Stephen Leather - Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

The next week Noy was back. I was dealing with a German who wanted to take two eighteenth-century Buddhist statues back to his loft in Paris and neither my French nor my German were as good as my Thai so it was taking forever to explain the regulations about taking religious figures out of the country. Noy wandered around the shop apparently aimlessly but she always seemed to be in my field of vision, smiling, brushing her hair behind her ear, cocking her head coquettishly. Start went over to see if she could help but Noy said that she was just browsing. She browsed for a full fifteen minutes until I’d finished with the German, then started talking to me about an antique Khmer dancing figure that I had in the window. It was bronze and I was pretty sure that it was more than two hundred years old but there were some very clever forgers working out of Vietnam so I had to admit that I wasn’t absolutely sure of its provenance I’d found it in an old house in a small village about thirty miles outside Udon Thani, and persuaded the old lady who lived there to sell it to me, along with half a dozen wooden carvings that were easier to date.

We chatted for a while and she was asking me about restaurants in the area. She told me that she was thinking about changing jobs and becoming an estate agent and she asked me where I lived. Back then I lived in the small apartment above the shop but I told her that I was looking for somewhere bigger. She bought the statue and she paid me in cash. I boxed it for her and took it out to her car, a new model Porsche SUV. It was one hell of a car and I figured it must have belonged to her husband, which shows you what a chauvinist I was back then.

After she’d gone, Start and Stop came over, grinning like they knew something I didn’t. Which as it turned out, was absolutely the case.

‘She isn’t interested in the statue,’ said Start.

‘She’s only interested in one thing in the shop,’ said her sister.

The giggled like naughty schoolgirls.

‘What?’ I asked, totally confused.

They giggled even more and finally I realised why they were laughing.

‘Oh come on, why would she be interested in me?’ I asked.

It was a fair point, all things considered. I was probably ten years older than her and while I’d managed to hang on to my own hair and teeth I’d also managed to pile on a few extra pounds.

‘She was looking at you all the time, Khun Bob,’ said Start.

‘All the time,’ said Stop, for emphasis.

‘She’s beautiful,’ I said.

‘Very,’ said Start. ‘You should ask her out next time she comes in.’

‘Why do you think she’ll come back?’ I asked and they both giggled.

‘She’ll come back,’ said Stop.

‘For sure,’ said Start.

They were right.

Three days later she was back in the shop, this time to look at a Japanese stair tansu, a chest in the shape of stairs. It was a good piece, the wood polished to perfection and the fittings made of aged bronze.

Start wasn’t in the shop when she came in but Stop was and she wagged her finger at me to let me know that I shouldn’t waste any more time.

I felt like a gawky teenager even thought it had been more than twenty years since anyone had described me as either gawky or a teenager. I stumbled over the words because I was sure she was going to turn me down but I asked her if she’d go for dinner with me one evening and she said she’d love to and she sounded as if she meant it.

We had dinner in a terrific Italian restaurant down the road from the shop and a few days later we had dinner again and then we went to see a Martin Scorsese movie but for the life of me I can’t remember which one because all I could think about was Noy and the fact that she was on a date with me.

Two months after we first met she introduced me to her parents. We flew up to Chiang Rai and I slept in a hotel while she stayed in their house because her parents were very traditional and, frankly, so was she. Three months after that, we were married.

Anyway, that was then and this is now. If anything I think Noy is even more beautiful now then when I met her. She’s confident, smart, and can make me smile without even trying. I can’t imagine living without her.

She finished playing and stood looking out across the Bangkok skyline, the violin at her side.

‘Beautiful,’ I said quietly.

‘Bach is always beautiful,’ she said, turning around.

‘I meant you,’ I said. I stepped forward and kissed her on the lips. She pressed herself against me, holding the violin to the side.

‘I missed you today,’ she said.

‘I missed you, too.’

‘No, I really missed you,’ she said, pressing herself harder against me.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s nice.’

‘Nice?’ she said, caressing the back of my neck. ‘I’ll give you nice.’

So what did I tell Noy? About the hospital?

Nothing.

Not a damned thing.

I carried on kissing her.

We went to bed.

We had great sex.

Then we went to sleep.

I didn’t think about cancer the whole night. Until I woke up.

I got to the Betta English Language School at just after six o’clock. The list that Petrov’s secretary had given me showed the first classes starting at six-thirty and I figured that the teachers wouldn’t be turning up much before then. I was wearing my English teacher’s outfit. Cheap khaki chinos with imitation leather belt, fake Lacoste polo shirt, scuffed shoes and carrying a canvas briefcase. I nodded at the security guard at the main entrance and headed up the stairs. The door to the school was locked but I only had to wait fifteen minutes before Petrov’s secretary arrived. She was wearing a pale blue skirt suit with a white bow holding her hair back in a ponytail.

‘You are early,’ she said.

‘The early bird catches the worm,’ I said.

She frowned and I explained the proverb as she unlocked the door.

Once inside she unlocked the door to the staff room for me before walking along the corridor and opening the classrooms.

I closed the door and went over to the metal lockers. Most had name tags glued to them, other had names scratched into the metal. Jon Junior’s name was on a locker on the bottom row. Padlocked. I’d seen the padlock last time Petrov’s secretary had shown me the room so I had come prepared.

I figured the padlock was significant.

If Jon Junior had quit or been sacked, why would he have left his locker padlocked?

It was a combination lock with three dials. Nine hundred and ninety nine combinations. A thousand if you included treble zero. You wouldn’t have to be a safecracker to open it, just patient. But I didn’t have time to go through all the combinations so I took the boltcutters out of my briefcase and snipped the cheap steel hasp.

There was a photograph taped to the inside of the locker. Jon Junior in his graduation get-up, father to his left with his hand on his shoulder, mother beaming proudly at the camera from underneath a wide-brimmed hat. There was a blue laundered shirt on a metal shelf next to a plastic bottle of ozone-treated drinking water and a dog-eared copy of a John Grisham novel. At the bottom of the locker was a squash racquet and a pair of old tennis shoes.

Nothing that you’d particularly want to take with you if you did a moonlight flit. I picked up the book. There was a Foodland receipt among the pages. A bookmark, halfway through the novel. Not many people gave up halfway through The Firm.

So maybe Jon Junior hadn’t had time to clear out his locker.

Or maybe somebody had prevented him.

The door handle started to turn and I quickly shut the locker.

It was Petrov’s secretary.

‘I can use any of these, can I?’ I asked, pocketing the padlock.