We went up to my room and over a few more Heinekens from the minibar I repeated Bob’s offer to marry her and take care of her and her daughter. Dang definitely wanted to get out of Macau but she wasn’t sure about Bob. ‘He so boring,’ she said.
I asked her what she wanted for her life.
She beamed. ‘I want a house for my mother and father and a house for me and my baby. And a pick-up truck. And someone who loves me too much.’
I got the feeling that Bob wasn’t even being considered for the role of ‘someone who loves me too much.’
I told her that Bob would take care of all her financial worries. I had no doubt he would build a house for her parents. Up in Isaan, a half-decent house could be built for less than a million baht and Bob clearly had money to burn. I was starting to feel a bit like Bob’s pimp.
‘I want go back to Bangkok,’ she said. ‘Macau boring too much. If I stay here long time I take drugs again, I sure.’
That was something, at least. If I could get Dang back to Bangkok at least Bob could talk to her in person. But I had no doubt that Broken Tooth would try to stop me if he found out that I was taking her out of Macau.
I used my mobile phone to book two business-class tickets from Hong Kong to Bangkok. That would allow us to get onto the next flight in Hong Kong, no matter what time we arrived. All I had to do was to get to Hong Kong. I figured that trying to go direct, from Macau to Bangkok, would just be asking for trouble.
There were two beds in the hotel room so there was no problem with the sleeping arrangements. The next morning I went with Dang to pick up her belongings and passport from her room. Luckily the Triads hadn’t taken her passport off her. I had a fall-back position in that I’d brought a passport belonging to a friend who looked a lot like Dang, but that wouldn’t have an immigration arrival stamp for Macau so I’d have been chancing my arm. Anyway, we took her things back to the hotel, packed them into my bag, then boarded the hotel courtesy bus to the ferry terminal.
I checked to see if we were being followed. The motorcycle was there. When we got to the ferry terminal, I made a big show of saying goodbye to Dang, lots of hugs and kisses, then she got into a taxi as I walked into the terminal. I saw the motorcycle follow the taxi and knew that I was right. The Triads were watching her.
I ignored the ferry and hovercraft ticket offices and headed for the offices of the local helicopter service. The six-seater helicopter would get us to Hong Kong in fifteen minutes, and there was a designated immigration queue that would have us to the helicopter within minutes. I bought two tickets for the next flight and then went downstairs to wait for Dang.
The plan was for her to go back to her room, wait twenty minutes, then catch a taxi back to the terminal. If she was followed, it wouldn’t matter because they wouldn’t have time to get us before we were through the fast- track immigration. As soon as her taxi arrived I paid the driver, grabbed her hand and hurried her inside the terminal. I didn’t see anyone following her but I didn’t take any chances and we hurried through immigration and into the helicopter departure lounge. Half an hour later and we were in a taxi heading for Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong, and four hours later we were safely in Bangkok.
Bob was there to meet us. He thrust a brown envelope full of banknotes into my hand and told me to send him a bill for my expenses. He hugged and kissed Dang and hurried her off to his waiting limousine. Dang was all smiles but I wasn’t sure how long it would last. She struck me as a girl who was easily bored. Still, I had my money and I had a satisfied client. A private eye can’t ask for much more.
THE CASE OF THE TWO-TIMING THAI
I normally steer clear of business investigations, especially where Thais are concerned. The thing you have to remember is that Thailand is for the Thais. Even the main political party is called Thais Love Thais. Farangs are outsiders, and the odds are always stacked against us. We can’t own land, we need visas to live and work here, we need to own businesses in partnership with Thais. If a farang ever runs up against a Thai in a business dispute, generally the farang comes off worse. And that’s if the local is playing fair. If the local is a shady character, he might decide to solve the dispute by hiring a guy on a motorcycle to put a couple of bullets in the farang’s head. Don’t laugh, it happens. It happens a lot. It’s not always a blatant bullet in the brain, either. Pretty much every week a farang will be found dead at the foot of his apartment block or lying on his bed with his head in a plastic bag. More often than not the cops will put it down to suicide but a lot of the deaths are murder, plain and simple. And a lot of the murders are the result of business disputes.
I got a phone call one afternoon from a well-spoken English guy who said that I had come highly recommended and that he had a problem he needed help with. At first I assumed he was just another sex tourist who’d fallen for the charms of a pole-dancer but then he said he’d like to meet me the next morning at 7am for breakfast at a five-star hotel along with his regional manager. I knew then that this wasn’t going to be a bargirl investigation-sex tourists tend to stay clear of five-star hotels, they don’t get up that early and they don’t usually have regional managers.
I spotted them as soon as I walked into the hotel restaurant. Two men in suits drinking coffee and reading the business section of the Bangkok Post. They both stood up and shook my hands. The guy who called was Alistair Stewart. He was tall with receding hair, late thirties maybe. His regional manager was Eric Holden, a Norwegian guy with white hair who was a few years older and several kilograms heavier. He was based in Hong Kong and had apparently flown over specifically for the breakfast meeting.
They made me sign a confidentiality agreement before they told me what their problem was. I was already starting to get cold feet but figured that a five-star breakfast was worth hanging around for. Stewart’s firm was a major freight forwarder that had been operating in Thailand for five years. They had maintained steady growth and had been in profit since day one. They had a first class finance director and he kept a tight grip on the money side which is why alarm bells had started ringing over the company’s cashflow. The company had stopped growing and had actually lost several clients. Turnover was down and profits were starting to fall. Stewart and Holden had put their thinking caps on and had come up with the only possible solution: the company’s woes were something to do with the number three man in the local team, a Thai who they had hired the previous years as sales director. They didn’t have any evidence, it was a hunch more than anything, but they felt that he was doing something that was taking business away from them.
As sales director, Gung spent a lot of time out of the office and so they wanted me to keep the guy under surveillance for a week. Find out where he went and who he saw.
I ordered another plate of toast and then ran through my concerns. The first problem is that following someone in Bangkok is a nightmare. The traffic is terrible, traffic lights can take up to fifteen minutes to change, parking is problematic at best. I prefer to use motorcyclists but they’re not allowed on expressways and intersection flyovers so the only answer was lots of manpower and that was expensive and even then success wasn’t guaranteed.
My second concern was a long-standing one. I had an unwritten rule never to investigate Thai men or Thai companies. The breakfast meeting came only a few weeks after an Australian auditor investigating a local firm was shot to death in the back of his minivan. I didn’t want to start flinching every time a motorcycle pulled up next to me.
So my advice to the two guys was to hire a local firm to do the surveillance. Stewart and Holden both shook their heads. They didn’t trust a Thai firm to do the job. But I came highly recommended. That was nice to hear, but I still wasn’t happy about investigating a local. I had no way of knowing how well connected he was. For all I knew his brother could be a high-up police officer or Army general and they’re not the sort of people you want to upset.
Stewart asked me to reconsider and said that he’d pay me half up front. I doubled my daily rate and he didn’t bat an eyelid. Holden opened a slim leather briefcase and handed me a wad of notes. Unwritten rules aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, not when you’re holding a stack of real money. I agreed to take the case. Holden gave me a manila envelope which contained a photograph of the target, the names and addresses of the company’s clients, details of his car and house, his mobile phone number. Holden was clearly efficient, everything I needed was in the envelope.
