Bangkok Bob and the missing Mormon

by Stephen Leather

  CHAPTER 10

  The key to finding an English teacher to Bangkok is remember that the job pays really badly. An expatriate teacher is doing well if he earns thirty thousand baht a month. That’s twice what a Thai would get, but it’s still only about a thousand dollars which doesn’t go far, even in Thailand, which means that they spend a lot of time hunting down cheap places to eat and drink. The Londoner Pub on Sukhumvit Road is one of many drinking holes that’s realised how hard-up teachers are and offers them a two drinks for one deal every Thursday. I left it until just before nine o’clock before heading there, figuring that the more they’d had to drink, the chattier they’d be. It had started raining again. I don’t know if it was the real thing or the result of more misplaced cloud seeding.

  The pub’s down a basement under an office building, right next door to a bowling alley. The decor is standard dark wood and brass fittings and the only nod to the London theme were the Beefeater dresses that a couple of the staff were wearing. Two televisions were showing a British football match but nobody was paying them any attention. The clientele were almost without exception young men in knock-offs of designer shirts and shabby chinos.

  A girl in a regular waitress uniform of white shirt and black trousers waved at an empty table but I shook my head and told her that I was there to see a friend.

  I wandered among the tables letting the conversations wash over me.

  Moans about working conditions. Long hours, low pay.

  Places that sold cheap beer.

  Why Singha beer always gave you a headache.

  Go-go dancers who offered free sex in exchange for English lessons.

  Not much talk about the education system or lesson-planning. That’s the way it is in the Land of Smiles – the vast majority of English teachers aren’t here on a mission to educate. They’re here to drink cheap beer. And hang out in go-go bars. Teaching is just a means to an end.

  I took out Jon Junior’s photograph and went over to a table where half a dozen guys in their twenties were standing guard over bottles of Singha and Heineken. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but have any of you lads seen him?’ I said, handing the picture over to the teacher nearest to me. He shook his head and handed it around the table. ‘He’s an American,’ I said. ‘Salt Lake City.’

  ‘A Septic?’ said one of the guys. ‘Just what Bangkok needs, another Septic teacher.’

  Septic Tank. Yank.

  British humour.

  ‘He arrived a few months ago,’ I said. ‘Now his parents are worried. Jon Clare’s his name. Jon Clare Junior.’

  The picture went around the group and back to me. They all shook their heads.

  ‘You a detective?’ asked one of the teachers. He was the smallest of the group with shoulder-length blonde hair tied back in a ponytail.

  ‘Just a friend of the family,’ I said.

  ‘No reward or anything, then?’

  I shook my head and slid the photograph back into my jacket. A waitress hovered at my shoulder and I ordered a Phuket Beer. She smiled apologetically and said they didn’t stock it so I ordered a Heineken.

  ‘He came over as a tourist a couple of months ago, then decided to stay on as an English teacher,’ I said.

  The guy with the ponytail sniggered. ‘Story of my life,’ he said.

  ‘How easy would that be?’ I asked.

  ‘To teach English?’ said the guy on my right. He was in his early twenties, overweight with slicked back hair and a gold earring in his left ear. He had a computer case slung over his shoulder and three cheap ballpoint pens in the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘Depends where he wanted to teach. There are some schools who’ll take anybody. Was he qualified?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘He had a degree, though?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then he’d get a job no problem. The Thai universities would insist on a teaching qualification like an RSA. The good ones, like Thammasat and Chula would want a Master’s degree. But most of the language schools will take on any farang provided they’ve got a degree.’

  ‘What’s an RSA?’ I asked.

  ‘Four-week course that supposedly prepares you for teaching,’ said the overweight guy. ‘That and a degree would get you into most schools. You can go on a course at the EEC in Siam Square. Set you back about sixty thousand baht.’

  ‘Or you can buy a fake one for a fraction of that,’ said Ponytail. ‘I got mine for two thousand baht on the Khao San Road.’

  Khao San Road.

  Uncooked Rice Road.

  The jumping-off point for most backpackers embarking on a South East Asian experience. Cheap food, cheap lodging, cheap transport to anywhere in the country and beyond. You can buy pretty much anything on the Khao San Road. Fake certificates, fake passports, fake driving licences. Drugs. Weapons.

  ‘Don’t they check?’

  ‘Depends where you go,’ said Ponytail. ‘Some places are desperate they’ll take anyone. There’s an Indian at my school who can barely speak English. He just gets the students to read the text books. But he’s got a degree certificate from the UK. I don’t think the ink’s dry yet, but the school doesn’t care.’

  ‘What about the students? They must realise that they’ve been fobbed off with an incompetent teacher?’

  Ponytail grinned. ‘They wouldn’t say boo to a goose. It’s not the Thai way. They’d probably just stop going after a few lessons. But there’s always more students joining. Most pay in advance so the schools don’t care about drop-outs.’

  I made a mental note to ask Mr and Mrs Clare if Jon Junior had taken his educational qualifications with him.

  ‘So you’re saying that anyone can get off a plane and start teaching English in Thailand?’

  The teachers nodded in unison.

