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

Stop right there.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Despite what most tourists believe, Thai girls are not easy. They do not fall into bed with handsome strangers. They do not fall head over heels in love with men twice their age, five times their weight or one tenth as attractive. Good Thai girls from good families are choosy about who they date. And they generally have higher moral standards than their Western counterparts. Good Thai girls do not hold a man’s hand in the street, they would not go out with a man, Thai or Westerner, without a couple of chaperones in tow, and they would not have sex until they are married, or at the very least, engaged. Good Thai girls do not fall into bed with farangs. But bad girls do. Hundreds of them, every year. Thousands.

Usually the tourist has gone home and is staying in contact by phone or via email. More often than not there are requests for money. Sometimes the girl switches off her mobile phone at night. Or in the evenings. Sometimes a man answers her phone and claims to be her brother. Suspicions are raised, but the tourist consoles himself be thinking that his girlfriend is a ‘good’ girl. But the suspicions festers like an open wound, and that’s when they call me. They always start the conversation the same way. ‘I know I’m worrying about nothing, because she’s a good girl. She isn’t a bargirl.’

Rule number one of the private-eye game: if you think that your girlfriend is being unfaithful, she almost certainly is. I don’t tell them that, of course. I don’t want to burst their bubble. Besides, if I did tell them the cold, hard truth there’d be no point in them wiring me a retainer, would they?

Anyway, one day I was sitting at my desk wondering whether two o’clock in the afternoon was too early to open a bottle of Jack Daniels when my mobile rang. It was a Danish guy who said he was heading back home the following day and would appreciate a few minutes of my time. He had a Thai girlfriend, ‘a real girl, not a bargirl,’ he stressed. He planned to marry her and take her back to live in Denmark, and in the meantime had agreed to support her. His name was Lars and he said he wasn’t far from my office having coffee at a Delifrance outlet. I said I’d be there within half an hour, figuring that if nothing else I’d get a free coffee and a croissant.

I was across the road from the Delifrance within five minutes and spent a quarter of an hour watching the place. I’d done several bargirl investigations the previous week and the last time I visited Soi Cowboy I had the distinct impression that a few of the girls were talking about me behind my back. Nothing concrete, just a prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck, but I had been looking over my shoulder a lot over the past few days. I didn’t know Lars and for all I knew a girl might be using him to set me up. I spotted him straight away-he was the only farang in the place, and by the look of it he was on his own. No Thai heavies nearby, nothing out of the ordinary. When I was absolutely sure he was alone I wandered over and introduced myself. He asked me what I wanted and I said I’d have a white coffee and a chocolate croissant.

He was in his mid-forties, losing his hair and gaining weight, with a receding chin and ears that stuck out like teapot handles. I’m no oil painting, but I reckoned that fate hadn’t been kind to Lars in the looks department. After eight years of being told that I was a ‘handsum man’ maybe I was starting to believe my own publicity. I could understand why a man like Lars would come to Thailand looking for love. I doubted he’d have much chance of pulling anything better than a three-bag girl back in Denmark.

I munched on my pastry as he told me his story. He was on his fifth trip to the Land of Smiles, and on his third visit he’d been drinking in a pool bar in Sukhumvit Soi 4, a regular place with no go-go dancers, short-time rooms or barfines. Just pool tables and waitresses, with maybe a few freelancers playing pool who wouldn’t say no to a short-time with a punter but who wouldn’t be too upset if they went home alone.

Lars was with a Danish friend who had started going out with a bartender, another ‘good’ girl who wouldn’t dream of trading sex for money. Lars had told her that he was fed up with bargirls and wanted to meet a ‘real’ Thai girl, a ‘good’ girl. A girl he could love and who would love him. Miss Bartender, as it transpired, had the perfect candidate. She knew of an attractive young student who was all alone and who would very much like to meet a handsome farang such as Lars. An introduction was arranged, and Lars fell in love. Her name was Pim, she was a twenty-three year old student at Rhamkamheng University, and she had never been anywhere near a go-go bar. Lars took her on holiday to Hua Hin, then they went up to Chiang Mai for a week, and before long he had agreed to pay her 20,000 baht a month. My eyebrows headed skyward when he told me that. If she was a ‘good’ girl, why was he paying her twice the national average wage to attend university? Was that how courtship worked in Denmark? Of course it wasn’t. I didn’t say anything, though. I wasn’t in a bubble-bursting mood, and I’d yet to receive a retainer, so I just nodded and smiled and ate my Danish.

Lars said that he had visited the girl’s small apartment, and she’d taken him to her university once, dressed in the traditional uniform of black skirt and white blouse. Miss Pim was set to graduate the following year but Lars had decided not to wait and that he was set to marry her within the next few weeks and take her back to Denmark. Pim had done nothing to arouse his suspicions, but Lars had been visiting a few websites devoted to Thailand and Thai ways, including a site that was full of horror stories of the ‘farang boy meets Thai girl, farang boy falls in love with Thai girl, Thai girl steals everything the farang boy has and runs off with her Thai husband’ type. Lars was sure that Pim was a good girl, and that she loved him, and that she would make the perfect wife, but he wanted me to run a few basic checks, just to make absolutely sure. The next night he was due to go back to Denmark for a month and that seemed the perfect opportunity to put me on the case. If the mouse did play she was more likely to do it while the cat was 6,000 miles away. He paid me a three-day retainer in cash and gave me her address and her landline phone number. She had a mobile but Lars always called her on the landline at night so he always knew where she was. That made good sense. A common sight in the city’s red-light districts is a bargirl huddled in a corner, a hand cupped around their mobile phones, assuring their sponsor that they were at home, tucked up in bed, already sleep.

Lars showed me a photograph of Miss Pim but it was a small passport type and I doubted that I’d be able to recognize her from it. Lars was staying at the Amari Boulevard and she was coming around to see him the following afternoon so we agreed that I’d wait in the lobby and see her in the flesh. I was there, reading the Bangkok Post , when Miss Pim arrived in her university uniform. She looked like any of the other thousands of students you can see in Bangkok any day of the week. Tidy, a little over five foot, slim, hair tied back in a ponytail. Not too pretty, but I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed. The only thing out of the ordinary was the confident way she walked across the lobby to the elevators. Most young Thai girls would have been too shy to walk into a major tourist hotel and go up to a man’s room, but Miss Pim clearly had no reservations.

I sent Lars a text saying mission accomplished and that I’d keep in touch by email.

According to Lars, Miss Pim went to university every day, taking the bus from her apartment on Sukhumvit Soi 77 at about eight o’clock and getting home just after four. So Monday morning at seven I took the Skytrain to On Nut and a motorcycle down Soi 77 to where she lived. There were four massive apartment blocks, creatively named A, B, C and D. It was a working-class Thai area and I was the only farang for miles. I sat down at one of the many pavement foodstalls and ordered my staple kow man gai and a Coke. With breakfast at thirty-five baht I was keeping expenses down, which would make Lars happy. Hundreds of students in black skirts and white blouses walked by, others whizzed by sitting side-saddle on the back of motorcycles. Eight o’clock came and went with no sign of Miss Pim, and by the time my watch read 9am I realised that she was either still at home or I’d missed her.