‘What do you think, Som? Khao pad or pad thai?’
‘I like pad thai. Pad thai mu.’ Thai fried noodles with pork.
‘You’ve sold me,’ said Harper, handing her back the photograph album. ‘And another bottle of Heineken.’
He was sitting in a beer bar in a side road off Walking Street, Pattaya’s main red-light strip. It was just after six, the street was quiet and there were only two other customers in Noy’s, playing pool, the loser buying tequila shots. The bar was open to the air but two large fans overhead gave enough of a breeze to make the evening bearable.
Som returned with a fresh beer, slotted into a foam cylinder bearing the bar’s logo – a bright red lipstick kiss superimposed on a cross of St George. Noy’s second and fourth husbands had been English. No one was quite sure how many she had had over the years, but they had all contributed to the upkeep of the bar in one way or another. Harper was just about to take a sip when he recognised the young girl walking purposefully along the street towards him. Her name was Em. Dark-skinned and lanky, she was nineteen years old and one of the top-earning dancers at the Firehouse, one of the busier Walking Street go-go bars. She was in the off-duty bargirl uniform of tight black top, cut-off denim shorts and impossibly high heels, with a thick gold chain around her neck and an even thicker one around her left wrist. A dragon tattoo wound down her left leg. She looked upset and got straight to the point. ‘Khun Lek, Pear is in hospital.’
Thais tended to have trouble pronouncing Alex or Lex and most ended up saying ‘Lek’, which happened to be the Thai for ‘small’ and was a common nickname. Harper had long ago given up correcting anyone who mispronounced his name and simply answered to Lek.
‘What happened?’ he asked. Pear was a dancer in Em’s bar, and came from the same village outside Surin, not far from the border with Cambodia. He had known her since she’d started working in Pattaya two years earlier, sent to dance in the bars by parents who were having trouble scraping a living as farmers. He’d met her on her second day on the job and she had been relieved to discover that Harper could speak Thai. She had spent the whole evening sitting next to him, telling stories about her life as a farm kid, then thrown up over him and passed out after her fifth tequila shot. Harper had assumed that the drinks he’d been buying her had been watered down, but there had been a miscommunication with the barman and Pear had been as drunk as a skunk. From that day on he had always felt responsible for the girl and had often helped her out at the end of the month if she wasn’t able to pay her rent or didn’t have enough to send back to her parents.
‘A customer attacked her,’ said Em. ‘He raped her. She’s very sick, Khun Lek.’
‘Which hospital?’
‘Pattaya International. ICU.’
Harper was already off his stool and heading for the door. If Pear was in the intensive care unit, it had to be serious. He handed Som a five-hundred-baht note and told her to eat his pad thai. His Triumph Bonneville motorcycle was parked outside the bar, his black full-face helmet sitting on one of the mirrors. He pulled on the helmet, fired up the bike and drove off.
Ten minutes later he was outside the ICU talking to a pretty Thai doctor with waist-length jet black hair and makeup that would have been more at home on a fashion model. Her nails were painted a glossy Barbie pink that matched her lipstick. ‘She’s been badly beaten,’ said the doctor. ‘She has lost two of her teeth, her kidneys are swollen and she’s passing blood at the moment. We’ll know in a day or two how bad her kidneys are, but it’s not looking good.’ Her English was perfect but with a slight American accent, probably the result of being educated at an international school and university.
‘Is she in pain?’ asked Harper.
‘We’ve made her as comfortable as we can but if we give her any more painkillers she’ll be unconscious and we don’t want that.’ The doctor looked uncomfortable. ‘Is she your girlfriend?’
‘Just a friend,’ said Harper.
‘Because there is something else, Mr Harper. I’m afraid she was raped. With considerable violence. Both her vagina and rectum are quite badly damaged.’
Harper cursed under his breath.
‘We have contacted the police and they will be sending an officer with a rape kit to gather evidence,’ said the doctor.
‘Can I see her?’
The doctor shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. She’s too sick for visitors at the moment. She’s in no immediate danger now, though, and we’ll be moving her out of the ICU tomorrow.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ said Harper.
