Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson (19 page)

I got my motorcycle taxi guy to run me home. On the way I stopped off at a late-night internet café and fired off an email to Lars laying out the shoe situation for him.

He phoned me three hours later, forgetting about the time difference in his haste to hear about the shoes from the horse’s mouth. I gave him a run down on what I’d seen, and suddenly he didn’t sound so sure of himself. Once when he’d phoned Pim on her landline a man had answered. Pim had hurriedly taken the phone and explained that it was her brother visiting. Lars said it was probably her brother again, but I could hear the uncertainty in his voice. I said I could easily check if she had a brother, though it would mean a trip to her home town.

Lars asked if I’d keep her under surveillance and promised to send me more money. I spent a couple of hours at the kow man gai stall the following morning, but I still couldn’t spot Miss Pim. There were just too many students on the move. I was starting to think about knocking on her door and giving her the old ‘I’m from the Danish Embassy’ speech and taking it from there. The temperature was heading towards the mid-forties again so I moved into a small shop where a dozen motorcycle taxi guys were watching a football match on a big screen TV. There was a small fan mounted on the wall and I positioned myself so that I could watch the game, keep an eye on the entrance to Block C, and enjoy a cool breeze. A couple of the guys were munching on fried grasshoppers and chatting away in a Laotian dialect so I nodded at the bag of insects and said ‘
sapp-e-lee
?’, the Laos phrase for delicious. They roared with laughter and asked me if I’d like to try. I’ve eaten bugs before so in the interests of a bit of male bonding I took one. I’d like to say it tasted like chicken, but I’d be lying. It tasted like a fried insect. A bit like a slightly bitter cashew nut, with legs. I ordered a bottle of Sangsom whiskey and some soda for my new-found friends and they found me a plastic chair. I figured I’d missed Miss Pim for the day so I might as well enjoy the football.

It turned out that one of the guys came from my wife’s village, so we did plenty of glass-clinking and shouting ‘
chon-gel’
which sort of means ‘cheers’. A few hours later and I figured I’d better head home to freshen up and dig out a suit to catch Miss Pim in my embassy guise later that evening.

My new best friend said that he was knocking off for the day and that he’d give me a lift to the Skytrain station at On Nut. It was one hell of a ride due to the combination of the whisky I’d bought him and the amphetamines he’d been popping. We zig-zagged through the traffic, me with white knuckles and clenched teeth, him with a manic look in his eyes and a tendency to scratch his groin with his gear-changing hand whenever we overtook a smoke-belching bus. By the time he pulled up in front of the Skytrain station I was feeling fairly light-headed.

The guy wouldn’t take any money from me. I was just about to head up the stairs to the platform when I thought I’d try a long shot. I pulled out Miss Pim’s picture and showed it to him. It was probably all the whiskey I’d drunk but I didn’t bother with a cover story, I just told him the truth, that Miss Pim’s boyfriend was worried that she might be being unfaithful and that I hadn’t been able to find out whether or not she was fooling around. The motorcycle taxi guy grinned the moment he looked at the photograph, then he beamed, then he burst out laughing. ‘I know her,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

He nodded. ‘If I tell you something, you mustn’t say it was me that told you, okay?’

‘Big okay,’ I said. And I promised him 500 baht to seal the deal. He asked me if I remembered a big guy who was sitting right in front of the television, drinking beer from an ice bucket through a straw. I remembered. He was an ugly brute with a huge mole on his top lip that looked as if it was about to turn cancerous. He’d glared at me when I spoke Laotian as if I had no right to be using his language, and he’d jumped to his feet every time a goal looked likely.

I nodded. The guy laughed again and jabbed a dirty fingernail at the photograph. ‘That’s his wife,’ said the guy gleefully.

‘No.’

‘Yes.

‘Are you sure?’

The guy nodded emphatically. He told me that the guy with the mole was the boss of the local motorcycle taxi rank, that he was a nasty piece of work and that nobody liked him. Like most ranks they operated on a rota system but the boss had a habit of grabbing the best jobs for himself, best meaning young, pretty and female. But what had really got up his men’s noses was that the boss had started boasting that he was able to get drunk every night on a farang’s money and that he was about to buy a new high-powered motorcycle as his wife was due to receive a stack of money from Denmark and an airfare. Pim was most definitely his wife, my guy had seen them together, and he lived with her in Block C. They had a two-year-old son who was being cared for by her mother back in Chonburi.

