“That’s what I said,” said Mr Clare, nodding. He patted his wife’s hand. “That’s exactly what I said.” He flashed a tight smile at me as if to thank me for the reassurance. “But you will check, right?”
“Of course I will.”
“And how much do you charge?” asked Mr Clare.
“That’s difficult to say,” I said. “I’m not a private detective, I don’t charge by the hour.”
“You sell antiques, Mr Richards said,” said Mrs Clare.
“That’s my main business, but I’ve been here for almost fifteen years so I have a fair idea of how the place works. I’ll ask around and I can try a few leads that the police wouldn’t necessarily think of.”
“He said you used to be a police officer.”
“In another life,” I said.
“In the States?”
I smiled thinly. “It’s not something I talk about, much.”
Hardly at all, in fact. Too many bad memories.
“I understand,” said Mr Clare. “Mr Richards said you were a good man. And reliable.”
“That was nice of him,” I said, though I figured what Matt Richards was really doing was getting the Clares out of his hair as quickly as possible. “I’ll start by making a few calls, see if I can find out where he was planning to live and work, and take it from there. I’d expect you to cover any expenses, and then when I’ve finished I’ll let you know how much work I’ve done and you can pay me what you think that’s worth.”
“That’s a strange way of doing business, Mr Turtledove.”
“It’s a strange country, Mr Clare. But things have a way of working out for the best here.”
*
CHAPTER 3
So, all I had to do was to find one lost American in the Village of Olives. That’s how Bangkok translates, I kid you not. Bang means “village’ and kok is an olive-like fruit. Doesn’t have much of a ring to it, so the Thais prefer to call their capital Krung Thep, or City of Angels. Actually, the full Thai name gets a place in the Guinness World Records book as the world’s longest place name. Krungthep, Maha Nakorn, Amorn Ratanakosindra, Mahindrayudhya, Mahadilokpop Noparatana Rajdhani, Burirom, Udom Rajnivet Mahastan, Amorn Pimarm Avatarn Satit, Sakkatuttiya, Vishnukarm Prasit.
Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
It translates as “The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with the nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in enormous royal palaces which resemble the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated God, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarm.”
Bangkok is shorter. But it is still one hell of a big city. Officially It’s home to twelve million people but at any one time there could be up to twenty million trying to make a living there. The vast majority are Thais so finding Jon Junior would be difficult, but not impossible.
So, what to do?
First, try the easy options.
I picked up a phone and tapped out the number of Jon Junior’s cellphone. It went straight through to a recorded message in Thai that said that the number wasn’t available and that I should try later. It didn’t give me the option of leaving a message or of using a call-back service which would notify me when the phone was available. I used my cellphone to send a text message in Thai, asking for whoever had the phone to give me a call and I’d make it worth their while.
I reached for my MacBook and switched it on, then sent an email to the address that Mr Clare had given me. While I waited to see if the email bounced back I looked through the letters that Jon Junior had written. There were three letters, mainly just chit-chat about what a great time he was having but that he missed his family and his church.
The first letter contained four postcards – pictures of a floating market, elephants playing in a river, and the Wat Phra Kaew and Wat Arun, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the Temple of Dawn. There were scribbled notes on the back – “been there, done that!”
In the second and third letters were photographs that Jon Junior had taken of more tourist sites, including the Chao Phraya River, the Chatuchak Sunday market, and what looked like shots of the street market in Patpong. Jon Junior was in some of the shots, grinning in knee-length shorts and a baggy t-shirt with the Thai flag on the front. His hair was longer and curlier and his skin was more tanned than it was in the photograph that his parents had given me, and he seemed a lot more relaxed, with a broad grin on his face and a sparkle in his eyes.
I put one of the pictures, in which he was standing in front of a noodle stall, on the scanner and scanned it into my laptop, along with the picture that the Clares had given me.
Jon Junior had obviously been having fun in Thailand.
And he had at least one friend here, because someone must have taken the photographs that he was in. But there was no mention of a travelling companion in the three letters, or any suggestion that he’d met anyone in Thailand.
I sat back in my chair and considered my options.
First, the basics.
Jon Junior had flown into Bangkok at the beginning of January. I needed to know if he was still in Thailand.
I had a good contact who worked for immigration at Suvarnabhumi International Airport. I’ve not met many Westerners who can come close to pronouncing Suvarnabhumi correctly. There are some in Thailand who think that is exactly why the Thais chose the name, which means Golden Land. Nobody really understood why the airport had been built in the first place because Bangkok had a perfectly serviceable airport at Don Muang. It was fair to say, though, that several wealthy Bangkok families did become noticeably wealthier during the construction of the new $4 billion airport.