‘But there is something else, I’m afraid …’
He cursed again, wondering just how bad it was going to get. ‘There’s the matter of Khun Pear’s bill,’ said the doctor. ‘That’s why she gave us your name. She said you would settle her account.’
‘No problem at all,’ said Harper. He unzipped his hip-pack , counted out twenty thousand baht, then handed it with a Visa card to the doctor. ‘Take that on account and put whatever you need on the card.’
The doctor smiled and handed it back with the money. ‘That’s all right, Mr Harper. You can pay when she checks out. But we’ll need a copy of your passport.’
Harper took his passport out of the hip-pack and gave it to the doctor. The hip-pack was around his waist pretty much all the time. It contained two of his many mobile phones, his passport, two credit cards and money. Always money. The pack, with the heavy gold neck chain he always wore, was his guarantee of a fast exit from any country, at any time, should the need arise. He had a more substantial escape kit stashed under the bed in his Thai apartment and another bug-out bag in a specially made concealed compartment beneath the floor of his SUV, but the hip-pack had everything he needed for a high-speed escape.
The doctor took the passport and headed down the corridor, her white coat flapping behind her to reveal an extremely shapely pair of legs and the red soles of fake Christian Louboutin high heels. At least, Harper assumed they were fake – Thai doctors weren’t as highly paid as their UK and US counterparts but she might have been from a wealthy family. Or maybe she had a rich husband.
Harper waited until she’d turned a corner, then slipped into the ICU. A machine was beeping quietly in time with Pear’s heartbeat. There was a bandage across her forehead and a plaster across her nose. Her eyes were almost hidden by puffed-up skin. Her lips were cracked and swollen and there were bandages on her arms. A tube ran from a bandage on her wrist to a clear bag hanging from a metal stand.
Harper touched her arm gently. She flinched and groaned but didn’t open her eyes. ‘Pear, baby, it’s me. Lek.’
Pear’s eyes fluttered open and she tried to smile but the effort made her wince. ‘Lek, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly, baby. There’s nothing to be sorry about.’
‘I have no money.’
He patted her arm. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve taken care of it.’
‘I’ll pay you back.’
‘You bloody won’t,’ said Harper. ‘Now, who did this to you? Em said it was a customer.’
‘It was a Russian. Valentine. He owns a bar in Walking Street.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I went with my friend Ying. She dances at the Cellblock. She wanted to see Russian girls dancing so we went to Red Oktober. They have pretty girls there. Valentine was giving us drinks and I got drunk very quickly. When I woke up I was upstairs in a room and there were two men with me. Valentine and another man.’
‘What was his name?’
‘I don’t know, Lek. I’m sorry. I forgot. He was a friend of Valentine’s. A Russian man.’ She shuddered. ‘They’d taken my clothes off and Valentine was taking pictures as the other man had sex with me. I shouted at them, told them not to take my picture. Valentine laughed and slapped me. I started screaming and then they …’ She shuddered again. ‘They did this to me.’ She sniffed. ‘I thought I was going to die, Lek.’
‘This room, where was it?
Above the bar?’
‘I don’t think so. I think it was a short-time hotel. I don’t remember.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ he said again. ‘Just get better, okay? I’ll take care of everything.’
She nodded and slowly closed her eyes. ‘Thank you, Lek. You’re a good friend.’
Harper leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, then hurried out, just in time to see the doctor coming down the corridor with his passport. If she’d seen Harper disobeying her instruction not to disturb the patient, she didn’t show it, just smiled, thanked him and returned the passport. She also gave him a business card with her mobile phone number. ‘You can call me anytime to ask how Pear is,’ she said.
‘She’s going to be all right, though?’
‘She needs a lot of rest. And I worry that she will always have the scars. But other than that …’
‘If you think a plastic surgeon will help with the scars, get one in,’ said Harper. ‘I’ll pay whatever it costs.’
‘We’ll see about that once she’s out of ICU, but I will be able to recommend someone, yes.’
‘Do you know where she was when this happened?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Did she come here in an ambulance?’
