inside.
I phoned my contact in the Dutch agency and explained that the waiter was definitely staying with the girl and there was no indication that they were heading up to Chiang Mai. My contact was pleased, but said that his client wanted a photograph of the girl and the waiter together.
I had a brand new digital camera in the boot of the car, so I parked as close to the apartment block as I could and sat with the camera on my lap. It had a telephoto lens and the salesman had assured me that it was state-of-the-art. Being digital, I could use my computer to email the pictures without having to wait for film to be processed. I as starting to feel pretty pleased with myself again. I had found where they were staying, there was only one way in and out, all I needed was a photograph and the fee was in the bag.
Time passed. It got dark. I had a couple of bottles of water in the car and I drank them both. Midnight passed. I was thinking about abandoning the surveillance for the night, figuring that perhaps the girl and the waiter were having too much fun to go out, when I saw movement in the lobby. I wound the window down and got the camera ready. It was the waiter. He held the door open and the girl walked out. ‘Yes,’ I hissed triumphantly. I brought up the camera lens and took a couple of quick shots. Just then there was a double flash of lightning. It looked as if my luck was changing for the worse-the weather had been fine all day and now that I had them in my sights a tropical storm was starting. I fired off another two quick shots and lightning flashed again.
Click. Flash. Click. Flash.
Then it hit me. My state-of-the-art digital camera with its onboard smarter-than-a-human-being computer had decided that as it was dark I should be using the flash. What the bloody thing hadn’t realised was that the last thing a private detective on a stakeout needs is a flash going off, computer-controlled or otherwise. The girl and the waiter looked in my direction and hurried along the road away from the car.
I cursed and fumbled with the camera, trying to find the control that turned off the flash.
Something smacked against the bonnet of the car and I looked up to see a muscle-bound Thai man glaring at me. He had a thick gold chain around his neck and a wicked scar across his left cheek that cut through a crop of old acne scars. He thumped on the bonnet again.
‘ Tham arai?” he screamed, which means ‘I’m sorry old chap but what exactly are you doing?’ or words to that effect.
I put the camera on the passenger seat and hit the central locking switch. The thuds of the locks clicking into place antagonised the man even more and he slapped the windscreen. A second man, just as heavily built, ran over and began pulling at the passenger door handle.
I looked around. Two more men were walking purposefully out of the restaurant and one of them was swinging a large machete. I didn’t know what I’d done to upset them but they didn’t look like the sort of guys who were going to respond to reason. I had the engine running to keep the aircon cold so I put the car into gear and moved forward, slowly enough to give the guy with the scar a chance to get out of the way. A foreigner running over a Thai would end only one way and sleeping on the floor of a Thai prison wasn’t how I was planning to spend my retirement.
I pushed harder on the accelerator. The guy kept hold of the passenger side door handle and jogged to keep up. I cursed. I didn’t want to drag him down the road, but I was equally unhappy at the prospect of the guy with the machete doing a remodelling job on the rental car.
Machete Guy shouted something and started to run. I stopped worrying about the man on the passenger side and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The wheels screeched on the tarmac and the car leapt forward. I roared down the road, snatching a quick look in the rear-view mirror. The four men were standing on the pavement, screaming at me. I grinned and took the first right turn, onto a major road. I was just starting to relax when I saw the motorbikes.
As they got closer I recognised one of the drivers-it was Machete Guy. I had no idea what I’d done to upset the guys, but figured they had obviously been up to something iffy and thought that I’d been taking photographs of them. Drugs maybe, or gambling. There might have been an underage brothel above the restaurant for all I knew. In an ideal world I’d have just explained that I had been taking pictures of an unfaithful wife, but Bangkok wasn’t an ideal world and it was probably too late for any explanation.
There was a fair bit of traffic around and I had to slow down. The motorcycles quickly gained on me. Machete Guy’s pillion passenger brandished a pistol and motioned for me to pull over to the side of the road. Yeah, right. I shook my head, braked hard, and pulled a left, cutting across a bus and feeling the rear end fishtail as I floored the accelerator again. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to outrun the bikes in the city. It would only be a matter of time before I hit traffic or a red light.
