Harlan Wolff - Bangkok Rules

House numbers in Bangkok were based on a very fuzzy logic and were typically all over the place. Carl fortunately understood the history of how the numbering had been allotted. The confusion had been created when large plots of land had been broken up into smaller pieces and sold. House number one hundred could be a long way from number ninety-nine and there could be dozens of buildings between them, each individually provided with a complex number at different times during Bangkok’s rapid growth. Carl functioned well in chaos so he found what he was looking for without too much trouble.

It was a stand-alone building with four floors and a flat roof. The place was deserted and had seen better days. There were unwashed floor to ceiling windows on the front of the building. Carl saw that it was facing the main road but all signs had been removed. Carl concluded that it would have been an office or showroom and not a retail shop. The building was empty and by the look of it had been for some time.

There were eight parking spaces belonging to the building and Carl parked the Porsche in the first one. Beyond the building’s private parking area there was a quadrant made up of shop houses operating various businesses and an open area where customers parked. As usual everybody looked. Yes Carl, how do you do it in a bright red Porsche?

There was a rundown noodle shop a few meters inside the quadrant off the main road that had obviously been in business for a long time. One of the few left in central Bangkok. It had become mostly plastic convenience food service in Bangkok but Carl was pleased to see that on Phetchburi Road that was not the case.

Carl went and sat at an old wooden table with a plastic tablecloth displaying its array of condiments, cutlery and toilet tissue. Toilet tissue to wipe your mouth had taken some getting used to until Carl realized that he only considered such tissues to have one purpose because an advertising company in Europe had told him so. In Thailand it was just tissue in a roll which was a far more practical attitude to such things.

Carl ordered an iced tea. He was fond of the Thai black tea, another thing that was becoming extinct because of US cultural products such as the sparkling sugar water that rots your soul. The pungent smell of frying garlic and chili peppers filled the air. It was how Bangkok was supposed to smell and it made Carl happy in spite of his hangover.

A chubby girl with depression’s flat feet that shuffled across the cement floor brought Carl his glass of tea. She would happily move over to Sukhumvit and work behind the counter of a burger joint in an air-conditioned shopping mall. Thailand’s worker bees were not a happy lot and who could blame them? Corporations had more interest in them than their own people or their government did and treated them better. Women like her wanted a better life and that would require saluting a corporate logo every morning. She wanted the Orwellian future and the future wasn’t pretty.

He studied the place for a while. The restaurant was no longer fashionable but appeared to manage to stay in business due to there being enough low-paid employees in the quadrant who needed to feed themselves on a tight budget.

The old man at a table inside the shop house at the far back was obviously the owner. He was the sole collector of all monies, carried to him by the slow-moving solitary waitress. In the more traditional Thailand the true owner of a business was the one who handled the money. All other ownership structure was purely cosmetic. Carl didn’t ask the girl for a bill but walked inside and went directly to the table at the back and paid the old Chinese looking man wearing shorts, vest and flip-flops.

“The tea is wonderful. Much better than that foreign rubbish all the kids drink,” Carl told the old man.

“Yes, business is bad now, very bad,” he told Carl in Thai with a Chinese accent. He didn’t show surprise that this foreigner was speaking to him in Thai.

“I haven’t been here for many years. I used to come and eat noodles here all the time. That was fifteen years ago. Everything changes so fast in Bangkok. Great that you are still here.”

He didn’t show much interest and didn’t answer.

“Take that building. It used to provide lots of jobs. Now it’s falling apart.”

“Big houses for rich people,” he said as he fiddled with his abacus.

“So long ago that I can’t remember. What was it?”

“Vegas. It was Las Vegas,” he told Carl.

Las Vegas Real Estate Company. Their advertisements had been all over town, still were. So this was where they had started. Inman knew the real estate business and liked a bet. Las Vegas Real Estate was not overly creative but was probably an effective name in the Thai market. Carl said thanks to the old man and got back in the car.

The first thing he did once he was comfortable in the air-conditioned car was telephone his lawyer. They had worked a lot of cases together over the years and he was always pleased to hear from Carl.

“Sawasdee Krab Khun Anand, how’re you? I am going to SMS you a company name. Can you check the ownership information at the Ministry of Commerce? I am looking for any foreign shareholders. Thanks and same to you. Let’s have lunch soon.”

Carl sent the name Las Vegas Real Estate Company Limited by SMS to him immediately and drove off. The old telephone number wouldn’t be of any use. It was a landline that would have been registered to the building and the building was another of Bangkok’s empty shells. One thing about the rundown building that Carl thought was very unusual was that the electricity meter on the concrete pole was still there in plain view and the heavy cables were still connected. What was an abandoned building doing with electricity and who was still paying the bill after all those years?

Carl called Colonel Pornchai, more an academic than a policeman. They had been involved in some serious cases together. He would be able to access social security records from the computer on his desk. Should Inman, alias Peabody, receive any form of taxable income he would be on the computer. But it didn’t take Colonel Pornchai long to confirm that he wasn’t on any government computer database.

Carl drove through the midday traffic to the Oriental Hotel on the river and walked through the lobby to the cigar shop. There was nobody around and the door was locked so he went back to the car and drove to the Grande Hyatt hotel where they also had a cigar shop. The shop at the Hyatt was busy as it had a private room with comfortable armchairs where customers could smoke. Carl asked for a Bolivar Churchill but was told they were out of stock so he bought a Ramon Allones Robusto instead.

“Do you get much demand for the Bolivar Churchill?” he asked the girl at the desk.

“We don’t sell many. They have been out of stock for a while now.”

He went into the smoky room and picked a leather armchair. Carl lit his cigar slowly so as not to overheat it. He took a couple of puffs and leaned back. The room was half full of local businessmen, politicians, and a few of the usual rogues. The rogues nodded at Carl and then went back to their whispered conversation. A large man came in and sat in the armchair opposite Carl.

“Heard anything about the coup?” he asked Carl.

“Only that there was one.”

The man sitting opposite Carl ran one of the legitimate stock brokerage companies in Bangkok. He was an elderly English public schoolboy who Carl assumed would have gone to Eton or Harrow. Carl’s money was on Harrow as there was a theory about Harrovians wearing brown suede shoes with everything. Today he was wearing a dark blue suit with his well-worn brown suede shoes. His name was Robert Standish and he was a pillar of Bangkok’s expatriate society.