I moved to be closer to the band and started joining in at the chorus. I was soon accepted by the Thais and a round of drinks made me even more popular. I showed Dang’s photograph around and a couple of the girls said that they knew her but that she had been at home all day with a cold. She worked in one of Broken Tooth’s massage parlours.
I was back at UFO the following evening, and after a couple of hours and half a dozen Jack Daniels, one of my new-found friends came over with Dang in tow. She looked tired and drawn, nothing like the happy-go-lucky girl in the picture that Bob had given me. She was a bit wary of me but I told her I was a friend of the girls I’d met in Soi 13 and she began to relax. I waited until her third Heineken before I told her that I knew Bob and that he was worried about her.
She was a bit taken aback but asked how he was. I told her that he missed her and that he wanted to talk to her.
‘Why?’ she said, genuinely surprised.
‘He loves you,’ I said. ‘He wants you back.’ I told her of his offer to marry her and talk her and her daughter to the States.
I wanted to get her out of the nightclub so that we could have a quite chat. The clientele was mainly Thai but there were a few hard-eyed Triad soldiers standing around and I didn’t want them getting curious about my conversation with Dang. I asked her if she’d come back to the Mandarin, making it clear that it was only a chat I wanted. She offered to go short-time with me for HK$2,000 and then giggled at the look of horror on my face. ‘Just joking,’ she said, but I’m sure she was serious. I was sure that Bob was making a big mistake by pursuing this girl, but I remembered rule number one of the private-eye business and took her outside to waiting taxi.
I motioned for Dang to keep quiet in the taxi. You never know who is in the pay of the Triads in Macau. I noticed a motorcycle keeping close tabs on us as we drove to the Mandarin. I figured it was probably a Triad soldier keeping track of their investment. If Dang did decide she wanted to go back to Bangkok, I was going to have to be careful.
We went up to my room and over a few more Heinekens from the minibar I repeated Bob’s offer to marry her and take care of her and her daughter. Dang definitely wanted to get out of Macau but she wasn’t sure about Bob. ‘He so boring,’ she said.
I asked her what she wanted for her life.
She beamed. ‘I want a house for my mother and father and a house for me and my baby. And a pick-up truck. And someone who loves me too much.’
I got the feeling that Bob wasn’t even being considered for the role of ‘someone who loves me too much.’
I told her that Bob would take care of all her financial worries. I had no doubt he would build a house for her parents. Up in Isaan, a half-decent house could be built for less than a million baht and Bob clearly had money to burn. I was starting to feel a bit like Bob’s pimp.
‘I want go back to Bangkok,’ she said. ‘Macau boring too much. If I stay here long time I take drugs again, I sure.’
That was something, at least. If I could get Dang back to Bangkok at least Bob could talk to her in person. But I had no doubt that Broken Tooth would try to stop me if he found out that I was taking her out of Macau.
I used my mobile phone to book two business-class tickets from Hong Kong to Bangkok. That would allow us to get onto the next flight in Hong Kong, no matter what time we arrived. All I had to do was to get to Hong Kong. I figured that trying to go direct, from Macau to Bangkok, would just be asking for trouble.
There were two beds in the hotel room so there was no problem with the sleeping arrangements. The next morning I went with Dang to pick up her belongings and passport from her room. Luckily the Triads hadn’t taken her passport off her. I had a fall-back position in that I’d brought a passport belonging to a friend who looked a lot like Dang, but that wouldn’t have an immigration arrival stamp for Macau so I’d have been chancing my arm. Anyway, we took her things back to the hotel, packed them into my bag, then boarded the hotel courtesy bus to the ferry terminal.
I checked to see if we were being followed. The motorcycle was there. When we got to the ferry terminal, I made a big show of saying goodbye to Dang, lots of hugs and kisses, then she got into a taxi as I walked into the terminal. I saw the motorcycle follow the taxi and knew that I was right. The Triads were watching her.
I ignored the ferry and hovercraft ticket offices and headed for the offices of the local helicopter service. The six-seater helicopter would get us to Hong Kong in fifteen minutes, and there was a designated immigration queue that would have us to the helicopter within minutes. I bought two tickets for the next flight and then went downstairs to wait for Dang.
The plan was for her to go back to her room, wait twenty minutes, then catch a taxi back to the terminal. If she was followed, it wouldn’t matter because they wouldn’t have time to get us before we were through the fast-track immigration. As soon as her taxi arrived I paid the driver, grabbed her hand and hurried her inside the terminal. I didn’t see anyone following her but I didn’t take any chances and we hurried through immigration and into the helicopter departure lounge. Half an hour later and we were in a taxi heading for Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong, and four hours later we were safely in Bangkok.
Bob was there to meet us. He thrust a brown envelope full of banknotes into my hand and told me to send him a bill for my expenses. He hugged and kissed Dang and hurried her off to his waiting limousine. Dang was all smiles but I wasn’t sure how long it would last. She struck me as a girl who was easily bored. Still, I had my money and I had a satisfied client. A private eye can’t ask for much more.
THE CASE OF THE TWO-TIMING THAI
I normally steer clear of business investigations, especially where Thais are concerned. The thing you have to remember is that Thailand is for the Thais. Even the main political party is called Thais Love Thais. Farangs are outsiders, and the odds are always stacked against us. We can’t own land, we need visas to live and work here, we need to own businesses in partnership with Thais. If a farang ever runs up against a Thai in a business dispute, generally the farang comes off worse. And that’s if the local is playing fair. If the local is a shady character, he might decide to solve the dispute by hiring a guy on a motorcycle to put a couple of bullets in the farang’s head. Don’t laugh, it happens. It happens a lot. It’s not always a blatant bullet in the brain, either. Pretty much every week a farang will be found dead at the foot of his apartment block or lying on his bed with his head in a plastic bag. More often than not the cops will put it down to suicide but a lot of the deaths are murder, plain and simple. And a lot of the murders are the result of business disputes.