  My two bottles of Heineken arrived. I asked the waitress to bring a round of drinks for the guys and they all beamed at me like I was Father Christmas.

  ‘So where’s the best place for me to go looking for Jon Junior?’

  ‘If he’s legit and an American, you could try the AUA,’ said the guy with earring. ‘The American University Alumni. They’re one of the biggest schools in Thailand. But he’d need real qualifications and references. You could try the Thai universities and high schools. And the International schools. They’re the best payers and the most selective. If he’s using dodgy documents, then you’d drop down to the second division English schools.’

  ‘How many of those are there?’

  ‘Dozens,’ said the guy with the earring.

  ‘Hundreds,’ added Ponytail.

  ‘Needle in a haystack,’ added one of the teachers.

  It wasn’t too daunting. There’d be a list of language schools somewhere. All I had to do was to telephone them all and ask if there was a Jon Clare on their staff.

  The drinks arrived, two for each of the teachers. I paid the bill and then went around the bar, showing Jon Junior’s picture to anyone who looked like a teacher.

  An hour later and all I’d seen were shaking heads and blank faces.

  I went home. At least it had stopped raining.

  Maybe my luck was starting to change.

  CHAPTER 11

  I could never get the hang of changing time zones. I know that if I fly to Hong Kong I lose an hour and that if I fly back to Bangkok I gain an hour. And I know that the clocks in the UK are moved an hour during the winter months so that farmers don’t have to get up in the dark, and that the Americans change their clocks a week after the Brits. But other than that it’s a mystery to me. I couldn’t work out if Salt Lake City was ahead or behind Bangkok time, but I figured that as it was pretty much on the opposite side of the world, the difference would be about twelve hours either way. I left it until eleven o’clock in the evening before calling the Clares. Mrs Clare answered and she sounded wide awake so I guess I hadn’t woken her up.

  ‘Is he okay, Mr Turtledove?’ she asked as soon as she realised it was me.

  ‘I have
n’t found him yet, Mrs Clare,’ I said. ‘But I’ve checked with the police and the hospitals and he’s not been in any trouble. And I’m fairly sure that he wasn’t in the nightclub. I’ve spoken to some of the people who worked there and no one remembers seeing him that night. So that at least is good news.’

  I was trying to sound as optimistic as possible but she was obviously close to tears. I asked her about Jon Junior’s degree. Had he taken it with him or asked her to send it to him in Bangkok? She said that he hadn’t mentioned it to her and that so far as she knew his degree was framed and hanging on his bedroom wall.

  I asked her to go and check. I waited for almost four minutes. The Clares must have lived in one hell of a big house.

  While I waited I booted my laptop and went to the Google Mail page. I tapped in Jon Junior’s user name and clicked the button that said I’d forgotten my password. It asked me for Jon Junior’s date of birth and I got that from the photocopy of his passport. The next stage was to answer Jon Junior’s security question. ‘What was the name of your first pet?’

  Mrs Clare came back on the line.

  ‘It’s still on the wall,’ she said.

  ‘Is it possible he took a copy before he left?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘It’s in a frame.’

  ‘And did he take some sort of teaching class before he came to Bangkok?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We had no idea that he was considering teaching as a career until we got his phone call.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have done it in secret?’

  ‘Why would he have done anything in secret, Mr Turtledove?’ she said archly.

  ‘Perhaps if he knew that you wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘I thought I made it clear in your office. We support our son fully in whatever he decides to do. Our philosophy in raising our children has always been to offer guidance and support, not to lay down the law.’

  That’s not quite what the Clares had said in my office and I didn’t have to look at the notes I’d made. They’d wanted Jon Junior to join the family business. And if he was set on becoming a teacher, they wanted him to teach in Utah, not Thailand.

  ‘Did he mention taking a teaching course in Thailand?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘I’m told it would cost about sixty thousand baht for a four-week course. About one thousand five hundred dollars. Nothing like that showed up on his credit card statements did it?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Did he have that sort of money on him?’

  ‘He was on a tight budget, Mr Turtledove. I don’t think he would throw away fifteen hundred dollars on a teaching course. Would you mind telling me why you have this sudden interest in my son’s educational qualifications?’

  ‘I’m trying to find out which school he was teaching at. It would make it easier if I knew what qualifications he had.’

  I didn’t want to tell her that if Jon Junior’s degree was hanging on the wall in a frame then he’d probably had a counterfeit copy made in the Khao San Road. I figured that a devout Christian would probably regard that as a sin.

  ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ she asked.

  ‘Actually there is,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me the name of Jon Junior’s first pet?’ I asked.

  There was a long pause during which time she was no doubt wondering whether I’d gone insane.

  ‘I’m trying to access his email account,’ I explained.

  ‘Isn’t that illegal?’ she said.

  That was a good question, and the answer was probably yes.

  ‘It’ll be a big help to see if he’s still sending emails,’ I said. ‘And with any luck there might be clue to his whereabouts in his inbox.’

  ‘Jeeves,’ she said. ‘He had a cat called Jeeves. He was a big fan of P.G. Wodehouse at school.’

  I tapped in ‘JEEVES’ and the server allowed me to reset the password on the account.

