Petrov Shevtsov was a big man who looked as if he worked out a lot. He was wearing a too-tight black t-shirt and khaki chinos and brown suede loafers with tassels on them. He had a couple of days of stubble on his chin, or maybe his hair just grew faster than mine. He wore a thick gold chain on his right wrist, a gold Rolex on his left, and he had a gold chain with three Buddhas on it around his neck. I knew his name was Petrov Shevtsov because that was the name on his office door. He hadn’t introduced himself when I’d walked into his office. ‘So where did you teach before?’ he asked.
‘New Orleans,’ I said. ‘Night school.’
‘You’re qualified?’ There were three cellphones on the desk close to his right hand. All brand new Nokias, the sort that let you surf the internet, take a five megapixel photograph, pinpoint your position to within a few feet and, on a good day, allow you to make a phone call.
‘Sure.’ I handed over a degree certificate showing that I’d got a degree in English from New Orleans University, and a TEFL certificate from a college in New Orleans. A print shop in the Khao San Road had made them up for me for five hundred baht. The owner of the shop had asked for two thousand but I’d bargained him down. It took him five minutes on a computer and I had perfect fake qualifications.
I’d faked the qualifications but I’d used my own name just in case I was asked to show my passport or driving licence.
‘References?’
‘I’m having some sent over.’
‘We pay four hundred baht an hour,’ said Petrov, tossing the certificates back to me. ‘You’ll get a minimum of six hours a day. Most of our classes are early mornings or evenings and weekends. Weekends are our busiest time.’
‘So that’s two thousand four hundred baht a day, right?’
Petrov squinted at me as if he had the start of a headache. ‘I just said, four hundred an hour. If there’s no class, you don’t get paid. If there’s a class, you get paid. Most of our students attend regular schools and use our school to get extra English lessons so most of the classes are early morning, in the evening and at weekends.’
‘How many pupils in each class?’ I asked. I was asking the questions I figured a job applicant would ask, but all I seemed to be doing was annoying the Russian. His frown deepened.
‘A class is a class,’ he said. ‘One, ten, a hundred. You teach, they learn. Do you want the job or not?’
So that was it. Interview over. ‘Sure,’ I said.
Petrov waved at the door. ‘Start the day after tomorrow. Talk to the secretary, she’ll give you a schedule.’
‘What about a work permit?’
‘Teachers fix up their own permits.’ One of his cellphones started to ring.
‘But I’m okay to teach without one?’
‘Immigration don’t bother us,’ said Petrov. ‘If it worries you, wait until you’ve got your permit.’
He answered his phone and spoke a few sentences of rapid Russian. When he cut the connection he glared at me as if he was annoyed that I was still in his office. He waved at the door again and looked at his Rolex.
‘A friend of mine used to work here,’ I said. ‘Jon Clare.’
‘So?’
‘I just wondered if he was still here.’
‘If he is, you’ll see him. If he isn’t, you won’t.’
‘Do you have a number for him?’
‘A number?’
‘A phone number. So I can call him.’
Petrov sighed. ‘I can’t be expected to remember all the teachers who work here,’ he said. ‘Talk to the secretary.’ He picked up one of his cellphones and tapped out a number, then swung his feet up onto his desk. He was barking in Russian as I left his office.
Petrov’s secretary was a Thai woman in her fifties with permed hair and Chanel glasses with pink frames. She was wearing a pink shirt with a fern pattern on it and peach slacks. I told her who I was and she gave me a photocopied sheet of times and classroom numbers and a dog-eared textbook. ‘The book is four hundred baht,’ she said.
‘I have to buy my own book?’
‘All teachers buy their own books,’ she said. ‘It is the company policy.’
I gave her four one hundred baht notes. ‘Does my friend Jon Clare still work here?’ I asked.
‘Is he a teacher?’
‘Sure. He started about three months ago.’
She went over to a filing cabinet by the door and asked me to spell out his name. She pulled out a drawer, ran her fingers over the files, then pushed the drawer closed. ‘No one called Clare,’ she said.
‘I’m sure he worked here,’ I said.
She sat down at her desk again. ‘No file.’
‘He’s an American. Twenty-one, good-looking.’ I took the photograph from my jacket pocket and showed it to her.
She shook her head before she’d even looked at the picture. ‘No file,’ she said.
‘But do you recognise him?’
