The Dubliner is an Irish pub at the entrance to Washington Square, all green paintwork and shamrocks with Guinness signs and dark wooden tables, some of them made from barrels. I sat down at a corner table and ordered a coffee and waited for the boiler room boys to put in an appearance. The pub was just around the corner from the kickboxing gym where Lek and Tam trained so I kept my face turned away from the window just in case either of them walked by.
Sitting at the table next to mine was a couple in their sixties from England with a man who was obviously their son and a girl who was obviously a bargirl, or a former bargirl. The parents were stick-thin and grey-haired with worn, tired faces, but they were clearly proud of the fact that their son had acquired a beautiful Thai bride-to-be. Their son was slack-jawed and shaven headed and had his name tattooed in Thai across his forearm. Derek. He was wearing a Chang beer vest and baggy shorts and plastic flip-flops and a fake Rolex watch and he spent a lot of time scratching himself.
He was educating his parents on the best way to treat Thais which seemed to involve speaking slowly and loudly and offering them bribes, and telling mum and dad that it was the best country in the world unless you were into drugs because they shot drug-dealers. He didn’t seem the sharpest knife in the drawer, but his proud parents were nodding and grunting at his pearls of wisdom as they ate their way through the Dubliner’s massive all-day breakfasts.
The girl sitting with them was in her very early twenties, dark-skinned with the high cheekbones you usually find on girls from Surin, close to the border with Cambodia.
Why did I think she was a bargirl?
The tattoo of a scorpion on her left shoulder was a clue.
As was the ornate tattoo across the small of her back, revealed every time she leaned forward to pick up one of the French fries off Derek’s plate.
The way she was dressed screamed bargirl – tight blue jeans and even tighter low-cut black t-shirt, with a heavy gold necklace that Derek had no doubt bought for.
But the clincher was the fact that she was on the phone to her Thai boyfriend while Derek and his parents chatted obliviously.
I couldn’t believe it, and neither could the two waitresses within earshot who kept giggling at the outrageous things the girl was saying.
Derek was from Wolverhampton, in the middle of England pretty much, and he had only known her for a month. He had already proposed and his parents had flown over to attend the wedding in Surin. It would be a proper ceremony but the girl, Apple, swore to her boyfriend that she would never sign the paperwork to make the marriage official. She told her boyfriend that it would be the third time that she had done the marriage ceremony with a customer and that it didn’t mean anything.
Derek had promised to build her a house in Surin, and had already paid the deposit for a Toyota pick-up truck, which the boyfriend was driving around in. And Derek, bless him, had agreed to pay a sinsot of three hundred thousand baht.
Sinsot? It’s a dowry, paid by the groom to the parents of the bride. I paid a sinsot of half a million baht when I married Noy. Plus another half a million in gold jewellery. A total of a million baht, about thirty-five thousand dollars back then.
Was she worth it?
Every cent.
Noy’s parents gave it all back after the wedding, of course. Noy kept the jewellery but used the cash towards the deposit on our flat. That’s part of the tradition – the parents return most if not all the sinsot to the newlyweds to give them a good start in life.
I doubted that Derek would be getting any of his sinsot back.
The fact that he’d agreed to pay a sinsot at all showed that Derek really didn’t understand Thailand. His bride-to-be clearly wasn’t a virgin, wasn’t from a good family, and the scorpion tattoo suggested that she either been in prison or been dancing around a chrome pole in one the city’s red light areas. Any one of those three would have meant a much-reduced sinsot, and the fact that he’d pulled a hat trick meant that really the parents should have been paying Derek to take her off their hands.
As she carried on her conversation with her boyfriend, half in Thai and half in Khmer, Apple kept winking at Derek and blowing him the occasional kiss.
‘She loves me,’ he told his parents. ‘Not like the girls back in Wolverhampton, hey, dad? These Thai birds really know how to treat a man.’
Apple was telling her boyfriend that she was on the pill so there was no way that she could get pregnant, and that once the house was finished she would send him packing. ‘Or you could kill him,’ she laughed, and I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.
I sipped my coffee as I watched the drama unfold.
Another lamb to the slaughter.
Derek was saying that he wanted children and that his mum would soon be a grandmother. His mum beamed and nodded.
‘We’re going to have kids soon, aren’t we Apple?’ he asked, jabbing at her with his knife.
Apple took the phone away from her mouth and nodded. ‘Soon, darling,’ she said. ‘I want your baby too much. I want handsome son, like you.’
