The Grey Man

by John Curtis

  One evening I received a call from IJM and agreed to meet up that night with two IJM operatives, Panom and Rick. The word was that Panom and Rick thought they'd found the man whose file Frank had shown me at our second meeting. Richard Davenport was a British expat and alleged serial paedophile who had been busted previously and had done time in a Thai gaol. It was believed he had moved to Chiang Mai from the UK, but he had so far eluded IJM and the local police. Davenport's dossier said he was gay, and that his tastes ran to young boys.

  I have absolutely no problem with people's sexuality, and I am certainly not anti-gay – The Grey Man's first treasurer was a gay former bishop of the Mormon church, a really nice guy who sadly passed away recently – but it did seem to me that IJM focused a lot of their time on gay male paedophiles. I had to wonder whether this came from their strong Christian leanings. Anyhow, I was still pleased to be working with them and I was always up for a challenge. The fact they had called this meeting with a sense of urgency had me wired.

  I took a tuk tuk to the area behind the Dusit D2 Hotel on Tha Pae Soi 1, which was known as a hangout for local and international gays in Chiang Mai. I walked up the single flight of stairs to the open-air second floor of the bar Rick had specified. Predictably it was full of guys – mostly Thais, with a sprinkling of westerners. Panom and Rick were playing pool; I greeted them and ordered a drink.

  Panom is Thai and Rick is half-Thai, half-American. Rick's a cool guy. He'd served in the Thai Special Forces and in the sixties his father had been a key player in the secret war in Laos, working for the CIA His father was a bit of a legend but the rest of the family were Bible-thumping missionaries out to convert the hill tribes – all except for Rick, who was a womanising, drinking, smoking wild boy. He reminded me of one of my best friends back home, a former biker who had started the amphetamine trade in Australia, went to prison and turned his life around.

  ‘We think we've found him,’ Panom said to me, sliding Davenport's dossier across the table.

  ‘There's a western guy in the bar over there who looks very much like him,’ Rick added. They said they had no photo, only a description (which would turn out to be totally inaccurate). I shrugged. ‘Sure, I'll give it a shot.’

  The three of us finished up and went to the bar where the suspect had been spotted. The place was heaving. The music was blaring and it was wall-to-wall guys of all ages. At the far end of the place I caught a glimpse of the man Panom and Rick thought was our target. They left me and I entered the fray.

  To blend in I mingled and chatted with other western men in the crowd and made quite a few new friends as I squeezed myself slowly through the crush at the bar. I talked to a few people and sat at a table with some expats for a while. One was in his seventies and his Thai boyfriend was around twenty-three. The older guy told me he spent his summers in England and returned to Thailand in the cooler months. He was putting his boyfriend through school and there was obvious affection there, but also an economic aspect. Though the conversation was pleasant I gradually eased myself away from them in search of the man we hoped was Davenport.

  At the end of the bar the suspect and three or four of his friends were sitting, chatting and drinking. I said hi to them and they were happy to let me into their circle, but within about five minutes I knew that Panom and Rick had got it wrong. This man wasn't Davenport – in fact he wasn't even British. Inwardly I sighed. I'd half expected this, as IJM's intel usually sucked. I had already followed plenty of leads from IJM that went nowhere.

  Some weeks later, a journalist friend of mine, Paul, told me that the real Davenport had recently bought a share in a bar, which was at least in the same district where Panom, Rick and I had been hunting his supposed lookalike. I thought the new lead was worth checking out.

  I found the bar and went in and ordered a beer. After I'd chatted to the barman for a while he pointed out the owner, an English guy. It wasn't Davenport, but I went over and greeted him. ‘I love what you've done with this place,’ I said to the guy. And it was true. The decor of the bar was quite striking – a funky blend of clean modern lines with an underlying hint of Asia.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘I'm thinking of buying into a bar myself,’ I said, ‘and I'd love to know who your decorator is.’ I had a hunch.

  ‘Oh, my partner Richard did all this. He's got great taste.’

  Bingo. ‘I'd love to meet him and have a chat. I'd be willing to pay him to do something in my place if I buy it,’ I said.

  ‘I'm sure Richard would be happy to help out, but he's overseas now. He's back in January.’

  Afterwards I did some more checking and confirmed that the ‘Richard’ the man had spoken about was indeed Davenport. I took Panom back to the bar a few days later, on the pretext of another casual visit, and introduced him as my business partner to the same man I'd met previously. I didn't know if I would still be working for IJM, or even if I'd still be alive in January 2005 when Davenport was due to return, so I wanted to give Panom the inside running on the operation so he could take over from me if I wasn't around. I hoped he'd be able to meet Davenport, and put him away.

  FOUR

  The Grey Man

  After about a month of my doing surveillance work for IJM, Frank Weicks offered to take me on as a paid employee, but I told him I was there to rescue kids, not find a job. I still had money to burn from my army pay so I didn't need to be earning a salary.

