Some said the workers took the job not for the excitement or karma but the riches. There have been reports of money and jewelery “lost” while traveling. The foundations deny this. After all, wouldn’t that wipe out the good karma?
The first night we sat in the petrol station for eight hours without a call. We started at seven and by midnight, we were listening to a radio phone-in show for that part of the Thai population—puzzling in its size—that enjoys gore. In the absence of any real violence, we listened to other people describe their favorite accidents, those they had witnessed or their own.
At two a.m., I bought a beer, thinking that might trigger an accident in the way that stepping into the bathtub causes the phone to ring. My photographer friend, Jonathan, a Brit who spoke better Thai than English, worked his way through several bags of crisps. Our driver gave himself a pedicure. We went home at five.
The second night the photographer voiced what I’d been thinking: “Is it okay to want somebody to get hurt or die? I mean, if it’s going to happen anyway…”
“Yeah,” I said, “and why can’t it happen before midnight?”
The call came at midnight. The scene was less than a kilometer away, but when we arrived there was only an overturned Vespa and a puddle of blood. The victim had been taken to a hospital by the coppers. A near miss for us, but from the size of the puddle, maybe the last miss for the Vespa driver.
After that, nothing. Same thing the third night. By now I was overdosing on junk food, too, and drinking far too much beer, and the photographer and I were beginning to tell each other the same stories.
The next three nights we shifted gears and hung out in a press room with reporters who cover crime and accidents for the Thai newspapers, who range over the whole city. They watched television and played cards and the only action was on TV. Jonathan and I wondered if we might hire ourselves out to ward off danger. Obviously, no one got maimed or killed on our watch.
So we returned to the bodysnatchers, who told us about a legendary ten-meter stretch of highway where so many died—it’s believed the ghosts of the dead were causing the new accidents. (Where, I wanted to ask, but thought that might seem rude.) Our driver also reminisced about the time when a truck bomb killed nearly a hundred people outside the city; everyone got in on that one, he said.
We were riding with a different Poh Teck Tung unit this time and when we started out at seven o’clock, it was a Friday night and it was raining and it was the last day of the month: payday. For sure, the driver said, we’d get something smeared across the macadam tonight. He predicted at least two serious accidents.
It was nearly midnight when I tried the buy-a-beer trick and with the first mouthful, the driver called, “Let’s go!”
Ten minutes of grand prix driving followed, siren announcing our importance, me sitting in the back on the floor with the number two guy, braced as we dodged at high speed through traffic. When we arrived there were two other rescue units on site already (from small, neighborhood foundations), along with a crowd of about two hundred spectators and police, who told us two men were taken away, the driver to a hospital with serious injuries, the other, injured slightly, to the police station to explain why he and his two mates stole the car and then drove it into a concrete telephone pole. A third man was barely conscious and wedged beneath the savagely crushed car’s front end and a rescue worker was holding an IV bottle with the drip stuck into the man’s arm as others wheeled the “iron jaws” into place to pry open the mangled iron to get to him.
The press was there, too, pushing forward to capture as much blood on film as possible. The police politely moved aside for them. On the way back to the petrol station, the man sharing the floor in the back with me gave me a hearty thumbs up and a happy grin. We settled down to another wait. I bought another beer.
At twelve fifty five a.m., we were off again, this time to where a pickup truck broad-sided a sedan. All drivers and passengers were on the way to a hospital and as we returned to the petrol station there was another call, this one to pick up three corpses, all dead on arrival following the car-truck accident.
The first two bodies, a man and a woman, were laid out on the emergency room floor and were being wrapped in blotting paper to catch the leaking fluids and then were trussed up in a muslin cloth. The third was in another hospital nearby, also on the floor, apparently naked, her body covered with paper toweling, the top of her head a mess, her eyes and mouth open, expressing something between horror and surprise.
Our driver took pictures of the corpses after scrawling their names on a piece of paper and positioning it beneath their chins, like the names held under the arrested in police photographs. In this case, the final I.D. was taken lying down.
One at a time, the bodies were carried to the ambulance where they were fingerprinted and stacked in the rear. I squeezed into the front with the photographer and the number two guy hunkered down with the corpses in the back.
At three a.m., we arrived at the Wang Tong Lung police station, where our guys dragged the bodies to the rear of the vehicle one at a time and opened the top end of the muslin wrappings so a cop could take pictures with his little point-and-shoot camera. I was reminded how the Thais so love to take pictures (no matter what the occasion) and wondered if the cop showed these to his friends over drinks. One of the bodies had to be removed from the rescue unit to get at the others, causing a head wound to re-open and send blood running into the street, providing something of interest for the stray dogs in the morning, perhaps. In an apartment building opposite, a half-dozen people stood on verandahs in their pajamas and watched. This probably was a nightly occurrence for them; better than Thai TV.
Once the pictures were taken, the cop returned to watch a football game on the station house TV and after re-stacking the corpses, our guys spent half an hour filling out forms. Jonathan, who’d been here before on assignment for another magazine, told me it’s the same for homicides, the corpses scraped off the floors or lifted from beds or bathtubs, wherever murder or suicide occurs: the cops let Poh Teck Tung do all the paper work.
At four a.m., at last we were at the end of the evening’s bloody highway, where the bodies were transferred to stainless steel gurneys and wheeled into the morgue at Police General Hospital. There they became statistics and in the morning, relatives would be notified if any could be found.
It Didn’t Happen Because I Wasn’t There
Several years ago, when I was researching a story about foreign movie-making in Thailand, I was invited to visit the set of Cutthroat Island, a Hollywood-style pirate flick starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine then being filmed in Krabi. The day before I was to leave Bangkok, my visit was cancelled and I was told that bad weather had caused the shoot to fall behind schedule, prompting the director to close the set to all visitors.
Later, I learned the truth. The film’s assistant director had jumped out of a hotel window to his death and the Hollywood film company didn’t want the story to leak out. Nor, of course, did the hotel or the Tourism Authority of Thailand.
How could an assistant director of a motion picture produced by a major American film company commit suicide in such a dramatic manner and the story not get into the press, at least locally? Easy. The police were paid to keep a lid on their reports, and if some lucky or enterprising local reporter stumbled onto the story, he was taken to lunch and given a fat envelope, too.