Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

by Stephen Leather

  Pete Derbyshire was a teacher from Sydney, Australia. He had met the love of his life dancing in a Soi Cowboy go-go bar. He’d barfined Noi for a week and taken her on holiday. They’d gone to her home town of Buriram and met her family. He’d proposed and offered to buy a plot of land and to build a new home for the two of them. The wedding date had been set, a sin sot, or dowry, of 100,000 baht had been agreed, and Pete had flown back to Australia to give up his job and prepare to make the move to Thailand. His plan was to teach English in Buriram and to live happily ever after with the lovely Noi. But Pete had heard all the horror stories so he emailed me asking if I’d check that Noi was being faithful while he was away.

  Pete was in his late thirties and Noi was twenty two, so the age difference wasn’t that big. But what sent alarm bells ringing for me was the fact that Noi was continuing to work in the bar while she waited for Pete to return. In my experience, guys who have any chance of making a bargirl relationship work have to get the girl out of the bar scene as quickly as possible. I told Pete to expect the worst but he said that Noi had told him that she wanted to be with her friends, that she’d be bored on her own in Buriram. She wouldn’t be working as a dancer, Pete said, and she wouldn’t be going with customers. She’d just earn money from the lady drinks that customers bought her. That sounded possible, just about. If Noi had been dancing then alarm bells would really start ringing because the whole payment system for dancers is based around them being barfined. They are paid a basic salary but if they aren’t barfined a set number of times in a month, their pay is docked. But if Noi was just working in the bar for drinks, then the bar owner wouldn’t be forcing her to go with customers. Pete said that he phoned Noi every night and that she was always there to speak to him. I smiled at that. Anyone who’s ever spent any time in a go-go bar would have seen girls sitting quite happily on a customer’s knee, then rushing off to the toilet to answer her mobile phone. ‘Of course I love you, too much’. There was only one way to find out if Noi was being faithful to Pete. I would have to go in to test her, and that was going to cost Pete a 10,000-baht retainer plus any expenses I incurred.

  He emailed me a photograph of Noi. She was a typical bargirl, dyed red hair, low cut black T-shirt, tight blue jeans, too much make up. I was almost ashamed to take his money, but business is business and three days later the funds had come through by bank transfer.

  I left it until Friday evening before wandering down to Soi Cowboy with some of Pete’s money in my wallet. I went in fairly early to make sure I’d catch her. There was only one other customer when I walked in, a guy in his fifties who was slumped over the bar with half a dozen girls all over him like vultures feeding on a dead buffalo. I sat in a dark corner and ordered a double Jack Daniels.

  The waitress was cute and when she came back with my drink I told her to get one for herself. Then I played a game that usually stood me in good stead. I bet her that I could guess what province she was from before she could guess what country I came from. I could normally tell if a girl was from Isaan or not, and most bargirls were from Korat, Udon or Khonkaen, or they’d be Khamen style which meant Buriram, Sisaket or Surin. I got the waitress in three guesses-Surin-by which time she’d guessed Germany, England and America for me. I don’t think most Thais even know that New Zealand exists.

  Anyway, I bought her another drink and another double Jack Daniels and started talking about provinces and steered the conversation around to Buriram. I nodded at a girl behind the bar and said that she looked as if she was from Buriram but the cute waitress said no, she was from Udon Thani. She pointed at three girls sitting together at the far end of the bar and said that they were all from Buriram. I was playing the slightly drunk farang, so I waved my arm around and said I’d by drinks for all the girls from Buriram. The waitress rushed around the bar and within minutes there were half a dozen girls at my table. At least one was an impostor-she had the pale skin and round face of a northern girl-but I wasn’t worried because one of the six was the lovely Noi.