  I continued to help out IJM now and again while I searched for kids to rescue, and Frank gave me a lead on the possible presence of children in a brothel masquerading as a hotel in a small town in central north Thailand called Uttaradit. I went there with Panom and Rick and a female operative, a Thai woman in her late forties who had served in the military and was very fit. It took us about four hours to get there and find the hotel in question. We all checked into the hotel for three nights. While Panom and Rick checked out rumours of an underage brothel near a lake, the female operative and I went for a massage at a place we were told we could find young girls. The masseuse took a fancy to me and I had to pretend that the Thai woman with me was my wife. Our enquiries came to nothing and it pretty soon became apparent that there was nothing much going on in this town. IJM's intelligence had failed again. I still hadn't rescued a child, but I did have my first try at singing karaoke. I picked an Elvis song, ‘Suspicious Minds’. I was crap, but the small crowd in the hotel restaurant applauded politely.

  In Chiang Mai I went back onto the streets on my own, which was how I preferred it. I must have visited at least a hundred brothels in those early days The brothels were relatively clean for the most part, if a bit spartan, with concrete floors and bare walls. In some of the places the owners had gone to a bit of effort and put up a few pictures on the walls or invested in soft furnishings. Most of the girls I met were nice enough, with a few hard ones thrown in every now and again. They all had their stories – broken relationships, fatherless children to raise, parents to support, debts to pay – though some just wanted to make money to buy phones, clothes and a motorbike. If the job of sex worker was not stigmatised and was subject to fair and regulated labour laws then it would simply be another job. However, the fact that the commodity being sold is sex means that this industry pushes the buttons of many people with strong views about the place of sex in society.

  I'd originally thought that those girls who weren't trafficked and forced into brothels, the ones who entered the profession of their own free will, did it simply because they were poor. I put this theory to some girls I knew who worked in a clothing shop and they all said I was wrong.

  Women do make choices, they told me. Women in Thailand are traditionally seen as second-class citizens, but they can elevate their social standing through wealth. The clothing-shop girls pointed out that not every poor girl in Thailand goes into prostitution; in their opinion, the women who worked in bars were just lazy. Many mamasans, the local term for a madam, told me that as well, but I didn't think it wa
s as simple as laziness. Some poor girls work in clothing factories, often holding down two or three jobs, and slave their guts out to get ahead. Others see prostitution as a short cut to nice clothes and shoes and the latest mobile phone. Some girls had gone to work in the bars and brothels for a limited time to pay off a debt they'd incurred to help pay for a sister's wedding, or to buy medicines to treat their own health problems or the ailments of other family members, or to support a child or their parents.

  One very attractive Thai sex worker told me she had worked in a factory that manufactured apparel for two of the major western sporting goods companies and was paid ten baht an hour for a twelve-hour shift (about five Australian dollars for a day's work). She had little time to spend with her husband and daughter and eventually he ran off with another woman and took the daughter with him. She decided it wasn't worth it, so she became a sex worker and was earning 5000 baht – about A$200 – per night. Her dream was to buy a convenience store and find her daughter.

  Another sex worker, Fon, told me she'd once had a small business selling shirts at a stall at Chiang Mai airport plaza. She was a classy woman, not terribly well educated, but smart, attractive and hard-working. When she was about thirty, a Thai guy raped her at a party, which knocked the hell out of her self-esteem. She lost her stall and ended up working in a bar. She wasn't selling her body, but she would be nice to the clientele and get them to buy her ‘lady drinks’ – watered-down cocktails. She was paid a percentage of the price of every drink bought for her.

  The owner of the bar, an older German man, convinced her he had fallen for her and wanted to be her boyfriend. He eventually persuaded her to come home with him and they had sex, and not long after that he swung her into working in the bar as a sex worker. He pointed out to her that if she went with a customer she could make enough in one night to cover her rent for a week and still have some money left over to buy a couple of items of clothing. He preyed on her low self-esteem at the time and her need to survive.

  I liked Fon and initially employed her as an interpreter. As I got to know her I wanted to help her find a better life. I gave her enough cash for a fresh start and eventually we entered into a relationship. Even when I went back to Australia I used to fund English and computer lessons for her.

  Fon got a job working for Empower, the organisation that stood up for the rights of sex workers in Thailand. Unfortunately, the gulf between us in education and culture was too great and we split up. As a parting gift I bought her a gym membership at an expensive hotel; I hoped she might meet a wealthy western guy who would look after her and her family. It was a forlorn hope and the last I heard she had gone back to the bars.

  Finally, about seven weeks after arriving in Thailand, my research began to pay off. It began with yet another apparent false start, when I was referred by a contact to a place in Santi Tam that apparently had an underage Shan girl. The Shan people are an ethnic minority based in Burma; they have their own separate language. Luckily I met a Shan girl in the markets selling knives; I explained the situation and told her I needed someone to translate for me. She offered to help, but when I went back later to confirm everything with her she said she didn't know who I was and didn't recall our conversation. Maybe she just got cold feet, but her sudden turnaround was very strange.

  In spite of this setback, I went to the place in Santi Tam and the mamasan told me she could get me a young girl, but I would have to wait while someone went to fetch her. I sat on a couch waiting, checking my watch, and wondered if I was just being strung along. After about twenty minutes the mamasan poked her head through the doorway and said, ‘Sorry, you must leave now.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. I wondered if she'd had second thoughts about my illegal request.

