Harlan Wolff - Bangkok Rules

He didn’t say no, so Carl continued.

“I will need to grease the wheels of justice to get things done, especially as I will be looking into an active murder investigation. This is not something that I typically agree to do as it is extremely foolish and draws attention to my activities. There are no licensed foreign investigators in Thailand and what I do would be illegal if they actually understood what it was. Unfortunately, seeking information on the progress of their investigation will be necessary in this case. I will need to provide good financial incentives to the police to accomplish this with any level of safety so I will not proceed until I receive this payment.”

The fat man nodded, so Carl said, “Should further money be needed you will get a full report and be in a situation to judge whether you are satisfied with the progress of the investigation.”

As Carl got up the client said, “Good luck.”Which Carl had not heard a client say before, especially one he had just cornered into parting with twenty thousand dollars. It felt ominous and Carl was uncomfortable. You’re not supposed to feel uncomfortable when you have just made a big score.

“I will be in touch as soon as I have something to report,” Carl said giving him his ‘you are in good hands’ look as he got up to leave.

Once in the street Carl sent the phone message with the bank details. Within two days he would know if he had a client. Carl was confident the fat man would send the money. Carl knew things about people. He figured he had a client, what he didn’t know was if he had a real case or not.

The client called Carl within an hour to let him know that the money had left his bank account and that he had emailed a copy of the confirmation to the email address on Carl’s business card. Carl chose to believe him so he decided to break his own rule about waiting until the money was in his hand and start planning. The story had piqued his interest.

He would not usually take a client’s word when money was involved. Payment was never confirmed until it was actually in his bank account. This was a rule to live by, as clients did not only lie about case information. Carl put his cynicism aside and started to plan how he would begin the investigation. He dropped his poker face and smiled as he waded through the water along Sukhumvit Road. It felt good to be out of the financial woods again.

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.