Harlan Wolff - Bangkok Rules

“You are right as always.”

“You look wrecked. There is a spare room upstairs, go and get some sleep. Nobody knows you are here so you can sleep soundly. Beirut rules my friend; when the bombs are going off never pass up a quiet opportunity to get some quality kip.”

“Thank you,” Carl told him. “I think I might just do that.”

Carl was between the chair and the door of the house when a thought occurred to him. He turned and asked Mike, “The one thing that is really bothering me, the thing that makes no sense is, why would General Amnuay be involved with this stuff? This is street stuff, he should be way above all that by now.”

Mad Mike thought for a moment, then looked at Carl and said, “This is one of those things from history that is not really a secret but just isn’t talked about much. There were thirty-eight thousand Thai soldiers serving in Vietnam under the Americans. They were called volunteers, whatever that means. If memory serves, Amnuay was a very young and very junior officer that was sent to Vietnam in the early 1970s. He came back to Thailand as a wealthy man, which is why he rose from junior officer to the dizzy heights he has achieved. Work on the assumption that he was working for the same people in Langley that your man did all those years ago. If they share a very nasty past there should be no surprise to find out their present activities are not squeaky clean either.”

“Every time I turn around I find another player in this story that used to be with the CIA. Does that mighty brain of yours have knowledge of any active CIA players presently based in Bangkok that I could reach out to, should it become necessary?”

“Of course it bloody does,” Mad Mike said smiling. “You could approach Bart Barrows and let him know that Inman is on his turf, if he doesn’t know already which he probably does. That might cramp Inman’s style and give him some sleepless nights.”

“Bart Barrows is CIA?” Carl blurted out in shock.

“Of course he is, you silly man. Didn’t you ever wonder why every bar where journalists drank in Beirut, sooner or later, you would end up bumping into the dreaded Bart Barrows? What did you think he was doing there, on holiday? Buying bomb-damaged carpets? He’s hardly the type. He’s your man, Quixote,” Mad Mike said laughing. “Carl Engel, super sleuth, can’t spot a Langley man even when he’s standing right in front of him.”

“You are a gentleman and a scholar.”

“And not necessarily in that order, and like I said, don’t tell anyone Quixote.”

“No problem Mike,” Carl said as he left him and entered the house. Mike was right; he was tired and hung over, as usual.

Carl woke up in Mad Mike’s house to the noises of Bangkok, urban birds, distant traffic, food vendors, and the chatter of maids. They were comforting sounds when you’d been around them as long as he had. Everything around him felt familiar. It reminded him of several houses that he’d lived in when he was young. He was smack bang in the middle of Bangkok expatriate life. He could have been anywhere and during any era from his past. It took him a while to remember where he was and what day it was. Reality soon kicked in and his mind went back into hyper-drive.

The room was old but clean and tidy. He had never thought of Mike as the sort of person to keep a comfortable home. There was a small bathroom door across from the bed. Carl needed a cold shower to get his mind sharp. He turned the water on after confirming that there were soap and towels he could use.

The walls and floors of the house were relatively thin and he heard the sound of Elgar’s Cello Concerto rising from the ground floor. He recognized it as an old recording with Jacqueline du Pre playing cello. Well, it stood to reason; what other recording could Mad Mike have owned? By the time Carl was showered and dressed, Jacqueline du Pre was attacking the second movement. Carl went downstairs. He was ready for coffee and cigarettes.

The music was louder than he had first thought. Maybe the walls were not as thin as he had assumed. Mike’s maid was nowhere to be seen. Which was a shame, Carl had been counting on a cup of that coffee. He went through the front door and saw Mike was still sitting in his grandiose peacock chair on his little veranda. Or, to be more accurate, Carl saw his dead body upright in the rattan chair. Mad Mike’s throat had been cut and the amount of blood on the floor under the white chair and the red stain that entirely covered the front of his white T-shirt left Carl in no doubt that Mad Mike was dead. A half-full bottle of beer was on the table in front of him and Carl could see it was still cold by the consistency of the condensation on the outside of the bottle.

He had most probably been killed during the first movement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, while Carl was upstairs in the shower. Immediately Carl became too focused on self-preservation to mourn for his old friend. He could worry about that sort of thing later. The first priority should be to make sure they didn’t get him too. Carl was still breathing, unlike Mike, so Carl’s own safety was all that he should focus on. Like Mike said, it was time for Beirut rules and Beirut rules said you were to forget the dead and look after the living. The assassins would have gone already, Carl decided hopefully. It would not make sense for them to risk getting caught anywhere near the corpse so they would have had to be long gone. He touched his gun for reassurance.

Carl saw Mike’s maid in the bushes with her neck broken as he hurriedly left the house by the front gate and walked without showing unnecessary speed along the small lane and away from the house. Having balanced the odds between the risk of accidentally bumping into the assassins, or staying at the house and risking the police catching him there with two dead bodies and an unlicensed gun, Carl had decided to leave as quickly as possible. His mind was running too fast and incoherently for him to pay it any attention so he focused solely on getting away as he walked toward the main road.

Carl found an empty taxi and jumped in. He told the taxi driver to take him to Central Department Store at Chidlom Road. He would switch taxis there just in case the taxi was local and would later be asked by the police about fares he had picked up on the day of the murder. Carl was going to impose on the Dutchman and he had no intention of drawing a straight line between Mike’s house and the Dutchman’s.

Once in the taxi he tried to get a grip on his confused thoughts. Did it happen because he was there, talking to Mike? Carl decided no. If they knew he was asleep upstairs then he would be dead too. Could anybody have known Carl was going to meet Mike today? Once again, the answer was no. Nobody in Bangkok even knew they were friends. Being a friend of Mad Mike’s was guilt by association. His bad behaviour in public was because he didn’t approve of people getting too close. Carl played along and kept his distance. So why did they kill Mike? Carl’s only conclusion was that Inman knew that he had been on the journalist’s radar in the past and had decided to remove all loose ends from his present. Inman may have assumed that sooner or later Carl would have compared notes with Mad Mike and that had most certainly put Mike at the top of his hit list.

Fuck! They had come over the wall and slit his throat while Carl was in the shower. Mad Mike would have been too drunk by that time of day to see them coming. There were probably two of them. They would have held Mike still while they used the knife. That’s why he was still in the chair and sitting upright. Two men on the ground. That sounded like the team that tailed Carl from the airport. He felt a cold shiver run rapidly up his back.