Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

by Stephen Leather

  I asked him for the address of the hotel and wrote it down.

  ‘We’ve already been there,’ said Mrs Clare. ‘So have the police. He checked out, just as he said he did.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to the police?’

  Mr Clare shook his head. ‘The embassy said they’d spoken to them. And they said that they had checked all the hospitals.’

  I nodded and smiled but didn’t tell them that in Thailand what people said they had done didn’t always match up with what had actually happened. More often than not you were told what you wanted to hear.

  ‘Did he tell you where he was going to be teaching?’

  ‘A small school, not far from his new apartment,’ said Mr Clare. ‘I don’t remember if he told me the name.’

  ‘Did Jon Junior have any teaching qualifications?’ I asked.

  Mrs Clare shook her head. ‘Not specifically,’ she said. ‘But he did help tutor at a local school some weekends.’

  ‘Did he mention anyone he’d met here? Any friends?’

  ‘No one specifically,’ said Mr Clare.

  ‘Do you think you can find our son, Mr Turtledove?’ asked Mrs Clare, her hands fiddling in her lap.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, and I meant it.

  She looked at me earnestly, hoping for more information and I smiled as reassuringly as I could. I wanted to tell her that doing my best was all I could promise, that whether or not I found him would be as much down to luck and fate as to the amount of effort I put into it. I wanted to explain what it was like in Thailand, but there was no easy way to put it into words and if I did try to explain then they’d think that I was a few cards short of a full deck.

  When a crime takes place in the West, more often than not it’s solved by meat and potatoes police work. The police gather evidence, speak to witnesses, identify a suspect and, hopefully, arrest him. In Thailand, the police generally have a pretty good idea of who has committed a crime and then they work backwards to get the evidence to convict him. Or if the perpetrator has enough money or connections to buy himself out of trouble, then they look for evidence to convict someone else. The end result is the same, but the approach is totally different. What I really wanted to tell Mr and Mrs Clare that the best way of finding where Jon Junior had gone would be to find out where he was and if that sounds a bit like Alice in Wonderland, then welcome to Thailand. But I didn’t. I just kept on smiling reassuringly.

  ‘Do you think we should stay in Bangkok?’ asked Mr Clare.

  I shrugged. ‘That’s up to you. But I can’t offer any guarantees of how long it could take. I might be lucky and find him after a couple of phone calls. Or I might still be looking for him in two months.’

  ‘It’s just that my cousin Jeb is minding the shop, and when the good Lord was handing out business acumen, Jeb was standing at the back of the queue playing with his Gameboy.’ He held up his hands. ‘Not that money’s an issue, it’s not. But Mr Richards said there wasn’t much that Mrs Clare and I could do ourselves, not being able to speak the language and all.’

  I nodded sympathetically. ‘He’s probably right. You’d only be a day away if you were back in Utah. As soon as I found anything, I’d call you.’

  ‘God bless you, Mr Turtledove,’ said Mrs Clare, and she reached over and patted the back of my hand. She looked into my eyes with such intensity that for a moment I believed that a blessing from her might actually count for something.

  ‘I would say one thing, just to put your minds at rest,’ I said. ‘If anything really bad had happened, the police would probably know about it and the embassy would have been informed. And if he’d been robbed, his credit card would have been used, here or elsewhere in the world. If it had been theft, they wouldn’t have thrown the card away.’

  ‘You’re saying you don’t think that he’s dead, that’s what you’re saying?’ said Mrs Clare.

  I nodded and looked into her eyes and tried to make it look as if my opinion might actually count for something.

  Her husband was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing as if he had the start of a headache. He looked like a man who had something on his mind.

  ‘Is there something else, Mr Clare? Something worrying you?’

  He looked over at his wife and she flashed him a quick, uncomfortable smile. Yes, there was something else, something that was painful that they didn’t want to talk about.

  ‘We read something in the paper, about a fire,’ said Mr Clare. ‘In a nightclub.’

  ‘Jon Junior wouldn’t be in a nightclub,’ said his wife, quickly.

