raised when his wife started talking about starting up a band and owning a restaurant, two long-term dreams of hers. He go in touch via my website and after a few emails I agreed to go and check her out. He faxed me a map to get me to his dream house and I drove out for a look-see. It was easy enough to find, and easy enough to see that building had stopped some time ago. The house had been half-completed but much of what had been done was now overgrown by weeds. There was bamboo scaffolding around the basic framework of the house, but there was no sign of a roof and there were no windows or doors. There was a large rectangular hole where the pool was going to be, and another hole which I guessed was where the garage foundations would go, but there was no building equipment around, no cement mixers or shovels or pickaxes. According to the schedule that the architect had given Ronnie, the house was due to be finished within eight weeks but there was clearly no chance of the builders meeting the deadline. I took a few snapshots with the trusty digital camera so that Ronnie could see for himself.
I spotted an old man feeding some chickens on the nearby plot and I went over and spun him a line about liking the look of the building and wanting to build one just like it myself. Did he by any chance know who the builders were as they were clearly a most professional firm? The old guy fell for my patter and gave me all the information I needed. According to the old man, the wealthy Thai woman who was paying for the house had told the builders to stop work and to start constructing a restaurant on South Pattaya Road, Soi 2 he thought. He gave me the name of the head builder and his mobile phone number. Apparently the guy gave the old man a few baht every now and then to keep an eye on his scaffolding.
I drove back to the Penthouse Hotel figuring that I’d made a pretty good start on both cases and that I deserved a few tumblers of Jack Daniels as a reward. I showered and headed down to the bar. It went by the name of The Kitten Club and Mr Singapore was in residence and feeling no pain. We started playing pool again and buying rounds of drinks for ourselves and his fan club. We stayed until closing and then we wandered over to the hotel’s restaurant which was open twenty-four hours. Alan said that the girls would join us later and that we didn’t have to pay barfines. Considering that we’d spent the best part of 10,000 baht on drinks and snacks already, I figured it wasn’t much of a saving. Anyway, within an hour we had his fan club sitting with us again and there was lots of leg-stroking and breast-fumbling and tongue-swapping. I popped over to the toilet a couple of times and managed to get a few digital snaps of Alan and his mate and the girls. Eventually the two guys chose a girl each, said good night to me, and staggered over to the elevators leaving me with the remains of the fan club. Alan gave me a leer and a thumbs-up as the doors closed. I waved back feeling like a shit because I was going to have to tell his wife what he was up to.
The four girls left were pulling out all the stops persuading me to take them upstairs and I was starting to think that perhaps I deserved more of a reward than just a few JDs, then Miss Du wandered over and started whispering in their ears. She obviously told them about my herpes flare-up because five minutes later I was sitting on my own and my hard on had faded into a memory.
Before I hit the sack I emailed the pictures to Singapore. I felt bad about dropping Alan in it and did my best to explain to Cindee that her husband appeared to be just blowing off a bit of steam. It wasn’t as if he had a mia noy or even a long-term girlfriend, he was just hanging out with bargirls and I figure that ninety-nine per cent of the men in Thailand, single or married, do that at some time. It’s only natural, right? As I hit the ‘send’ button I had a feeling that Cindee wasn’t going to see it that way, though.
The next morning I launched into the hotel’s breakfast buffet then took a stroll down to South Pattaya Road, Soi 2. It was a rough area, even by Pattaya standards, and most of the residents seemed to be Thai labourers and their families. I sat down at a foodstall area and even though I wasn’t hungry I ordered a plate of kow man gai, one of my favourite dishes. It’s steamed rice and chicken and a bowl of watery soup. It tastes a lot better than it sounds. I got chatting to the middle-aged couple running the stall. They were from Kalasin but they had moved to Pattaya decades earlier to seek fame and fortune. They had six kids and the foodstall, which wasn’t much by Western standards but by Thai standards they were doing okay. I always figure that anyone who isn’t up to his knees in water planting rice by hand in the burning sun has got to be ahead of the game. The couple knew about the new Thai cabaret that had just opened further down the soi. They were too old to go out much at night, and they had to be up at first light to go to the market, but they often heard the cabaret’s band late at night. ‘They’re not very good,’ chuckled the old man. ‘I’ve heard drowning dogs that were more tuneful.’