She shook her head again.
So that was it. The school where Jon Junior had worked for three months didn’t have a file on him.
Interesting.
‘Would you show me around?’ I asked.
She nodded and I followed her out of the office. There wasn’t much to see. Eight classrooms, four on each side of a corridor. There were glass panels in the doors so that anyone walking down the corridor could see inside. I pictured Petrov striding up and down, cracking a whip and urging his underpaid teachers on. There were classes in four of the rooms and two were empty. Each room had a dozen wooden chairs with panels screwed to the side so that the students could take notes. On the wall, a large whiteboard. Two windows with the blinds drawn and fluorescent lights overhead. At the end of the corridor was a staffroom. Two teachers were sitting on a wooden bench, blowing cigarette smoke through an open window. They looked up guiltily as the secretary opened the door and showed me in. There was a no-smoking sign by the window. Along one wall was a line of metal lockers. Half were padlocked. There was a coffee percolator and a microwave and a stack of stained cups in a grubby sink.
Salubrious.
Not.
The teachers nodded at me but said nothing as they made a half-hearted attempt to hide their cigarettes. The secretary blinked amiably at me. The unspoken question hung in the air like the stale smoke: had I seen enough? I nodded. More than enough.
Opposite the school was a shophouse with a few tables on the ground floor and a glass-fronted fridge containing beer and soft drinks. I sat down at one of the tables and ordered a Phuket Beer but they didn’t have any so I said I’d have a Heineken, one from the back of the fridge, and no ice because it didn’t look like the sort of place that bought in ice. There was probably an old man in the back with a sweat-stained t-shirt and a rusty knife hacking away at a big block of the stuff, and while my immune system was well up to speed when it came to dealing with Thai microbes and viruses, there was no point in tempting fate.
At four o’clock a bell sounded from somewhere up on the second floor and a couple of minutes later a stream of boys and girls flowed out of the main entrance. The girls wore the standard Thai uniform of white shirt and black skirt and I was too far away to see the small badges that identified the individual schools. A few had regulation haircuts, no longer than shoulder length, a sign that they were from the city’s public schools. The majority of the girls with longer hair, shorter skirts and Gucci high-heeled shoes were from the international schools, where fees were higher and the pupils were given more leeway dress-wise and were allowed to grow their hair longer. There didn’t seem to be any mixing between the two groups. The public schoolgirls headed for the bus stop, the up-market pupils walked together in small groups, presumably to wherever they’d parked the cars that their doting parents had given them.
It was just as easy to spot the social status of the boys. The few who were in the public school system had crew cuts, with well-worn white shirts tucked into black shorts. The private school kids had their shirt tails out, their ties at half mast, wore their hair fashionably long and had cellphones pressed to their ears.
As one lot of pupils flowed out, a new lot flowed in. More upper-class pupils arrived by the luxury car-load while the poorer kids walked from the bus stop.
My bottle of Heineken arrived with a handful of shaved ice in a glass so I drank it from the bottle. There was a stack of Thai newspapers on one of the tables so I leaned over and picked up a copy of Thai Rath, the local scandal sheet. They specialised in close up photographs of road accident victims or Burmese girls hiding their faces but not their breasts after being busted in a local massage parlour. The old woman who’d bought me my beer nudged her husband in the ribs and nodded at the farang reading a Thai newspaper. He snorted and closed his eyes again.
Five minutes after the bell the pavements were empty again. I read the paper from cover to cover and ordered another Heineken, without ice. The old woman put a fresh bottle on the table, with a fresh glass of shaved ice. I smiled. Sometimes it didn’t matter how fluent you were in the language, whatever you said went in one ear and out of the other. The trick was not to let it annoy you.
Jai yen.
Cool heart.
Forget about it.
The next time the bell rang three farangs were among the throng of eager-to-leave pupils. All men in their twenties wearing polo shirts, jeans and cheap shoes and carrying plastic briefcases.
Teachers.
They headed over to the shophouse, flopped down at the table next to mine and ordered three Singha beers. I’ve never been fond of Singha. It’s too sweet and on the few occasions I’ve had more than a couple of bottles I’ve always ended up with a fierce hangover.
