Khun Wichit was a portly man in his early fifties wearing a neatly-pressed white shirt with oval gold cufflinks and a blue silk tie. His hair was thinning and flecked with dandruff and he had a large mole under his left nostril. I introduced myself and handed him a business card. I had spoken to two female secretaries and a male assistant and waited in a corridor for the best part of an hour before getting into Khun Wichit’s office.
‘I’m not sure what it is you want from me, Khun Bob,’ he said.
That was understandable. I’d spoken to all his subordinates in rapid English and pretended to misunderstand virtually anything they’d said to me. If I’d used Thai they’d have come up with a million and one reasons why I couldn’t talk to their boss. But rather than admit their inadequacies with English, they’d passed me up the food chain. Sometimes it paid to be the idiot farang. But there was no point in playing that game with Khun Wichit. His framed university diploma was on the wall behind him and it was from Bangkok’s Assumption University where courses were taught in English.
‘I need some tax advice.’
Khun Wichit took out a pair of gold-framed reading glasses, perched them on his stub of a nose, and frowned as he studied the business card.
‘You are an antiques dealer?’ he said eventually.
‘That’s right.’
He placed the business card on his desk like a poker player revealing a winning ace. ‘We are tax collectors, Khun Bob,’ he said softly. ‘For advice you require the services of an accountant.’
I nodded. I knew that.
And I knew that information held by the Tax Office was confidential.
So I lied.
I told Khun Wichit, graduate of Assumption University with a second class degree in Information Technology, that I was looking for an English school for a friend’s teenage daughter and that I wanted to make sure that the school I recommended was a reputable one.
Khun Wichit’s frown deepened.
‘I thought that one way of checking that a school is reputable would be to see that if it was paying its taxes,’ I said. ‘One hears so many stories these days of schools interested only in making a quick profit,’ I said. ‘I want to ensure that the school that my friend’s daughter attends is a responsible one.’
Khun Wichit nodded slowly. ‘That is admirable,’ he said. ‘It may be that I can offer you some assistance in that regard. What is the name of the company?’
‘The Betta English Language School in Sukhumvit Soi 22.’
‘Betta?’
I spelt it for him. He frowned. ‘What does it mean, Betta?’
I shrugged. ‘It might be a way of spelling Better,’ I said. ‘Or they might have mis-spelled Beta.’
‘Beta?’
‘Alpha, Beta, Gamma.’
‘Why would they spell it incorrectly?’
‘By accident, maybe.’
‘It is confusing.’
‘It is,’ I agreed.
There was a computer on a side table next to his desk and Khun Wichit carefully adjusted his cuffs before pecking at the keyboard with the index finger of his right hand. He peered at the screen, tutted, and then pecked at the keyboard again. He smiled in triumph as a spreadsheet appeared on screen and he studied it for almost a full minute before nodding to himself.
‘Everything is in order, Khun Bob,’ he said. ‘The Betta English Language School has been registered with us for the past three years and they have been most prompt in paying their taxes.’
I smiled easily. ‘That is good to hear,’ I said. ‘So there is nothing untoward, nothing that my friend should be concerned about?’
‘I wish that all companies were as diligent as this one in filing their tax returns,’ said Khun Wichit.
‘I wonder if it would be possible to have a copy of that file,’ I said. ‘So that I could give it to my friend. Just to show him how reputable a school his daughter would be attending.’
‘Quite impossible, I’m afraid,’ said Khun Wichit. ‘The Data Protection Act prohibits the sharing of our database with members of the public. The information we collate has to remain confidential.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘But I wonder if perhaps the payment of a fee might facilitate the process. The information would remain confidential, of course. It would only serve to reassure my friend that his daughter’s education is in the hands of reputable people.
‘How much of a fee were you thinking about?’ he asked.
I smiled amiably as I looked him over. Assumption was a private university and while it wasn’t the best in Bangkok it wasn’t the cheapest which meant he came from a reasonably well-off family. His shirt had a Ralph Lauren logo on it and it looked like the genuine article. His watch was gold but not a make that I recognised and was probably plated. He wore a simple gold wedding ring but there was nothing simple about a Thai wife. On the desk was a framed photograph of two small boys in dark blazers. Private education wasn’t cheap in Bangkok. No photograph of the wife but he didn’t look as if he was taking care of himself so maybe there was a minor wife somewhere in the building. Minor wives weren’t cheap.
The trick was not to offer too little so that he wouldn’t be offended. But there was no point in overpaying. There could be a negotiation, but only if my first offer was somewhere in his ballpark.
His smile was as amiable as mine as he looked me over. What did he see? A Rolex Submariner that was scarred and chipped from twenty years of diving. A cheap suit that I’d had knocked up by an Indian tailor in a Sukhumvit backstreet for a couple of thousand baht. The material, a wheat-coloured linen, was fine but the stitching was suspect and I’d had to ask the tailor to redo some of the stitching around one of the buttonholes. Expensive shoes because I never scrimp on footwear but they were under the desk so he couldn’t see them. A hundred baht haircut, a hundred and twenty if you count the tip.
‘I thought perhaps a thousand baht,’ I said, as if I was thinking out loud. Probably equivalent to a day’s salary.
His smile tightened a little.
‘Two thousand?’ I added quickly.
He looked at his wristwatch.
Message received.
‘Three thousand?’
A pained smile. Close, but no cigar.
‘Five thousand?’
‘That sounds satisfactory,’ he said. He opened the top drawer of his desk and passed a pale green file over to me. He looked at me expectantly. I took five one-thousand baht notes from my wallet, slid them inside the file and gave it back to him. The file disappeared back into the drawer. He hit a few keys on the keyboard, then gave me a curt nod. ‘Please, I shall only be a few minutes.’
He left me alone in the office. I looked at the clock on the wall as it ticked off the seconds, wondering if he was going to return with the police and I was going to end up sleeping on the floor of a Thai prison for the next five and a half years. When Khun Wichit returned he didn’t have Bangkok’s finest with him but he did have a computer print-out which he gave me with a knowing smile. ‘If there is anything else I can do for you, don’t hesitate to call, Khun Bob,’ he said. ‘I am at your service.’
I’d overpaid.
You live and learn.