Stephen Leather - Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

The trick was not to offer too little so that he wouldn’t be offended. But there was no point in overpaying. There could be a negotiation, but only if my first offer was somewhere in his ballpark.

His smile was as amiable as mine as he looked me over. What did he see? A Rolex Submariner that was scarred and chipped from twenty years of diving. A cheap suit that I’d had knocked up by an Indian tailor in a Sukhumvit backstreet for a couple of thousand baht. The material, a wheat-coloured linen, was fine but the stitching was suspect and I’d had to ask the tailor to redo some of the stitching around one of the buttonholes. Expensive shoes because I never scrimp on footwear but they were under the desk so he couldn’t see them. A hundred baht haircut, a hundred and twenty if you count the tip.

‘I thought perhaps a thousand baht,’ I said, as if I was thinking out loud. Probably equivalent to a day’s salary.

His smile tightened a little.

‘Two thousand?’ I added quickly.

He looked at his wristwatch.

Message received.

‘Three thousand?’

A pained smile. Close, but no cigar.

‘Five thousand?’

‘That sounds satisfactory,’ he said. He opened the top drawer of his desk and passed a pale green file over to me. He looked at me expectantly. I took five one-thousand baht notes from my wallet, slid them inside the file and gave it back to him. The file disappeared back into the drawer. He hit a few keys on the keyboard, then gave me a curt nod. ‘Please, I shall only be a few minutes.’

He left me alone in the office. I looked at the clock on the wall as it ticked off the seconds, wondering if he was going to return with the police and I was going to end up sleeping on the floor of a Thai prison for the next five and a half years. When Khun Wichit returned he didn’t have Bangkok’s finest with him but he did have a computer print-out which he gave me with a knowing smile. ‘If there is anything else I can do for you, don’t hesitate to call, Khun Bob,’ he said. ‘I am at your service.’

I’d overpaid.

You live and learn.

The specialist that Doctor Duangtip sent me to see was a kindly-looking man in his late fifties with greying hair and metal-framed spectacles with round lenses. I waied him as I walked into his office. He seemed momentarily confused at being waied by a farang but he waied me back half-heartedly, then stood up and shook hands. His hand was as dry and cool as a lizard. Mine was bathed in sweat and I wiped it on my trouser leg as I sat down. His name was Doctor Wanlop and he was, according to Doctor Duangtip, one of the most experienced intestinal cancer specialists in Asia.

There was that word again.

Cancer.

Doctor Wanlop had more certificates than Doctor Duangtip, but his were all from Thai institutions. Like Doctor Duangtip he had a computer on his desk and he tapped on the keyboard and studied the screen for several minutes before turning to smile at me.

‘My colleague explained about CEA?’ he said, peering over the top of his spectacles. He spoke in English, which was fine with me.

‘He said it was a marker for…’ I hesitated. I didn’t want to say the word. I wanted to use something less final. Something I could tell my wife.

‘For colorectal carcinoma,’ he said.

Whoa there, hoss. That sounded a hell of a lot worse than cancer. Colorectal carcinoma? Where had that come from?

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want my voice to tremble when I spoke. ‘For cancer, he said.’

There. I’d said that. The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall in. But I didn’t feel any better.

Dr Wanlop smiled. It was a reassuring smile, a smile that told me not to worry, that he knew what he was doing, that he would cure me of whatever ailed me. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer. The heart of a twenty-five year old.

‘Carcinoembryonic antigen, to give it its full name, was used as a test for cancer of the colon for a few years, but I’m not convinced that CEA levels are a valid marker for tumours,’ he said.

That sounded hopeful. It sounded a hell of a lot more hopeful than colorectal carcinoma. And he was smiling reassuringly. That had to be a good sign.

Right?

‘In fact, I can say with confidence that of the last twenty people who passed through that door with elevated CEA levels, not one had a tumour.’

I frowned. ‘But Doctor Duangtip said that CEA was an indication that there was a problem.’

‘It can be. And it’s only right and proper that he had you come and see me. But I don’t think you should worry too much. These days we tend to use CEA more as a treatment marker. If after we’ve carried out a procedure we get a sudden elevation in CEA, then we know that our procedure has not been effective.’

Thais aren’t great at breaking bad news. In the old days, when they’re going to execute a criminal, they hid the machine gun behind a sheet. The condemned man didn’t even know that he was going to be shot until the bullets ripped through him.

Doctor Wanlop was certainly making me feel a lot better, but I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that he was just sugar coating his diagnosis to stop me worrying. Maybe he just wanted me to feel better, right up until the moment that the cancer ripped through my guts.

‘So what happens next?’ I asked.

‘We should have a look inside,’ he said. ‘Reassure ourselves that there isn’t a problem. Assuming that we don’t find anything, we will know that you have a naturally high level of CEA.’

‘An operation, you mean?’

‘Not exactly. We can put a very small camera inside your intestines. We give you a small injection, just to relax you.’

Right.

Fine.

That doesn’t sound so bad.

Not really.

‘And you’ll do that for me?’ I asked.

Doctor Wanlop smiled and shook his head. ‘I used to, but I’m too old these days,’ he said apologetically. ‘You need nimble fingers, and a lot of practice. I do so few these days that it takes me forever. But I can recommend a colleague who is an expert in the technique. She can do the entire procedure in less than thirty minutes.’

She?

A woman was going to run a camera through my intestines?

Interesting.

There are all sorts of rumours about Big Ron. One is that he once lost more than two hundred pounds on a crash diet. Grapefruit and tomato, or something like that. He lost weight so quickly that his skin hung around his waist and down to his knees like a deflated Zeppelin. A local surgeon cut out three square feet of skin that Big Ron had made into lampshades that now stood either side of his specially-reinforced bed. Then he started eating again and the weight was back on within a year. I don’t know if that’s true or not but sometimes when he’s drunk and the Fatso’s Fools are in full mad mode, he’ll lift up his enormous t-shirt and show off the scars across his stomach and hips. They look as if a great white shark had bitten out huge chunks of his skin. That’s what he says happened, scuba diving near the Great Barrier Reef. I’m not sure I believe that any more than I believe about the lampshades. Big Ron’s more of a floater than a swimmer.

The other big rumour about Big Ron was that he was almost taken hostage by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. The first one, with George Bush Senior running the show. The one that didn’t end in an absolute disaster. Big Ron, so the story goes, hid out in a disused water tank on the top of his apartment building in Kuwait City, only leaving at night to go downstairs for food. Three months he was there, and he only left when the Americans moved in. Big Ron was chief accountant with one of the big Arab banks. The Iraqis had looted the main branch before running home, but when Big Ron gets there he finds that the Iraqis hadn’t been able to open one of the vaults. Big Ron still had the key on his key chain and he opens the vault to find ten million dollars. The story is that Big Ron filled two suitcases, drove to the airport and flew straight to Bangkok. True or not? Only the Shadow knows. But Big Ron bought Fatso’s from a former British publican who wanted to swap the bright lights of Bangkok for the seedy underbelly of Pattaya and he did it with cash, by all accounts. And he bought himself a nice two-bedroom condo, again with cash. True story or not, Big Ron has never been short of money and he has one of the best financial brains I’ve ever come across.