‘No, a taxi. One of her friends brought her, I think.’
Harper thanked her and headed out of the hospital.
CHAPTER 7
The Cellblock didn’t usually start to get going until ten at night and the best girls didn’t bother turning up until eleven. They knew they’d be taken out by a customer within an hour or so of going on stage so there was little point in clocking in early even if not doing so meant the management docking a few hundred baht from their pay. Most of the girls didn’t care about the salary the bar paid, anyway. They earned most of their income from customers in hotel rooms, anything from two thousand baht from a Pattaya regular to five or six thousand from a newbie who didn’t know the going rate.
The Cellblock was done out as if it was a prison, with an upper area of barred cells in which girls would dance and a lower area like a concrete exercise yard. Harper didn’t want to miss Ying so he got there at eight and sat in a corner nursing a Heineken. There were two other customers and half a dozen girls pretending to dance on concrete podiums, shifting their weight from foot to foot as they checked their smartphones. Over the next hour a dozen or so more arrived, mostly wearing crop tops and shorts, flip-flops slapping on the floor. They would disappear through a curtain into the changing room, emerging a few minutes later in high-heeled boots, thongs and little else.
Several of them eyed Harper as they walked by but his body language and blank eyes betrayed him as a local, which meant they didn’t bother trying to hit him up for a drink. That was the third way the dancers made money: they earned commission on every drink a customer bought them. A girl who hustled could easily get twenty drinks a night – usually cola or water masquerading as tequila – which meant a thousand baht or so in her hand. Harper had enough mates in the Pattaya bar business to know that a hard-working girl with a sweet mouth could earn more than two hundred thousand baht a month – close to fifty thousand pounds a year.
He was on his second beer when Ying walked into the bar. He almost missed her – with no makeup, her hair tied back and her figure disguised in an oversized T-shirt, she looked more like a farm-girl than one of the Cellblock’s top-earning dancers. ‘Hey, Ying, over here,’ he called.
Her eyes widened when she saw him. ‘Lek, you know about Pear?’
‘That’s what I want to talk to you about.’ He patted the seat next to him. She slid onto it and almost immediately a chubby waitress with bad skin appeared, nodding expectantly. Harper didn’t bother arguing, just ordered a drink for Ying. He knew the rules: if a girl sat with a customer she had to have a drink. The waitress pointed at herself and smiled, showing uneven teeth. Harper shook his head. He didn’t mind buying Ying a cola but the waitress was pushing her luck. She held out her right hand so that he could see her palm. On it was written in felt-tip pen – BUY ME A DRINK?
Harper shook his head. No.
She held out her left hand, fingers splayed. CHEAP CHARLIE. She waited until he had read it, then spun on her heels and flounced off with her nose in the air.
‘What happened last night?’ Harper asked Ying.
She had high cheekbones and skin the colour of mahogany, big almond eyes and full lips. With her large breasts and long legs she was the sort of girl Westerners flocked to, though most Thais wouldn’t have considered her pretty. ‘We went to Red Oktober,’ she said, her lips just inches from his ear. ‘We wanted to see Russian girls dancing, and a man started buying us drinks.’
‘His name was Valentine, right?’
She shook her head. ‘Valentine wasn’t the man who bought the drinks. His name was Grigory. Valentine owns the bar.’ Her hand was stroking his thigh as she talked, from habit rather than any wish to arouse him. It was her bargirl instinct kicking in.
‘You know him?’
She shook her head again. ‘No, he told me he was the boss. I joked about working for him but he said he only has Russian girls in his club.’
‘And who was this Grigory?’
‘Just a customer.’
‘And he was a friend of Valentine?’
Ying nodded. ‘They were good friends, I think. They kept talking to each other in Russian, and laughing. We’d been there about an hour and my boyfriend rang. He wanted to see me. He was gambling and he needed money.’
‘So you left her?’
The waitress returned with Ying’s cola, then flashed her CHEAP CHARLIE hand and flounced off again.
‘She was okay, Lek. She seemed happy. A bit drunk, but you know Pear. She drinks a lot.’