  Too quickly.

  The nightclub they were talking about was the Kube. Two hundred and eighteen people had died. A lot had been foreigners. Most of the bodies still hadn’t been identified.

  I nodded and tried to look reassuring. ‘That was last week,’ I said.

  March the thirteenth, to be exact. A Saturday.

  ‘We wondered…’ said Mr Clare. ‘We thought…’ He shuddered and Mrs Clare reached over to hold his hand.

  ‘Jon Junior doesn’t go to nightclubs,’ said Mrs Clare. ‘He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t like the music.’

  ‘If…’ said Mr Clare, but then he winced as if he didn’t want to finish the sentence. I tried an even more reassuring smile to see if that would help. To my surprise, it did. ‘If Jon Junior was by any chance involved… in the fire.’ He rubbed his face with both hands. ‘Would they tell us? Would they even know? They said that the bodies..’ He shuddered.

  Burnt beyond recognition. That’s what they’d said.

  The more salacious Thai newspapers had run pictures of the aftermath of the fire and it wasn’t pretty. I could see why the Clares wouldn’t want to talk about the possibility of their son being among the dead.

  ‘I really don’t think that’s likely,’ I said, and I meant it.

  ‘But they haven’t identified all the bodies,’ said Mr Clare, happier to talk about it now that I’d downplayed it as a possibility. ‘And there were a lot of foreigners. More than fifty they said in the Tribune.’

  ‘That’s true. But there are other considerations.’

  ‘Considerations?’ echoed Mrs Clare.

  ‘If Jon Junior had been living in Bangkok and had been in the nightclub, his friends would have noticed. Or the people he lived with. Or the people he worked with. Some one would have realised that he wasn’t around.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Mr Clare, nodding. He patted his wife’s hand. ‘That’s exactly what I said.’ He flashed a tight smile at me as if to thank me for the reassurance. ‘But you will check, right?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘And how much do you charge?’ asked Mr Clare.

  ‘That’s difficult to say,’ I said. ‘I’m not a private detective, I don’t charge by the hour.’

  ‘You sell antiques, Mr Richards said,’ said Mrs Clare.

  ‘That’s my main business, but I’ve been here for almost fifteen years so I have a fair idea of how the place works. I’ll ask around and I can try a few leads that the police wouldn’t necessarily think of.’

  ‘He said you used to be a police officer.’

  ‘In another life,’ I said.

  ‘In the States?’

  I smiled thinly. ‘It’s not something I talk about, much.’

  Hardly at all, in fact. Too many bad memories.

  ‘I understand,’ said Mr Clare. ‘Mr Richards said you were a good man. And reliable.’

  ‘That was nice of him,’ I said, though I figured what Matt Richards was really doing was getting the Clares out of his hair as quickly as possible. ‘I’ll start by making a few calls, see if I can find out where he was planning to live and work, and take it from there. I’d expect you to cover any expenses, and then when I’ve finished I’ll let you know how much work I’ve done and you can pay me what you think that’s worth.’

  ‘That’s a strange way of doing business, Mr Turtledove.’

  ‘It’s a strange country,
Mr Clare. But things have a way of working out for the best here.’

  CHAPTER 3

  So, all I had to do was to find one lost American in the Village of Olives. That’s how Bangkok translates, I kid you not. Bang means ‘village’ and kok is an olive-like fruit. Doesn’t have much of a ring to it, so the Thais prefer to call their capital Krung Thep, or City of Angels. Actually, the full Thai name gets a place in the Guinness World Records book as the world’s longest place name. Krungthep, Maha Nakorn, Amorn Ratanakosindra, Mahindrayudhya, Mahadilokpop Noparatana Rajdhani, Burirom, Udom Rajnivet Mahastan, Amorn Pimarm Avatarn Satit, Sakkatuttiya, Vishnukarm Prasit.

  Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

  It translates as ‘The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with the nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in enormous royal palaces which resemble the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated God, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarm.’