I gave the guy 500 baht and stumbled up the stairs to the platform, marvelling at my luck. The Chinese have a saying that pretty much covers it: even a blind cat can stumble over a dead mouse sometimes.

The next day I emailed Lars with the details of Miss Pim’s web of lies. I never enjoy breaking bad news, but at least I’d be saving him a lot of heartbreak down the line. I just hoped that he didn’t ask for proof, which a lot of my clients did. ‘Just a photograph,’ they say. ‘So I can see for myself.’

I’ve never understood that. They pay me to get the information they want, then when I get it they want more. It’s as if they want to torture themselves. Or maybe they don’t believe me. Or don’t want to believe me.

Often they start firing questions at me, as if somehow I know all there is to know about all things Thai. How could she lie to me? How could she sleep with me when she has a husband? How could a husband allow his wife to sleep with another man? All good questions. And to be honest, I don’t have the answers. I’m a private eye, not a psychiatrist. I have my opinions though, not that they’re much use to Lars and the thousands of other farangs who get ripped off by Thai girls every year.

How can they lie so easily? For money. Most of the girls that farangs meet are from the countryside, or are one generation removed from working the land. Rice farming is back-breaking, sweaty, unpleasant work. So is factory work, twelve-hour shifts and one day’s holiday a month. Is it surprising that a girl would be prepared to tell a few lies if it means an easier life? And once she’s started lying, wouldn’t the lies get easier and easier? Especially if she’s gone into the relationship solely as a way of earning money.

How can they sleep with farangs when they already have a Thai husband or boyfriend? Because by doing so she gets a better life for herself and for her man. It’s work, pure and simple. And in comparison with local wages, it pays well. A half-decent go-go girl can earn over 100,000 baht a month, about six times what a nurse or a teacher would get. As a student, Miss Pim’s earnings would be zero. Her husband, even as the boss of the motorcycle rank, would be lucky to pull in 10,000 baht a month. Then out of the blue appears Lars, flashing his Euros and offering her 20,000 baht a month just to go to university and have sex with him on his occasional trips to Thailand. Lie back and think of the money. I’ve heard that refrain from countless bargirls. Farangs like Lars assume that girls would be ashamed to take money for sex, that there is something morally wrong with trading sex for money. The Thais don’t see it that way. They see it as commerce, and more fool the farang if he mistakes commerce for love.

How can the husband tolerate his wife sleeping with another man? Because he understands that it’s work. She doesn’t love the farang, she probably doesn’t even like him. She is the mother of his child. She is his wife. The farang is just a customer. A fool with more money than sense.

I hoped that Lars would just do the sensible thing and cut off all contact with Pim. But I knew from experience that often the girl would be able to persuade the farang to give her a second chance. Or a third. Or a fourth. Thai girls can be very persuasive. And farangs can be very stupid. A perfect match, really.

I can never remember if it’s good things that come in threes, or bad things, but that week I got two more ‘good’ girls that guys wanted me to check up on. Like Miss Pim, they were both girls who had never been within a hundred yards of a naughty bar or a short-time hotel. Both ladies were in their early twenties.

A guy called Terry who lived in the UK had lost his heart to Nam, who worked as a private secretary in a Thai oil company.

A South African by the name of Mark who worked for an estate agency in Bangkok had hooked up with Suming, a hi-so girl who seemed to do nothing other than shop, take care of her daughter from a previous marriage, and socialize. She had a maid to clean the ten million-baht penthouse that she shared with Mark. Hi-so girls, in my experience, should come with a Government health warning. Hi-so stands for ‘high society’ and you’ll see them in all the trendy bars and restaurants, hanging out in the expensive shopping malls, or parking their BMWs or SUVs while talking nineteen-to-the-dozen into mobile phones. The hi-so girls are generally high maintenance, they rarely pay their own way and expect to be courted with expensive gifts, holidays and sometimes cold, hard cash. They also, from what I’ve seen, tend to have the moral standards of alley cats that have snacked on Viagra. A pal of mine who is a good deal more cynical than me once said that if a hi-so girl is at the wheel of an expensive car then she’s either having sex with a rich guy, or is the daughter of someone who had sex with a rich guy. Mind you, he’s the same guy who swears blind that bargirls who wear high heels only ever adopt the starfish position when they’re in bed and I know for a fact that he’s wrong on that one.