  ‘All right, Mrs Clare, I’m in,’ I said. ‘Please stay on the line and I’ll see if there’s anything useful here.’

  I opened Jon Junior’s inbox. Nothing had been opened for two weeks. There were more than fifty unopened emails, about half of which were spam offering cheap Viagra, millions of dollars from Nigerian bank accounts and cheap flights. I clicked on a personal message, from a friend back in Utah asking him why he hadn’t been in touch.

  ‘I don’t see anything recent, Mrs Clare,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not good, is it?’ she asked.

  ‘It might not mean anything,’ I said. ‘He might just be away from a computer. Did he have a laptop with him?’

  ‘It’s here, at home,’ she said. ‘He wanted to travel light. This isn’t good, is it, Mr Turtledove?’

  ‘He could be travelling,’ I said, trying to put her at ease, even though I was beginning to share her concern. ‘A lot of backpackers go up north to visit the hilltribes or over the border into Laos or Burma. Not everywhere has internet coverage.’

  ‘Tell me one thing, Mr Turtledove. If Jon Junior has started working as a teacher in Bangkok, why hasn’t he called us?’

  It was a good question. One that I couldn’t answer.

  ‘We’re not bad parents,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure you’re not.’

  ‘We love our son.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  She was upset.

  I’d upset her.

  I thanked her, promised to call her when I had any news, and cut the connection.

  CHAPTER 12

  Thailand’s immigration policy is different to most developed countries – they just put out a welcome mat and pretty much allow everybody in. There are a few countries where Thailand insists on visas and generally anyone who arrives is given permission to stay for thirty days. Anyone who wants to stay longer can apply for a tourist visa at a Thai consulate or embassy in their own country and they’ll be given a sixty-day visa, good for either one or two stays. The Thais are happy to let visitors in because all employment of foreigners is strictly regulated through a work permit system – a system that leads straight to jail if it’s abused.

  I guess the way the Thais think is that providing visitors aren’t working, they’re bringing money into the country which can only be a good thing. But what they didn’t bank on was the visa run, where foreigners working illegally in Thailand simply leave and return once a month. Coaches packed with illegally-employed Westerners now shuttle back and forth between Cambodia and Laos so that they can be legally in the country, albeit working without a work permit. Once the authorities realised the extent that the system was being exploited, they slashed the number of days that would be granted to a visitor arriving by land from thirty to fifteen. But that didn’t stop the illegal workers, it just doubled the number of visa runs and increased the profits of the companies, mostly Western-owned, that ran the coaches.

  I googled ‘Thailand visa run’ and got almost a quarter of a million hits. I went through the first few pages, looking for companies based in Bangkok that did same-day visa runs to the Ban Laem border crossing that Jon Junior had used. Most of the companies only offered overnight trips for people who needed to get a new visa from the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh. They spent the night in a cheap hotel and then picked up the visa the next day.

  Jon Junior didn’t need a new visa, all he had to do was to leave the country and return to activate the second half of his double re-entry visa. After half an hour of scrolling through the Google search results I had about twenty possibles, and I started calling them. I got lucky with the seventh company. The phone was answered by a Thai girl who spoke English with an American drawl that she had probably picked up at an international school in Bangkok. I spoke to her in Thai and asked if Jonathon Clare had been on her company’s run to Cambodia on March the fifth. She put me on hold for a couple of minutes and then came back on the line and said yes, he been on the bus.

  I punched the air in triumph.


  ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked, and I reassured her that there wasn’t. I explained that his parents were looking for him and asked if she had an address or phone number for him. She only had a number and it was for a cellphone, the one that the Clares had given me.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know if he was sitting next to on the coach, do you?’

  ‘I know the bus was almost full,’ she said. ‘My boss was on it, he might remember, but he isn’t in at the moment. I’ll ask him and give you a call.’

  I gave her my number and ended the call.

  I figured the next line of attack should be to track down the school where Jon Junior was teaching. For that I needed a list of English language schools and I figured my old friend Stickman would be able to help. Stickman runs a website about Thailand and in a former life he was an English teacher until he started to earn more from the internet than he was paid to stand in front of a group of unruly teenagers. Before I went to bed I emailed him to see if he had a list of English language schools. When I switched on the computer again at eight o’clock in the morning he’d replied with a list of thirty but warned me that it wasn’t an inclusive list. ‘The fly-by-nights open up for a few months, shut down and then open up under another name,’ he said in his email.

  Top of his list was the AUA school. I called and an efficient secretary confirmed within minutes that there was no Jonathon Clare on staff.

  Sometimes it was important to be specific when talking with Thais so I got her to check Jon Clare and J Clare, and also to check using Junior as the family name.

  It took me the best part of two hours to work my way down the list. None of the schools had heard of Jon Junior. He was either working for a school that wasn’t on the list, or he was using another name.

  That worried me.

  If Jon Junior wasn’t using his own name, then he was hiding. But from whom? And why?

  I went through to the kitchen where Noy had made breakfast for me. A cheese omelette with a slice of wholewheat toast and a cup of tea. She sat and watched me as I ate.