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.
I told him that I could get proof that he was being taken for a ride and asked him to send me another 10,000 baht. Then I told him to tell Metta’s friend that he would send some money to the Western Union office on Sukhumvit Soi 22 the next day.
I was outside the Western Union office with my camera and long lens just before it opened. It was on a busy road but I was able to sit at a duck noodle shop with a perfect view of the shopfront. I didn’t have to wait long.
A black Cherokee Jeep pulled up in front of the office and a middle-aged Isaan woman wearing a gold chain around her neck as thick as my thumb climbed out of the passenger seat. She went into the office and spoke to the girl behind the counter. The woman produced a passport and signed a form and was handed a bundle of banknotes. I managed to get a few good shots of her grinning as she counted Mike’s money.
As she walked out of the Western Union office and headed towards the Jeep, half a dozen policemen in brown uniforms rushed over to her. At the same time a police car screeched to a halt in front of the Jeep and four police motorcycles pulled up behind it. I took a few more photographs with the long lens, then went over to shake hands with the police colonel who’d planned the arrest. The driver of the Jeep was a farang in his sixties, a bald head and heavy jowls and thick-lensed spectacles. He had a gold chain around his neck as thick as the one the woman was wearing.
The woman was crying and telling anyone who’d listen that the farang had made her do it, that he was the one who prowled around internet chatrooms and sent emails to gullible men around the world.
The farang and the woman were regular visitors to the Western Union office, the colonel told me, and in the last month alone had collected a quarter of a million baht from a dozen or so ‘sponsors. They were handcuffed and taken away. The money that Mike sent was handed over to me and I signed a receipt for it. I went back into the Western Union office and cabled it back to Mike, minus my expenses of course.
I phoned him when I got back to the office. I didn’t take any pleasure in telling him that his beloved Metta was a sixty-five-year-old Belgian scam artist, and the photographs that Mike had framed and hung up all around his house were of a well-known Thai soap opera star. He took it quite well, I thought, and thanked me for saving him from making a complete fool of himself.
Mike said that he’d learned his lesson and that he wouldn’t be going near internet chatrooms again. In fact, he decided that he’d come to Thailand himself. He asked me if I’d find him a girlfriend, someone who wouldn’t rip him off. I put him in touch with a reputable dating agency run by Nung, a good friend of mine. When Mike flew over three months later, Nung fixed him up with a few possibles but none took Mike’s fancy. Mike wanted to go travelling around the country and the girls that Nung introduced him to weren’t happy about sharing a hotel room with a farang they had only just met. I decided to play Cupid and went to a beer garden in Soi 7 and after a couple of hours stumbled across Riang, a thirty-five-year-old mother of two who looked twenty-five, pretty and with a good sense of humour. I ran the Mike situation by her and she jumped at the chance of a free holiday, especially if Mike would agree to take her back to her home in Phitsanulok for a couple of days so that she could see her kids. To cut a long story short, they got on like a house on fire. A year later and she was his wife and she and her kids were living with Mike in central London. All’s well that end’s well, that’s what I figure.
THE CASE OF THE MACAU SNATCH
It was a story I’d heard a hundred times over the years in one variation or another. Dang had been born in small village in Khon Kaen, one of six children. Her parents eked out a living on a small rice farm that they leased. Dang was a good student but her options were always going to be limited. She was pretty with a cute smile and she attracted the attention of a good-looking boy who was a few years older. One thing led to another and she fell pregnant just before her seventeenth birthday. Both their families were poor but respectable and the only way for Dang and her boyfriend to save face was for them to elope. They packed a few clothes and caught the bus to Bangkok. The boyfriend had a relative who worked in the Patpong red-light district, and as they had no money and no qualifications Dang had no choice but to start work in a go-go bar. There’s no social security safety net in Thailand. If you don’t work, you either starve or rely on charity. So Dang started dancing around a silver pole and her boyfriend worked as a tout, standing in the street trying to lure customers inside.
They were earning decent money by Thai standards, helped by the fact that Dang was being barfined three or four times a week. But Bangkok is much more expensive than the countryside, and their hard-earned money went as quickly as they earned it. Dang didn’t enjoy going with farangs and she started taking drugs to make herself feel better. She smoked dope for a few months and then a dancer friend persuaded her to start smoking yah ba, the amphetamine that is the drug of choice among the country’s go-go dancers. The more she became addicted to drugs, the less she cared about the sort of men she went with. And before long all thoughts of saving were forgotten-any money she made by selling her body went on drugs for herself and her boyfriend.
Dang had left it too late to do anything about her pregnancy, and once the baby started to show she had to give up work. When the baby was born the boyfriend did a runner. He ended working as a dancer in a gay bar and was apparently a natural. Dang had no choice but to go back and beg forgiveness from her parents. They agreed to look after the baby, a girl, but they were short of money and Dang agreed to go back to Bangkok. She started working in a go-go bar in Nana Plaza and was soon in demand. She was sexy and a good dancer and farangs were queuing up to pay bar for her. A girl in the bar introduced Dang to heroin and Dang soon became an addict. Between the money she paid to her dealer and the cash she sent back to Khon Kaen she had barely enough to cover her rent and food.
She decided to cut her costs a bit and buy her heroin in the slums of Klong Toey, buying a week’s supply at once, plus a bit more to sell on to her friends. That all went well until she was picked up by a plainclothes cop. He offered her the chance to buy her way out of the problem but he wanted more money than she had so she was charged and sentenced to six months inside. She was eighteen years old.