‘What are you doing today, light of my life?’ I asked.
‘I’m showing an American around three apartments. He’s got sixty million baht to spend.’
‘What does he do?’ I asked, my fork poised over the omelette.
‘He’s a banker,’ she said. ‘Works in Hong Kong but wants a place here.’
‘Where did I go wrong?’ I asked.
‘Are you unhappy with your lot?’ Her eyes sparkled with amusement.
I grinned back. ‘No honey, I’m the luckiest man alive.’
‘Because you’ve got me?’
‘Exactly,’ I said.
And I meant it.
CHAPTER 13
I was in the shop helping Ying wrap a bronze statue of a Khmer dancer that we’d sold over the internet to a collector in Texas when my cellphone rang. I didn’t recognise the number or the voice, but it was a Frenchman speaking accented English and he said that his name was Philippe and that he was the owner of the company that had taken Jon Junior to Cambodia. I asked him if he remembered Jonathon Clare but he ignored the question.
‘Who exactly are you?’ he asked.
‘My name’s Bob Turtledove, I sell antiques. I’m trying to help Mr and Mrs Clare find their son.’
‘And where are you now?’
‘My shop. Soi Thonglor.’
‘Can you come and see me?’
‘You can’t tell me on the phone?’
‘I’d be happier talking to you face to face,’ he said. ‘I’m in On Nut. Not far from the Skytrain station. There’s a coffee shop under the station. I’ll be there in an hour.’
I looked at my watch. It was ten o’clock in the morning and On Nut was only half an hour away by taxi. ‘Okay, I’ll come,’ I said.
‘And bring your passport or photo ID with you,’ he said. He ended the call before I could say anything.
I finished helping Ying wrap and box the statue, then called Federal Express to come and collect it. I left Ying filling in the paperwork while I went outside and flagged down a taxi.
When I got to the coffee shop, the Frenchman was sitting at a table by the window. He was in his sixties, balding with a greasy comb-over and wearing a rumpled linen suit. He stood up and shook my hand and immediately asked to see my passport. I gave it to him and he put on a pair of reading glasses and he looked at my photograph, then checked my name before giving it back to me.
‘I’m sorry if I seem over-cautious,’ he said as he sat down. ‘But my assistant said that you spoke perfect Thai and the Government isn’t very keen on the service that we offer.’
‘But visa runs aren’t illegal,’ I said, sitting down opposite him. A waitress came over and I ordered an Americano. The Frenchman already had a frothy cappuccino in front of him.
‘Not illegal, but the authorities would rather they didn’t happen. They think that too many people are using the visa runs as a way of staying in the country indefinitely.’
‘And you thought, what? That I was a Government spy?’
The Frenchman chuckled. ‘I didn’t know what to think,’ he said. ‘But I thought better safe than sorry.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘The thing is, the majority of people using our service are using visa runs to stay in the country. And a lot of them are regular customers working in Thailand without work permits. They obviously want to keep a low profile.’
‘Obviously,’ I repeated. I took out the photograph of Jon Junior and gave it to him. ‘He was on the bus on March fifth, right?’
The Frenchman nodded. ‘First time he’d used us.’ He handed the picture back to me. ‘Hadn’t been in Thailand long. You could tell, most of the regulars watch the movie or sleep, he was looking out of the window the whole way there and back.’
‘Did you talk to him?’ My coffee arrived and I stirred in a spoonful of sugar.
‘Just to say hello and take his money. It was a straight through and through run and we were late setting off so we didn’t even stay for lunch in Cambodia.’
‘Did you take any details from him? Address, place of work, anything like that?’
‘All we ask for is a name and to be honest we don’t even check that. We take bookings but anyone can turn up on the day and if there’s a seat they’re on the coach.’ He gestured around the coffee shop. ‘This is where we meet. Seven in the morning and we head off at seven thirty.’
‘Was he travelling alone?’
The Frenchman nodded. ‘Sat near the back next to the window.’
‘Anyone sit next to him?’
‘One of our regulars, he got here just before we left. Almost missed us.’
‘Can I talk to him?’
The Frenchman looked as if I’d asked him to give me a couple of pints of his blood. ‘He’s not the sort to talk to people he doesn’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that he’d want me to give you his name.’
‘I really don’t care who he is or what he’s done, I just want to know if Jon Junior said anything that might help me locate him.’
The Frenchman dipped a biscuit in his coffee and then bit into it. A large chunk fell into his cup but he pretended not to notice. ‘He’s working illegally, that’s the problem. He runs a go-go bar in Soi Cowboy. His boss won’t apply for a working visa so he’s here on tourist visas and that means at the moment he’s doing a run every two weeks.’
‘Like I said, what his visa status is no concern of mine.’
‘He won’t want to talk to strangers, that’s the problem.’ He took an iPhone out of his jacket pocket. ‘I’ll give him a call.’ He stood up and went outside. I watched him through the window as he paced up and down, talking animatedly into the phone. After a couple of minutes he came back and gave the phone to me. ‘He’ll talk to you now.’
I took the phone from him and he sat down. ‘This is Bob Turtledove,’ I said. ‘Thanks for agreeing to talk to me.’
