance, but he still went through the Ps diligently. It was never a good idea to give the other person an excuse to be sloppy so Carl made sure the Dutchman saw how carefully he studied the pages. Getting people to the racetrack is one thing but spend too much time patting yourself on the back and they’ll never reach the finish line. The next file Carl picked up was a list of subscribers to Bangkok Shuho, a Japanese language newspaper. It was getting ridiculous but he went through it anyway.
An hour later brought the ‘eureka’ moment. The thinnest file of course, the least likely to succeed, the runt of the litter. It was no more than ten pages.
“What’s this?” Carl asked the Dutchman.
“Let me see.” He grabbed it from Carl’s hand. He studied it and started laughing.
Carl was in mild shock. There it was, the name he was looking for on a yellowing page, shouting at him from the analogue past. He hadn’t expected to find it. It was a case to go through the motions; it’s not like he took such an eccentric client seriously. A private detective may start his career with belief in his fellow man but life will get the better of faith and eventually make him cynical. The industry jargon is ‘paranoid survival’. Meanwhile, Carl was having a Hollywood moment. Fan-bloody-tastic!
“I had this mistress. The wife never knew,” The Dutchman said with a huge grin. “She was cute, from the North, Loei up by the border. Only Thai girl I ever knew with pink nipples. Can you believe it? Pink nipples.”
He started rolling a joint from another box, Nepali hashish this time. When he was puffing the pungent smoke he continued. Not smiling but content in that no man’s land of a happy memory.
“She worked for a travel company in the business district. A very small travel company, she was the secretary. They organized gambling tours to Macau for rich Thai-Chinese, the kind of people that could lose a million dollars in a weekend without having to commit suicide. The company made most of their real money by arranging cash when the clients gambled themselves broke. The currency control regulations in those days made it almost impossible to get large amounts out of Thailand. The company gave a horrible exchange rate and charged interest, all arranged through our old money changer in Chinatown. It took me forever to get her to make me a copy of their client list but I wasn’t going to miss out on having a list of people like that. Last time I sold it was around 1995, to a yacht marina with two million dollar houses for sale. There is a code after the names and information on the back page. Ah, here it is; high stakes poker it says. And here it says a private game on the top floor of the Lisboa casino. Not on public floors, no poker on public floors in those days. Must be rich to have been in a big private game like that.”
“What about contact details?” Carl asked him.
“Just an address and phone number.”
Just an address and phone number! It was all Carl could do to stay calm. He was having a good day, a special day. Like getting a Christmas card from Easter Island that said Happy Birthday.
“Let me write that down,” Carl said reaching for pen and paper while handing the Dutchman five thousand