  I waved for Noi to sit on my left, and another of the Buriram girls sat on my right. Their drinks arrived and there was much clinking of glasses and laughing and I ordered another round. I asked all their names. The girl on my right was Lek. I laughed at that because Noi and Lek both mean little. ‘My two little girls,’ I said and everyone laughed uproariously. You have to be careful in bars, you start to believe your own publicity. They weren’t laughing because I was a funny guy, they weren’t laughing because they liked me, they were laughing because I was buying them drinks and every drink I bought them earned them thirty baht. It was all about money. Everything that happened in a go-go bar was driven by cash. I knew that, the girls knew that, it was only the tourists like Pete who thought there was anything else going on.

  Noi and Lek were stroking my thighs and giggling. They’d told me that they were sisters-‘Same Mother, Same Father’-but I doubted that they were even related. It was a common ploy among the bargirls, to pretend to be related, because they knew that was a turn-on for farangs.

  I asked them if they had boyfriends, and Noi was quite happy to tell me that she had a farang in Sydney who was sending her money and that one day she was going to marry him. ‘I love him too much,’ she said, as fingers moved gently up my thigh. ‘But he far away.’

  I bought another round of drinks and Noi and Lek exchanged a look. I was playing the role of drunken farang to the hilt. ‘I’ve always wanted to sleep with sisters,’ I said.

  ‘You can,’ said Noi. She nodded at Lek. ‘Two thousand baht for her, same for me.’

  ‘And you have to pay bar,’ said Lek, playing with the zip of my jeans.

  I was tempted. Really tempted, but I was a professional so I told them that I was still jet-lagged and that I had to sleep. I promised to return the next night and asked Noi for her mobile phone number so that I could check that she was working.

  She happily gave me the number, I bought another round of drinks, and then paid my bill and headed to an Internet cafA© where I emailed Pete with a report of what had happened. I sent him the mobile phone number as proof that I’d spoken to her.

  The next day I received a reply from Pete. He’d phoned Noi and asked her what she’d been doing that night. Noi had said she’d been bought drinks by a farang but that she wouldn’t let him pay her bar fine. And she’d promised him that she didn’t go with customers any more. It was clear from the tone of the email that Pete believed her. That’s one thing I could never understand. The client pays for information and then believes the word of a lying bargirl who is taking him for every penny she can rather than trusting the professional he’s paying.

  I emailed him back, assuring him that Noi would have happily gone with me. Pete phoned me a few hours later. He said he trusted Noi, but to be absolutely sure he wanted me to go back and see her, and this time he wanted me to pay her bar fine and take her to a hotel. Once she was in the room, he wanted me to text him. He’d phone her and that would be that. I agreed, but told him that he’d have to come up with another 10,000 baht, plus the money for the bar fine, plus any other expenses. He promised to send me 12,000 baht by bank transfer. So far as I was concerned he was throwing good money after bad, but the client is always right. Even when he’s wrong.

  Once the money was safely in the bank I went back to Noi’s bar. The staff greeted me like a long-lost friend and the bartender was pouring a double Jack Daniels before I’d even sat down. Noi and Lek appeared within seconds and as the waitress went off to get them two lady drinks their hands were already stroking my thighs.

  A couple of drinks later and I paid bar for the two girls and we walked to a nearby short-time hotel. Four hundred baht bought us a room for ninety minutes. I was planning to text Pete while the girls were in the shower, but as soon as the door closed they pushed me on to the bed and ripped off their clothes, and mine. I tried to put up a fight, honest I did, but they were consummate professionals, and besides I figured it was Pete’s fault, putti
ng temptation in my way like he did. They were both as cute as hell and had clearly worked together before. Even taught me a few tricks. Twenty minutes later I was flat on my back, drained, while the two girls were giggling in the shower.

  I sent a text to Pete, giving him the name of the hotel and the fact that she was there with Lek. I dressed quickly. As I headed out of the door, I heard Noi’s mobile phone start to ring. I hurried down the stairs and out onto the street. I didn’t want to be around when she tried to explain where she was and what she’d been doing.

