Bangkok Rules by Harlan Wolff Read Free Book Online

off a minor street at the suburban end of Sukhumvit Road.
     
    The house was Bangkok old style and had well-matured trees in the garden and a rusty gate at the front. The Dutchman was one of Bangkok’s more famous old eccentric expat characters. He dealt antique Tibetan rugs out of his sitting room; that is to say he was mostly broke and in debt. He had been married once and his wife had foolishly tried to make him respectable.
     
    They had established a direct mail advertising business in the late 1980s, his version of going straight. His ex-wife had been a large round woman, Thai-Chinese and madly, passionately in love with money. Her father had been a mister-fix it army major. A lot of plain brown envelopes stuffed with money had been passed to him under Bangkok coffee shop tables. He was known for having a dark side and would, for a fee, happily give somebody a serious talking to including a slap or worse. His daughter had not fallen far from the tree.
     
    Carl knew the marriage was not a happy one when, around 1993, he noticed the Dutchman on Soi Cowboy every Tuesday falling down drunk. After several weeks of this odd behaviour Carl asked him why every Tuesday brought on such self-destructive behaviour? “Because Tuesday is the night Bla-bla-bla wants to sit on my face!” he slurred unhappily.
     
    ‘Bla-bla-bla’ was what he un-affectionately nicknamed his wife whom everybody else politely, and possibly out of fear, called Barbara although that was not her real name. She had chosen it due to an addiction to Barbara Cartland’s novels. Carl sympathized with the Dutchman’s plight. Bla-bla-bla was not the sort of woman that he could imagine in any sort of intimate situation. There was no surprise when the divorce came soon after that. She had gone away and was living in sin with her money in Vienna. He was down and out in Bangkok. It was hard to say which one of them got the best end of the deal.
     
    The Dutchman’s maid ‘Pim’ came to the gate surrounded by ten yapping small dogs. She smiled when she saw Carl. It had been a while since he had been there last. She liked Carl in the way that women with a need to play mother to an unmanageable rogue are fond of the rogues that they do not have to be responsible for. The Dutchman was her project and the more he argued with her and the less he paid her, the fonder she grew. What Carl saw was a case of full-blown martyrdom, a functional relationship in which the Dutchman was the tantrum-throwing little boy, and she the suffering adult. Carl was confident that they would live happily ever after.
     
    “He’s still in bed. Nothing has changed. He is still smoking too much ganja and drinking too much. There is a woman living here, watch out for her she’s another one of his whores. She’ll be gone soon, like the others. When the money runs out again she will leave.” Pim was muttering to herself in Thai as much as to Carl. He had heard it all before.
     
    She opened the door to the house and Carl went in. It was a place he had fond memories of. Everything was old. Even the music collection was vinyl. The house contained piles of antique carpets and the smell of old wood and imported Tibetan dust. The Dutchman lived from hand to mouth even though what he had was highly valuable stock. Deep down he was trying not to sell it, as he’d grown attached to every piece of it. He always waited until the final demand bills came or the collectors were on his doorstep when it became essential to sell one of his treasured items. It became a matter of timing but time didn’t really matter to the Dutchman so he was often in trouble.
     
    “You bloody asshole!” he boomed from halfway down the stairs in pyjamas and bedroom slippers. “Where have you been hiding? I heard your car from up the street. Still driving around like a bloody millionaire then. If you can afford to run that thing you can afford to send out for noodles and beer.” He went straight to the open door.