I found the office and asked the middle-aged Thai Chinese manageress if Ning or Mem were in. She wanted to know what room so I played the idiot tourist and said that my friend Gary had left Thailand suddenly with some money to give Mem. Mentioning money to landlords is a sure-fire way of getting their help. If their tenants have got money, the rent is going to be paid, and the one thing that keeps a landlord sweet is rent money paid on time. She picked up a phone, buzzed a room, then handed me the receiver. It was Ning, and I heard a baby crying in the background. The manageress was out of earshot so I switched back into embassy official mode and told Ning that I had some papers for Mem to sign. Ning said that Mem had gone back to her home in Khon Kaen for a week but that she would come down and see me.
She was a plain girl and looked worn out, and the baby she had cradled in her arm wouldn’t stop crying. I asked Ning if she knew whether or not Mem still wanted to go to the US and Ning shrugged and said that she didn’t think she did. I decided to change my story and said that I didn’t actually work for the embassy, but for a visa service that handled visa applications for various countries.
‘Like Switzerland?’ asked Ning. ‘I want to go to Switzerland.’
It turned out that the father of Ning’s baby was Swiss and he had told her it was next to impossible to get a visa for Switzerland. That’s not true, which made me think that perhaps Mr Swiss had a wife back in the land of cuckoo clocks and chocolate, but I put on my happy face and promised her that I’d send around the necessary Swiss forms. Ning said that Mem would probably want the Swiss forms too, as she was seeing a friend of Mr Swiss and that he was paying for her to go to school and was planning to marry her. ‘Mem finish Mr Gary,’ said Ning. ‘He butterfly too much.’
‘So she won’t want to see Mr Gary again?’
Ning shook her head. ‘She happy now,’ she said. ‘Her boyfriend good guy. Good heart.’ Good heart generally means generous with money. Over-generous.
I wondered if Gary knew that he’d been kicked into touch in favour of a more reliable sponsor. I guessed that he didn’t, but that his wife would take great pleasure in telling him, probably at the exact moment she served him with divorce papers.
So that was that. I went to an Internet cafA© and sent off three emails. Mission accomplished. Three cases, three fees, three sets of expenses, all in one day. A private eye can’t ask for much more. And I had the rest of the evening to enjoy myself at the expense of my clients. All three of them.
THE CASE OF THE MAGIC FINGERS
The Thais, it has to be said, are not great inventors. There are no Thai-designed cars or planes, or electronics, or computer programs. They are famous for two things, really. A spicy soup called tom yam gung, and the body massage. And, truth be told, they didn’t actually invent either. Until the Chinese moved into Thailand, all Thai cuisine was dry. Meat, seafood, vegetables, rice, all of the above, but no soup. And massage, well that came from India. But the Thais are great at taking someone else’s invention and putting a Thai spin on it. There’s no soup in Chinese cuisine that comes close to tom yam gung. And the Thai body massage is the closest thing you can get to sexual nirvana.
There are massage parlours all over Thailand. Most of them cater to a Thai clientele, but there are many, especially in Bangkok and Pattaya, that are geared for Westerners. I’ve never understood why any self-respecting man would fall for a massage parlour girl. They’re really only one step up from the girls who work in the blowjob bars. A go-go dancer can choose who she sleeps with. She always has the option of saying no. And I’ve known two go-go dancers who never went with customers. They were both married and had kids, and earned enough money from dancing and lady drinks, to support themselves and their families. They didn’t go with customers, period. But massage parlour girls don’t get to choose their customers. They sit in ranks with numbered badges and customers look at them through a window. Literally, a goldfish bowl. The guys decide who they want, their numbers are called, and the girls take them along to a room for a soapy massage and sex. The girls don’t have a choice. And they have sex at least once a day, often as many as three or four times, whereas go-go dancers might only go with a customer a few times a week.
