Stephen Leather - Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

‘I’m not in my office just now, Khun Bob, so I’ll have to call you back.’

I gave him Jon Junior’s passport number and date of birth, thanked him and ended the call.

The Clares had been told that the American Embassy had contacted the police and the hospitals, but I’ve learned from experience that embassies aren’t the most efficient of institutions so I didn’t think it would hurt to check for myself. I had a list of local hospitals in my desk drawer and I methodically worked my way through them, patiently spelling out Jon Junior’s name and his passport number. He hadn’t been admitted to any, and there were no unidentified farangs.

Farangs. That’s what the Thais call foreigners. It’s derived from the word for Frenchman but now it’s applied to all white foreigners.

Okay, so Jon Junior wasn’t lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg or a ruptured appendix.

So far so good.

I phoned my best police contact, Somsak. Somsak’s a police colonel in the Soi Thonglor station, just down the road from my apartment. He’s a good guy, his wife’s a friend of my wife but our real connection is poker. We play every Friday along with four or five other guys, taking it in turns to host the game. Somsak’s a ferocious player with a tendency to blink rapidly whenever he draws anything better than a pair of kings. He never bluffs, either, just plays the percentages. He’s a tough player to beat; he either blinks or folds.

Somsak’s assistant put me through straight away.

‘Khun Bob, how are you this pleasant morning?’ said Somsak.

Somsak always called me Khun Bob. I could never work out whether he was being sarcastic or not, but he always said it with a smile. He always spoke in English, too. My Thai was better than his English but he was close to perfect so it was no strain.

‘I’m trying to find a missing American,’ I said. ‘He’s a young guy, came here as a tourist but it looks like he’s teaching English now. He hasn’t been in touch with his parents for a while and they’re starting to worry.’

‘And you’re wondering if he’s been caught trying to smuggle a kilo of white powder out of the country?’

‘It happens.’

It happens a lot. Despite the penalties – and Thailand still executes drugs smugglers – there are still hundreds, maybe thousands, of backpackers and tourists who try to cover their costs of their trip to the Land of Smiles by taking drugs out of the country.

Heroin is cheap in Thailand.

Really cheap.

A couple of hundred dollars a kilo. For heroin that would sell for a hundred times as much in New York or London.

‘I will make some enquiries,’ said Somsak. ‘You have checked the hospitals?’

‘Just before I called you.’

‘Why are you contacting the police and not his parents?’

‘His parents spoke to the embassy and they said they’d talk to the police. I’m just covering all bases, that’s all.’

‘He is a good boy, this Jon Junior?’

‘He’s from a good family. ‘

‘I hope he is okay.’

‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘How are things going with the Kube fire?’

‘You think he might have been there?’

‘It’s not impossible,’ I said. ‘Unlikely, but not impossible.’

‘We still have some unidentified bodies.’

‘The identified ones, their relatives have been informed?’

‘Mostly,’ said Somsak. ‘But not all.’

‘Two hundred and eighteen dead?’

‘Two hundred and twenty-three,’ said Somsak. ‘Five more died overnight.’

‘Terrible business,’ I said.

‘I’ll be there tomorrow with the Public Prosecutor. About nine o’clock. You should come around.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘Is someone going to be prosecuted?’

‘Hopefully,’ said Somsak. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’

He ended the call. I didn’t hold out much hope that Jon Junior was in police custody. A farang being arrested was always big news. A more likely possibility was that he’d been the victim of a crime but if he’d been badly injured he’d have been in hospital and if he wasn’t then why hadn’t he contacted his parents?

I had tried to be optimistic while I was talking to the Clares, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about Jon Junior’s disappearance.

A very bad feeling.

The hotel that Jon Junior had stayed in was a featureless concrete block in Sukhumvit Soi 9, a short walk from the Nana skytrain station. It was six stories high with air-conditioning units mounted in front of each window. The reception was dark and gloomy; half the fluorescent tubes had been removed from the overhead lighting, presumably to save money.

There was a young woman behind the reception desk, adding up receipts with a calculator when I walked in. There were two wall-mounted fans taking it in turns to play across the desk, and with each pass of air she had to hold the receipts down with the flat of her hand so that they didn’t blow away. Behind her was a large wooden unit divided into pigeonholes. A sheet of paper had been taped to the bottom. Child-like capital letters warned that if the room charges were a week late, the electricity supply would be cut off. Two weeks later and the water supply to the room would be turned off.

I smiled when she looked up. ‘Sawasdee ka,’ she said. She had shoulder-length hair with a Hello Kitty bow behind one ear.

Cute.

I told her that I was looking for Jon Clare Junior and she frowned as if I’d just given her a difficult mathematical equation to solve. ‘Where he come from?’ she said. ‘Have many foreigners here.’

I’d spoken to her in Thai but she had replied in English. That wasn’t unusual in Thailand. Many Thais assumed that Westerners couldn’t speak their language, and even though they heard the words in Thai they would assume that they had been spoken to in English. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.

‘America, I think he checked out about three weeks ago,’ I said. ‘Do you remember him?’ I passed over the photograph that his parents had given me.

She looked at it, her frown deepening. Then realisation dawned and she smiled. ‘Khun Jon,’ she said. ‘He check out already.’

She handed me back the photograph and went back to adding up her receipts.

‘Did he say where he was going?’ I asked, in Thai. ‘Did he leave a forwarding address for his mail?’

‘I don’t think so.’ She was still speaking in English and I was persevering with Thai.

‘Do you think you could check with the manager?'

‘Manager not here today.’ She smiled at me and waited for me to go away so that she could get on with her work.

I took out my wallet and gave her a one hundred baht note, which is probably as much as she earned in a day. ‘Maybe you could check anyway,’ I asked.

She reached under her desk and brought out a heavy ledger, opened it and flicked through the pages. She ran her finger down the hand-written entries, frowning furiously again. One of the fans blew her stack of receipts across the desk and she gasped and tried to gather them up.

I turned the ledger around and looked at it. Most of the guests were foreigners and their names were written in English, as were the dates they checked in and out. All other comments were in Thai.

I found Jon Junior’s entry. His name, his address in Utah, his passport details, and the dates he’d checked in and out. There was nothing else.

The girl finished picking up the receipts and weighed them down with the calculator. I turned the ledger around.

‘Do you remember Khun Jon?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘American boy,’ she said. ‘Very polite. He say he want to be teacher.’

‘Do you know where he wanted to teach?’