estate agents seem to smile the world over. Anita introduced us, but I was too busy looking the woman over to get her name straight. I thought it was Sanilee, or Saralee, or some kind of Lee, but at least I got her nickname. It was Nok.
Nok was tall for a Thai, nearly six feet, and she had the slim figure and bouncing strut of a runway model rather than the more generally compact and inconspicuous way of walking most Thai women employed. She wore a white blouse and a long yellow skirt with a wide belt and high-heeled sandals that taken together were perhaps just a touch too elegant for the occasion. Her long hair was slightly teased up and then swept straight back from her high forehead and her eyes were invisible behind huge tortoiseshell sunglasses. She looked vaguely familiar, although I was sure I’d never met her before. Then in a moment it came to me. She looked as if she had stepped straight out a seventies photograph of Jackie Kennedy and her friends.
“The house was built about three years ago,” she was saying as I eventually tuned into the conversation, “but no one has ever lived in it. We’re selling it for the bank that provided the financing.”
The woman’s right hand held a mobile phone and she was gesturing toward the house with it, using its little antenna as a pointer. I followed it with my eyes and for the first time took a close look at the house.
I had to admit it wasn’t bad. Not up to the standard of Plato Karsarkis’ house, of course, but still very nice. The style was something you would probably call early Hollywood Hills, hardly the sort of thing you’d expect to find in Phuket. Still, I had to admit the whitewashed walls and plain lines went surprisingly well with the green of the rain forest and the streaky blue of the sea beyond.
“What do you think, Jack?” Anita asked.
I mumbled something suitably vague that seemed to satisfy her and then trailed along behind the two women as they started their tour.
As it turned out, the house was impressive and Nok was thorough and professional in her presentation. For twenty minutes or so we paced the huge living room with a stone fireplace that looked somewhat out of place on a tropical island, examined the teak-floored bedrooms, peered at the designer-perfect kitchen, and took in the sweeping views from the hillside westward over the Andaman Sea. The thing that really grabbed me of course was the tennis court, a green-tinted Har-Tru surface carefully laid out along a north-south axis just as it should have been. It, too, enjoyed a spectacular sea view.
When the tour was done, we regrouped by the cars and Nok handed us both business cards and little booklets about the house. I flipped through {ippour was my copy of the brochure while she was talking, but nothing really caught my eye until I got to the last page and saw the asking price. It was eighty-five million Thai baht, nearly three million United States dollars. If this Hollywood Hills house had actually been in the Hollywood Hills, at least on one of the better streets, that probably would have been just about right. But it was in Phuket, and I couldn’t imagine there was any house in Phuket that had ever sold for that much money.
I held the little pamphlet up and looked at Anita.
“Have you seen the price?” I asked her.
“Yes, it’s pretty ridiculous,” Nok spoke up before Anita had to say anything. “But Thai banks are completely unrealistic about the value of property. They’d probably take a lot less if you offered cash.”
“It does seem high,” Anita mumbled, but she didn’t look at me.
“Well, my husband and I bought a house from the same bank,” Nok said, still pitching hard. “We offered about half of what they were asking and stuck to it and eventually they took it.”
“That’s still may be a little more than I wanted to spend,” Anita admitted.
“It’s a
“Did you have a figure in mind?” Nok asked politely, looking at me rather than Anita.
“Yes,” I smiled. “Zero.”
Nok looked puzzled, as she should have.
“I would be buying the property,” Anita explained. “Jack’s not sure it’s a good idea. That what he means.”
Nok started talking to me again, although I wasn’t sure why.
“Phuket is a great place to have a second house, I can tell you that,” she said. “My husband and I have a penthouse in Bangkok and a farm up north of Chiang Mai as well as our place here, but we spend as much time in Phuket as we can.”
That was a lot of real estate, even in Thailand. Now that I thought about it, I realized it would have taken at least a month of my university salary to pay for the simple, but elegant clothing in which Nok was dressed and another six months or so to cover the elaborate, but refined jewelry she wore with it. Now it was my turn to look puzzled. I had never guessed there was so much money to be made selling houses in Phuket.
“Oh, I’m not really a real estate agent,” Nok quickly volunteered, sensing my curiosity. “I just do this sometimes to help out a friend. And for the gossip, of course. Phuket’s just loaded with gossip. When you deal with real estate, you get to hear every bit of it.”
“I’m sure you do,” I nodded.
“Neither my husband nor I really work,” she shrugged.
“You don’t?”
“My husband is an American,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“I’m an American,” I said. “I work.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it
“What’s his name? Bill Gates?”
“No,” she {o, amp;='1em said, not getting the joke, which was okay with me since it wasn’t a very good joke. “It’s Edward Dare. Most of his friends call him Eddie. Do you know him?”
I shook my head.
“You should. You’d like him, and he doesn’t know that many other Americans out here. Maybe we could all have dinner somewhere one night soon.”
“That would be nice.” Anita jumped in to rescue me before the ethnic solidarity routine spiraled completely out of hand. “But I’m afraid we’re going back to Bangkok tomorrow.”
“Well, maybe another time.” Nok seemed genuinely disappointed. “I’m sure he’d really enjoy meeting a couple from back home.”
“I’m Italian,” Anita said. “Jack’s the American.”
“And I live in Bangkok,” I added. “That’s where ‘back home’ is for me.”
“Oh. .” Nok briefly looked disappointed again, but then she abruptly brightened. “Anyway, I hope you’ll think about the house. Phuket is a wonderful place to live and there’re so many prominent people here. It’s just that you never hear about them because everyone is so discreet.”
I rolled my eyes and said nothing, but Anita couldn’t resist.
“Prominent people?” she asked, her voice dripping innocence.
“I don’t like to gossip,” Nok said, “but I hear…”
She bent toward us and lowered her voice, although I had the impression the house was sufficiently isolated we could have set off a low-yield nuclear device without anyone hearing it.
“A cousin of the British royal family secretly owns a beautiful house at Karon Beach through a Cayman Islands company, and there is a
I struggled to look impressed, but I just couldn’t pull it off.
“And of course our most prominent resident of all has a stunning house up on one of the northern beaches you probably haven’t seen. It’s very private and very isolated.”
I glanced smugly at Anita and then back at Nok.
“Now who would that be?” I asked.
“Ah…” Nok glanced from side to side and lowered her voice even more. “No one knows for sure if he’s here now, but there are these people all over the island. They’re trying to be low-profile, but you can’t do much around here without somebody noticing.”
“Who’s all over the island?”
“You know,” Nok winked at me. “You Americans. The Secret Service, the FBI, the military. Probably even the
