He looked even more dishevelled than usual. Carl guessed he was wearing his gardening clothes. It appeared he had put them on to wade through the floodwater in the rain. This told Carl that Bart had left his house in the morning and had not been out all night. But why would he have left home in the rain when everybody else would have been running for shelter?
“You look like shit,” Carl told him.
“Haven’t slept at all. It’s my daughter, god dammit!”
“Explain,” Carl told him sharply, expecting this was going to be pro bono as people that knew him assumed that all assistance should be free. It made him want to send them copies of his alimony bills.
“She has this boyfriend, Thai boy. She is very secretive and I have no idea who he is, or what they get up to. She didn’t come home last night. These student murders, I mean, it could be him. He could be the killer. The boyfriend dammit! I need you to find her.”
“I am sure she is fine and will be home soon.”
“There, look there.”
He had thrown the newspaper across the table. He was an angry bully. The newspaper ran a story of yet another young female victim of murder, torture, and sexual violence.
Bangkok was not famous for serial killers but they finally had one. They called him The Bangkok Angel Killer and the authorities were said to be clueless. The victims were young and female. They had all suffered hours or days of torture prior to death. Their mutilated young bodies had often been found burned beside rice fields a long way from Bangkok. The paper described sadistic rituals involving missing ears, knife cuts and trauma to joints. It also alluded to the possible involvement of local black magic. Thailand had never had such a case as far as Carl knew, not since he had been reading the local newspapers anyway.
“Did your daughter go out with her boyfriend last night?” Carl asked him.
“Yes,” he replied, “About eight o’clock.”
“Then go home and get some sleep. I’m certain she’ll come home sooner or later.”
“How the hell can you know that? What, you think I can’t pay you?” He was spluttering and getting angry.
“Not that. I’m just certain that her boyfriend’s not the serial killer.”
“How the hell can you know that?” He was starting to get loud.
“Because this devil is definitely an older man, probably foreign. The FBI would classify him as a type IV killer, the worst kind and difficult to catch. A type IV serial killer has no remorse, doesn’t understand the concept. He has what they call an anger-excitation profile. The whole process he performs is his own way to sexual gratification. This man kills for sport. He’s not out of control, quite the opposite in fact. Most importantly, in regard to your daughter’s safety, the rules of his game are that he must murder strangers. He doesn’t kill people he knows. So if your daughter’s with people she knows then she cannot be with the killer.”
He looked at Carl as if the detective were completely mad. It was something Carl had long grown used to.
“Go home,” Carl told him. “Keep trying to call her mobile. Everything’s going to be all right.” He put on his firm ‘this meeting is over’ face.
“Damn kids! No respect, acting like whores. Just my mother fuckin’ luck for knowing the laziest PI in the whole of South-East Asia,” Bart said as he got up.
He paid his bill with wet notes and left noisily. Carl could hear him splashing his way up the street. He did feel sorry for Bart. He was genuinely upset and confused by his loss of control over his child. The one Carl felt really sorry for, though, was his daughter. If Bart Barrows had been Carl’s father he wouldn’t have wanted to come home either.
Carl finished his coffee and started on the breakfast. A large cooked breakfast with real coffee made from coffee beans was one of the few things that made Carl momentarily forget where he was. However, he was rarely up in time and had no intention of making it a regular event. He only got up before noon when he had a big case and that didn’t happen often enough to become habit forming.
Carl took his time eating his breakfast: he had once walked Sukhumvit Road for three days without any food due to lack of funds and although that had been a long time ago, such memories linger. He had weighed sixty kilos in those days and could easily have qualified for a job on the Burma railway. Had he been offered a job laying railway track in the jungle between Thailand and Burma for Japanese psychopaths he would have probably taken it, times being what they were. Carl had put on thirty kilos since his really hungry years, which at the very least gave him the air of being wealthy. He read the paper for a while and then paid the bill and said goodbye to the dark smouldering waitress and the Drowning brothers. They wished him a good day; the waitress didn’t.
Carl stood outside and surveyed the flood. It was still slightly above knee deep and the murky water was not going anywhere for a while. He was going to have to leave the car and pull up his trouser legs. He had received a call on Sunday afternoon. Someone needed help and was Carl available? That immediately made him a very potential client. The best clients don’t ask the cost on the phone, they are quite rare and not to be taken lightly. Carl never knew how long he might have to wait for the next one. So he needed to go and listen to a story and to do that he was going to get wet.
Carl rolled up his trouser legs and found a taxi that, for a fare higher than for a run to the Cambodian border, would take him where he was going. He was going to arrive a little damp but mostly presentable. He ran a mental checklist and concluded that he was prepared for the meeting.
The taxi’s radio was tuned to one of the local news channels. Saturday had brought a coup at sunrise. The tanks had rolled into Bangkok in the early hours passing the old airport to the north of the city, as they always did. The morning television had been martial music and generals, admirals, air marshals and police chiefs displaying crisp uniforms and chests full of medals. Carl wondered, as he did during every coup, what all the medals were for; there hadn’t been a war. Maybe they got them for showing up on time to the previous coup.
By Sunday the military coup had made the front page of newspapers around the world and Carl was explaining long distance that there was no reason for concern. The western media always made it sound like the sky had fallen, but that had never been the case. A coup d’etat in Thailand was like a no confidence debate with tanks and had little effect on the general population.
From time to time, Thai people went out on the streets and taunted the army, which was an almost certain way of getting themselves shot at. It was not typically their idea, but mobs in Thailand were easily led. The majority of the population would stay at home for a few days and let the military storm pass. The true effects were felt months later when the political power struggles started. The old politicians smelling a possible election in the air created chaos as leverage to get a cabinet post under a military led ‘democratic’ government. This was Thailand and they had their own way of doing things.
The program on the crackling taxi’s radio was mostly martial music broken up by partisan panel discussions providing justification for the military coup. The general in charge was reported to having said it was unacceptable that certain politicians had been making billions of baht. Carl wondered how much was acceptable but wisely kept the thought to himself. The taxi driver, thrilled and amazed that Carl spoke his language, was complaining about the military’s action.
After a while Carl asked him, “How does it make you feel that those politicians have so much while you have so little?”
The driver shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Don’t you understand that they must have done something good in their previous life to get so much in this one?”
Carl nodded even though he didn’t understand and probably never would.