Stephen Leather - Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye - True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

The bread and butter work of a private eye in Bangkok is running checks on bargirls. I don’t know why but tourists seem to check in their brains on arrival. They go trawling through the red-light districts of Bangkok and Pattaya until they meet a girl they think is ‘special’. The love of their life was working as a prostitute, but now she’s a good girl. She loves me, only me. Time and time again I hear the same refrain: ‘my girl is different.’ So different that they want to pay me to check up on the love of their life.

Anyone thinking of starting a long-term relationship with a bargirl has to get one thing straight from the start. Girls work in the sex industry for one reason and one reason only: money. Cold, hard cash. They’re not dancing around a chrome pole because they want to be rescued by a White Knight, they’re not spreading their legs in short-time hotels because they want to live happily ever after with a guy twice their age. So if a guy wants to settle down with a bargirl, he’s going to have to accept the fact that for the rest of his life he’s going to be funding her, one way or another. If the guy’s prepared to do that, all well and good. But the guys who come a cropper are the ones that leave their new-found girlfriends in situ. After years of running checks on girls working in the bars I’m sure of one thing: they will not be faithful. It is almost a physical impossibility. A frog and scorpion thing. But like I said, it’s my bread and butter so if a guy wants me to check on his bargirl, I’m happy to take his money.

Pete Derbyshire was a teacher from Sydney, Australia. He had met the love of his life dancing in a Soi Cowboy go-go bar. He’d barfined Noi for a week and taken her on holiday. They’d gone to her home town of Buriram and met her family. He’d proposed and offered to buy a plot of land and to build a new home for the two of them. The wedding date had been set, a sin sot, or dowry, of 100,000 baht had been agreed, and Pete had flown back to Australia to give up his job and prepare to make the move to Thailand. His plan was to teach English in Buriram and to live happily ever after with the lovely Noi. But Pete had heard all the horror stories so he emailed me asking if I’d check that Noi was being faithful while he was away.

Pete was in his late thirties and Noi was twenty two, so the age difference wasn’t that big. But what sent alarm bells ringing for me was the fact that Noi was continuing to work in the bar while she waited for Pete to return. In my experience, guys who have any chance of making a bargirl relationship work have to get the girl out of the bar scene as quickly as possible. I told Pete to expect the worst but he said that Noi had told him that she wanted to be with her friends, that she’d be bored on her own in Buriram. She wouldn’t be working as a dancer, Pete said, and she wouldn’t be going with customers. She’d just earn money from the lady drinks that customers bought her. That sounded possible, just about. If Noi had been dancing then alarm bells would really start ringing because the whole payment system for dancers is based around them being barfined. They are paid a basic salary but if they aren’t barfined a set number of times in a month, their pay is docked. But if Noi was just working in the bar for drinks, then the bar owner wouldn’t be forcing her to go with customers. Pete said that he phoned Noi every night and that she was always there to speak to him. I smiled at that. Anyone who’s ever spent any time in a go-go bar would have seen girls sitting quite happily on a customer’s knee, then rushing off to the toilet to answer her mobile phone. ‘Of course I love you, too much’. There was only one way to find out if Noi was being faithful to Pete. I would have to go in to test her, and that was going to cost Pete a 10,000-baht retainer plus any expenses I incurred.

He emailed me a photograph of Noi. She was a typical bargirl, dyed red hair, low cut black T-shirt, tight blue jeans, too much make up. I was almost ashamed to take his money, but business is business and three days later the funds had come through by bank transfer.

I left it until Friday evening before wandering down to Soi Cowboy with some of Pete’s money in my wallet. I went in fairly early to make sure I’d catch her. There was only one other customer when I walked in, a guy in his fifties who was slumped over the bar with half a dozen girls all over him like vultures feeding on a dead buffalo. I sat in a dark corner and ordered a double Jack Daniels.

The waitress was cute and when she came back with my drink I told her to get one for herself. Then I played a game that usually stood me in good stead. I bet her that I could guess what province she was from before she could guess what country I came from. I could normally tell if a girl was from Isaan or not, and most bargirls were from Korat, Udon or Khonkaen, or they’d be Khamen style which meant Buriram, Sisaket or Surin. I got the waitress in three guesses-Surin-by which time she’d guessed Germany, England and America for me. I don’t think most Thais even know that New Zealand exists.

Anyway, I bought her another drink and another double Jack Daniels and started talking about provinces and steered the conversation around to Buriram. I nodded at a girl behind the bar and said that she looked as if she was from Buriram but the cute waitress said no, she was from Udon Thani. She pointed at three girls sitting together at the far end of the bar and said that they were all from Buriram. I was playing the slightly drunk farang, so I waved my arm around and said I’d by drinks for all the girls from Buriram. The waitress rushed around the bar and within minutes there were half a dozen girls at my table. At least one was an impostor-she had the pale skin and round face of a northern girl-but I wasn’t worried because one of the six was the lovely Noi.

I waved for Noi to sit on my left, and another of the Buriram girls sat on my right. Their drinks arrived and there was much clinking of glasses and laughing and I ordered another round. I asked all their names. The girl on my right was Lek. I laughed at that because Noi and Lek both mean little. ‘My two little girls,’ I said and everyone laughed uproariously. You have to be careful in bars, you start to believe your own publicity. They weren’t laughing because I was a funny guy, they weren’t laughing because they liked me, they were laughing because I was buying them drinks and every drink I bought them earned them thirty baht. It was all about money. Everything that happened in a go-go bar was driven by cash. I knew that, the girls knew that, it was only the tourists like Pete who thought there was anything else going on.

Noi and Lek were stroking my thighs and giggling. They’d told me that they were sisters-‘Same Mother, Same Father’-but I doubted that they were even related. It was a common ploy among the bargirls, to pretend to be related, because they knew that was a turn-on for farangs.

I asked them if they had boyfriends, and Noi was quite happy to tell me that she had a farang in Sydney who was sending her money and that one day she was going to marry him. ‘I love him too much,’ she said, as fingers moved gently up my thigh. ‘But he far away.’

I bought another round of drinks and Noi and Lek exchanged a look. I was playing the role of drunken farang to the hilt. ‘I’ve always wanted to sleep with sisters,’ I said.

‘You can,’ said Noi. She nodded at Lek. ‘Two thousand baht for her, same for me.’

‘And you have to pay bar,’ said Lek, playing with the zip of my jeans.

I was tempted. Really tempted, but I was a professional so I told them that I was still jet-lagged and that I had to sleep. I promised to return the next night and asked Noi for her mobile phone number so that I could check that she was working.