He had over thirty years of history with Duke’s American Bar and Restaurant and liked to drop in from time to time for a shot of nostalgia. The customers Carl had known over the years had come and gone. Some of them had left dead and some had left by airplane. Fading eight by ten photographs of a youthful Carl with some of them lined the walls. He had always thought it fortunate that very few people looked at the pictures of his youthful smiling and overtly optimistic face standing beside the long departed. Funny thing about the dead; he still expected them to walk through the door one day. The ones that had left by plane would eventually walk through the door. Bangkok had that effect on people. They always came back.
Carl was sitting alone at a round table that had wooden chairs for eight people. It had started life as a poker table that had taken pride of place in a Patpong go-go bar run by Texans with ten-gallon hats. Poker was illegal as was all gambling not in the hands of the government so the owners would send the bikini clad girls home, lock the doors at 1 a.m. and play cards until the sun came up. The table’s history went all the way back to the Vietnam War era and had seen a lot of money change hands over the years. When the go-go bar finally closed its doors following the death of the alcoholic owner, the legendary piece of furniture had somehow made its way across town and become a dining table in Duke’s. Carl liked the table.
Two men standing at the bar were looking in the direction of the window and laughing like schoolboys. They were Tom and Gary Downing, known around town as the Drowning brothers because they had made their fortune building and maintaining swimming pools. They were an expatriate success story and Carl had always been partial to a happy ending.
“Hey Carl,” the larger of the two brothers called out. “You know how you do all that undercover stuff? Fixing things and investigating and so on?”
Carl looked up without saying anything.
“We just really want to know something. How do you do all that in a bright red Porsche?”
He knew they were trying to be funny, rather than insulting. He had tracked down the location of a victim held by a highly unpleasant group of foreign gangsters and local Thai police. The gang had kidnapped and tortured the friend of the smaller quieter brother and demanded a million dollars ransom. Carl had been hired to investigate the gang and liaise with local police, which was not without personal danger, as the police typically protected their own.
Carl managed the problem by providing large cash incentives to policemen who were not related to the perpetrators and then feeding the police information he got from working the streets. They found the gang in four days and got the victim back without having to pay any ransom. Carl had managed the ransom negotiations using an alias and bought the police the time they needed to apply for the court warrants and permissions necessary for kicking down the doors that were required for Carl’s plan to work.
A thirty-man metropolitan police commando unit carried out the rescue. The commandos blew off the doors of the townhouse where the victim was being held and went in with guns and stun grenades. It had been a big story. Although Carl had made sure he had not been mentioned in the tabloids, the client knew he had put everything together. Carl knew he knew because he had happily paid Carl’s enormous bill. The police got all the credit, and the client and the victim’s family were sworn to secrecy. Carl liked to stay in the shadows. It would not be healthy to do what he did otherwise.
“You two are starting even earlier than usual. Do your wives know you have escaped?” Carl asked when their laughter had ceased.
“What else is there to do on a rainy day in Bangkok? Join us for a drink?” the big man asked Carl.
“You have to be joking. Last time I drank with you the beer was spiked with vodka and I went to my now ex-wife’s birthday party on rubber legs. It’s a little early for me anyway.”
“I forgot you don’t like to drink when you are leaping over tall buildings in a single bound and wearing your underpants outside your trousers. Anything interesting going on?” the small man asked, assuming that Carl’s life was all high voltage.
“I’m not involved in anything at present, I just don’t feel like drinking.”
“You are not as much fun as you used to be,” the smaller man said.
“Who is?” Carl replied.
They mumbled and went back to their breakfast beers. The brothers were fundamentally decent and Carl liked them both, even though they were prone to playing annoying schoolboy pranks on everybody they knew. Carl was left pondering the island that was his car, and wondered where advertising stopped and vanity started. Mind you, it made a lovely noise when it was dry.
“Better you let them buy you a drink. You’re much nicer when you are drunk,” Pet told him.
Pet was in a foul mood. Her name meant duck and she was his waitress that morning. She had taken a shine to him years earlier and was very angry that her feelings were not reciprocated. In her childlike innocence she could not see beyond her own idyllic vision and begrudged Carl his own interpretation of the future, and whatever else caused him to withhold service. She was clearly the extremely possessive type but Carl had already lived in that nightmare. He wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t hold a candle if she didn’t know where it had been, but some things just couldn’t be translated.
“Why do you read the menu? You always order the breakfast,” she said to him in Thai as she took the menu from his hand and turned on her heels and waddled away.
She returned with his order ten minutes later and slammed it angrily in front of him. If they’d been married and he had come home the previous night drunk and covered with lipstick her behaviour wouldn’t have been any different.
There had been a drunken night once when he had almost given her cause to have a claim on him. She had cupid lips and her body was willing, firm, brown and cuddly. He thanked God that he had found a moment of clarity and been able to resist her seductive charms. The picture of Carl and Duck Engel that he had was very different to her vision. The other reason was she had the look of a bunny boiler in her sweet eyes.
Carl wondered what she saw in him. He was fifty, ten kilos overweight, and wearing heavy black reading glasses. Women must like ugly men, he concluded, as he was more popular now than he had been when he had been in his twenties. Carl had tried harder in those days, and he had even briefly been overtly romantic. He had become a retired romantic since he had learned the cost involved. She hovered nearby in case he changed his mind.
The doors flew open and Bart Barrows made his less than sober entrance. Soaked through from the rain he trudged to the bar in his baggy shorts and squelching training shoes that could only be bought from the bottom shelf at Wal-Mart.
“Beer!” he demanded loudly.
He didn’t have to name the brand. The bartender knew what he drank. Heineken bottle in hand, he sat opposite Carl at the round table. Bart Barrows was rotund, unkempt and always angry. He had come from Arkansas to Thailand via the war in Vietnam. A grunt who thought he should have ruled the world, a confrontational American in a non-confrontational Thai world.
“Carl, I have been looking for you everywhere,” he half-shouted across the big table as he dripped water into puddles on the floor.