I’ve always understood the attraction of go-go dancers. Over the years I’ve probably sampled the delights of several hundred pole-dancers, and every now and again I’d even think about settling down with one. But I’ve never even entertained the idea of settling down with a massage parlour girl. A massage girl who’s been in the business for a year has probably had sex with more than a thousand guys. A thousand random guys. Fat guys. Thin guys. Good-looking guys. Ugly guys. Black guys. White guys. Healthy guys. Sick guys. I wouldn’t be able to look at her in the morning without thinking of all the guys who’d been there before me.
Not all massage girls are prostitutes, of course. All over Thailand there are places offering therapeutic massage, and the girls who work there wouldn’t dream of doing anything in the least bit naughty. Derek, an Australian based in Dubai, who had built up an import-export company and was a frequent visitor to the Land of Smiles, had fallen for the charms of a foot massage girl. He’d met Wanna at a ‘Reflex’ massage outlet, a fairly reputable chain around Thailand, where the girls are all well trained, and as far as I know, stick to the basic straight massage. And at Wanna’s salon, foot massages took place on the ground floor by the window so there was no chance of anything naughty going on.
Wanna hadn’t been an easy conquest. He’d courted her for six months before she agreed to go back with him to his hotel, and even then she didn’t have sex with him. They’d since become lovers, and now he was preparing to take the next step-marriage. When he was back in Dubai she sent him text messages every day and he was sure that she was a ‘good’ girl, he just wanted me to make sure. He emailed me a photograph and she seemed like a good sort. Mid-twenties, long hair, cute button nose, sexy smile. I could see the attraction. Derek had asked her to stop work but she said that she preferred to support herself, which was a good sign. But he sent her a monthly allowance and showered her with expensive gifts, which was a bad sign.
I told him I’d need a three-day retainer. For that I’d check that she went straight home after work and that she didn’t have a boyfriend or husband waiting for her, I’d check that she arrived at work on her own, and then I’d get a massage from her and check that ‘extras’ weren’t on the menu. Derek sent the money through to my bank and I was on the case. Early indications were that Derek had got a decent girl. She left work at ten o’clock each night, ate some Thai food on the street with her workmates, then caught a bus to her studio flat in Sukhumvit 71. She lived there alone, and every morning caught the bus to her place of work. After three days of following her to and from work, I went in and asked for a massage from Miss Wanna. I told the cashier that Wanna had been recommended by a friend, and that I wanted a full body massage. I was shown upstairs to a small cubicle where I swapped my T-shirt and jeans for white wraparound baggy pants and jacket. Miss Wanna came in, looking professional in black trousers and a green polo shirt with the name of the company on the pocket. Up close she didn’t look as attractive as her photo. That’s par for the course in Thailand. Most photographic studios run their portraits through Photoshop, lightening skin, wiping out wrinkles and reducing fat, and they had certainly done the business with Wanna’s photograph. She was a bit better looking than the average therapeutic massage girl, though, and had a fair enough figure.
I lay down on the massage table while she went to work on me. She had strong fingers and knew what she was doing. In between grunts and groans I chatted away in Thai. I started by telling her that I had a sore back because I’d been driving my wife and daughter to Nong Khai and back, and it was easy to go from there to asking her about her family.
She told me that she had a four-year-old son-something that Derek wasn’t aware of-and that he was being cared for by her parents in Sisaket. Her Thai husband had run off when the baby was born and hadn’t been heard of since. She had to work to support her son and her parents and she made a reasonably good living doing massage. The boss of the shop gave her half of the fee, plus she got to keep all the tips. Most of the customers were farangs, and generally farangs are better tippers than Thais, she said.
It was easy to start chatting about farangs, and I suggested that she wouldn’t have a problem finding a Westerner to take care of her. She laughed. I asked her if she had any special farang friends and she said that there was an American that she liked but there was no mention of an Australian and certainly no mention of Derek. As we got towards the end of the massage I asked her if there were any extras on the menu and she just laughed and suggested I try one of the soapy massage parlours. ‘They have girls there that can take care of you,’ she said, ‘I am
