Stephen Leather - Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

‘The lawyer said the prosecution were looking to put me away for life.’

‘I spoke to a Public Prosecutor yesterday and she said the investigation was ongoing.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. The lawyer said that I was going to get the blame for the fire certificate not being up to date, for the locked exits and for the underage kids there. He said the best thing to do was to just admit everything and throw myself at the mercy of the court and that I’d probably only get ten years and that would get cut in half at some point.’

I nodded.

The bit about the sentence being cut was right. That’s how it worked in Thailand. On major holidays like the King’s birthday thousands of prisoners had their sentences reduced. It happened so often that a guy sentenced to thirty years for murder could easily be back home in five years. The only sentences that weren’t reduced were those of drug dealers.

‘Sounds to me like you need a lawyer, Ronnie. Someone with your best interests at heart.’

‘Do you think?’ he said, his voice loaded with sarcasm.

‘Do you know anyone?’

‘Never needed one before,’ he said.

‘I’ve got a friend who knows what he’s doing,’ I said. ‘I’ll get him to drop by.’

‘Thai?’

‘For this sort of thing, you need a Thai lawyer,’ I said. ‘And you need a good one.’

I stood up and both knees cracked. Marsh grinned. ‘You’re getting old, Bob.’

‘We all are,’ I said.

‘Can you see the remote?’

It was on a shelf next to his drip. I picked it up.

‘Put the sound up so I can hear it, will you?’ I boosted the volume and he thanked me. ‘You could try talking to Lek and Tam. They might have seen your boy.’

‘They were on the door?’

‘Yeah. They’re kickboxers, they train at the gym in Washington Square most days. You’d better say you’re a friend of mine or they’ll not talk to you.’

‘Thanks, Ronnie.’

‘No sweat. Just don’t forget that lawyer.’

There were half a dozen girls giggling at the reception desk when I got out of the elevator on the second floor. I was there for a battery of tests as part of a yearly health check. The sort of annual service that would cost you several grand back in the States and costs a couple of hundred at the Bumrungrad, and you’re waited on hand and foot every step of the way. A nurse who looked sixteen smile coyly and took me to a seat where a girl who could have been her twin took a blood sample that I swear to God caused me not one iota of discomfort. I don’t know if they used extra sharp needles or if the sight of two beautiful creatures in nurse’s uniforms dulled the pain, but I felt nothing.

I was taken to a waiting area where after five minutes another nurse apologised for the delay and gave me a coupon for a free cup of coffee or a portion of French fries. Two minutes later I was in to see the doctor who would be overseeing the tests.

Doctor Duangtip.

There was a battery of framed certificates on the wall behind him. Bangkok. London. San Francisco. You could buy similar certificates in any print shop in the Khao San Road, but his were the real thing. I’d been coming to see Doctor Duangtip every year for the past four years, so I knew the drill. A physical, blood tests, a cardiac test that had me running on a treadmill with electrodes strapped to my upper body, a chest X-ray and a lower abdomen ultrasound. Two days later a brief chat about the results and a suggestion that I should try cutting down on fatty foods and alcohol to lower my cholesterol. My cholesterol levels, good and bad, had remained a few per cent higher than average since I’d been having the yearly check-ups, and cutting back on fatty food and going to the gym three times a week hadn’t made any difference either way so I’d cancelled my gym membership and eaten what the hell I wanted.

Doctor Duangtip ran through my medical history and then sent me of for the first of the tests. I was totally relaxed.

I was fine.

I was fit.

I was healthy.

I was going to live forever.

Little did I know.

Washington Square is a hangover from the days when Thailand was an R amp;R destination for American troops fighting in Vietnam. The main venue slap in the middle was the Washington Theatre, a huge cinema with more than a thousand seats. Around the theatre were dozens of bars, clubs and massage parlours, all just a few hundred yards from the intersection of Asoke and Sukhumvit roads. After the war ended the troops went home but the Square stayed much as it was, frequented by vets who preferred to stay in Asia rather than return to the real world. Time took its toll, on the vets and on the area, and these days Washington Square is a pale shadow of what it once was. Some of the bars are still there, and you can still get a soapy massage, but the cinema became a transvestite cabaret show and then a sports bar, and every year there’s talk of the area being demolished to make way for a shopping mall or condominiums.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Washington Square. The Bourbon Street restaurant, tucked away behind the cinema building, serves great Cajun food, and the bars are quiet havens where you can have a drink and watch American sport and listen to American voices mumbling around you. And I’m a big fan of the Dubliner, an Irish pub at the entrance to the square which serves breakfast all day and a decent cup of coffee most days. The Muay Thai gym wasn’t a place I’d ever visited, mainly because they didn’t serve breakfast or coffee and because these days my preferred exercise is a game of tennis with my next door neighbour.

It was a hot day, probably in the low forties, but there was no air-conditioning in the gym. Instead they had opened all the windows and had half a dozen floor fans on full power, and the contrast with the blisteringly-cold air-con of the taxi that dropped me outside had beads of sweat forming on my forehead within seconds.

I took off my jacket and wiped my forehead with a handkerchief. ‘I’m looking for Lek, or Tam’ I said to a stocky man sitting behind a metal table reading a Muay Thai magazine and chewing on a toothpick.

The man looked up and frowned, confused because I’d spoken to him in Thai. ‘You speak Thai?’ he said.

‘This is Thailand, right?’ I said, and he laughed.

‘Why is your Thai so good?’ he asked, switching to Khmer. He had nut-brown skin and a snub nose and I figured he was probably from Surin or Sisaket, close to the Cambodian border. He was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of two kickboxers slamming into each other and baggy tracksuit bottoms.

‘I watch too much television,’ I answered, speaking in Khmer and throwing in a few curse words for emphasis.

He nodded, impressed. ‘Thai girlfriend?’

‘Thai wife,’ I said.

‘From where?’

‘Chiang Rai.’

‘Children?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. Thais had no reservations about asking the most personal questions of people they had only just met.

‘Is Lek here? Or Tam?’ I asked.

He took the toothpick out of his mouth and jabbed it towards the far end of the gymnasium where a lanky trainer in a baggy tracksuit was holding a punchbag for a bald-headed Westerner who was grunting every time he launched a kick which thudded against the canvas with the sound of a seal being clubbed to death. ‘That’s Lek.’

I sat down on a wicker chair and waited for the session to finish. The bald guy wasn’t a fighter, and he certainly wasn’t fit. After a minute or two he was bathed in sweat and he was barely getting his kicks above knee height. Eventually he waved Lek away and bent double, gasping for breath. Lek patted him on the back and draped a towel around his shoulders before helping him over to the changing rooms. Lek reappeared a couple of minutes later holding a bottle of water.