Anyway, Terry and Mark got in touch with me shortly after I’d burst Lars’ bubble. Of the two cases, Suming was the more interesting because according to Mark she spent most of her evenings at Rivas nightclub in the Sheraton Hotel. Usually she was with Mark, but when he was out of town she went alone or with friends and it was on one of these nights that he wanted me to check on her. That meant sitting in a top bar eyeing up hard bodies and drinking JD and Coke at 200 baht a throw. Mark had okayed all expenses and sent me a decent retainer to kick off the case.

Nam’s routine was much more mundane. She worked in the company’s head office in Yannawa, a huge building more than thirty storeys tall, and I had to hang around in the midday heat trying to spot her among the thousands of office workers pouring out for a noodle or fried rice lunch or at five o’clock when they headed to the bus stops.

Terry had sent me several good photographs of Nam plus a copy of her ID card and passport so it didn’t take me too long to spot her. He didn’t expect me to find out anything untoward. He loved her, she was from a good family in Chonburi and was a university graduate. They were engaged and had already set a date for a wedding in Thailand in six months time and were already talking about starting a family. Everything had been going along swimmingly until Terry had started visiting several websites devoted to Thailand and Thai ways, especially the Stickman website at
www.stickmanbangkok.com
. Stick’s an old mate and his site is packed with first-person accounts of farangs who have lost their hearts, and their cash, to lying bargirls. There are some success stories too, written by guys who have settled down with former bargirls and never regretted it, but I’d say that the horror stories outnumber the success stories by about fifty to one. Terry realised that the odds were stacked against him, and while he had no reason to doubt that Nam was anything other than the perfect fancé he figured it would be prudent for me to run a few basic checks. Smart boy.

As always, I ran through a list of questions with him, partly to get a feel for the girl but also because there are often telltale signs that something is wrong that only a long-time resident of Thailand would spot. Women with kids asking for a sin sot, or dowry, for instance. Payment of a sin sot is common enough in Thailand, but the amount paid depends on the girl’s social status and frankly, her condition. A hi-so virgin would set a suitor back several million baht. A bargirl who has been around a bit and has a couple of kids wouldn’t merit anything. So when clients tell me that their bargirl’s parents are insisting on a big dowry, I usually tell them to run a mile.

Nam’s parents ran a small supermarket in her home town and they had asked for a sin sot of 100,000 baht. She wasn’t a virgin when she’d met Terry, but she had only had a couple of boyfriends and no kids so I figured that sounded reasonable. He’d met her in a cinema, she’d been with a girlfriend, he’d been there alone. They’d started chatting, he’d asked her out and she’d accepted. That sounded okay, though it was slightly unusual in that she’d turned up alone on the date. Usually a ‘good’ Thai girl would bring along a friend or two as chaperones.

But what really set alarm bells ringing was that he had never been to her apartment. Not once in all the months he’d known her. She’d told him that as much as she wanted him to see it, the block was for women only. It was close to her office, walking distance. Now, there are woman-only apartment blocks in Bangkok, but they are few and far between, but in my experience it’s always a red flag when a girl doesn’t let a guy see where she lives. They’ll pull out a whole host of excuses: it’s a mess, it’s in a dangerous area, she lives with a friend and the friend has the key. But the bottom line is that she’s probably living with a boyfriend or husband, or the place is full of his pictures and his toothbrush is in the bathroom.

Terry had given me Nam’s office address but he didn’t know the name of the apartment block. That was another red flag raised. Anyway, I went out to Yannawa one afternoon and took a few bags of fried insects over to the nearest motorcycle taxi stand and started chatting to the guys there. The motorcycle taxi guys pretty much know everything that goes on in their locality and they’re always my first port of call in an investigation.