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

Anyway, I took my bowl over to the old woman and asked for more noodles. I smiled at Joy and said ‘ Sawasdee krup.’

We started chatting in Thai and I asked her if it was engagement ring on her finger. She beamed and said that yes, she was getting married to a farang, a guy from Scotland called Bill. She took a bottle of water from the fridge and hurried back up stairs.

The old woman handed me my bowl of noodles with another flash of gold teeth.

‘She is very beautiful,’ I said.

The old woman nodded.

‘The farang doesn’t mind that she’s a katoey?’ I asked.

The old woman had the grace to blush. ‘He doesn’t know,’ she said.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Isn’t he going to find out sometime?’

The old woman shrugged. ‘My son is going to have the operation soon,’ she said. She made a scissor cutting motion with her fingers. ‘As soon as the farang sends the money.’ She cackled and stirred her soup with a long metal ladle.

I took my bowl of noodles back to my table. It can be a funny old world at times.

I waited until I was back in Bangkok before faxing my report to the client. I suppose I should have phoned but I couldn’t face telling him, even over the phone. I sent him a typewritten report and a copy of the print out I’d got from the Government office and a translation. And I faxed a copy of my bill. Four days later I got a cheque through the post. No note, just a cheque. I figured there was nothing he wanted to say. They way I see it, he had a lucky escape. Sooner or later he would have found out, even with Joy’s skill at oral sex, and even with all her family in on the secret. That’s what blew me away. He’d met the folks, he’d discussed a dowry with them, all the time thinking that he was getting a beautiful girl, and a virgin to boot. And no one had said a thing. Maybe they were hoping that MacKay would send them enough money to pay for the operation before the wedding. Then I had a thought that made me shudder. If I hadn’t found out what was going on, and if Joy had had the final cut, and if she could come up with an excuse for why she wasn’t getting pregnant, than MacKay might never have discovered the truth.

Greig Knight was one of the few real success stories among Thailand’s expat community. The Thais don’t make it easy for foreigners to succeed in business, but Greig had bucked the trend and made a decent-sized fortune building up a chain of American-style restaurants. You know the sort of thing: racks of ribs, barbecued chickens smeared in hickory sauce, burgers covered in cheese and bacon with French fries the size of a labourer’s fingers. Not that they were called French fries in Knight’s restaurants. Ever since 9/11 they were Freedom fries in all his establishments and there wasn’t a bottle of French wine on the menu. Knight had served in the military-he’d been one of the first soldiers into Kuwait-before deciding that he’d rather take his chances in the Land of Smiles. He landed at Don Muang without being able to speak a word of Thai and a cheque from the US Government in his back pocket. He found a decent hotel, decent beer, but couldn’t find a decent burger despite looking the length and breadth of the city. He figured the only way he was going to get the sort of food he wanted was to cook it himself, so he set up a small burger joint in a soi close to Patpong. He never looked back and now he owns a huge house in one of the more heavily fortified areas of town and flies himself to Hong Kong to watch his racehorses run.

He didn’t tell me who he was when he phoned. He just said that he needed a private detective and asked me to meet him at Starbucks in Soi Thonglor. He said he’d be reading a copy of the Asian Wall Street Journal but his choice of reading material wasn’t important because he was the only farang in the place. I recognised him immediately from photographs in the glossy magazines they leave around in my dentist’s. Usually he was holding court at the opening of one of his restaurants, or attending a function to honour some visiting American dignitary or other, standing with his arm around a leggy Thai beauty queen or a gay DJ raising a glass of champagne to the camera, grinning with a set of teeth so white that they had to have been capped. He was well over six foot tall, greying at the temples with flint-grey eyes that looked at me inquisitively as I walked over to his table. He unwound himself from his chair. He was thin with a runner’s build, and as I knew for a fact that he ate in one of his own restaurants every night, he must have had the metabolism of a humming bird.

‘Greig Knight,’ he said. He nodded at the muscular Thai man who was sitting in the armchair opposite his. ‘This is Gung. My driver.’

Gung stood up and waied me with a cold smile. He didn’t look like a driver. He looked more like a bodyguard and from the way he held himself I figured he was former military or police.

Knight wound himself back into his armchair and waved for me to take Gung’s place. Gung stood slightly to the left of Knight, his arms crossed. He didn’t look like the sort of man you’d want to meet in a dark alley.

‘As you’ve probably guessed, it’s a woman,’ said Knight.

‘It usually is.’ I said.

‘Do you want a coffee?’

‘Black.’

‘You don’t want a cappuccino or a latte?’

‘I’m a traditional sort of guy,’ I said.’

‘Cappuccino is for wimps?’

‘My thoughts exactly.’

Knight grinned and nodded at Gung. ‘Mr Olson will have the same as me,’ he said. ‘Same as we like our heavyweight boxers.’

Gung frowned.

‘Strong and black,’ said Knight, and he tapped the table in front of him with a large ring on his left hand.

I chuckled but Gung’s frown just deepened. He nodded and walked over to the counter.

‘He’s been with me for ten years,’ said Knight. ‘Just so you know, I trust him completely.’

‘Former army?’

Knight nodded. ‘Captain in the Thahan Phran.’

I raised an eyebrow. The Thahan Phran are Thailand’s paramilitary border guards. Hard bastards. You wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of one, dark alley or not.

He steepled his fingers under his chin and leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve got a live-in girlfriend. Ying.’ He smiled. ‘Beautiful girl. Sexy as hell.’

‘You’re a very lucky man,’ I said.

‘If I thought that, I wouldn’t be having this conversation,’ he said. He sighed. ‘I was in a Humvee, a few years back. Had a sergeant who thought he was Michael Schumacher. Took it as an insult to his manhood if he had to put his foot on the brake. We were heading into Kuwait City, full-pelt. I don’t know what it was, but I just had a feeling that something was wrong. I told the sergeant to stop. He moaned like hell but he pulled over. I went ahead on foot. Fifty feet in front of where we stopped was a landmine. A biggie.’

‘Wow.’

‘Wow is right. Humvees are damn big vehicles but the mine would have blown it to kingdom come. But if the hairs on the back of my neck hadn’t stood to attention, my army career would have come to an abrupt end there and then.’

‘And this Ying is making your hair stand to attention, is that it?’

Knight made a gun out of his right hand and faked shooting me in the face. ‘Got it in one. There’s nothing I can put my finger on, it’s just a feeling.’

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a couple of photographs and handed them to me. I tried to look at them without drooling. She was beautiful all right. Shampoo commercial hair, toothpaste commercial teeth, moisturiser commercial skin, you get the picture. Drop dead lovely, but as Greig Knight was one of the richest farangs in Thailand, it was only to be expected. The only dogs he’d go near would be at the greyhound track in Macau.