Harlan Wolff - Bangkok Rules

Valkyries filled the inside of his car and hung around the outside like a loud mist. He had reconfirmed his status as a god so he was attentively listening to every glorious note of Wagner at full volume. Only Wagner was powerful enough and had sufficient metaphysical depth for the ears of gods whilst instilling the necessary terror in mortals.

His shiny new black Mercedes raced and bounced along the potholed dirt road raising a cloud of dust in its wake. The old man didn’t usually have a heavy foot but he was annoyingly late and the sun’s rise was imminent. He cursed the poor farmers who were out walking to their fields at such an inconvenient and ungodly hour. He was getting careless in his old age. He had never cut it so fine before and he sure as hell was never going to leave it so late again. He had no choice but tolerate the dirt and the gravel that was kicked up by his wheels as they spun for traction. The small stones would leave marks on the perfectly waxed paint and he wasn’t happy about that. The Mercedes was his pride and joy.

He had driven off the highway somewhere past the ancient capital of Ayuddhaya. He wasn’t totally sure where he was but he knew how to get back to the main road, which was all that mattered. He drove with his back ramrod straight and his face pushed forward so his eyes could see through the tiny gaps in the red fog of laterite dust. He identified a dirt lane to his left that ran beside a dry irrigation ditch to a field that looked neglected and unfarmed. This would have to do, so he turned left and drove a couple of hundred meters until he couldn’t see anyone in his rear-view mirror. He stopped the car beside the ditch. His breathing was fast and he could feel his heart beating. He lived for this.

He went to the back of the car and opened the boot. She was perfect, he thought, and now she was his forever, nobody else could ever have her. She looked young, she might well have been. It was hard to tell with Thai women. From the neck up she was without blemish. The perfect long, shiny black hair covered the bloody stumps where her ears had been and she had retained the face of an angel. From the neck down the naked broken and slashed torso was covered in blood and gore. My god you are beautiful, he thought as he hurriedly lifted her small body out of the plastic and duct tape lined boot. He carried her into the ditch for the ritual of cleaning, and gently laid her down on a bed of brown leaves.

Then, with agility that belied his years, he jumped from the ditch and retrieved a plastic supermarket bag from the bloody boot. He hastily took several beer bottles out of the bag and removed their plastic caps. From the bottles he poured petrol from one end of the body to the other. Normally, he wouldn’t have rushed but today was different. He grabbed a newspaper from the front seat, rolled it up, lit it with a match, and dropped it into the ditch without ceremony.

When the police eventually responded to the phone calls and arrived at the scene, the local farmers were gathered around the blackened smoking remains still taking pictures with their hand-me-down telephones held together with sticky tape, glue and brightly coloured rubber bands. All the farmers could claim to have seen was a cloud of dust moving fast away from them towards the main highway to Bangkok.

One smiling, gap toothed, leather faced local villager on a rusty bicycle told the cops that he was sure the vehicle had been a very new S class Mercedes driven by an elderly foreigner and sounding like it was full of screaming ghosts. The police called him a fool and disregarded his statement as the uneducated ramblings of a village idiot. Everybody knew that elderly foreigners with ridiculously expensive cars didn’t dispose of bodies in rural Thailand at five o’clock in the morning.

It had been another monsoon Monday and Sukhumvit Road, the neon artery of boozy expatriate life, was knee deep in foul-smelling water. Carl Engel, Bangkok’s longest suffering private investigator, had taken shelter from the storm in a side street, his car parked a short distance from the main road. He had gone seven weeks without a client and had been forced to sell a hand-carved ivory chess set from Hong Kong that had been given to him by his long dead father. The sale had provided him with enough cash flow to last a couple of months and temporarily alleviated his fear of poverty. Being broke was the only thing that Carl was still scared of. Death had tapped him on the shoulder enough times for him to develop a certain level of immunity but Bangkok was no place for a foreigner to be penniless.

He had left home early and had been lucky not to break down and get trapped in the rising water. This he interpreted as a reward for putting aside his usual pessimism and embracing the possibility of turning the day’s unexpected potential client, an endangered species, into a badly needed cash injection. The early start had left him with time to kill and growing impatience for his appointment with his latest opportunity. Glaring at the clock on the wall was not making the hands move any faster so he stopped but soon found himself looking at his watch instead.

The floodwater had reached the bottom of the doors on his classic 1977 red Porsche, an impractical car at the best of times. It was over thirty years old and impossible during the monsoon season. Women had come and gone in his life but the car had stayed. He was looking at the old Porsche through the window of Duke’s American Bar and Restaurant, one of the few places that opened early enough for breakfast. The rain had been heavy, not cats and dogs, more like elephants and buffalos. Fortunately Duke’s entrance was high enough to keep the water at bay. Whatever happened outside, things inside would carry on as usual and in case of emergency there was a guesthouse with a few cheap rooms upstairs.

Carl had once lived in the guesthouse and called Duke’s home for a few months following the implosion of one of his marriages — a period of loose women, poker and binge drinking, which had come to an abrupt end when the cards ran cold and his money ran out. This was followed by some introspection that had all the comfort of going down a sewer in a glass bottom boat followed by a good scrub and brush up as he re-joined the world of making money as opposed to spending it.

Carl Engel’s dark hair was peppered with grey. He was above medium height and slightly over medium build. His belly had grown with every year since his fortieth birthday so he had a decade of growth to contend with. His height helped him to carry the extra weight but now that he had hit fifty the belly was starting to take charge.

He liked expensive Italian clothes but wasn’t flashy. That day he wore jeans, a black polo shirt and a grey linen sports jacket that wrinkled with wear. To complete the look, he wore soft black leather driving moccasins with no socks. On his wrist he wore a Girard-Perregaux chronograph. It was a valuable timepiece that had somehow avoided the pawnshop and stayed on his wrist through thick and thin. He chose to look chic and successful to camouflage the tidal nature of his finances. His face looked thoroughly lived in but he had always maintained the spark of the undefeated in his pale blue eyes.

In his youth Carl had been fortunate enough to experience all Thailand had to offer. Once upon a time he’d even been an idealistic romantic but his work had quickly put an end to that. Carl had seen the best and the worst of people, mostly the worst. Through experience he had reached the conclusion that nobody ever really knew anybody, as there were always parts that were kept hidden and were exclusively reserved for other people or situations. He could see deeper into people’s souls than most and it left him with no doubt of the duality that existed below the surface. Carl had come to believe that romance required putting someone on a pedestal and he could no longer do that.