I was across the road from the Delifrance within five minutes and spent a quarter of an hour watching the place. I’d done several bargirl investigations the previous week and the last time I visited Soi Cowboy I had the distinct impression that a few of the girls were talking about me behind my back. Nothing concrete, just a prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck, but I had been looking over my shoulder a lot over the past few days. I didn’t know Lars and for all I knew a girl might be using him to set me up. I spotted him straight away-he was the only farang in the place, and by the look of it he was on his own. No Thai heavies nearby, nothing out of the ordinary. When I was absolutely sure he was alone I wandered over and introduced myself. He asked me what I wanted and I said I’d have a white coffee and a chocolate croissant.
He was in his mid-forties, losing his hair and gaining weight, with a receding chin and ears that stuck out like teapot handles. I’m no oil painting, but I reckoned that fate hadn’t been kind to Lars in the looks department. After eight years of being told that I was a ‘handsum man’ maybe I was starting to believe my own publicity. I could understand why a man like Lars would come to Thailand looking for love. I doubted he’d have much chance of pulling anything better than a three-bag girl back in Denmark.
I munched on my pastry as he told me his story. He was on his fifth trip to the Land of Smiles, and on his third visit he’d been drinking in a pool bar in Sukhumvit Soi 4, a regular place with no go-go dancers, short-time rooms or barfines. Just pool tables and waitresses, with maybe a few freelancers playing pool who wouldn’t say no to a short-time with a punter but who wouldn’t be too upset if they went home alone.
Lars was with a Danish friend who had started going out with a bartender, another ‘good’ girl who wouldn’t dream of trading sex for money. Lars had told her that he was fed up with bargirls and wanted to meet a ‘real’ Thai girl, a ‘good’ girl. A girl he could love and who would love him. Miss Bartender, as it transpired, had the perfect candidate. She knew of an attractive young student who was all alone and who would very much like to meet a handsome farang such as Lars. An introduction was arranged, and Lars fell in love. Her name was Pim, she was a twenty-three year old student at Rhamkamheng University, and she had never been anywhere near a go-go bar. Lars took her on holiday to Hua Hin, then they went up to Chiang Mai for a week, and before long he had agreed to pay her 20,000 baht a month. My eyebrows headed skyward when he told me that. If she was a ‘good’ girl, why was he paying her twice the national average wage to attend university? Was that how courtship worked in Denmark? Of course it wasn’t. I didn’t say anything, though. I wasn’t in a bubble-bursting mood, and I’d yet to receive a retainer, so I just nodded and smiled and ate my Danish.
Lars said that he had visited the girl’s small apartment, and she’d taken him to her university once, dressed in the traditional uniform of black skirt and white blouse. Miss Pim was set to graduate the following year but Lars had decided not to wait and that he was set to marry her within the next few weeks and take her back to Denmark. Pim had done nothing to arouse his suspicions, but Lars had been visiting a few websites devoted to Thailand and Thai ways, including a site that was full of horror stories of the ‘farang boy meets Thai girl, farang boy falls in love with Thai girl, Thai girl steals everything the farang boy has and runs off with her Thai husband’ type. Lars was sure that Pim was a good girl, and that she loved him, and that she would make the perfect wife, but he wanted me to run a few basic checks, just to make absolutely sure. The next night he was due to go back to Denmark for a month and that seemed the perfect opportunity to put me on the case. If the mouse did play she was more likely to do it while the cat was 6,000 miles away. He paid me a three-day retainer in cash and gave me her address and her landline phone number. She had a mobile but Lars always called her on the landline at night so he always knew where she was. That made good sense. A common sight in the city’s red-light districts is a bargirl huddled in a corner, a hand cupped around their mobile phones, assuring their sponsor that they were at home, tucked up in bed, already sleep.
Lars showed me a photograph of Miss Pim but it was a small passport type and I doubted that I’d be able to recognize her from it. Lars was staying at the Amari Boulevard and she was coming around to see him the following afternoon so we agreed that I’d wait in the lobby and see her in the flesh. I was there, reading the Bangkok Post , when Miss Pim arrived in her university uniform. She looked like any of the other thousands of students you can see in Bangkok any day of the week. Tidy, a little over five foot, slim, hair tied back in a ponytail. Not too pretty, but I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed. The only thing out of the ordinary was the confident way she walked across the lobby to the elevators. Most young Thai girls would have been too shy to walk into a major tourist hotel and go up to a man’s room, but Miss Pim clearly had no reservations.
I sent Lars a text saying mission accomplished and that I’d keep in touch by email.
According to Lars, Miss Pim went to university every day, taking the bus from her apartment on Sukhumvit Soi 77 at about eight o’clock and getting home just after four. So Monday morning at seven I took the Skytrain to On Nut and a motorcycle down Soi 77 to where she lived. There were four massive apartment blocks, creatively named A, B, C and D. It was a working-class Thai area and I was the only farang for miles. I sat down at one of the many pavement foodstalls and ordered my staple kow man gai and a Coke. With breakfast at thirty-five baht I was keeping expenses down, which would make Lars happy. Hundreds of students in black skirts and white blouses walked by, others whizzed by sitting side-saddle on the back of motorcycles. Eight o’clock came and went with no sign of Miss Pim, and by the time my watch read 9am I realised that she was either still at home or I’d missed her.
Pim’s apartment was number 305C, which I figured was Block C, third floor, apartment five. I waited around the entrance to the block until a group of students came out, and I hurried inside before the door closed. There were no elevators and the temperature was heading towards the predicted low-forties so I took off my jacket and headed for the stairs. There was a metal grille across the door to apartment five on the third floor. On the door itself were the numbers 305 so I figured I had the right place. The grille was padlocked on the outside, so there was obviously no one inside which meant that I’d missed her. Or that she hadn’t gone home that night.
I left it until four o’clock in the afternoon before returning to the roadside foodstall. The mid-forties forecast had been breached, and it was hellishly humid, and the boiled chicken had been sitting in the sun all day so I gave the kow man gai a miss and just ordered a Coke and a ten-baht bag of fresh pineapple. I ate my pineapple and sipped my Coke and scrutinised the faces of the passing students for any sign of Miss Pim. Five o’clock came and went and there was no sign of her, but as the majority were whizzing by on the back of motorcycles at five baht a time, I figured I could easily have missed her.
I got a motorcycle back to the Skytrain, then went home for a shower and a nap. I had a bargirl investigation that I’d been meaning to do for a while so after dark I caught a taxi to Soi Cowboy and parked myself in a dark corner of the After School Bar with a JD and Coke. The girl I was looking for was the fiancA© of a Swiss guy currently in receipt of a 30,000-baht-a-month retainer until her visa came through. Her name was Ann and there was no sign of her on the stage or sitting next to the half dozen or so customers scattered around the bar.
I started chatting in Khamen to one of the prettier girls. Yu-ee her name was, and she was determined to get me over to the Naughty Boys’ Corner but the only oral I was interested in was the sort that produced answers to my questions. I offered to buy her a cola but she said she’d prefer a Heineken beer and a tequila chaser. She told me she was eighteen but I figured she was a few years older than that. But even if she was in her early twenties that was still a pretty impressive drinks order for eight o’clock in the evening.