I paid for my snack and wandered along the soi to take a look at the cabaret. A pack of mangy soi dogs watched me walk by, wondering what the hell a farang was doing in their neck of the woods. Soi dogs are strange animals. Like Thai people they’re good-natured unless riled, and they have a totally laid back approach to life. You’ll see them sleeping under cars, in the middle of the road, in gutters, totally oblivious to traffic and pedestrians. The dogs, that is. And the people, too, come to think of it. You never see soi dogs scrounging for food, either, the way you do in the West. They don’t go around begging, they just wait to be fed. There’s always a dog-loving foodstall owner who’ll put out a bowl of rice and meat for them or an old lady throwing out her kitchen scraps. The Lord will provide, seems to be their philosophy. Or Buddha will provide, I guess. I figure the dogs, given the choice, would opt for Buddhism rather than Catholicism or Judaism. The circle of life, and all that. I might only be a humble soi dog but next life I’ll be a general or a politician or a massage-parlour owner. Call me a naA?ve and sentimental old fool, but I always felt that I’d been a soi dog in a previous life. The one question I couldn’t answer was whether my karma was improving or not.
There was a large hand-painted banner stretched across the soi proclaiming that the ‘Isaan Allstars’ were in residence at ‘Gradai’s Cabaret and Beer Bar.’ There was an impressive frontage with a wrought-iron gate that led through to a gravelled area with twenty wooden tables facing a small stage. I figured that didn’t open on rainy nights because there was no roof. There were posters advertising Chang Beer, the tipple of choice for workers on the minimum wage, and a big hoarding with a photograph of a middle-aged lady holding a bulbous microphone with a raggedy bunch of Isaan musicians behind. It was obviously Gradai and the Isaan Allstars. There was nobody around so I went back to the Penthouse and had a few Jack Daniels and games of pool with Alan. He was in fine form so Cindee clearly hadn’t been in touch. He and his buddy had their fan club in tow though none of them would so much as smile at me.
I went back to Gradai’s Cabaret and Beer as the sun was going down. There was a young guy doing some half-hearted tidying up so I spun him a story about wanting to arrange a birthday party for my Thai wife and he gave me Miss Gradai’s mobile number. She lived in a posh apartment in nearby Jomtien with her partner, he said. A Thai policeman. It wasn’t looking good for Ronnie.
I phoned the number and Miss Gradai answered. I used bad Thai and it soon became apparent that Miss Gradai spoke perfect English so we switched to that. I stuck to my party story. I told her that I was in Jomtien and she agreed to meet me in a hotel lobby. I drove there as quickly as I could and was in the lobby when she arrived. She was in her late thirties and had obviously spent some of her husband’s hard-earned money on a nose job and bigger breasts and she was well dressed in a Versace shirt and Gucci jeans with Raybans propped up on her head. She shook my hand with a hand that was festooned with glittering rings. She was chatty and within a few minutes had told me that she was married to an Englishman, but that he was always busy and that he didn’t understand her. She was a singer, she said, and had just opened the cabaret and bar. Business was slow, she told me, but she expected it to pick up soon. Her band, the Isaan Allstars, would soon be household names, she said. As we started talking about my fictitious girlfriend’s party, her top-of-the-range Nokia mobile rang. She put her hand over the phone but I could hear enough to work out that she was talking to her Thai boyfriend.
‘Your husband?’ I said, when she’d finished the call.
‘My boyfriend,’ she said.
‘Oh, is he in the band?’
She shook her head. ‘No, he’s a policeman here in Jomtien. But he likes to sing.’
I made a provisional booking for the Cabaret and gave her a pay-as-you-go mobile number that I was planning to dump in a few days. I promised that I’d drop by the place that night and drove back to the Penthouse. I parked, then popped into an internet cafe and emailed photographs of the Cabaret and the unfinished house to Ronnie, along with an initial report. I didn’t like breaking bad news, but that was what I was paid for. And it was better that he learnt the truth sooner rather than later. Gradai was bleeding him dry, with a Thai boyfriend to boot. I knew that Ronnie’s options were limited: the Thai legal system isn’t farang-friendly and the fact that the guy she was sleeping with was a Pattaya cop meant that Ronnie would have to tread carefully if he didn’t want to end up with a plastic bag over his head or at the bottom of a local high-rise.
I showered and shaved and changed into clean clothes, feeling pretty damn pleased with myself. I’d nailed
