saying that I knew he was blackmailing her.
She buried her head in her hands, sobbing. I was right.
‘You have to tell us what happened,’ I said. ‘If you tell us, we can help you.’
‘You can’t help me,’ she sobbed. ‘He’s a policeman. He works in the American Embassy.’
‘He took you to the bar? To the upstairs room?’
She nodded and wiped her eyes. ‘I said I wanted to see the bar and he took me. I didn’t like it, but he gave me something to drink. I felt dizzy and the next thing I knew I was in bed with him.’
‘And he filmed the two of you together?’
More nods. ‘I didn’t know what was happening at the time. But when I tried to stop seeing him, he sent me an email with some video. You couldn’t see his face but you could see mine. He said if I didn’t keep seeing him he’d send it to everyone I knew. And he said he’d send it to the university.’ She looked at me fearfully. ‘How could I ever be a lawyer, with people seeing something like that? If my father saw it, he’d kill me.’
‘So what happened then?’
‘I moved apartments. I changed my name. But he found me again. I had to see him. I had to do whatever he wanted.’ She shivered, and stared down at the table. ‘I have to do whatever he wants. Until he is tired of me.’
‘And what about Klaus?’
She looked over at Klaus who was putting the coffees onto a tray. ‘He is a good man. He wanted to take care of me.’
‘Do you love him?’
Nut shook her head sadly. ‘I just need someone to take care of me.’
‘This American, he gives you money?’
Nut nodded. ‘Some.’
‘And does he make you do the videos?’
She nodded again. ‘Sometimes. I have to go to the room with men. Sometimes two or three men at the same time. Afterwards, he pays me. He says they are only for sale in America and that no one else will ever see them.’
Klaus came over with the coffees. He put them down on the table and then went back to the counter.
‘You have to tell him,’ I said.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Will you? I don’t want him to keep bothering me.’
Klaus returned and sat down next to Nut. He put a hand on her arm but she flinched and sat with her arms crossed.
‘Vot is the problem, theerak?’ he asked.
‘I have to go to university,’ she said. ‘I am late.’
‘Ve need to talk,’ said Klaus.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I will phone you.’
Klaus gave her his business card. ‘Phone me when your classes are finished this afternoon,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Maybe we could have dinner tonight,’ said Klaus.
‘Okay,’ she said.
‘Whatever the problem, I can help you,’ he said. ‘I vont to take care of you.’
She forced a smile. ‘You are a good man, Klaus. You have a good heart.’
‘I love you, Nut,’ he said.
‘I love you, too,’ she said. I could tell that she didn’t mean it. But Klaus beamed, accepting what she’d said at face value.
‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ he said. I knew that what he said was every bit as false as her declaration of love. The difference was that Klaus meant what he said. Which was a bit sad, really.
Nut stood up and walked away, clutching her bag. Klaus was smiling as he watched her go. He turned to grin at me. ‘See, Varren,’ he said. ‘She does love me. This will work out.’
She never phoned, of course. The next day, Klaus went to the apartment block but she’d moved out of her room without leaving a forwarding address. Her mobile phone was switched off. He asked me to find out where she’d gone, but I told him there was no point in throwing good money after bad. I didn’t tell him what Nut had said. There was no point. There was nothing Klaus could have done to help her.
Being a private eye in the real world isn’t like it is in the movies: there aren’t always happy endings. Sometimes you find out the truth but realise that knowing the truth doesn’t help you one bit. Sometimes you just have to accept that the world can be a shitty place and get on with it.
THE CASE OF THE VANISHING BEER BAR
Like most private eyes, I get more than my fair share of missing person cases. Thailand is a big country with a population of sixty million or thereabouts, and there are about ten million in Bangkok alone. But finding farangs who have gone missing is usually a fairly easy proposition because they represent a small percentage of the population. And they stick out. Often I’d be contacted by worried parents who hadn’t heard from their backpacking offspring for a few weeks. And more often than not said offspring would turn up on a beach somewhere stoned out of his or her mind living their own version of The Beach.
Finding missing Thais isn’t quite as easy. And what Peter from New Zealand asked me to do sounded next to impossible. He’d been in Thailand on holiday and had spent a few days bar-hopping in Bangkok. He’d visited the usual haunts-Nana Plaza, Patpong, Soi Cowboy-and one night he’d visited a complex of beer bars at Sukhumvit Soi 10. He’d strolled from bar to bar and then found a girl that he really liked. Her name was Apple and she worked as a cashier in one of the bars. He’d offered to pay her bar fine but Apple had told him that she wasn’t interested in ‘short-times’. Peter had spent the rest of the night in the bar, talking to her as she worked and buying her colas, then when she knocked off for the night she went with him to his hotel. Peter didn’t go into too much detail other than to say that it was the best night of sex that he’d ever had and that he realised there and then that Apple was the girl that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
He opened his heart to Apple, but she was sceptical. She saw hundreds of farangs pass through her beer bar, and knew that more often than not they were butterflies, flitting from girl to girl. She wasn’t working in the bar because she wanted a boyfriend, or because she enjoyed the job. She worked because she had to support her family upcountry. Peter was determined to show Apple that he was serious about her so he arranged to see her the next evening. She agreed to speak to her boss so that she could finish work early, and they could go and have dinner and talk.
Peter was over the moon. He went to a jewellery shop and bought an engagement ring which he planned to give her that night. He booked a table at a good restaurant, went for a haircut, and withdrew a stack of cash on his credit cards. The wind went out of his sails when he turned up at Sukhumvit Soi 10 that evening. The entire complex of bar beers had gone. It had been razed to the ground. A wire fence had been erected around the whole area warning people to keep out. At first Peter thought he’d gone to the wrong place. He looked around, scratching his head, but gradually realised that he was where he should be. The Ambassador Hotel was opposite, the Sky Train roared by overhead. But the bars had gone. Every one of them. Peter was distraught. All he knew of Apple was her name. She didn’t have a mobile phone, and when he’d asked her where she lived the name of her road seemed to have a dozen syllables.
He spent the night on his own in his hotel hoping that Apple would contact him, but his phone never rang. He went to the airport the next day, flew back to New Zealand and emailed me. I knew what had happened to the beer bars. The owner of the land-who also happened to own a big chunk of the city’s massage parlours-had decided that he could make more money by developing the site than renting it out to bar owners. Rather than waste his valuable time negotiating with the dozens of tenants, the landlord decided to send in bulldozers at dawn instead.
I told Peter that I might be looking for a needle in a haystack. If he’d had her full Thai name it would have been easier, but her one syllable nickname was all he had. Thais often have several nicknames, one for their family, one for their friends and another for work. There was every chance that Apple was only known as Apple at the bar. Peter was adamant that he wanted me to try so he wired over a retainer and I got to work.
