The Payback Read Free

white dinghy containing a muscular western man I didn’t recognize, in T-shirt and sunglasses, bobbed up and down below me. The man gave me a cursory nod as I walked down the steps and clambered aboard, then, without a word, he started the engine and pulled back.
    The harbour was lined with a varied cluster of boats, with the most expensive nearest the shoreline, while the local junks were relegated to a far corner, next to the outer harbour wall. It was therefore no surprise that our journey lasted all of fifty yards until we came to the back end of one of the sleekest, most expensive-looking yachts in the place. Bertie Schagel was not the kind of man to scrimp when it came to his own comfort.
    A second westerner in T-shirt and sunglasses appeared on deck and took hold of the proffered rope as I came up the back steps. I slipped on the fibreglass and almost tumbled backwards, and he had to grab my arm to steady me. I nodded in thanks, recognizing him from my last meeting with Schagel in a Singapore hotel, slightly embarrassed to have lost the cool demeanour I like to portray in situations like this.
    The guy pointed towards the lower deck, and taking a last look at the setting sun, I went through an open door and into the air-conditioned coolness of a dimly lit room where a very large man with a very large head sat in a huge leather tub chair that stilllooked tight around his rolling, multi-layered midriff. Bertie Schagel’s thinning grey hair was slicked back, and he was wearing a black suit with a black open-necked shirt beneath it, from which sprouted a thick, wiry wodge of chest hair. He had an outsized glass of something alcoholic in one hand and a Cuban cigar, already half-smoked, in the other, making him look uncannily like Meatloaf in a Gordon Gekko fancy-dress costume.
    ‘Ah, Dennis, good you could make it,’ he said with a loud smile, not bothering to attempt to extricate himself from the chair, which would have taken far too long. ‘Take a seat. Would you like a drink of something?’
    Normally I would have baulked at the prospect, as I never liked to mix business with pleasure, or spend any more time with Schagel than I absolutely had to, but the flight from Bangkok had taken it out of me. I told him I’d have a beer. ‘Singha, if you’ve got it.’
    ‘We’ve got everything,’ said Schagel, before leaning over his shoulder and calling out to someone to bring it through.
    A few seconds later, a dark-skinned Thai girl with dyed-blonde hair came through the door behind him, carrying the beer. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen at most, which made her at least thirty years short of Schagel, and she was wearing tight denim hotpants and an even tighter, garish pink halter-top that clung like a second skin to her boyish body. As she set the bottle and a coaster down on the teak coffee table, Schagel leaned forward and, with an unpleasant leer, slapped her behind with a painful-sounding thwack. The girl flinched with shock but otherwise made no move to acknowledge what had happened, and retreated from the room without meeting my eyes.
    It was clear that Schagel was humiliating her for my benefit. He seemed to like doing that. Once, at another of our meetings, I’dbeen made to wait while he’d yelled abuse at someone in an adjoining room (I never knew if it was a man or a woman because whoever it was didn’t speak once), ending his tirade with an audible slap before lumbering back into the room and greeting me with one of his sly, knowing smiles. I think it was his way of reminding me that he was the boss, the one in control; that he could do exactly what he liked, and there was not a thing that I, or anyone else, could do about it.
    Only once had I ever defied his orders. He’d wanted me to kill a middle-aged Russian housewife based in Kuala Lumpur on behalf of her businessman husband, who it seemed didn’t want to have the hassle of a divorce. The husband must also have been mightily pissed off