  ‘Police are coming.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Friend of mine in police call me five minutes ago. They tell me they coming to raid me. Better you go now before they come, okay?’

  ‘Yes, okay!’ Once my heart had stopped pounding I had to laugh as I walked briskly down a narrow street and was passed by a police car with flashing lights. For once I was grateful for police corruption in Thailand. Undeterred, I went back to the same brothel the next evening and found it closed, although the mamasan was sitting on a chair outside, an angry scowl on her face. Her expression brightened a little when she recognised me.

  ‘Did the police close you down for good?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘Only three day, because king coming to visit. No good for business.’

  I looked up and down the street. Things did seem quiet; it appeared the cops wanted the sleaze driven underground for a while because of the planned royal visit to Chiang Mai. ‘I still want a girl.’

  The mamasan looked up at me for a moment and pursed her lips. ‘I can get.’

  ‘Young, okay?’

  She nodded, then reached into her pocket for a mobile phone. She spoke to someone in rapid Thai that I found hard to follow, then ended the call. ‘You wait.’

  I agreed, and leaned against a wall. Less than ten minutes later a young man on a motorbike cruised up the street. There was a girl on the pillion seat. The man stopped the bike, but neither of them got off.

  ‘You like?’ The mamasan gestured to the girl.

  Jesus Christ, this was like ordering a pizza and having it delivered. The girl was attractive, but she was certainly not underage. I shook my head and was asked to pay the driver 100 baht. It wasn't much, and I didn't want to alienate the mamasan, so I handed over the money.

  ‘I want a young girl,’ I said to the mamasan, and held my hand palm down, quite low, to show her what I meant.

  A look of understanding dawned on her face again, but now I was less hopeful; I'd thought she knew what I meant last time. ‘You come with me. We walk.’

  I shrugged. I had nothing to lose. We walked side by side down a narrow alley off the main road and came to another, smaller street. The mamasan waved to a trio of young men lounging by some parked motorcycles and one of them strolled towards us. The woman told the young pimp I was looking for a small girl. Part of me was sickened by the smile on the man's face, but I also experienced a tingling in my spine that told me maybe, at last, I was getting somewhere.

  The pimp pulled out a mobile phone and keyed some buttons. He held it up to me and when I shaded the small screen from the glare of the streetlight I could see he was showing me pictures – of girls. He started to scroll through them. If I thought having a girl served up to me on a motorcycle was weird, this was bizarre. Still, at least I wouldn't waste time waiting for girls who were clearly of a legal age.

  ‘That one,’ I said, stopping him when I saw the forced smile of a girl who looked out of place from the rest of the digital album of working girls whose faces, while still pretty, radiated an undeniable hardness.

  I ordered the girl, and five minutes later she turned up on the back of a bike. My heart sank. Her picture on the phone must have been a few years old; this girl, too, was definitely not underage. I shook my head and handed over another 100 baht. I was about to call it a night when the mamasan put a hand on my forearm. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘There is somewhere else we can go, but it not good place.’

  ‘That's okay,’ I said. ‘I don't care. Take me there.’

  She led the way, on foot again, deeper and deeper into the seedy maze of brothels and cheap hotels in Santi Tam. We were well away from the main area now, and with the crackdown in force the place was much darker and even creepier than usual. It seemed the whole economy in this part of the city had closed down along with the flesh trade. We came to a run-down building that looked like an abandoned hotel. Just a couple of dim lights glowed from behind grubby curtains.

  The mamasan stopped outside the door and looked up at me. ‘This dangerous place. Even police not come here. You still want?’

  Her jumpiness was rubbing off on me a little, but the adrenaline was also starting to kick in. I was completely unarmed and
I, too, had picked up a bad feeling from the dump we stood looking at. ‘Yes, I still want.’

  She nodded and pushed open the door. I followed her in and took off my shoes as was the usual custom. I felt the grit of the unswept tile floor on the soles of my feet. It was gloomy inside and smelled of mould and something nastier. I sensed a presence and looked around. Off to one side, in the corner, like a scene from an old detective or horror movie, the face of a man appeared from nowhere, momentarily illuminated as he dragged deeply on a cigarette.

  The mamasan told the Thai man I was looking for a young girl. He nodded but said nothing. He got up off the stool he'd been sitting on and walked past us and up a flight of stairs. The mamasan looked at me again and I shrugged. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought. We followed the pimp up the stairs and along a corridor stained with mildew and dripping water. He took a set of keys from his pocket and opened the door. I paused and looked inside.

  The room was sparsely furnished with a bed, wooden chair and small dressing table, and weakly lit by a single bare light bulb. A girl was lying on the unmade bed. She rolled over and looked at us, her face bored. The man beckoned to her and she swung her legs over the side and walked towards me. She was wearing pyjamas – nothing provocative or remotely sexy. She looked like any other kid in her early teens, but she'd clearly been robbed of a normal childhood.