‘Philippe says you’re cool,’ he said. He had a British accent, Liverpool maybe, as if he was talking through his nose and not his mouth.
‘That was nice of him,’ I said.
‘You are cool right?’
‘As a cucumber.’
‘Because I don’t like busybodies sticking their nose in my business.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I just want to know about Jon Clare. The American boy you were sitting next to on the way back from Cambodia.’
‘The Yank, yeah. Total newbie. Didn’t know his arse from his elbow.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Not much, I was asleep most of the way. He asked me about what I did for a living and I told him about Soi Cowboy. He’d never been inside a go-go bar, can you believe that?’
‘He’s a Mormon,’ I said. ‘His family’s religious.’
‘Yeah? He seemed like a mummy’s boy.’
‘Did he say where he was working?’
‘Some English school. I don’t think he said where. He was complaining about it, said it was run by some dodgy Russians. He thought they were up to something.’
‘Did he say what?’
‘I don’t think he knew. But he wanted out.’
‘Was he in trouble?’
‘I’m not sure. He wasn’t exactly opening his heart to me, it was just chit-chat.’
‘Did he say where he was living, where he hung out? Any clue as to where I might find him.’
‘He said he had a girlfriend. We were talking about the bars and he said he’d never been inside a go-go bar and he didn’t think that his girlfriend would like it if he did.’
‘So she’s Thai?’
‘I assumed so,’ he said.
‘Didn’t he say?’
There was a pause of several seconds. ‘Hand on heart, I can’t remember. But a single guy in Thailand, why would he be hanging out with a farang girl?’
‘And when you got back to Bangkok, did he say where he was going?’
‘He didn’t say anything. Just goodbye and then he took his bag and went.’
‘T
axi?’
‘Motorcycle taxi,’ he said. ‘Just down from On Nut Skytrain station. I saw him go by.’
‘Heading which way?’
‘Back to lower Sukhumvit,’ he said. ‘And he was talking on his cellphone.’
I thanked him for his help, ended the call and gave the phone back to the Frenchman.
‘Any help?’ he asked.
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘We’ll see.’
CHAPTER 14
There were several vans lined up in the road outside Jon Junior’s former hotel. Two were red, one was yellow and one was a green so dark that it was almost black. The drivers were huddled in a tight group at the front of the queue, smoking cigarettes and laughing. One of the saw me walking across the road and waved. ‘Tuk-tuk?’ he asked.
I shook my head and showed him the photograph of Jon Junior. ‘Did you ever pick this boy up at the hotel and take him somewhere? He had two bags with him.’
The driver looked at the photograph and shook his head. I showed the photograph to the rest of the drivers. They blew tight plumes of smoke as they studied Jon Junior’s picture.
‘He went in a red tuk-tuk,’ I said. ‘He probably went to another hotel. Or an apartment block.’
The first driver took back the photograph and looked at it again. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe I took him.’
‘Where?’ I asked.
The driver pointed down the soi. ‘That way.’
Right. Fine.
‘What was the name of the building you went to?’
The driver shrugged.
‘Are you sure it was him?’
The driver scratched his neck with the nail of his little finger that seemed to have been grown extra long specifically for the purpose of scratching.
‘I think so.’
‘Your tuk-tuk is red?’
The driver nodded.
‘Which one is yours?’ I asked, in case he was just telling me what I wanted to hear.
He pointed at one of the two red tuk-tuks. That was a good sign.
‘Was he with anyone?’
‘No, he was alone.’
‘And he went to another hotel?’
‘Condominium,’ he said.
‘Condominium?’ I repeated. ‘Are you sure?’
The driver shrugged and scratched his neck as he frowned at the photograph. ‘Old building,’ he said. ‘Sukhumvit Soi 22.’
‘Can you take me?’ I asked.
‘A hundred baht,’ he said quickly.
‘Let’s go.’
There are two sorts of tuk-tuks. There’s the three-wheeled type that is powered by a two-stroke scooter engine, covered with a canopy and with a seat just large for three people at the back. They’re noisy, smelly and uncomfortable and part of the Thai tourist experience, usually for a vastly-inflated fee. There are also four-wheeled versions with larger engines and with two facing seats at the back. They’re more for locals with too much baggage or shopping to get onto the bus. I’m not a fan of either but sitting in the back with my head jammed against the roof was the only way that I was going to get Jon Junior’s forwarding address.
Getting to Soi 22 from Soi 9 meant braving the traffic on the main Sukhumvit Road, a white-knuckle ride in any vehicle but a near-death experience in the back of a tuk-tuk, no matter how many wheels it has. The air was stifling hot, and every time we stopped it seemed that there was a bus next to us, belching out black smoke.
We shot down Soi 22 past a row of massage parlours and drove by the Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel and then made a quick left turn into one of the side sois. We slowed to a crawl past a woman who cooking at a roadside stall and I got a blast of burning chilli in my eyes. By time the tuk-tuk had stopped there were tears streaming down my face.