So why didn’t I warn Derek that his bride-to-be didn’t really love him and was only after his money?
Because it was none of my business.
Most countries in Asia have a saying along the lines of you don’t mess with another man’s rice bowl, and I’ve been in Asia long enough to respect that philosophy.
Apple was doing what she had to do to survive.
If Derek was too dumb to see that, then really he deserved what was coming to him. I reckoned he was in his late thirties, a good fifteen years older than her. He was overweight and clearly hadn’t bothered to learn any of the language, so why would he think that a pretty girl would see him as anything other than a cash cow? Or more likely a buffalo to be led around by the nose.
I finished my coffee. I knew that the Dubliner didn’t sell Phuket Beer so ordered a half pint of Guinness instead. I was half way through it when Bear came in, followed by three young men in sharp suits. Bear was as big as his name suggested, a little over six feet six inches tall, broad shouldered and pot-bellied with a bushy beard and a pair of black horn-rimmed spectacles.
He sat down on a stool at one of the circular tables fashioned from a barrel and ordered three beers as his colleagues joined him.
I picked up my beer and went over. ‘Alistair?’ I asked. ‘Alistair Wainer?’
Bear screwed up his eyes as he looked at me. ‘You look like a cop,’ he said suspiciously.
‘I used to be one,’ I said. ‘In another country and in another life. But I sell antiques now.’ I took out one of my business cards and gave it to him.
He frowned as he read the card. ‘If it’s about shares, I work in administration, you need to talk to your broker.’
‘Relax, Bear, I’m more of a cash-under-the-mattress sort of guy.’ I took out the photograph of Jon Junior and gave it to him.
‘He owe you money?’ asked Bear.
I shook my head. ‘He’s missing. His parents have asked me to look for him.’
Bear nodded. ‘Jon, right? Jon Clare. That’s his name, yeah? A Yank?’
‘He came to see you?’
Bear gave me back the photograph. ‘A week or so ago.’
‘Can you remember when exactly?’
Bear frowned. ‘Why does that matter?’
I put the picture back into my jacket. The waitress brought over three pints of beer and put them down on the table. ‘Remember the nightclub that burned down? The Kube?’
Bear nodded. ‘That was some serious shit,’ he said.
‘Yeah, well his parents are worried that he might have been caught up in it.’
Bear picked up his pint and took a long drink. ‘Yeah, he came to see me a few days before the fire, looking for a job. I asked him back for a trial and he came to the office last Monday, which was what, two days after the fire?’
‘Yeah, the fire was on Saturday.’ I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. At least I had definite proof that Jon Junior was alive and well after the Kube had burned down. ‘Did you offer him a job?’
Bear took a drink, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘He didn’t have the balls,’ he said. ‘Absolutely zero killer instinct.’ He nodded at one of his companions. ‘Jimmy took him under his wing, gave him a script and watched as he made a few calls.’
‘Bloody disaster,’ said Jimmy in an upper-class English accent. ‘Couldn’t sell smack to a heroin addict.’
Nice analogy. But I got the drift.
‘Did he say where he was going? What he was doing?’
‘He was teaching English at some school,’ said Bear. He clicked his fingers at a waitress and asked for a menu. ‘I figure he’d make a better teacher than broker.’
‘He’s left the school,’ I said. ‘That’s the problem. Did he say why he wanted the job?’
‘The money, probably. But he wasn’t happy at the school. He thought there was something not right about it.’
‘In what way?’
‘It’s run by some Russian guy and he thought he was Mafia. Kept seeing shady characters hanging around the office.’
‘The thing is, he was only supposed to be in Thailand for a year, he was going back to work for the family firm. And he already had a job, teaching English.’
Bear and his two companions laughed. ‘Teaching English isn’t really a job, Bob,’ said Bear. ‘I spend in one night what a teacher earns in a month.’
‘He’s a Mormon,’ I said. ‘They’re not driven by money.’
‘The Osmonds performed for free, did they?’ laughed Bear. ‘Everyone’s driven by money, trust me. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t make the living we do.’
‘Greed is good?’ I said.
Bear laughed. ‘It might not be good, but it keeps me in booze and hookers and puts gas in the Ferrari.’ He took a long pull on his pint. ‘You ever thought about sales, Bob?’
‘I told you, I sell antiques.’
‘I mean real sales. Stocks. Shares. The margins we operate on, a guy like you could make a good living.’
‘I’ll pass,’ I said. I nodded at my business card which he’d put down on the table. ‘If by any chance he gets in touch again, give me a call, yeah?’