I could feel sweat trickling down my neck. Life is cheap in Bangkok. That’s not a clichA©, it’s an economic truth. The going rate for a professional hit is 20,000 baht for a Thai, 50,000 if it’s a farang. But amateurs were also happy to use bullets to solve a quarrel because most murderers end up serving seven years at most, and that was in the unlikely event of them being caught. All of this was running through my mind as I drove through the streets at high speed. Along with wondering why I hadn’t chosen another profession, why I’d moved to the Land of Smiles in the first place, and why I hadn’t read the manual for the camera before taking it on the job.
The best I could hope for was to run across a police patrol car but even that was no guarantee that I’d be safe. For all I knew, the four guys in hot pursuit could well be off-duty cops.
The second bike drew up on my passenger side and the pillion passenger waved a large automatic at me. I swung the car to the right. I had a really, really bad feeling about the way this was going to play out. They were getting madder and madder and all it would take would be one shot to a tyre and it would all be over.
Suddenly I saw a sign for the Pattaya Expressway and realised that it was my best hope: bikes aren’t allowed on the expressway and even if they ignored the law and followed me I’d be able to get the car up to full speed and with them being two up on small bikes they wouldn’t be able to keep up with me.
I kept on going straight, accelerated, then as the ramp approached I slammed on the brakes and pulled the car hard to the left, just missing the concrete dividing wall that separated the ramp from the road. The bikes continued to roar down the road then I saw the brake lights go red as they realised what had happened. I sped towards the line of toll booths, pulling my wallet out of my pocket and flicking through the notes. The toll was forty baht but I flung a red 100-baht note at the toll booth attendant and yelled at her to keep the change as I sped on through.
As I accelerated down the expressway I kept looking in the rear view mirror but there was no sign of my pursuers, and after twenty minutes barrelling along at more than 140 kilometres an hour I started to relax. I left the expressway at the third exit, then parked up and had a bowl of noodles and pork and a bottle of Chang beer at a roadside vendor to calm my nerves. My hands stopped shaking by the time I’d put the third bottle away.
I waited a couple of hours before driving back to the city, and I caught a few hours sleep after emailing a full report to the Dutch agency along with the photographs I’d taken.
I was woken by the phone ringing. It was one of the Dutch operatives- the client had booked himself on the next flight to Bangkok and he wanted to confront his wife, ideally while she was in bed with her lover. I’ve never understood that, but it’s happened time and time again. It’s not enough for the wronged guy to know that his wife has been unfaithful, he wants to rub her face in the fact that he knows. If it was me, I’d just up and leave. Okay, I’d clear out the bank accounts first and maybe take a razor blade to all her clothes, but I wouldn’t bother with a confrontation. That’s just me, though, and in this business the client is always right. Even when he’s wrong.
I got up and showered, then returned the rental car. The guy who ran the rental company was an old friend and he agreed to swap my paperwork with that of an American tourist who’d just fown back to Seattle so I was covered just in case the bike guys had taken my registration number.
The Dutch agency had told me to take good care of the client so I booked a Mercedes and driver and got to Don Muang Airport an hour before the flight was due, holding a piece of card with his name on it as I sipped my black coffee. The man who walked over to me and introduced himself was just about the fattest guy I had ever set eyes on. He wasn’t big. He wasn’t even huge. He was obese and must have weighed at least 400 pounds straight out of the shower. He was in his early forties, with slicked back hair and half a dozen chins. He was wearing a light blue suit that was stretched like a sail in a high wind; I figured he must be at least five times the weight of the his wife and I couldn’t imagine how they went about having sex. We shook hands. His was the size of a small shovel but the fingers were soft, like underdone pork sausages. He had no luggage and hadn’t shaved on the plane, but he said he wanted to head straight out to the apartment. I sat upfront as we drove out to Bangna. The client didn’t say anything and only grunted at my attempts to start a conversation so after a while I just let him sit there in
