Stephen Leather - Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

So that was it. Interview over. ‘Sure,’ I said.

Petrov waved at the door. ‘Start the day after tomorrow. Talk to the secretary, she’ll give you a schedule.’

‘What about a work permit?’

‘Teachers fix up their own permits.’ One of his cellphones started to ring.

‘But I’m okay to teach without one?’

‘Immigration don’t bother us,’ said Petrov. ‘If it worries you, wait until you’ve got your permit.’

He answered his phone and spoke a few sentences of rapid Russian. When he cut the connection he glared at me as if he was annoyed that I was still in his office. He waved at the door again and looked at his Rolex.

‘A friend of mine used to work here,’ I said. ‘Jon Clare.’

‘So?’

‘I just wondered if he was still here.’

‘If he is, you’ll see him. If he isn’t, you won’t.’

‘Do you have a number for him?’

‘A number?’

‘A phone number. So I can call him.’

Petrov sighed. ‘I can’t be expected to remember all the teachers who work here,’ he said. ‘Talk to the secretary.’ He picked up one of his cellphones and tapped out a number, then swung his feet up onto his desk. He was barking in Russian as I left his office.

Petrov’s secretary was a Thai woman in her fifties with permed hair and Chanel glasses with pink frames. She was wearing a pink shirt with a fern pattern on it and peach slacks. I told her who I was and she gave me a photocopied sheet of times and classroom numbers and a dog-eared textbook. ‘The book is four hundred baht,’ she said.

‘I have to buy my own book?’

‘All teachers buy their own books,’ she said. ‘It is the company policy.’

I gave her four one hundred baht notes. ‘Does my friend Jon Clare still work here?’ I asked.

‘Is he a teacher?’

‘Sure. He started about three months ago.’

She went over to a filing cabinet by the door and asked me to spell out his name. She pulled out a drawer, ran her fingers over the files, then pushed the drawer closed. ‘No one called Clare,’ she said.

‘I’m sure he worked here,’ I said.

She sat down at her desk again. ‘No file.’

‘He’s an American. Twenty-one, good-looking.’ I took the photograph from my jacket pocket and showed it to her.

She shook her head before she’d even looked at the picture. ‘No file,’ she said.

‘But do you recognise him?’

She shook her head again.

So that was it. The school where Jon Junior had worked for three months didn’t have a file on him.

Interesting.

‘Would you show me around?’ I asked.

She nodded and I followed her out of the office. There wasn’t much to see. Eight classrooms, four on each side of a corridor. There were glass panels in the doors so that anyone walking down the corridor could see inside. I pictured Petrov striding up and down, cracking a whip and urging his underpaid teachers on. There were classes in four of the rooms and two were empty. Each room had a dozen wooden chairs with panels screwed to the side so that the students could take notes. On the wall, a large whiteboard. Two windows with the blinds drawn and fluorescent lights overhead. At the end of the corridor was a staffroom. Two teachers were sitting on a wooden bench, blowing cigarette smoke through an open window. They looked up guiltily as the secretary opened the door and showed me in. There was a no-smoking sign by the window. Along one wall was a line of metal lockers. Half were padlocked. There was a coffee percolator and a microwave and a stack of stained cups in a grubby sink.

Salubrious.

Not.

The teachers nodded at me but said nothing as they made a half-hearted attempt to hide their cigarettes. The secretary blinked amiably at me. The unspoken question hung in the air like the stale smoke: had I seen enough? I nodded. More than enough.

Opposite the school was a shophouse with a few tables on the ground floor and a glass-fronted fridge containing beer and soft drinks. I sat down at one of the tables and ordered a Phuket Beer but they didn’t have any so I said I’d have a Heineken, one from the back of the fridge, and no ice because it didn’t look like the sort of place that bought in ice. There was probably an old man in the back with a sweat-stained t-shirt and a rusty knife hacking away at a big block of the stuff, and while my immune system was well up to speed when it came to dealing with Thai microbes and viruses, there was no point in tempting fate.

At four o’clock a bell sounded from somewhere up on the second floor and a couple of minutes later a stream of boys and girls flowed out of the main entrance. The girls wore the standard Thai uniform of white shirt and black skirt and I was too far away to see the small badges that identified the individual schools. A few had regulation haircuts, no longer than shoulder length, a sign that they were from the city’s public schools. The majority of the girls with longer hair, shorter skirts and Gucci high-heeled shoes were from the international schools, where fees were higher and the pupils were given more leeway dress-wise and were allowed to grow their hair longer. There didn’t seem to be any mixing between the two groups. The public schoolgirls headed for the bus stop, the up-market pupils walked together in small groups, presumably to wherever they’d parked the cars that their doting parents had given them.

It was just as easy to spot the social status of the boys. The few who were in the public school system had crew cuts, with well-worn white shirts tucked into black shorts. The private school kids had their shirt tails out, their ties at half mast, wore their hair fashionably long and had cellphones pressed to their ears.

As one lot of pupils flowed out, a new lot flowed in. More upper-class pupils arrived by the luxury car-load while the poorer kids walked from the bus stop.

My bottle of Heineken arrived with a handful of shaved ice in a glass so I drank it from the bottle. There was a stack of Thai newspapers on one of the tables so I leaned over and picked up a copy of Thai Rath, the local scandal sheet. They specialised in close up photographs of road accident victims or Burmese girls hiding their faces but not their breasts after being busted in a local massage parlour. The old woman who’d bought me my beer nudged her husband in the ribs and nodded at the farang reading a Thai newspaper. He snorted and closed his eyes again.

Five minutes after the bell the pavements were empty again. I read the paper from cover to cover and ordered another Heineken, without ice. The old woman put a fresh bottle on the table, with a fresh glass of shaved ice. I smiled. Sometimes it didn’t matter how fluent you were in the language, whatever you said went in one ear and out of the other. The trick was not to let it annoy you.

Jai yen.

Cool heart.

Forget about it.

The next time the bell rang three farangs were among the throng of eager-to-leave pupils. All men in their twenties wearing polo shirts, jeans and cheap shoes and carrying plastic briefcases.

Teachers.

They headed over to the shophouse, flopped down at the table next to mine and ordered three Singha beers. I’ve never been fond of Singha. It’s too sweet and on the few occasions I’ve had more than a couple of bottles I’ve always ended up with a fierce hangover.

I sipped from my bottle of Heineken and listened as they swapped gossip, war stories of a day at the chalkface. The one in the pale blue shirt was British with a girlish giggle and a rash of acne across his cheeks and neck. The one in the red polo shirt was Canadian with receding hair and nicotine-stained fingers, and the one in the green shirt was from New Zealand or Australia, I can never tell the difference between the accents, a good-looking guy with piercing blue eyes and a dimpled chin. The Brit was describing a girl in one of his classes in a way that would annoy the hell out of me if she’d been in any way related to me. The other two nodded enthusiastically as if it was the most normal thing in the world for teachers to be discussing the breasts and thighs of a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been entrusted to their care.