“No, no, quite different. It’s the usual thing, this one. You know, forty-something guy, young wife. He thinks she’s playing away from home and instead of doing the sensible thing and talking to her about it, he hires me. Anyway, I saw her getting into this Fortuner and I know hubby wasn’t driving.”
I could hear him tapping keys. “That’s good to know, you don’t want to... this guy’s even older. She left her husband for a sixty-five year old?”
“Oh well, you know how it is. Trading up sugar daddies.”
“His name’s Boonchai Wongsawat and he lives out in Tungkru. The address is Phutta Bucha Road, Soi forty-four and the house number is... Vijay, it’s a triple nine, if this guy can—”
“Great, just what I needed. Bus coming, I’ve got to dash. Bye, Mana.” I wrote the address on my forearm and looked at it. Thought: Why am I never carrying a notebook when I need one? Then thought: It was a triple nine address.
In countries where people believe in fate they also believe in luck, and in Thailand nine is a lucky number. The Ministry of Transport auctions off license plates containing only nines, and the highest possible combination — two Thai characters followed by 9999 — goes for around ten million baht. The same fetish applies to house numbers. If you have enough pull you can see to it that your house gets a big nine combination, irrespective of the street’s number sequence. Which made Khun Boonchart old money and serious influence.
I left the air-conditioned cool of Pantip to get an expressway bus that would take me across the river, out to the suburbs of Tungkru. But “express” was the wrong word for the caravan of hot, exhausted metal we joined, and by the time we’d come off the toll road it was three p.m. I was starving. So I had lunch at a curry shop and asked which bus would take me to Phutta Bucha.
By the time I’d got there it was almost three thirty. Soi 44 was a narrow, straightish lane. At its entrance there were a couple of motorbike taxi guys sitting at a stone table under a tree, playing draughts with bottle tops. I waved away their offers and strolled down, keeping to the right-hand side where the shade was. The mouth of the soi was all shops — hairdresser, general store, pharmacy, then further in it was residential, houses behind high walls, and about a kilometer down, number 999. This wasn’t so much a house as a compound, with five saloon cars lined up outside. High vanilla-white walls were topped by cobalt blue metal spikes. The same shade of blue had been used for the ornate metal gates set at each end of the compound, almost twenty yards apart. It was hot and still and, away from the mouth of the soi, relatively quiet. I walked up to the gates and peered inside. In the center of a gravel courtyard was an oval fountain where two faux Roman cherubs were being cheerfully soaked. Behind that, white walls, white Doric columns, and broad white steps leading up to an entrance of black-tinted glass that revealed nothing. At either end of the courtyard was a covered area for cars. The black Fortuner was parked here, next to a silver Mercedes. And lots of free, shaded space.
The buzz of an engine came from behind me and one of the motorbike taxis swept past, a middle-aged woman on the back, seated sideways with her shopping in her lap. I looked up to where the bike had come from and saw the other taxi driver was looking down the soi. I had the idea he was watching me, and as I strolled back up to the entrance, flapping out my wet T-shirt, it seemed that was indeed the case. At least as far as I could tell, given I couldn’t see his eyes behind his dark glasses.
I stopped in at the general store, bought two bottles of Fanta from their refrigerator, and carried them over to the taxi driver. He was a big, dark-skinned guy whose corded forearms were covered with blue protection-from-evil tattoos. I handed him one of the bottles, and he took it in a silent, matter-of-fact way, like a tribute that was owed to him. I sat where his friend had been.
It’s a given in Bangkok that any long soi will have a bunch of motorbike guys making a living from ferrying people down it. And it’s a given those guys will know far more about the life of the soi than the soi’s residents realize.
I said in Thai, “It’s really hot.”
“Really hot.”
We were agreed on that then.
I ran the cold bottle along my forearms.
“So, the house down there. Nine-nine-nine. What’s going on?”
“What do you think?” If I couldn’t make an intelligent guess, why should he help me?
“Lots of shaded parking space inside, but cars parked out in the heat. For a house a long way down a soi, away from nosy people, from the wrong kind of cops. Cops who haven’t been paid off. I think it’s a casino.”
His dark face split into a very white grin. “That’s what we all think.” He shrugged. “No one knows for sure. The visitors don’t use us; they all have cars.”
“But it’s the same people who keep coming?”
He nodded. “In the afternoon there’s older women. Hair up here and small handbags. In the evenings it’s mostly men. On Friday nights a Jaguar always comes, leaves very late.”
“I bet you can remember the license number.” He could as well and I keyed it into my phone, as it was just getting silly scribbling on myself the whole time. “What else stands out?”
“There’s a Chinese-looking guy, bald head, comes in an old red Mercedes. He left very angry one night, drove very fast. Almost hit my friend.” He glugged down some Fanta. “Have a young woman with him usually. Suey. But when he was angry he left by himself.” He shrugged. “Many of the cars have tinted windows. At night you can’t see much.”
“Think I could get a game there?”
He looked troubled. “Pii[3]... why would you want to do that? I’m not looking down on you, but I’ll speak straight. You can’t afford it. This game is for rich people.” I let him convince me and then we went on to other things, football and politics and how business was. Still concerned, he gave me his phone number and said if I wanted a game he could find a much cheaper one from his brother-in-law.
As I was walking back to the bus stop he called after me. “Pii. You thought it was a casino... just from the cars?”
“That wasn’t the only thing.”
“Twenty-one, right? That’s the game you can win at?” It was late afternoon. I was back in the office chatting with Doi. She frowned. “I don’t think you win at anything. The casino win.”
“Most of the time. But for twenty-one it’s different. I remember reading about this someplace. It’s the only game with a memory. They put four decks into the shoe. Every card that comes out changes the probability for the cards that are left. If you keep track of everything that’s been played and keep calculating the odds, you know when to bet against the house.”
“Vijay, I think it’s so difficult.”
“There’s a bunch of people in this city right now who could do it for fun.”
I thought about Colin Krasinsky, in the top zero point zero zero one percentile of calculators and still no lingerie model girlfriend. And unlike Heinrich, no motivational speaking to bring the money in. So what did he turn to? And then you had Atiya, who was apparently altruistic enough to hire a private detective to find someone she’d met just once, in a McDonald’s. Or in a different reality, had fallen out with her Mercedes-driving sugar daddy and now needed a new source of funds. I decided I wanted a chat with both of them, together.
First I phoned Colin and found that he hadn’t left for Ko Samet after all, but was still in the city. (“Just thought I’d check out Patpong, eh?”) I told him I needed his help in finding Anthony and as he let me convince him, the scales of my suspicion dropped in his direction. Then I phoned Atiya and told her the same thing, and when she let me talk her into phoning in sick at the bank and coming to meet me, the scales righted and were level again. I leaned back in my chair with my hands behind my head thinking about the two of them, and suddenly I realized that, while picking him out was going to be difficult, I did actually know where Anthony was.