I sipped from my bottle of Heineken and listened as they swapped gossip, war stories of a day at the chalkface. The one in the pale blue shirt was British with a girlish giggle and a rash of acne across his cheeks and neck. The one in the red polo shirt was Canadian with receding hair and nicotine-stained fingers, and the one in the green shirt was from New Zealand or Australia, I can never tell the difference between the accents, a good-looking guy with piercing blue eyes and a dimpled chin. The Brit was describing a girl in one of his classes in a way that would annoy the hell out of me if she’d been in any way related to me. The other two nodded enthusiastically as if it was the most normal thing in the world for teachers to be discussing the breasts and thighs of a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been entrusted to their care.
I leaned over. ‘Are you guys teachers?’ I asked.
The Brit stopped his girlish giggling and his cheeks flushed. Maybe he thought I was the father of one of the girls at the school, or maybe it was just the Singha beer kicking in. ‘Why?’ he asked defensively.
I smiled amiably. ‘I’ve just been offered a job over there,’ I said, nodding in the direction of the school. ‘Supposed to start tomorrow.’
‘You talked to Petrov, yeah?’ said the Canadian.
‘Yeah, what’s his story? Bit strange to find a Russian running an English language school, isn’t it?’
The Canadian shrugged. ‘There’s all sorts running schools out here,’ he said. ‘Any man and his dog can set up a school. Where did you teach before?’
‘Back in New Orleans,’ I said. ‘Came out here on spec.’
The Kiwi grinned. ‘Well you sure didn’t come out here for the money,’ he said.
‘The son of a friend of mine told me it was a good place to work,’ he said. ‘American guy, Jon Clare. Do you know him?’
‘Jon Boy? Haven’t seen him around for a couple of weeks.’
‘He quit, didn’t he?’ said the Brit.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said the Kiwi.
‘From Salt Lake City,’ I said.
‘Yeah, a Mormon,’ said the Canadian. ‘Could never get him inside a go-go bar.’
‘I thought he was gay,’ said the Brit.
‘Just because he didn’t want to watch naked girls swing around silver poles doesn’t mean he’s gay,’ said the Kiwi.
‘Yeah, but it’s a good indication,’ said the Brit, and giggled. It was the sort of giggle that made me want to lean across and slap his acne-scarred face.
Jai yen.
‘Jon Junior wasn’t gay,’ I said. ‘Just a well-brought up kid. Any idea where he went? It’s been a couple of months since I spoke to him.’
All three men shook their heads.
‘Petrov could have sacked him,’ said the Brit. ‘Jon Boy was forever in his office complaining about one thing or another.’
‘Complaining about what?’ I asked, and took another sip of my Heineken.
‘He needed to kick back and relax,’ said the Kiwi. ‘He took it all too seriously.’
‘Took what all?’
The Kiwi shrugged again. ‘We’re not teaching brain surgery, right? Mainly we’re teaching rich kids to speak English. Most of them don’t want to be there, it’s their parents who want them to learn. So they resent it. They resent us and they resent their parents. Our job is to stand in front of them for an hour and talk to them in something approaching a Western accent. If Petrov could get away with it he’d staff the school with Indians and Malaysians but the parents want to know that they’re getting genuine native speakers so he has to hire us.’
The Brit giggled girlishly. ‘Yeah, but sheep-shaggers don’t really qualify as native speakers, do they?’
‘It’s your language in name only,’ said the Kiwi.
‘What’s this crap about lingua franca, anyway?’ said the Brit. ‘Why use a French phrase to say that English is the common language. I’ve never understood that.’
‘It’s Italian,’ I said.
‘What’s Italian?’ said the Brit, frowning.
‘Lingua franca. It’s Italian.’
His frown deepened. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ I waved for a round of beers. ‘On me,’ I said. ‘Tradition back at my old school was that the new guy buys the beers.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ giggled the Brit. I was giving serious consideration to hitting him over the head with my bottle of Heineken.
Jai yen.
‘So you’re telling me that job satisfaction isn’t high on your list of priorities?’ I said.
‘You get bitter and twisted,’ said the Canadian. ‘Some of the kids do want to learn. Some of them work during the day and spend their own money on the courses. But in the main, yeah, it’s rich kids doing what their parents want. If you want job satisfaction, join one of the international schools or the Thai universities.’
The fresh beers arrived and the teachers toasted me. ‘So what’s your reason for coming to Thailand?’ the Kiwi asked me.
‘To teach.’
The Brit sniggered but didn’t say anything.
