by Jake Needham
The lounge offered an elaborate breakfast buffet, but Tay took only a single Danish pastry, got another cup of coffee, and settled himself in a deeply cushioned club chair with a matching ottoman that was off in a deserted part of the lounge. When he saw the copy of the Financial Times folded neatly and waiting on the side table it occurred to him that he had no idea what the exchange rate was for the Thai baht so he flipped to the back and scanned the foreign-exchange table until he found it.
He took out the money August had given him, counted it, and did the math in his head. His first thought was to be impressed that August had provided him with almost $5,000. His second thought was less cheerful.
Why would he need $5,000 for just a couple of days?
Clearly August expected this to take longer than that. Did August know something he hadn’t yet shared with Tay? Of course he did. August knew all kinds of things he hadn’t yet shared with Tay and never would. That wasn’t really the question. The question was whether August knew a little thing that was likely to turn into a headache for Tay, or if he knew a big thing that was likely to dump him straight in the shit.
The large amount of money August had provided him didn’t seem like a good sign. That probably meant it was a big thing that August was holding back. Maybe a really big thing.
Tay thought about all that while he ate his Danish pastry and finished his coffee, but he came to no useful conclusions. He was venturing into unknown territory, that was obvious enough, but he supposed regardless of that he would simply do what he always did in any investigation. He would take whatever problems arose head on and solve them one by one as they appeared. What else could he do?
He looked up at the video screen which displayed departing flight information and checked the boarding time for his flight. It was still forty-five minutes away, but he wiped his hands on a napkin, stood up, and collected his things anyway. Better to leave the lounge early and take the walk to the gate at a leisurely pace.
Tay had learned a long time ago that nothing good ever happened to him when he had to hurry.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The flight was a short one, only a couple of hours. Throughout it identically smiling flight attendants with perfectly matched uniforms, hairstyles, and body types made Tay feel like he was surrounded by a squad of androids. Had artificial intelligence progressed to the point that robots had replaced human beings as flight attendants? He didn’t think so, but before the flight was over he had begun to wonder. The droids implored him to eat an elaborate breakfast. Tay stuck to coffee. It tasted real. More or less.
Arrival in Bangkok wasn’t nearly as pleasant and trouble-free as his departure from Singapore had been. The immigration hall was a heaving mess of bodies, most of whom appeared unimpressed by the frantic efforts of a few uniformed personnel to direct them into recognizable lines. It took Tay nearly an hour to fight his way through the masses of Chinese tour groups led by flag-waving minders, get his passport stamped, and find his suitcase.
When Tay left the terminal building to search for the taxi queue, he felt like he had walked into a wall. Singapore was hot and humid, but Bangkok was in a class of its own. The air was gelatinous, so heavy it was as if it had congealed. Tay felt like he was breathing Jell-O.
The line of people waiting for taxis was long and it moved slowly. Tay finally made it to the front, got into a cab, and told the driver he was going to the Hilton in Pattaya. The man grinned and named a fare for the ninety-minute drive that Tay had no doubt was extortionate, probably by a factor of at least five, but he was tired and he was hot and he didn’t have the energy to argue about it. He hated the driver thinking of him as a mark to be swindled, but the air-conditioning in the taxi was on high and blowing cold, dry air and Tay decided that was far more important than what the man thought of him. Whatever amount he paid, it would be worth it just to regain his humanity.
Tay leaned back in his seat and waved the driver on. The man grinned even more widely. He looked as if he couldn’t believe his luck.
Tay had been to Pattaya a couple of times before and had decidedly mixed feelings about the place. He had to admit that both of those trips had been pleasant enough, possibly because they were short, but Pattaya simply wasn’t a town that appealed to him very much. Too coarse, too crude, too blatant. “There always has to be some place where the world sweeps its dirt,” someone once said. They had been describing Shanghai before World War Two, Tay knew, and he had no idea if that had been an accurate characterization of Shanghai back then or not, but he thought it certainly would be a good description of Pattaya today.
The Pattaya Hilton stood well above the rest of the place, both figuratively and literally. A thirty-five-story glass tower resting on top of Central Festival, Pattaya’s classiest retail mall, the Hilton was doubtless the best hotel within at least a hundred miles. When Tay checked in, he was given a very nice room on the thirty-first floor with a view across the bay to a narrow headland where huge orange letters on a tree-covered slope spelled out P-A-T-T-A-Y-A C-I-T-Y. The sign was no doubt supposed to put people in mind of the famous white letters spelling out H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D against the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles, but the comparison really wasn’t working for Tay.
It was only a little after mid-day so Tay went down into the mall and wandered around until he found a Japanese restaurant that looked okay and had a lunch of shrimp tempura and tuna sashimi. While he ate, he thought about how he ought to proceed.
According to August, the woman had come to Secrets at exactly six o’clock on a Thursday evening, not exactly a peak time in the warren of tiny laneways around August’s bar, but still busy enough. Tay had been to Secrets a year or so back to meet August and he remembered that there were no roadways anywhere close to it that carried automobile traffic. You could only get to the place on foot or by motorcycle.
