Gung left the office at ten o’clock and we followed him towards Klong Toey Port. He spent an hour there and then we tailed him to an office block in Chinatown. Then he went home again. I checked the addresses against the customer list that Holden had given me. There were no matches. That could have meant he was drumming up new business for the firm, or that there was something going on that his employers didn’t know about. One thing was for sure, he wasn’t working hard. A couple of hours in the office in the morning, a couple of business calls, then home. However much Stewart was paying the guy, it was too much.
On the third day Gung visited two more firms that weren’t on Holden’s list and one that was a major client of the firm, then spent three hours in a short-time hotel in Soi 3 with a very pretty girl who clearly wasn’t his wife. I fired off half a dozen long-range pictures with my telephoto lens as they left.
I spent the afternoon at the Company Registrar on Ratchada Road. There’s a civil servant there that I’ve used on several occasions, so I slipped him Gung’s full name and date of birth and a 500-baht note. He ran the details through the databases and found that Gung was a director of half a dozen companies, all based in Bangkok. I took the list to the nearest Starbucks and compared the directorships with the addresses that Gung had visited over the past couple of days. There were two that matched: one was the office in Chinatown and the other was in Silom, close to the Patpong red-light district. Both companies were freight forwarders, in direct competition with Stewart’s business. Gung had joined the boards of both companies five years before he started working for Stewart. Bingo. It was obvious what was going on. Gung had joined Stewart’s company with the sole intention of poaching his clients.
I didn’t have proof, of course. But over the course of the week Gung spent more time visiting his own companies and his minor wife than he did attending to Stewart's customers. And one of the firm's that Gung had visited didn't renew its contract with Stewart's company. I made a phone call, posing as a potential customer, and got the name of the freight forwarder they were now using. No surprises there. It was one of Gung's companies.
I gave the information to Stewart and they sacked Gung a few days later. He made noises about suing them for breach of contract, but the photographs of him leaving the short-time hotel with his mistress put paid to that.
There's a Chinese expression about not breaking someone else's rice bowl, and I had definitely broken Gung's. I insisted that Stewart and Holden didn't reveal my involvement in the case, but over the next few days I still found myself ducking when motorcyclists pulled up next to me. Thailand truly is the Land of Smiles but it's also the Land of Hitmen on Motorcycles.
THE CASE OF THE MILLION-BAHT BARGIRL
I’ve never understood why so many tourists end up sending money back to their temporary girlfriends when they go home. It makes no sense to me. Paying and playing while you’re in Thailand is all well and good, but why pay when you’re thousands of miles away? My bread and butter work is checking up on bargirls. And nine times out of ten, the client is a love-struck farang wanting me to check that his beloved isn’t doing what she was doing when he met her. There is a theory that sex tourists check in their brains on arrival at the airport, but there’s no excuse for long-term residents of the Land of Smiles to be shelling out money to bargirls. Anyone who lives here really should know better. You’ve only got to sit down at one of the beer bars at the entrance to Nana Plaza to see what goes on. Motorcycles buzz up with a pretty young thing on the back. The girl totters into the plaza to start work, the boyfriend drives off to play pool with his friends. After the bars have closed, the guy drives back and picks up the girl and off they go to spend her hard-earned cash. The girls are hookers hooking and they’re not going to stop doing that just because some guy thousands of miles away starts sending her a few thousand baht each month.
Guys who live here know how it works, which is why I was so surprised when I met Yves. And even more surprised when I heard what the daft sod had done. He phoned me on my mobile and said that he’d heard good things about me from a couple of guys I’d worked for. It’s always nice to get a word-of-mouth recommendation rather than a client who has just seen one of the stickers I put on every ATM machine I use. Yves was French, very well spoken and clearly upper class so I put on my best shirt and tie and went around to his office for a chat. Well, not his office, actually. He was a bit wary about being seen with a private eye, so we met in a nearby Starbucks.
I got there twenty minutes early which gave me time for a look around, but he turned up on his own and looked every bit as French as he’d sounded on the phone. He was a small man in his early forties, his hair starting to grey at the temples, fairly good looking and looking dapper in a double-breasted blue blazer, grey slacks and dark brown shoes with tassels on them. He bought a couple of coffees and then told me his story.
He’d been in Thailand for most of his life. His father had been involved in the shipping business at the time of the legendary Jim Thompson, and on occasions they’d done business together. Thompson is just about the most famous farang in Thailand; he pretty much single-handedly set up the country’s silk exporting business before disappearing under mysterious circumstances.
Yves had met several members of the Thai Royal Family and had married a Thai woman from a high-class background. She was now on the family estate in Pyrenees raising their three children. Yves travelled back and forth between France and Thailand, though he admitted that the Bangkok office pretty much ran itself. It soon became clear why Yves was spending so much time in the Land of Smiles. He was a frequent visitor to Patpong, one the city’s main red-light districts. Being married hadn’t stopped him fooling around and, with his wife in France, his sex drive had gone into full throttle.
He usually drank in one of the biggest bars in Soi Cowboy, and was a close friend of the Thai owner. He paid and played and from the ‘cat that got the cream’ grin on his face, I could see that he enjoyed himself. Yves’s life had changed a month earlier when a twenty-year-old girl by the name of Boo walked onto the stage and started dancing around a silver pole.
Boo means crab. It’s a common enough name for a Thai girl. Prawn. Chicken. Apple. Orange. For some reasons Thais seem to love to name their daughters after food.
Anyway, according to Yves, Boo was drop-dead gorgeous. Waist-length hair, full breasts, long legs, tight stomach, great arse, hell I was getting turned on by the description alone. And when he took a photograph from his wallet and showed it to me I practically started salivating. She was hot. Hot, hot, hot.
Yves got the owner to send young Boo over to his table and within seconds he was infatuated with her. He offered to let her stay in his penthouse apartment in Silom, and wanted to pay her to stop working. She’d only been dancing for three weeks and the bar owner was none-too-pleased at Yves taking his best-looking dancer away, but a 10,000-baht backhander got everything sorted.
Boo didn’t fully move into Yves’s apartment, but she did spend a lot of time there. They went out most nights, usually to the bar where she used to work. They’d barfine a few of her friends and visit the city’s top nightclubs. Usually at some point he’d slip her some money and she’d return with a few tablets of Ecstasy and then they’d go home where, before too long, he’d crash out. He was twice her age and I figured she was wearing him out. It was funny, Yves didn’t look the type to be doing E. Just shows that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Anyway, usually when Yves woke up, she was gone.
Then he hit me with the big one, the fact that took my breath away. In order to formalise his relationship with her, he had given her a million baht. One million baht! When I heard that my eyebrows shot skyward and my jaw dropped. A million baht!