I’d met Khun Chauvalit several times through my wife. He’s a fan of Chinese art and so is she and we kept bumping into each other at exhibitions and I discovered that he is a big fan of Cajun food and as I’m from New Orleans we had a lot to talk about. During a very long Sunday lunch at the Bourbon Street restaurant he gave me his business card and said that if ever I needed any assistance I shouldn’t hesitate to contact him.
I have done just that, several times, and he has always been helpful and never asked anything in return.
I called him on his cellphone and he answered after just two rings.
“Khun Chauvalit, how are you this fine day?” I asked in my very best Thai.
“Working hard for little or no appreciation, as always,” he replied.
He asked me about Noy and I asked him about his wife and five children, and then I got around to the point of the conversation and asked him about Jon Junior.
“He flew in on Delta on January the eighth with a tourist visa. I’d like to know if He’s still in Thailand and if so if he’d arranged to have his stay extended.”
“I’m not in my office just now, Khun Bob, so I’ll have to call you back.”
I gave him Jon Junior’s passport number and date of birth, thanked him and ended the call.
The Clares had been told that the American Embassy had contacted the police and the hospitals, but I’ve learned from experience that embassies aren’t the most efficient of institutions so I didn’t think it would hurt to check for myself. I had a list of local hospitals in my desk drawer and I methodically worked my way through them, patiently spelling out Jon Junior’s name and his passport number. He hadn’t been admitted to any, and there were no unidentified farangs.
Farangs. That’s what the Thais call foreigners. It’s derived from the word for Frenchman but now It’s applied to all white foreigners.
Okay, so Jon Junior wasn’t lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg or a ruptured appendix.
So far so good.
I phoned my best police contact, Somsak. Somsak’s a police colonel in the Soi Thonglor station, just down the road from my apartment. He’s a good guy, his wife’s a friend of my wife but our real connection is poker. We play every Friday along with four or five other guys, taking
it in turns to host the game. Somsak’s a ferocious player with a tendency to blink rapidly whenever he draws anything better than a pair of kings. He never bluffs, either, just plays the percentages. He’s a tough player to beat; he either blinks or folds.
Somsak’s assistant put me through straight away.
“Khun Bob, how are you this pleasant morning?” said Somsak.
Somsak always called me Khun Bob. I could never work out whether he was being sarcastic or not, but he always said it with a smile. He always spoke in English, too. My Thai was better than his English but he was close to perfect so it was no strain.
“I’m trying to find a missing American,” I said. “He’s a young guy, came here as a tourist but it looks like He’s teaching English now. He hasn’t been in touch with his parents for a while and they’re starting to worry.”
“And You’re wondering if He’s been caught trying to smuggle a kilo of white powder out of the country?”
“It happens.”
It happens a lot. Despite the penalties – and Thailand still executes drugs smugglers – there are still hundreds, maybe thousands, of backpackers and tourists who try to cover their costs of their trip to the Land of Smiles by taking drugs out of the country.
Heroin is cheap in Thailand.
Really cheap.
A couple of hundred dollars a kilo. For heroin that would sell for a hundred times as much in New York or London.
“I will make some enquiries,” said Somsak. “You have checked the hospitals?”
“Just before I called you.”
“Why are you contacting the police and not his parents?”
“His parents spoke to the embassy and they said they’d talk to the police. I’m just covering all bases, that’s all.”
“He is a good boy, this Jon Junior?”
“He’s from a good family. “
“I hope he is okay.”
“Me, too,” I said. “How are things going with the Kube fire?”
“You think he might have been there?”
“It’s not impossible,” I said. “Unlikely, but not impossible.”
“We still have some unidentified bodies.”
“The identified ones, their relatives have been informed?”
“Mostly,” said Somsak. “But not all.”
“Two hundred and eighteen dead?”
“Two hundred and twenty-three,” said Somsak. “Five more died overnight.”
“Terrible business,” I said.
“I’ll be there tomorrow with the Public Prosecutor. About nine o’clock. You should come around.”
“I will,” I said. “Is someone going to be prosecuted?”
“Hopefully,” said Somsak. “Let’s talk tomorrow.”
He ended the call. I didn’t hold out much hope that Jon Junior was in police custody. A farang being arrested was always big news. A more likely possibility was that he’d been the victim of a crime but if he’d been badly injured he’d have been in hospital and if he wasn’t then why hadn’t he contacted his parents?
I had tried to be optimistic while I was talking to the Clares, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about Jon Junior’s disappearance.
A very bad feeling.
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Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers and is published in more than twenty languages. He was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Before that, he was employed as a biochemist for ICI, shovelled limestone in a quarry, worked as a baker, a petrol pump attendant, a barman, and worked for the Inland Revenue. He began writing full time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into more than ten languages. He has also written for television shows such as London’s Burning, The Knock and the BBC’s Murder in Mind series, and two of his books, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were turned into movies. You can find out more from his website at www.stephenleather.com
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