with its present version of red, white and blue stripes and introduced the Boy Scouts to Thailand.
The fact that there were no surnames until the twentieth century meant that there were no common family names, no equivalent of Smith or Jones or Williams. There were also hundreds of thousands of them. Surnames were distinctive and often ran to more than five syllables. There were also so hard to remember that outside of official business Thais generally didn’t use them. They would introduce themselves by their first names, or their nickname, and often close friends of many years might not know each other’s family names.
The fact that Thai surnames were so distinctive also meant that once you did know the full name of the person you were looking for it was often reasonably easy to track them down. The phone book was often all that you needed, provided that you could read Thai.
I could.
The Santhanavit residence was on Sukhumvit Soi 39, not far from the Emporium Department Store. I like the Emporium. It’s one of the most up-market department store in Bangkok, jam-packed with designer label clothing, state-of-the-art electronics and the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen selling perfume on the ground floor. It’s also got a great food court, one of the best-kept secrets of culinary Bangkok. You buy coupons which you can exchange for Thai dishes that you’d normally find on the street: stewed pork knuckle; wanton noodle soup; chicken and rice. You get the street hawker culinary experience but with an unbeatable view over the city.
I could just about see the top of the Emporium tower while I was parked outside the big house midway down Soi 39 where the Santhanavits lived. I couldn’t say exactly how big because it was surrounded by a wall twice my height and the gate was solid metal. All I could see from the street was the roof. It was a big roof. Maybe eighty yards from end to end. Attached to the all at the side of the gate were metal tubes for newspapers, two for leading Thai papers and one for the Bangkok Post. The newspaper delivery boys didn’t throw the papers onto the garden American-style or push them through the letterbox, British-style. They went into the tubes and the maid or security guard came out and collected then.
Under the newspaper tubes was an oblong red box with Thai writing on it.
Interesting.
It was a police box.
The Thai police aren’t the hardest working law enforcement officials in the world, and their bosses are always looking for ways of making them more efficient. One scheme was to attach the red boxes at points around the various beats in the city. Inside the red boxes were cards which had to be signed every hour by patrolling police officers. At first the red boxes were placed at random, but before long the city’s wealthier citizens realised that having a police officer turning up at your gate every hour was a pretty good way of deterring criminals. They started offering hard cash for the privilege of having one of the red boxes.
That meant that my idea of sitting outside the house and waiting for Tukkata to leave was a non-starter as cops would be turning up every hour or so and they’d be sure to spot my car. A black Hummer is pretty hard to miss.
Time for Plan B.
I drove home.
CHAPTER 29
The Dubliner is an Irish pub at the entrance to Washington Square, all green paintwork and shamrocks with Guinness signs and dark wooden tables, some of them made from barrels. I sat down at a corner table and ordered a coffee and waited for the boiler room boys to put in an appearance. The pub was just around the corner from the kickboxing gym where Lek and Tam trained so I kept my face turned away from the window just in case either of them walked by.
Sitting at the table next to mine was a couple in their sixties from England with a man who was obviously their son and a girl who was obviously a bargirl, or a former bargirl. The parents were stick-thin and grey-haired with worn, tired faces, but they were clearly proud of the fact that their son had acquired a beautiful Thai bride-to- be. Their son was slack-jawed and shaven headed and had his name tattooed in Thai across his forearm. Derek. He was wearing a Chang beer vest and baggy shorts and plastic flip-flops and a fake Rolex watch and he spent a lot of time scratching himself.
He was educating his parents on the best way to treat Thais which seemed to involve speaking slowly and loudly and offering them bribes, and telling mum and dad that it was the best country in the world unless you were into drugs because they shot drug-dealers. He didn’t seem the sharpest knife in the drawer, but his proud parents were nodding and grunting at his pearls of wisdom as they ate their way through the Dubliner’s massive all-day breakfasts.
The girl sitting with them was in her very early twenties, dark-skinned with the high cheekbones you usually find on girls from Surin, close to the border with Cambodia.
Why did I think she was a bargirl?
The tattoo of a scorpion on her left shoulder was a clue.
As was the ornate tattoo across the small of her back, revealed every time she leaned forward to pick up one of the French fries off Derek’s plate.
The way she was dressed screamed bargirl – tight blue jeans and even tighter low-cut black t-shirt, with a heavy gold necklace that Derek had no doubt bought for.
But the clincher was the fact that she was on the phone to her Thai boyfriend while Derek and his parents chatted obliviously.
I couldn’t believe it, and neither could the two waitresses within earshot who kept giggling at the outrageous things the girl was saying.
Derek was from Wolverhampton, in the middle of England pretty much, and he had only known her for a month. He had already proposed and his parents had flown over to attend the wedding in Surin. It would be a proper ceremony but the girl, Apple, swore to her boyfriend that she would never sign the paperwork to make the marriage official. She told her boyfriend that it would be the third time that she had done the marriage ceremony with a customer and that it didn’t mean anything.
Derek had promised to build her a house in Surin, and had already paid the deposit for a Toyota pick-up truck, which the boyfriend was driving around in. And Derek, bless him, had agreed to pay a sinsot of three hundred thousand baht.
Sinsot? It’s a dowry, paid by the groom to the parents of the bride. I paid a sinsot of half a million baht when I married Noy. Plus another half a million in gold jewellery. A total of a million baht, about thirty-five thousand dollars back then.
Was she worth it?
Every cent.
Noy’s parents gave it all back after the wedding, of course. Noy kept the jewellery but used the cash towards the deposit on our flat. That’s part of the tradition – the parents return most if not all the sinsot to the newlyweds to give them a good start in life.
I doubted that Derek would be getting any of his sinsot back.
The fact that he’d agreed to pay a sinsot at all showed that Derek really didn’t understand Thailand. His bride-to-be clearly wasn’t a virgin, wasn’t from a good family, and the scorpion tattoo suggested that she either been in prison or been dancing around a chrome pole in one the city’s red light areas. Any one of those three would have meant a much-reduced sinsot, and the fact that he’d pulled a hat trick meant that really the parents should have been paying Derek to take her off their hands.
As she carried on her conversation with her boyfriend, half in Thai and half in Khmer, Apple kept winking at Derek and blowing him the occasional kiss.
‘She loves me,’ he told his parents. ‘Not like the girls back in Wolverhampton, hey, dad? These Thai birds really know how to treat a man.’
Apple was telling her boyfriend that she was on the pill so there was no way that she could get pregnant, and that once the house was finished she would send him packing. ‘Or you could kill him,’ she laughed, and I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.