If the woman who had come to August posing as a messenger from the Band was nearly as attractive as August had said she was, she would have been noticed by a lot of people. There would have been people in the area on foot, perhaps even a lot of people, and few if any of them would have been attractive women who were not Thai. Somebody would have noticed this woman.
All Tay had to do was to locate a few of those people, find out from them the direction the woman had come from or the direction she went when she left Secrets, and he would be on his way to working out her movements both before and after her meeting with August. Those movements ought to lead him to a hotel or maybe to an airline flight, and a hotel or an airline flight would lead him to a name and some kind of identification, maybe a credit card, and he would be close to finding out who the woman was.
People in Tay’s profession didn’t like to admit it, but the hard truth of every investigation was that you needed a break. Sometimes you made your own break, but more often than not the break was simply a fluke. Tay had learned a long time ago that the difference between a detective with a reputation for success and one with a reputation for failure was that the successful detective recognized the fluke when it came along.
August had told him that Secrets didn’t have a CCTV system. That was a shame, but it was easy to understand why it didn’t. With the kind of things that August got up to there, it was no wonder he didn’t want any of it recorded.
Still, the thought gave Tay an idea.
Maybe some of the other bars and shops in the area did have CCTV. If he could begin to work out the woman’s movements, then maybe one of the businesses she walked past had an exterior camera that had caught her. A decent picture could well make this thing game over. That might be enough for August’s intelligence contacts to identify the woman without Tay having to track down a hotel registration or airline trip.
Either way, the starting point was the same. He had to get out on the streets at about the same time of evening as the woman had come and gone from Secrets and see what he could put together. Street vendors operating from fixed locations, doormen at bars, and even waiters in o
utdoor cafés could have seen her. Then once he at least knew the direction from which the woman had come and gone, he could walk the routes she might have taken and look for CCTV coverage.
All that made sense conceptually, but it raised a glaring problem. Tay didn’t speak a word of Thai, so how was he going to approach people who might be able to help him?
He did have one thing going for him. When he retired, he had kept his warrant card identifying him as a detective in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Singapore Police. At the time he wasn’t absolutely sure why he had done that. Mostly, he supposed, he had simply been so angry at being forced out that he didn’t want to be even remotely cooperative. He had returned his service weapon, but when they asked for his warrant card he said that he had lost it. They didn’t believe him, of course, but nobody wanted the embarrassment of making an issue out of it so they had let it go.
He had brought his old warrant card to Pattaya with him without even really thinking about it, but he saw now that there could be an advantage in identifying himself as a detective from Singapore CID. He had been a detective in the Criminal Investigation Department for almost two decades and he would still be a CID detective if they hadn’t forced him out, so saying that he was one now only stretched the truth a little bit.
Tay thought that was a perfectly adequate justification. Good enough for him anyway.
On the other hand, there was something else to consider. He doubted Pattaya was a particularly friendly town for a cop to go around asking questions. Singapore was a place where everyone respected official authority, whether that authority was worthy of respect or not, but Pattaya was world famous as a haven for international criminals on the hustle and villains on the lam. Official authority probably didn’t translate into respect here quite the way it did in Singapore. He might need somebody to vouch for him.
Fortunately, August had provided him with a local contact, a fellow bar owner who ran a place called Babydolls. As soon he got some ideas about where to start looking for traces of the mystery woman, he would look the guy up. August had told Tay that he could trust him, but Tay was going to make up his own mind about that. It didn’t help that August had told him to go to Babydolls and ask for Mad Max. While Tay had a lot of confidence in August’s judgment, putting his trust in someone called Mad Max bothered him. Pattaya was a long way from Singapore. Tay understood that. But he wasn’t sure it was that far.
He looked at his watch. Just after two o’clock. Enough time to go up to his room, take a little nap to make up for the lack of sleep last night, and then hit the streets.
Tay left the Hilton at a little after six, crossed over Beach Road, and turned south on the walkway along the beach. The atmosphere was so dense with humidity it felt as if the air itself was sweating. The sun was a red orb sitting on the horizon, too tired to give any heat, too lazy to take its leave. The last of its light had turned the sea to pewter and a soft mango-colored haze was filtering over Pattaya. A gentle breeze off the ocean brought odors of salt and fish and made Tay think of places he would rather be.
Out on the bay, neon lights sparkled from the anchored party boats gearing up for another night of riot and debauchery. The boats scattered here and there across the bay looked like floating Times Squares or Piccadilly Circuses. One boat even sported a huge cross on top. It was bathed in white light and gave the party boat a resemblance to a floating church. Or maybe the boat was a floating church. Surely not, Tay thought. Not in Pattaya.
In Tay’s view, calling the narrow mud flat that lay between the walkway and the ocean a beach was stretching the word beyond all reason. Even the waves that washed up on it were flat and gray-brown. It wasn’t exactly Hawaii, was it? Tay had never actually been to Hawaii, of course, but he had seen pictures, and he had once a long time ago watched an episode of Hawaii Five-0 on television.