  Bangkok is shorter. But it is still one hell of a big city. Officially it’s home to twelve million people but at any one time there could be up to twenty million trying to make a living there. The vast majority are Thais so finding Jon Junior would be difficult, but not impossible.

  So, what to do?

  First, try the easy options.

  I picked up a phone and tapped out the number of Jon Junior’s cellphone. It went straight through to a recorded message in Thai that said that the number wasn’t available and that I should try later. It didn’t give me the option of leaving a message or of using a call-back service which would notify me when the phone was available. I used my cellphone to send a text message in Thai, asking for whoever had the phone to give me a call and I’d make it worth their while.

  I reached for my MacBook and switched it on, then sent an email to the address that Mr Clare had given me. While I waited to see if the email bounced back I looked through the letters that Jon Junior had written. There were three letters, mainly just chit-chat about what a great time he was having but that he missed his family and his church.

  The first letter contained four postcards – pictures of a floating market, elephants playing in a river, and the Wat Phra Kaew and Wat Arun, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the Temple of Dawn. There were scribbled notes on the back – ‘been there, done that!’

  In the second and third letters were photographs that Jon Junior had taken of more tourist sites, including the Chao Phraya River, the Chatuchak Sunday market, and what looked like shots of the street market in Patpong. Jon Junior was in some of the shots, grinning in knee-length shorts and a baggy t-shirt with the Thai flag on the front. His hair was longer and curlier and his skin was more tanned than it was in the photograph that his parents had given me, and he seemed a lot more relaxed, with a broad grin on his face and a sparkle in his eyes.

  I put one of the pictures, in which he was standing in front of a noodle stall, on the scanner and scanned it into my laptop, along with the picture that the Clares had given me.

  Jon Junior had obviously been having fun in Thailand.

  And he had at least one friend here, because someone must have taken the photographs that he was in. But there was no mention of a travelling companion in the three letters, or any suggestion that he’d met anyone in Thailand.

  I sat back in my chair and considered my options.

  First, the basics.

  Jon Junior had flown into Bangkok at the beginning of January. I needed to know if he was still in Thailand.

  I had a good contact who worked for immigration at Suvarnabhumi International Airport. I’ve not met many Westerners who can come close to pronouncing Suvarnabhumi correctly. There are some in Thailand who think that is exactly why the Thais chose the name, which means Golden Land. Nobody really understood why the airport had been built in the first place because Bangkok had a perfectly serviceable airport at Don Muang. It was fair to say, though, that several wealthy Bangkok families did become noticeably wealthier during the construction of the new $4 billion airport.

  I’d met Khun Chauvalit several times through my wife. He’s a fan of Chinese art and so is she and we kept bumping into each other at exhibitions and I discovered that he is a big fan of Cajun food and as I’m from New Orleans we had a lot to talk about. During a very long Sunday lunch at the Bourbon Street restaurant he gave me his business card and said that if ever I needed any assistance I shouldn’t hesitate to contact him.

  I have done just that, several times, and he has always been helpful and never asked anything in return.

  I called him on his cellphone and he answered after just two rings.

  ‘Khun Chauvalit, how are you this fine day?’ I asked in my very best Thai.

  ‘Working hard for little or no appreciation, as always,’ he replied.

  He asked me about Noy and I asked him about his wife and five children, and then I got around to the point of the conversation and asked him about Jon Junior.

  ‘He flew in on Delta on January the eighth with a tourist visa. I’d like to know if he’s still in Thailand and if so if he’d arranged to have his stay extended.’

  ‘I’m not in my office just now, Khun Bob, so I’ll have to call you back.’

  I gave him Jon Junior’s passport number and date of birth, thanked him and ended the call.

  The Clares had been told that the American Embassy had contacted the police and the hospitals, but I’ve learned from experience that embassies aren’t the most efficient of institutions so I didn’t think it would hurt to check for myself. I had a list of local hospitals in my desk drawer and I methodically worked my way through them, patiently spelling out Jon Junior’s name and his passport number. He hadn’t been admitted to any, and there were no unidentified farangs.

