It wasn’t hard finding out where Somchit Santhanavit – alias Tukkata – lived. Thai surnames are usually very distinctive. In fact, a hundred years or so ago there weren’t any surnames. The entire population had just first names. It was King Vajiravudh who realised that knowing his subjects on a first name basis wasn’t conducive to good governorship. If nothing else it made taxation difficult. He issued an edict that henceforth every family should have a family name and even came up with several hundred surnames himself.
Vajiravudh was one of the great kings of Thailand. He was educated at Sandhurst, studied law and history at Oxford, and was a real Anglophile. He replaced the traditional flag of Siam – a white elephant on a red background – with its present version of red, white and blue stripes and introduced the Boy Scouts to Thailand.
The fact that there were no surnames until the twentieth century meant that there were no common family names, no equivalent of Smith or Jones or Williams. There were also hundreds of thousands of them. Surnames were distinctive and often ran to more than five syllables. There were also so hard to remember that outside of official business Thais generally didn’t use them. They would introduce themselves by their first names, or their nickname, and often close friends of many years might not know each other’s family names.
The fact that Thai surnames were so distinctive also meant that once you did know the full name of the person you were looking for it was often reasonably easy to track them down. The phone book was often all that you needed, provided that you could read Thai.
I could.
The Santhanavit residence was on Sukhumvit Soi 39, not far from the Emporium Department Store. I like the Emporium. It’s one of the most up-market department store in Bangkok, jam-packed with designer label clothing, state-of-the-art electronics and the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen selling perfume on the ground floor. It’s also got a great food court, one of the best-kept secrets of culinary Bangkok. You buy coupons which you can exchange for Thai dishes that you’d normally find on the street: stewed pork knuckle; wanton noodle soup; chicken and rice. You get the street hawker culinary experience but with an unbeatable view over the city.
I could just about see the top of the Emporium tower while I was parked outside the big house midway down Soi 39 where the Santhanavits lived. I couldn’t say exactly how big because it was surrounded by a wall twice my height and the gate was solid metal. All I could see from the street was the roof. It was a big roof. Maybe eighty yards from end to end. Attached to the all at the side of the gate were metal tubes for newspapers, two for leading Thai papers and one for the Bangkok Post. The newspaper delivery boys didn’t throw the papers onto the garden American-style or push them through the letterbox, British-style. They went into the tubes and the maid or security guard came out and collected then.
Under the newspaper tubes was an oblong red box with Thai writing on it.
Interesting.
It was a police box.
The Thai police aren’t the hardest working law enforcement officials in the world, and their bosses are always looking for ways of making them more efficient. One scheme was to attach the red boxes at points around the various beats in the city. Inside the red boxes were cards which had to be signed every hour by patrolling police officers. At first the red boxes were placed at random, but before long the city’s wealthier citizens realised that having a police officer turning up at your gate every hour was a pretty good way of deterring criminals. They started offering hard cash for the privilege of having one of the red boxes.
That meant that my idea of sitting outside the house and waiting for Tukkata to leave was a non-starter as cops would be turning up every hour or so and they’d be sure to spot my car. A black Hummer is pretty hard to miss.
Time for Plan B.
I drove home.