Still, the walkway was very nice. It was about fifteen feet wide and paved in ceramic tile formed into a wavy cream and white pattern. The walk was lined along both sides with tall coconut palms, their leaves slapping together in the warm ocean breeze like ranks of snare drummers each of whom was drumming a separate rhythm.
The other thing lining both sides of the walkway was streetwalkers, although in this case Tay thought perhaps beachwalkers might be the more appropriate term. The girls stood quietly all along the walkway in ones and twos, in some places almost shoulder to shoulder, and waited for passing males to show signs of interest.
To fill the time until they were approached, they were all, every single one of them, utterly absorbed in staring at their telephones. The cool gray-blue light from the telephone screens imbued their features with an otherworldly luminescence that made their faces look eerily disembodied, each of them floating independently there in the darkness. It made Tay think of a race of aliens just emerged from the sea and looking for just the right moment to step forward and announce its arrival.
The girls’ most enthusiastic suitors were packs of men who appeared to be Indians, eight or ten to a group, roaming up and down the beach walk leering at all the girls uniformly: young or old, tall or short, fat or thin. It struck Tay as strange that very few of the men in those little bands ever seemed to approach any of the girls directly. Perhaps they were too shy and seeking protection in their packs, or perhaps they were looking for a girl who advertised a group rate. The girls, however, didn't seem to notice or to care. They only had eyes for only one thing: their telephones.
About a hundred yards along, a frail, elderly woman suddenly appeared from somewhere and flung herself prostrate at Tay's feet. She thrust a grimy plastic cup at him and Tay recoiled. When the woman remained stretched out in front of him, unmoving, cup thrust upward, Tay fumbled in his trouser pocket, but he couldn't find any change. Finally, in desperation, his hand closed around the first bill it touched. He shoved it into the woman's cup and sidestepped quickly around her. He had been taken, of course, and he knew it. He wondered how much he had given her, but as in the case of the taxi driver he didn’t much care. He had gotten what he wanted, which was to be away from the woman, and how much it had cost him didn’t really matter.
A little further along the walkway the line of girls thinned out a bit and Tay found himself glancing at them as he passed. He was surprised to see that most of the girls looked young, most were conservatively dressed, and a few were downright attractive. He noticed one girl dressed in heels and what appeared to be a tan business suit. She could have been on her way to the office where she worked, he supposed, but of course it was pretty obvious she wasn't.
Then he noticed something even odder. The girl was holding a dog's leash with what he thought was probably a beagle on the end. A streetwalker with a dog? For a moment Tay flashed on an image so disgusting he felt nauseous. Surely not, he told himself. Not even in Pattaya.
Tay increased his pace and was relieved when the walkway along the beach petered out and he found himself in the upheaval of Walking Street where the packs of Indians and loitering hookers were replaced by Chinese tour groups and go-go bars. He spotted Babydolls, but he wasn’t ready to talk to Mad Max yet. Besides, it was almost certainly too early to expect any self-respecting Pattaya saloonkeeper to be at work anyway.
The first few hours of any investigation were always the best hours for Tay. His mind was uncluttered by half-formed theories and assumptions, and his energy was at its peak. After that, the confusion and tedium settled in soon enough. That was why he always tried to make the most of the magic hours at the beginning.
Secrets was only a few hundred yards away and taking a careful look at the area around Secrets was what Tay wanted to do first.
It was time to go to work.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The first time Tay was in Pattaya had been when he was taken there to meet August by a United States diplomatic security agent. He and the woman were jointly investigating the murder of the wife of the American ambassador in Singapore and she thought August could help them.
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She described August as a retired State Department employee who had bought a Pattaya go-go bar for a retirement gig. The bar August owned then was called Babydolls, the same bar where August told him he could find Mad Max now if he needed a local he could trust. Not a coincidence, obviously.
The second time Tay was in Pattaya had been when he got a cryptic summons from August concerning a different case. He met August that time at Secrets, and August told him he had sold Babydolls.
Babydolls had been typical of Pattaya. It was a raucous go-go bar filled with half-naked Thai girls and loud, mostly white tourists swilling beer and ogling the women. Secrets was anything but typical of Pattaya. It was more of an old-school gentlemen’s club, one that smelled of fine leather, expensive whiskey, and good cigars.
Tay had been uncomfortable in Babydolls. He hated admitting that, even to himself, because it made him feel like a bit of a wimp. Oddly, he had the sense that August didn’t much like Babydolls either. He may have been wrong about that, but August’s abrupt change in style caused him to believe he probably wasn’t.
Tay recognized the laneway off Walking Street that led to Secrets when he came to it. It was a narrow alley paved in cracked concrete and overhung with big signboards promoting the bars, restaurants, and modest hotels to be found along it. The wall of the building on the corner had probably been tiled one day long ago but, if it had been, the tiles had all cracked and fallen away leaving nothing but a rough masonry wall on which someone had inexplicably painted a wide red stripe about head high.