  Farangs. That’s what the Thais call foreigners. It’s derived from the word for Frenchman but now it’s applied to all white foreigners.

  Okay, so Jon Junior wasn’t lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg or a ruptured appendix.

  So far so good.

  I phoned my best police contact, Somsak. Somsak’s a police colonel in the Soi Thonglor station, just down the road from my apartment. He’s a good guy, his wife’s a friend of my wife but our real connection is poker. We play every Friday along with four or five other guys, taking it in turns to host the game. Somsak’s a ferocious player with a tendency to blink rapidly whenever he draws anything better than a pair of kings. He never bluffs, either, just plays the percentages. He’s a tough player to beat; he either blinks or folds.

  Somsak’s assistant put me through straight away.

  ‘Khun Bob, how are you this pleasant morning?’ said Somsak.

  Somsak always called me Khun Bob. I could never work out whether he was being sarcastic or not, but he always said it with a smile. He always spoke in English, too. My Thai was better than his English but he was close to perfect so it was no strain.

  ‘I’m trying to find a missing American,’ I said. ‘He’s a young guy, came here as a tourist but it looks like he’s teaching English now. He hasn’t been in touch with his parents for a while and they’re starting to worry.’

  ‘And you’re wondering if he’s been caught trying to smuggle a kilo of white powder out of the country?’

  ‘It happens.’

  It happens a lot. Despite the penalties – and Thailand still executes drugs smugglers – there are still hundreds, maybe thousands, of backpackers and tourists who try to cover their costs of their trip to the Land of Smiles by taking drugs out of the country.

  Heroin is cheap in Thailand.

  Really cheap.

  A couple of hundred dollars a kilo. For heroin that would sell for a hundred times as much in New York or London.

  ‘I will make some enquiries,’ said Somsak. ‘You have checked the hospitals?’

  ‘Just before I called you.’

  ‘Why are you contacting the police and not hi
s parents?’

  ‘His parents spoke to the embassy and they said they’d talk to the police. I’m just covering all bases, that’s all.’

  ‘He is a good boy, this Jon Junior?’

  ‘He’s from a good family. ‘

  ‘I hope he is okay.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘How are things going with the Kube fire?’

  ‘You think he might have been there?’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ I said. ‘Unlikely, but not impossible.’

  ‘We still have some unidentified bodies.’

  ‘The identified ones, their relatives have been informed?’

  ‘Mostly,’ said Somsak. ‘But not all.’

  ‘Two hundred and eighteen dead?’

  ‘Two hundred and twenty-three,’ said Somsak. ‘Five more died overnight.’

  ‘Terrible business,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll be there tomorrow with the Public Prosecutor. About nine o’clock. You should come around.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘Is someone going to be prosecuted?’

  ‘Hopefully,’ said Somsak. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’

  He ended the call. I didn’t hold out much hope that Jon Junior was in police custody. A farang being arrested was always big news. A more likely possibility was that he’d been the victim of a crime but if he’d been badly injured he’d have been in hospital and if he wasn’t then why hadn’t he contacted his parents?

  I had tried to be optimistic while I was talking to the Clares, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about Jon Junior’s disappearance.

  A very bad feeling.

  CHAPTER 4

  The hotel that Jon Junior had stayed in was a featureless concrete block in Sukhumvit Soi 9, a short walk from the Nana skytrain station. It was six stories high with air-conditioning units mounted in front of each window. The reception was dark and gloomy; half the fluorescent tubes had been removed from the overhead lighting, presumably to save money.

  There was a young woman behind the reception desk, adding up receipts with a calculator when I walked in. There were two wall-mounted fans taking it in turns to play across the desk, and with each pass of air she had to hold the receipts down with the flat of her hand so that they didn’t blow away. Behind her was a large wooden unit divided into pigeonholes. A sheet of paper had been taped to the bottom. Child-like capital letters warned that if the room charges were a week late, the electricity supply would be cut off. Two weeks later and the water supply to the room would be turned off.