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.
Carl could hear Ben Webster’s tenor saxophone as he got out of the fourth taxi that he had used to get to the Dutchman’s house. Carl had expanded on his crooked line theory and had taken the scenic route from Central. The jazz music coming from the house told him that the Dutchman was at home.
Pim opened the gate for him, muttering to herself as usual. Her grumbling was going in one ear and out the other and Carl hadn’t registered a word of it. He tried to smile at her but by her reaction it couldn’t have been a nice smile. What did she expect? He was in shock for fuck’s sake.
Carl removed his shoes and entered through the back door, the friend’s entrance. He could smell the sickly sweet aroma of Nepali hashish smoke. The Dutchman was sitting on the sofa obviously stoned. It made no difference that he was high. The Dutchman was permanently stoned and it seemed to have very little effect on his ability to function.
“You’re back?” the Dutchman said as Carl turned the volume down on the amplifier and went and sat beside him on the sofa.
Carl spoke as calmly as he could, “I am in serious trouble Dutchman. If anybody finds out that I am here your life will be in danger. Is it all right if I stay?”
“My house is your house Carl. Do you remember that cute French girl you met in a discotheque and brought back here late one night because you had promised her a joint? Back when you were the young playboy? You got stoned and screwed her in that closet.”
“I don’t think you understood me.”
“I heard you. My point was that my house has always been your house.”
“Thank you,” Carl said. “I need a safe place to get my breath back.”
“Should you tell me about it?”
“Better give me a while to get my head together. Then I’ll tell you what I can.”
“If that’s what you want. You don’t have to tell me.”
“That’s what I want. A moment.”
“Pim! Carl needs a whiskey. He is white as a ghost,” he bellowed.
Carl gratefully drank the neat whiskey in silence. His brain was still not functioning properly. He needed to give it a little time and a little more alcohol. Carl wanted to call George on his new safe phone. The trouble was he couldn’t remember if it was actually safe. Carl drank some more whiskey and tried to think it through. Yes, it was safe. He took the phone from his pocket and made the call.
“It’s me,” he told George. “Mad Mike’s dead and it wasn’t a heart attack. Do you know the Dutchman’s house? I am holed up here until I work out what to do next.”
“I’m on my way,” he said and hung up.
“Mad Mike is dead?” the Dutchman asked.
Carl nodded. “He’s gone.”
“Oh, my God!” the Dutchman yelled. “He was the funniest man I ever met. A dreadful drunk but a brilliantly intelligent and entertaining man.”
It wasn’t much of a secret after all, Carl thought to himself. He immediately looked for something to divert his attention away from the mourning process. He could do all that later. Carl walked over to the sideboard and poured himself another shot of whiskey and lit a cigarette. It was what Mike would have expected him to do.
“George will be here in a couple of hours,” Carl told The Dutchman.
“Where the hell is he coming from? Pattaya?”
“No, Dutchman, he is close by, but he’ll take the long way here.”
“Jacqueline stopped by late last night, after Brown Sugar closed. She said she was worried about you and thought you were in trouble. She said you had that look about you. When I asked her what look she meant, she said, your scared look. She really knows you Carl, I’ve known you forever and I have never seen you look scared.”
“Everybody gets scared, it’s the price for being alive, she told me once. Jacqueline was always right about most things.” She knew Carl far too well for his liking. He didn’t let people get too close. Maybe that was the root of their problem, he thought.
George arrived slightly less than two hours later. He brought news from the old man.
“Carl, the old man says he lost the target. He gave them the slip by jumping on a long-tail boat at the Oriental Pier. He had dinner at the Oriental Hotel and then came out of the hotel around 10 p.m. He went next door to the public pier and took the only boat there at that time. They watched him go up-river but had no way of following him. He hasn’t gone home and he has not been to his office.”
“So he gave the order to hit Mike and then disappeared the night before it was due to happen,” Carl said.
“You don’t think he was there, do you? Shook off the surveillance so he could be there for the kill,” George asked Carl.
“He is certainly evil enough and sadistic enough so it would certainly be a possibility.”
“Shit!” George said.
‘Shit’ was right. Inman may have been in the garden watching his men murdering Mike while Carl was upstairs in the shower. If that was the case he had missed his chance to win the war. Carl decided he would make sure Inman lived to regret that oversight.