  I don’t know why farangs think that the place to look for a long-term partner is in a go-go bar or massage parlour. I doubt that they’d go looking to marry a prostitute in their own country. Like I said, it’s as if they check in their brains when they arrive in Thailand. I often get asked if it’s possible to marry a bargirl and actually live happily ever after. I knew of a few cases where it’s worked out. Four, in fact. But in all four cases the girls hadn’t been working in the bars for more than a few weeks, and the guys they married weren’t hardened barflies. But they were the exceptions. Generally marriages to bargirls don’t work out. The girls are damaged goods. Many are on drugs, many have a kid upcountry staying with the parents, more often than not there’s a Thai boyfriend or even a husband in the background. A girl who’s been working the bars for just a couple of years will have slept with hundreds of different guys and is probably supporting her whole family. Any farang who expects to find the love of his life under those circumstances needs his head examined. And the services of a Bangkok private eye.

  THE CASE OF THE INTERNET SCAMMER

  I was having a dream about two twin go-go dancers doing terrible things to me with whipped cream when my mobile phone started ringing and dragged me back to reality. It was a British voice on the other end of the line. A man.

  ‘What time is it there?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you think I am, a speaking clock?’ I growled. I squinted at the clock on the bedside table. It was just after three.

  ‘It’s nine o’clock here,’ he said.

  ‘It’s three in Bangkok,’ I said.

  ‘That’s okay then,’ he said.

  ‘In the morning,’ I said. ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m in London.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said.

  ‘Shall I call back later?’

  I sat up in bed, rubbing my face. ‘That’s okay, I’m awake now. Is this business or pleasure?’

  ‘Business,’ he said. ‘I need help.’

  I always keep a notebook and pen by my clock so I took notes as the caller went through his story. His name was Mike Tyson (no relation to the boxer, he said, ‘and I’m a fair bit older and whiter’) and he was a retired businessmen. He’d built up his own sportswear company and sold out for a decent price once he hit sixty. I got the feeling that he wasn’t exactly short of money. He’d sent his Thai girlfriend the money for her ticket to the UK but Mike had waited at Heathrow airport for hours and there’d been no sign of her. He’d tried calling her mobile phone but it was switched off. Mike was sure that something had happened to her and he wanted me to check the local hospitals, go around to her house, to do whatever it took to find out what had happened to her.

  It was an easy enough job, so I told him to send me a 10,000-baht retainer through Western Union.

  ‘No problem, that’s how I send money to Metta,’ he said.

  ‘Have you been sending her a lot of money?’ I asked. Alarm bells were already ringing.

  ‘Just a few hundred pounds a month,’ he said. ‘And some extra money when her father was in hospital. And money for her passport and visa. And for her ticket.’

  I asked Mike for as much detail as he could give me. Her name was Metta Khonkaen, he said. I got him to spell it for me twice because Khonkaen is a city in the north east and it seemed a strange surname. It would be like being called Pete Birmingham or Eddie Queenstown. Not impossible, but unlikely. He had her date of birth and I groaned inwardly when I realised that he was almost three times her age. Alarm bells were really ringing now.

  ‘Where did you meet Metta?’ I asked. I would have bet money that he’d met the lovely Metta in a go-go bar or massage parlour.

  ‘I haven’t actually met her yet,’ said Mike. ‘Not in person. We met online.’

  I was totally awake now. Mike had sent hundreds if not thousands of pounds to a girl he hadn’t even met? I was starting to wish I’d asked for a bigger retainer because Mike clearly wasn’t a man who kept a tight grip on his money.

  I asked Mike to email me any pictures he had of Metta, and to fax copies of any paperwork he had, then I put down the phone and went back to sleep.

  The next day I wandered along to Starbucks for a latte and a banana muffin and then took a motorcycle taxi to the Western Union office. Mike had been as good as his word and I collected my 10,000 baht. There was a faxed copy of her passport and copies of the papers that she’d taken to the British Embassy. And he’d emailed me some head and shoulder shots of her. Metta was a stunner, no doubt about it. Pale skin, high cheekbones, long straight hair.