I used a handkerchief to wipe my eyes as I looked up at the building. It was hard to tell whether Jon Junior’s new address was a step up or a step down from the cheap hotel in Soi 9. From the look of the outside I’d probably say that he was paying a bit less but getting a bit more for his money. He was a good fifteen minute walk from the nearest Skytrain station, Phrom Pong, but there was a motorcycle taxi rank across from the building so transport wouldn’t be a problem. The building was a soot-stained, grey oblong, eight floors high, with windows that didn’t appear to have been cleaned in decades. There was no sign that I could see, no way of telling if the building was a hotel or an apartment block or an abattoir. Or a combination of all three.
‘You’re sure this is it?’ I asked the tuk-tuk driver as I climbed out of the back of the van. I had to bend my head low, the tiny vans were designed to ferry around slightly-built Thais, not six-foot-tall farangs.
The driver was smoking a roll-up and he took the remnants from between his lips, coughed and spat into the street. ‘I didn’t see him go in, but this is where I dropped him.’
‘With his bags?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just him?’
‘Like I said, him and his bags.’
‘But no one brought him here?’
He frowned, not understanding. ‘I did.’
Jai yen yen. It was my own fault for not phrasing the question properly.
‘You brought him and his bags, but did you bring anyone else?’
The driver took a last drag on his roll-up and flicked it into the gutter. ‘He came alone.’
I gave him a hundred baht note and he sped off in a cloud of black smoke.
There were two double doors at the entrance and I pushed through them into a small reception area. There were two rattan sofas and a glass-topped coffee table at one end of the room and a small booth at the other. There was a woman sitting in the booth watching a Thai soap area on a tiny television.
On the wall behind her were rows of keys on hooks and pigeon holes for mail. ‘Excuse me, is this a hotel or serviced apartments?’ I asked.
‘You want a room?’ she said, not taking her eyes off the TV. A middle-aged woman with hair piled high on her head was bemoaning the fact that her husband had taken a mia noi, a minor wife. The friend she was confiding in was nodding sympathetically and produced a box of tissues as the betrayed wife burst into tears. Heart-rending stuff.
I told the receptionist that I was looking for a friend and showed her Jon Junior’s picture. She glanced at it and handed it back to me.
‘He check out already.’
‘Jonathon Clare,’ I said. ‘From America.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘He check out.’
‘When?’
‘Last week.’
‘Where did he go?’
She sighed but kept looking at the television. I couldn’t tell if she was sighing because she was bored with my questions or if she was moved by what she was seeing on the television.
‘He didn’t say.’
‘But he paid his bill and left?’
She nodded.
‘He was a teacher,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Do you know where he was teaching?’
On the television the middle-aged betrayed wife collapsed onto a sofa and dabbed at her cheeks with a handful of tissues. The receptionist put her hands together and clasped them to her chest. She was close to tears. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Did he have any friends?’ I asked. ‘Anyone who came to see him?’
The soap opera hit a commercial break. The receptionist gasped.
I repeated my question.
‘There was a girl,’ she said, looking me in the eye for the first time since I’d walked into the building.
‘A Thai girl?’
The woman nodded. ‘Young.’
‘How young?’
‘A teenager.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘Short hair, hi-so maybe.’
‘She went to his room?’
The woman nodded. ‘Once. Mostly she waited for him here.’
‘She came often?’
‘Three or four times.’
‘Do you think she was
a girlfriend? Or a student?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She was dressed like a student.’
‘Do you know which school she went to?’
She shook her head.
‘And this is a hotel, right? Not a condominium block.’
‘Both,’ she said. ‘You can rent rooms by the day or week, or you can stay for a year. Some people buy the rooms.’
‘What about Jonathan Clare? Was he renting by the day or the week?’
She picked up a ledger and flicked through it. ‘By the month,’ she said.
‘So he paid a deposit?’
The woman nodded.
‘And he got that back when he checked out?’
‘Usually we give people their deposits the day after they check out.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘It’s our policy. We have to check for damage and that phone calls and electricity and water bills have been paid.’
‘And he came back for his deposit?’
She looked at the ledger and nodded.
If Jon Junior waited around for his deposit then he probably wasn’t running away from anyone. He’d just moved on. But why? And where?
I asked her if anyone had moved into Jon Junior’s room. She flicked through the ledger and shook her head. ‘It’s still empty,’ she said.
‘Can I look around?’ I asked.
I could see the look of concern flash across her face so before she could say anything I slipped her a five hundred baht note. Probably more than two days wages. She stared at the note, then the adverts ended and the soap opera restarted. She gave me the key to room 31. ‘Second floor,’ she said, her eyes back on the TV set.
There was an elevator but I took the stairs, figuring that I could do with the exercise.
The room was large with a queen size bed, a cheap black plastic sofa and a glass-topped coffee table that was a twin of the one in reception. There was a wardrobe and a dressing table and a door that led to a small bathroom. Western-style toilet, washbasin and a shower stall.
The wardrobe was bare except for a line of pink plastic coathangers.
There as nothing in the dressing table drawers.
I looked under the bed. There was a roach trap and a lot of dust, but nothing else.
I lifted the pillows. Nothing. Lifted the mattress. Nothing.
Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon Page 7
