“What did he look like?’ Carl asked, dreading the answer.
“Very old and very fat. I have a picture.”
“That’s all right, I know who he is. We will talk again on Monday. Thank you.”
Shit! Never trust a client. The case was flowing nicely and everything was in place and then his own client blew his cover. He hadn’t considered the possibility, even though these things happened. They happened a lot. Carl should have been used to it. But, more importantly he should have planned for the possibility. It was extremely foolish of him to assume that on whatever case he was working on, that this time everything was going to be different. Clients were impatient and acted foolishly.
Carl needed to rethink his situation before he got to the airport. Anthony Inman knew that he had been found but had still gone to Macau. That could mean he was not concerned or it could mean that he was. So it made no difference to Carl’s understanding of his new situation. Was there any reason to believe that he would be aware that it was Carl who had located him? Not likely, but certainly not impossible. Would he take it personally if he knew it was Carl? No reason to think so. Most people didn’t. As long as he was not a raving lunatic he should see Carl as a nuisance, not an enemy. Like a person being sued would feel towards the lawyer retained to sue him. Not that Bangkok private investigators had the luxury of assumed respectability that often protected lawyers.
Reality check. All Carl really knew was that he didn’t know very much. The real decision to be made was whether or not he should get on the plane to Macau. He found the adventure was irresistible so he had spent ten minutes doing mental gymnastics for nothing. Of course he was going to Macau.
Carl arrived at Suwarnabhumi Airport with plenty of time to kill. He strutted in like he owned the place to cover up the stress that had taken a grip on him in the taxi. Airports are not good places to be seen acting nervous and upset in. Not unless you liked being touched up by a gorilla in a uniform. He avoided the new automatic check-in machines and went to a counter with a human being behind it. Carl was old-fashioned about such things.
The name of the airport should be a warning to visitors. The unpronounceable name ‘Suwarnabhumi’ for an airport built to receive millions of visitors who don’t speak Thai is a declaration that the locals are planning to have it all their own way. The correct pronunciation is soo-wah-nar-poom but only a handful of foreigners can work that out from the complex spelling. Typically when tourists asked Carl how they should pronounce it to Bangkok’s taxi drivers so they could be understood, Carl always told them, “Airport!” That worked most of the time, he told them.
Carl spent the long journey from the security check to the departure gate trying to work out what had been bothering him since the first day when he had taken the case. The long distance walk gave him plenty of time to think. The conclusion he reached on arriving at the departure gate was that it was the money. The money had come too easily for Carl’s subconscious to be comfortable with. The rest of Carl had of course been ecstatic. The voice at the back of Carl’s head was reminding him of something. It was saying that people who pay that much money and that easily usually have a guilty conscience. Carl put his doubts aside for the second time. He was going to Macau and he was going to play poker with somebody else’s money. What could possibly go wrong?
Once in the air he soon wished he had stayed on the ground. Carl had taken a Bangkok Post newspaper from the rack at the door of the plane. He waited until the plane had taken off before opening it. He had only taken it for the cryptic crossword. A quick glance at the headlines on his way to the cryptic crossword was his habit. Unfortunately Carl got stuck on page three and never made it to the crossword page.
He had noticed a small headline in the top right hand corner with a couple of paragraphs below it; a seventy-year old tourist had been shot outside the Sukhumvit Grande Hotel. Victor Boyle, a tourist, had been shot Thursday evening as he left his hotel. A motorcycle with two men in dark clothing and wearing black crash helmets had pulled up beside him as he was getting into a taxi. They shot him three times and fled through the Bangkok traffic. The paper reported they were believed to be professional killers as the shooter had calmly walked up to his victim and checked for a pulse before fleeing. The deceased was said to be a very large man and a US citizen from the state of Nevada.
After all the years Carl had been operating as a private investigator it had finally happened; he had lost his first client. Who the hell was Victor Boyle? Carl thought his name was Victor Inman like his brother. He hadn’t checked, which was stupidity bordering on total incompetence.
He went to the luggage locker above his head and took the background check on Anthony Inman from his hand luggage. Carl sat down, put his glasses on, fastened his seatbelt and started reading. It was all there as he expected; the marriage and divorce, the children he had abandoned, and his company directorships. There was no mention of him and the CIA of course. It was pretty much what Carl had been told by his client. There was one glaringly obvious thing missing though; Anthony Inman didn’t have a brother!
Chapter 11
Macau from the air was only recognizable to Carl from its shape and the location of the bridge that joined the two parts. It had gone from being a sparsely populated island to a neon metropolis. He had last been there in 1979 for a day. He had arrived on the hydrofoil from Hong Kong to seek his fortune at the tables. Carl left Macau that night for Hong Kong, on the last boat out, with empty pockets. The tables had not been kind.
The last time Carl had been a teenager. Now, over thirty years later, the memories were patchy. He remembered arriving back in Hong Kong and eating a cheeseburger from a fast food outlet. It was all he could afford and a novelty as the factory that made semi-synthetic food hadn’t invaded Thailand at that time. After that Carl went to the famous Bottoms Up bar and found himself unable to finish a whiskey soda. This was something he found curious indeed. Carl returned to the very cheap hotel he was staying at and went straight to bed.
Carl woke up two days later. He was bright yellow and too weak to walk to the bathroom. He remembered rallying all his strength and crawling there to vomit continuously. He somehow found the strength to get back on the bed where he passed out and didn’t come to until another twenty-four hours had passed. Whatever it was, it was very bad. Carl thought he was dying but hoped survival was not out of the question. Staying in the hotel room was not feasible. He was almost out of money and if he stayed any longer the bill would exceed his wallet. Carl decided to die in Thailand instead of Hong Kong.
He had an open return ticket to Bangkok so he called downstairs and asked them to book him a seat for that afternoon. Carl put on sunglasses to hide his yellow eyes, summoned strength from who knows where, and got a taxi to the airport. The only thing he could remember about the airport was dragging his bag across the airport floor because he had been too weak to lift it. The bag had only weighed eight kilos.
The next few weeks were a blur but even in his confused state Carl immediately made a decision to avoid all alcohol and unhealthy food for a year. He moved into a wooden shack surrounded by Bangkok’s poor due to lack of funds and his inability to work. It was not a bad year as he soon got a grasp of slum politics. Carl’s liver recovered and his Thai became fluent. He walked out of the slum community into a new decade. The year was 1980.