The Kiwi shook his head. ‘You’re not being interviewed now,’ he said. ‘No one comes to Thailand to teach. There’s no money in it. You must have talked money with Petrov, right? You’ll be getting a quarter of what you’d be getting in the States.’
‘It’s not about money though, is it?’
All three of them laughed. ‘No, it’s not,’ said the Kiwi.
The Canadian took a long pull on his beer and wiped the back of his mouth with his hand. ‘There are three reasons for coming here,’ he said. ‘Sex, sex, and sex.’
‘You forgot sex,’ said the Brit.
‘You put up with the low wages, the students who don’t give a shit, the cockroach-infested classrooms, because a couple of times a week you can go out and get laid by some of the best looking women in the world,’ said the Canadian, warming to his theme.
‘Or men,’ said the Brit. He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
‘That’s just the way it is,’ said the Canadian. ‘The only ones not here for the sex are the ones running away from something.’
‘So which are you, Bob?’ asked the Kiwi.
I shrugged. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you guys, but I enjoy teaching. I’ve been doing it almost fifteen years and I wanted to see a bit of the world. And I don’t think Jon came here for sex, either.’
‘Born again virgin,’ sneered the Brit.
‘Yeah, you could never get Jon Boy into a go-go bar,’ agreed the Kiwi.
‘Any sort of bar,’ agreed the Canadian.
‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Not everyone’s here for sex. And I don’t see Jon sticking at a job he didn’t like. Do you think that he just found a better job?’
The Kiwi shrugged. ‘It’s possible. More likely that Petrov sacked him, I’d have thought.’
‘Why do you say that?’
The Kiwi took a sip from his bottle of Singha. ‘Nothing was good enough for Jon. He argued about the classrooms, the state of the textbooks, the fact that classes were merged if we were a teacher short, the rattle and hum from the air-con. He was never out of Petrov’s office, always in there with one complaint or another.’
‘And Petrov didn’t give a damn, right?’
‘The school’s a business, that’s all. He doesn’t care if the students come out speaking the Queen’s English or not, so long as the fees are paid. The kids don’t care one way or another. So why should we? I put in the hours, I get paid, end of story.’
I took a sip of my beer. ‘So do you think Jon quit? Or Petrov sacked him?’
‘Either’s a possibility.’
‘You’ve all got lockers at the school, right?’
The Kiwi frowned at the change of subject. ‘So?’
‘I’m just wondering if Jon cleaned his out.’
The frown deepened. ‘Do you think something’s happened to him?’
‘I’d feel a lot easier knowing that he’d cleared out his locker, that’s all.’
The Kiwi put down his beer. ‘You think Petrov did something to him?’
I put my hands up. ‘I’m just considering all angles, that’s all.’
‘You don’t shoot a guy just because he objects to teaching from photocopied text books,’ said the Kiwi.
‘Who said anything about shooting?’ I said.
‘That’s what you were suggesting.’
‘You’re the one who mentioned shooting,’ I said. ‘Is Petrov like that?’
The Brit screwed up his face as if he’d just swallowed a wasp. ‘We did see him with a gun once. In his office.’
‘Once,’ said the Kiwi.
‘He was playing with it,’ said the Brit. ‘Looked like he was practising a quick draw.’
Guns aren’t difficult to get in Thailand, and just because a man has one doesn’t mean he’s going to use it.
But it wasn’t a good sign.
‘Look, we make jokes about it being a school run by the Russian mafia, but the school is a business,’ said the Kiwi. ‘And Petrov is a businessman.’
‘A businessman with a gun,’ I said.
‘He does hang out with some pretty heavy characters,’ said the Brit.
‘So now we’re condemning a man for the friends he’s got,’ said the Kiwi. ‘Look, he pays my wages and leaves me alone. What more can you ask for from a boss? Jon Junior was a pain in the arse and I wouldn’t be surprised if Petrov sacked him.’
‘Fine. So if Jon Junior was sacked, where is he?’
The three teachers shrugged.
‘Who knows?’ said the Kiwi. ‘People come, people go. Bangkok’s a city of transients.’
‘Who cares?’ said the Brit. ‘He was a stuck-up prick. So where are we going tonight? I fancy Nana Plaza.’
Jai yen.
I caught a taxi back to the shop and as I sat in the back I dialled the cellphone number that Jon Junior had called. The answering service kicked in again. This time I left a message.