  I went through the motions and phoned a couple of dozen hospitals in Bangkok but none had admitted a Metta Khonkaen. I checked my emails and there was a message from Mike. One of life’s little coincidences; just a couple of hours after speaking to me, he’d received an email from a friend of Metta’s. According to the friend, Metta had been arrested by the immigration police when she was trying to leave the country. There was something wrong with her visa and she didn’t have enough funds to cover her time in the UK. The police were holding her in the notorious Bangkok Hilton and the friend said that she needed 50,000 baht to get her released, and another 150,000 baht so that Metta could show she had sufficient funds to travel to the UK. Two hundred thousand baht in all. The helpful friend had included her own name and bank account details so that Mike could send her the money without further ado.

  I phoned Mike and the guy was at the end of his tether. It was too late to send the money but the next day he was going to be at the bank first thing to arrange the telegraphic transfer. I told him to wait until I’d made a few enquiries, there were just so many things about this case that didn’t ring true. I pressed him for more details about his internet courtship. He told me that he’d first met her in a chatroom, and they’d started talking by email every day. She was working as a waitress in Bangkok but after Mike started sending her money she’d gone back to stay with her parents in Chiang Rai, helping to support her younger sisters while she studied for a degree in accounting. It had always been her dream to live in England, she’d said. They’d traded photographs, and Metta had told Mike that he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Like a movie star, she’d said. And she loved the photographs of his large house in central London. His thirty-two-foot yacht. His collection of sports cars. Her email began to become more affectionate. Maybe she could fly to London to see him, she’d suggested. Maybe they’d get on so well together that he would want her to stay with him. Maybe he might one day want to marry her.

  By the time Mike had finished telling me the story, he was in tears. I told him not to do anything until he heard from me again.

  I picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and went along to the Immigration Department on Soi Suan Phlu. The chief there was an old friend of mine. I went up to the third floor, gave him the whisky and then we spent half an hour talking about golf before I got around to the real reason for my visit. I showed him the fax of Metta passport and he shook his head emphatically. ‘ Mai chai, mai chai, mai chai,’ he muttered.

  He pointed at the passport picture. Metta was smiling happily. The chief explained that smiling wasn’t allowed in passport photographs. They were taken in the passport office and the camera operator would make sure that the person didn’t smile. Also, the wavy lines that were supposed to run through the photograph were missing, and the surname was in a sligh
tly different typeface to the rest of the wording on the passport. It looked to the chief as if the photograph had been stuck into an existing passport, and the surname had been typed on a piece of paper and stuck into the travel document. The passport was fake.

  I asked him what would happen if the girl tried to leave the country with a doctored passport. Would she be arrested?

  The chief assured me that the girl would probably have just been turned away. If she had been a known criminal then she might have been held by the immigration police, but she certainly wouldn’t have been hauled off to the Bangkok Hilton. To put my mind at rest he tapped the name into his computer terminal. There was no record of any problems with a Metta Khonkaen.

  My next call was to the municipal office in Pathumwan. I was a regular visitor and whenever I popped in I took a selection of Thai snacks with me. The head lady saw me coming and came over to relieve me off my tidbits and see what I wanted. I asked her about Metta’s surname and she shook her head emphatically. Khonkaen was not a surname that she had ever come across and after a couple of minutes on her computer terminal she was able to tell me that there wasn’t a Khonkaen family anywhere in the country.

  I waited until late evening before phoning the unlucky Mike and told him what I’d discovered. And I told him of my suspicions-that Metta Khonkaen, or whatever her real name was, was conning him.

  Mike was still convinced that there was some sort of misunderstanding. He was still getting frantic emails from Metta’s friend, imploring him to help her and he was convinced that she was banged up in a damp, dark cell somewhere.