Bangkok Rules by Harlan Wolff Read Free Book Online Page A

“Pim, Pim, get in here, Carl is giving you some money to get beer and noodles. He’s hungry.”
     
    “You mean you’re thirsty,” she muttered to him as she bustled into the house carrying a tray laden with coffee cups and water glasses.
     
    Carl gave her five hundred baht and she went off muttering about the annoying habits of drunks and whores.
     
    “So, Dutchman, what’s this I hear about you and a new woman in your life?”
     
    “Did Pim call her a whore?”
     
    “No, just muttered a lot.”
     
    “You look good,” he told Carl sarcastically.
     
    “Rough night,” Carl replied as he watched both of his shaky hands negotiating with the hot coffee cup.
     
    “I thought you’d given up drinking like an Arab on his first Asian holiday.”
     
    “So did I.”
     
    “When you’re not completely pissed are you still tilting at windmills, saving damsels in distress and all that nonsense?”
     
    “No, just running errands for Thailand’s white collar criminals.”
     
    “To hell with them! Let’s go to Patpong or Soi Cowboy and get nasty drunk. Meet some naked women and smoke some shit. Just like the old days, just like the old days Carl.”
     
    He was at least fifteen years older than Carl but was still living in adult Disneyland. The decades of smoking the coarse Thai marijuana had taken its toll on his lungs. He wheezed when he talked and he wasn’t looking good. He was one of the few men standing from the wild times of the Asian hippy trail in the 1970s but it didn’t look like it would be for too much longer.
     
    They had become close friends in 1979 when they spent a year together smuggling rubies from Calcutta to Bangkok to defeat India’s strict foreign exchange regulations for an Indian moneychanger with an office in Bangkok’s Chinatown. It had been a year of high adrenalin including lots of alcohol and Nepali hashish. They both knew that the fact they didn’t end up in an Indian jail was more luck than good design.
     
    The partnership had ended at Calcutta airport. The Dutchman had lost his nerve and handed one of the two boarding passes to Carl and run off to go through customs alone leaving Carl to smuggle the rubies. This was against their agreement as they had mutually decided that should they end up in an Indian prison they should not go there alone.
     
    Carl was not concerned that he had several packs of very valuable rubies in his shoes that day as he had successfully carried out several smuggling trips by then. Unfortunately when he showed his passport and boarding pass to the Indian customs officer he was immediately accused of attempting to travel under an assumed name.
     
    The Dutchman had handed him the wrong boarding pass. Carl’s name boldly printed on the boarding pass the Dutchman had run off with had obviously not drawn the negative attention that Carl’s possession of his had. The Dutchman was happily sitting at the bar inside the departure lounge sipping on a cold Kingfisher beer. Carl’s documentation was a different matter entirely. Teenage smugglers were always at greater risk of getting caught.
     
    The angry officers started by accusing him of being in the CIA even though Carl explained that he carried a British passport and that the CIA were in fact an American organization. The military moustached men in their shiny customs uniforms did not see that as a relevant argument and continued to insist Carl was spying for the Americans.
     
    The entire Calcutta customs department questioned him for forty minutes. He was frisked three times when they ran out of questions. Fortunately they stopped their search at his ankles every time and he had not been asked to remove his shoes. Carl had always been lucky.
     
    Forty minutes later after his insistence that the girl at the airline check-in desk had handed him the wrong boarding pass, they compared the name on his passport with the flight manifest and he was let go. Which was a great relief as the penalties for