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

Most of the Thai working girls hang out in the Mandarin Hotel while the Chinese and Russian hookers tended to gather at the more downmarket Lisboa. I checked into the Mandarin, showered and had a meal, then hit the hotel’s lounge bar. I recognised a couple of English jockeys talking to a group of pretty Thai girls in evening dresses. Macau has a big racing industry, second only to Hong Kong in the region, and unlike Thailand there are no restrictions on jockeys and horses. I sat at the bar and said hello to a pretty Isaan girl who was wearing a long blue dress that emphasised her large, presumably enhanced, breasts. I spoke to her in her northern dialect and told her that one of the jockeys was renowned for having a small dick and more money than sense. She thanked me and went over to join the jockeys. She was soon by his side, stroking his arm and fluttering her long eyelashes.

I sat and sipped my Jack Daniels. When the jockey with the small dick went to the toilet, the girl in the blue dress came over to me. She bought me a drink and said that the jockey had agreed to pay her HK$5,000 for short-time, twenty times the going rate in Thailand. She’d be through by midnight and would come to see me in my room, if I wanted. No charge. I thanked her but pulled out the photograph of Dang and said that she was a close friend on my wife’s and that I wanted to check that she was okay. I spun the line that Dang had promised to phone once she got to Macau but that she hadn’t and my wife was starting to worry about her. The girl looked closely at the picture and then shook her head. She hadn’t seen her around, but if she had only recently arrived in Macau then her Chinese employers would probably be watching her quite closely until they could trust her. But most of the off-duty Thai girls went to the UFO nightclub, so she suggested that I try there. We didn’t have time to chat further because the jockey returned from the toilet. I knew about UFO. It was in the same building as a number of massage parlours controlled by a well-known Triad boss who went by the name of Broken Tooth. I left it until after two o’clock before heading there, but it didn’t start to fill up until after three o’clock. A band crowded onto a small stage and began belting out Thai hits. The audience was mainly Thai, working girls who had finished for the night and young Thai men who worked in the local restaurants or lived off the earnings of their girlfriends. The girls didn’t seem as friendly or as approachable as the bargirls I was used to in Thailand. They were mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, eyes dulled by years in the sex industry and associated drug-taking. Usually they came to Macau on three-month contracts to the Triad-owned massage parlours, and providing they were earning good money they were allowed some freedom, and even allowed to do extra freelance hooking in their off-hours. But if they tried to break their contracts they would be deported, often after being beaten or worse. For the fun-loving Thai girls, working in Macau was akin to a prison sentence, and many turned to drugs to get them through it. And the Triads were happy to supply all the drugs that the girls wanted. It wasn’t unusual for a Thai girl to return to Bangkok after three months in Macau with no money and a serious drug habit.

I moved to be closer to the band and started joining in at the chorus. I was soon accepted by the Thais and a round of drinks made me even more popular. I showed Dang’s photograph around and a couple of the girls said that they knew her but that she had been at home all day with a cold. She worked in one of Broken Tooth’s massage parlours.

I was back at UFO the following evening, and after a couple of hours and half a dozen Jack Daniels, one of my new-found friends came over with Dang in tow. She looked tired and drawn, nothing like the happy-go-lucky girl in the picture that Bob had given me. She was a bit wary of me but I told her I was a friend of the girls I’d met in Soi 13 and she began to relax. I waited until her third Heineken before I told her that I knew Bob and that he was worried about her.

She was a bit taken aback but asked how he was. I told her that he missed her and that he wanted to talk to her.

‘Why?’ she said, genuinely surprised.

‘He loves you,’ I said. ‘He wants you back.’ I told her of his offer to marry her and talk her and her daughter to the States.

I wanted to get her out of the nightclub so that we could have a quite chat. The clientele was mainly Thai but there were a few hard-eyed Triad soldiers standing around and I didn’t want them getting curious about my conversation with Dang. I asked her if she’d come back to the Mandarin, making it clear that it was only a chat I wanted. She offered to go short-time with me for HK$2,000 and then giggled at the look of horror on my face. ‘Just joking,’ she said, but I’m sure she was serious. I was sure that Bob was making a big mistake by pursuing this girl, but I remembered rule number one of the private-eye business and took her outside to waiting taxi.

I motioned for Dang to keep quiet in the taxi. You never know who is in the pay of the Triads in Macau. I noticed a motorcycle keeping close tabs on us as we drove to the Mandarin. I figured it was probably a Triad soldier keeping track of their investment. If Dang did decide she wanted to go back to Bangkok, I was going to have to be careful.

We went up to my room and over a few more Heinekens from the minibar I repeated Bob’s offer to marry her and take care of her and her daughter. Dang definitely wanted to get out of Macau but she wasn’t sure about Bob. ‘He so boring,’ she said.

I asked her what she wanted for her life.

She beamed. ‘I want a house for my mother and father and a house for me and my baby. And a pick-up truck. And someone who loves me too much.’

I got the feeling that Bob wasn’t even being considered for the role of ‘someone who loves me too much.’

I told her that Bob would take care of all her financial worries. I had no doubt he would build a house for her parents. Up in Isaan, a half-decent house could be built for less than a million baht and Bob clearly had money to burn. I was starting to feel a bit like Bob’s pimp.

‘I want go back to Bangkok,’ she said. ‘Macau boring too much. If I stay here long time I take drugs again, I sure.’

That was something, at least. If I could get Dang back to Bangkok at least Bob could talk to her in person. But I had no doubt that Broken Tooth would try to stop me if he found out that I was taking her out of Macau.

I used my mobile phone to book two business-class tickets from Hong Kong to Bangkok. That would allow us to get onto the next flight in Hong Kong, no matter what time we arrived. All I had to do was to get to Hong Kong. I figured that trying to go direct, from Macau to Bangkok, would just be asking for trouble.

There were two beds in the hotel room so there was no problem with the sleeping arrangements. The next morning I went with Dang to pick up her belongings and passport from her room. Luckily the Triads hadn’t taken her passport off her. I had a fall-back position in that I’d brought a passport belonging to a friend who looked a lot like Dang, but that wouldn’t have an immigration arrival stamp for Macau so I’d have been chancing my arm. Anyway, we took her things back to the hotel, packed them into my bag, then boarded the hotel courtesy bus to the ferry terminal.

I checked to see if we were being followed. The motorcycle was there. When we got to the ferry terminal, I made a big show of saying goodbye to Dang, lots of hugs and kisses, then she got into a taxi as I walked into the terminal. I saw the motorcycle follow the taxi and knew that I was right. The Triads were watching her.

I ignored the ferry and hovercraft ticket offices and headed for the offices of the local helicopter service. The six-seater helicopter would get us to Hong Kong in fifteen minutes, and there was a designated immigration queue that would have us to the helicopter within minutes. I bought two tickets for the next flight and then went downstairs to wait for Dang.