about her. She was a bargirl, he’d paid for sex with her, and now she had gone. The best thing he could do would be to forget Dang and find another girl. He could throw a spanner down Sukhumvit Soi 4 and hit a hundred possible candidates.
Bob insisted. He pulled a photograph from his pocket and slid it across the desk. She was a pretty girl, but not a stunner. Blonde streaks in her shoulder-length hair, nice breasts, long legs. I could see the attraction but I was about to tell him he’d be wasting his time when he slapped a fistful of 1,000-baht notes on top of the picture. ‘This girl’s special,’ he said. ‘I want you to find her for me.’
I looked at Bob, his eyes burning with a fierce intensity, and I looked at the pile of banknotes.
‘I just want to know why she left,’ he said. ‘If I did something wrong, I want to know what I did. That’s all. I want a chance to put it right.’
I knew what was coming next. He was going to tell me that he loved her, and I didn’t want to hear that so I just took the money and said that I’d go looking for her.
Unlike most Bangkok expats, my favourite hangout wasn’t a trendy nightclub or even a go-go bar. I preferred to spend my late-night drinking hours on a small plastic stool at a table on the corner of Sukhumvit Soi 13, strategically located between Soi Nana and Soi Cowboy. Khun Moi and her family have sold beer and Sangthip whisky on the corner for more than thirty years. Her relatives run the nearby barbecued chicken stall and the corner motorcycle taxi rank where I could always be sure to find temporary assistants when I needed them. Khun Moi’s business was a stone’s throw from Thermae and is a favourite haunt of streetwalkers. I used to have a stack of twenty-baht notes in my top pocket to help out any down-at-heel girls to buy some spicy somtam or to get the last bus home. So I already had my network of informants in place; all I had to do was to sit on the corner and show Dang’s photograph around. I was only halfway through my second glass of Sangthip by the time I had two of Dang’s friends at my table. They helped me work my way through the bottle as they told me Dang’s story.
It was yet another story that I’d heard a hundred times before. Much as she appreciated his money, Dang had soon become bored living with Bob. She was stuck in the apartment 24/7. Like most expats, Bob worked hard and long and when he got back to the apartment he was in no mood to go out and party. He wanted to stay in and watch TV, while Dang wanted to go out and hit the city’s nightclubs. And by all accounts, Bob had become lax in the sexual area. Dang was bored, pure and simple. But she still needed money. She wanted to build a big house upcountry and one day she wanted to live there with her daughter. Bob was an okay bet short-term, but she felt as if she was in prison. She spoke to a friend-not one of the girls sharing my whisky-who suggested that she go to Macau. Thai girls could make big money in Macau’s massage parlours and bars, far more than was on offer in Thailand. The friend recommended an agent who promised to arrange a job for her if she gave him 10,000 baht. She also needed a new passport under a different name because as a convicted drug user she couldn’t leave the country. That meant more money. Dang used Bob’s second 40,000-baht ‘salary’ to fund her move to Macau.
I phoned Bob the next day and gave him the bad news. I made it sound as if she’d been ‘lured’ to Macau because I wanted him to at least retain some of his self-esteem, but I did make it clear that she’d become bored with life as a housewife. I thought Bob would just accept what I’d told him and that he’d move on with his life. The last thing I expected was that he’d want me to continue with the case but that’s what he said. He wanted me to go to Macau to talk to Dang. He wanted me to tell her that he’d marry her, and that he’d take Dang and her daughter to America. I figured he was crazy. Dang had already demonstrated that she didn’t love him. She’d turned down an easy life with Bob to work as a prostitute in Macau. Sending me after her would be throwing good money after bad. But before I could say that, he offered me 10,000 baht a day plus expenses. Rule number one of the private-eye business: the client is always right. Even when he was wrong. The following day I was on an Air Macau flight. I explained that I might be on a fool’s errand but Bob said he’d be happy enough just to talk to her on the phone. If she told him that it was truly over between them, he’d accept it. Ten thousand baht a day to arrange a phone call. Easy money. Plus I get a free holiday in Macau. If nothing else I’d get a few hours in one of the casinos.