Like most of the girls in the industry, Pear used alcohol and drugs to get through the night, partly for energy and partly to numb the pain.
‘If I’d known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have left her.’
Harper sipped his beer. ‘Do you know where they took her? Pear said she was in a room somewhere.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Tears were welling in her eyes. ‘It’s my fault, isn’t it?’
‘No. It’s Valentine and Grigory who are responsible.’
He paid for the drinks, then headed down Walking Street and along a darkened side-street to BJ’s, one of Pattaya’s seedier bars, with half a dozen scantily dressed girls sitting outside touting for customers. ‘Is Ricky in?’ he asked one.
She pulled open a stained curtain. Harper ducked and walked through, wrinkling his nose at the stale smell of God knew what inside. BJ’s was called BJ’s because that was the specialty of the house, the act taking place in one of a dozen small booths around the edge of the bar, while a few plump girls went through the motions of dancing on a podium in the centre. To the right there was a Jacuzzi in which two even plumper girls were lathering themselves as a couple of elderly men in matching Chang Beer vests ogled them.
Ricky was standing at the cash register. His face lit up when he saw Harper. ‘Fuck me, Lex, long time no see.’ He walked over and hugged Harper. He was a big guy, well over six feet, a former merchant seaman, who had retired to Pattaya three years earlier. He had a good pension and several property investments back in England. The bar was more of a hobby than a business, which was why he’d staffed it solely with the sort of girls he liked – short, plump and dark. He couldn’t care less whether it was busy or not. It was his own personal playground and that was all that mattered.
‘Beer?’ asked Ricky. ‘On the house?’
‘Sure,’ said Harper, slipping onto a stool. Ricky joined him, waved at the barman, mimed a beer and held up two fingers. The barman nodded. Ricky had never bothered learning Thai but his sign language was understood the world over.
‘What can you tell me about Red Oktober?’ asked Harper, as the beers arrived.
‘Russian go-go on Walking Street,’ said Ricky. ‘Pretty girls. A lot of Ru
ssian and Latvian blondes. Teenagers most of them.’
‘Underage?’
‘Borderline, but they’re paying off the cops big-time to let non-Thais work so I don’t think anyone’s bothered about how old they are.’
‘And who runs it? A guy called Valentine?’
‘Valentin,’ corrected Ricky. ‘Valentin Rostov. But he’s the figurehead. It’s Russian Mafia money. Have you got a problem with him, Lex? If you have, you need to stay well clear. They’re vicious bastards and they’re protected.’
‘He put a friend of mine in hospital.’
‘A girl?’
‘Yeah, why do you ask?’
Ricky looked pained. ‘Because he’s got a bit of a reputation for liking the nasty stuff. We’ve warned our girls not to go there. He knocked around a girl from Electric Blue a few months ago. And a girl from Dollshouse before that. He’s got a thing for anal, especially if the girls don’t like it.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Ricky.’
Ricky held up his hands. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger, mate,’ he said. ‘What do you expect me to do? Go to the cops? Then I’ll be the one taking it up the arse. Valentin Rostov is protected. There’s nothing can be done.’
‘What’s he look like?’
‘Big. Probably former military. Crew-cut. Scar across his left cheek. Jagged like it was done with a bottle. Diamond earring.’
‘The gay ear or the straight ear?’
Ricky laughed. ‘An earring in any man’s ear is fucking gay, mate. But this is a big diamond. Real, by all accounts. A couple of carats.’
‘And he’s got a friend called Grigory?’
‘That I don’t know. There’s a lot of Russians drink there, obviously. And Indians. The Indians like the Russian birds and the Russian birds aren’t fussy.’
‘I doubt they’re given much choice, right?’
Ricky nodded. ‘Fair comment.’
It was an open secret that many of the Russian girls working in the go-go bars were little more than slaves, trafficked into the country, their passports held by their bosses until they had paid off the cost of their flight, visa and assorted bribes. The local girls could always choose whether or not to go with a customer, but the Russians had to do as their pimps told them. If a Thai girl was unhappy with her bar she could quit and find another place to work. That wasn’t a luxury afforded the Russians.
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