Most of the Thai working girls hang out in the Mandarin Hotel while the Chinese and Russian hookers tended to gather at the more downmarket Lisboa. I checked into the Mandarin, showered and had a meal, then hit the hotel’s lounge bar. I recognised a couple of English jockeys talking to a group of pretty Thai girls in evening dresses. Macau has a big racing industry, second only to Hong Kong in the region, and unlike Thailand there are no restrictions on jockeys and horses. I sat at the bar and said hello to a pretty Isaan girl who was wearing a long blue dress that emphasised her large, presumably enhanced, breasts. I spoke to her in her northern dialect and told her that one of the jockeys was renowned for having a small dick and more money than sense. She thanked me and went over to join the jockeys. She was soon by his side, stroking his arm and fluttering her long eyelashes.
I sat and sipped my Jack Daniels. When the jockey with the small dick went to the toilet, the girl in the blue dress came over to me. She bought me a drink and said that the jockey had agreed to pay her HK$5,000 for short- time, twenty times the going rate in Thailand. She’d be through by midnight and would come to see me in my room, if I wanted. No charge. I thanked her but pulled out the photograph of Dang and said that she was a close friend on my wife’s and that I wanted to check that she was okay. I spun the line that Dang had promised to phone once she got to Macau but that she hadn’t and my wife was starting to worry about her. The girl looked closely at the picture and then shook her head. She hadn’t seen her around, but if she had only recently arrived in Macau then her Chinese employers would probably be watching her quite closely until they could trust her. But most of the off-duty Thai girls went to the UFO nightclub, so she suggested that I try there. We didn’t have time to chat further because the jockey returned from the toilet. I knew about UFO. It was in the same building as a number of massage parlours controlled by a well-known Triad boss who went by the name of Broken Tooth. I left it until after two o’clock before heading there, but it didn’t start to fill up until after three o’clock. A band crowded onto a small stage and began belting out Thai hits. The audience was mainly Thai, working girls who had finished for the night and young Thai men who worked in the local restaurants or lived off the earnings of their girlfriends. The girls didn’t seem as friendly or as approachable as the bargirls I was used to in Thailand. They were mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, eyes dulled by years in the sex industry and associated drug-taking. Usually they came to Macau on three-month contracts to the Triad-owned massage parlours, and providing they were earning good money they were allowed some freedom, and even allowed to do extra freelance hooking in their off-hours. But if they tried to break their contracts they would be deported, often after being beaten or worse. For the fun-loving Thai girls, working in Macau was akin to a prison sentence, and many turned to drugs to get them through it. And the Triads were happy to supply all the drugs that the girls wanted. It wasn’t unusual for a Thai girl to return to Bangkok after three months in Macau with no money and a serious drug habit.
I moved to be closer to the band and started joining in at the chorus. I was soon accepted by the Thais and a round of drinks made me even more popular. I showed Dang’s photograph around and a couple of the girls said that they knew her but that she had been at home all day with a cold. She worked in one of Broken Tooth’s massage parlours.
I was back at UFO the following evening, and after a couple of hours and half a dozen Jack Daniels, one of my new-found friends came over with Dang in tow. She looked tired and drawn, nothing like the happy-go-lucky girl in the picture that Bob had given me. She was a bit wary of me but I told her I was a friend of the girls I’d met in Soi 13 and she began to relax. I waited until her third Heineken before I told her that I knew Bob and that he was worried about her.
She was a bit taken aback but asked how he was. I told her that he missed her and that he wanted to talk to her.
‘Why?’ she said, genuinely surprised.
‘He loves you,’ I said. ‘He wants you back.’ I told her of his offer to marry her and talk her and her daughter to the States.
I wanted to get her out of the nightclub so that we could have a quite chat. The clientele was mainly Thai but there were a few hard-eyed Triad soldiers standing around and I didn’t want them getting curious about my conversation with Dang. I asked her if she’d come back to the Mandarin, making it clear that it was only a chat I wanted. She offered to go short-time with me for HK$2,000 and then giggled at the look of horror on my face. ‘Just joking,’ she said, but I’m sure she was serious. I was sure that Bob was making a big mistake by pursuing this girl, but I remembered rule number one of the private-eye business and took her outside to waiting taxi.
I motioned for Dang to keep quiet in the taxi. You never know who is in the pay of the Triads in Macau. I noticed a motorcycle keeping close tabs on us as we drove to the Mandarin. I figured it was probably a Triad soldier keeping track of their investment. If Dang did decide she wanted to go back to Bangkok, I was going to have to be careful.
