The case of the Aussie takeaway Part 2

There was a fair bit of traffic around and I had to slow down. The motorcycles quickly gained on me. Machete Guy’s pillion passenger brandished a pistol and motioned for me to pull over to the side of the road. Yeah, right. I shook my head, braked hard, and pulled a left, cutting across a bus and feeling the rear end fishtail as I floored the accelerator again. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to outrun the bikes in the city. It would only be a matter of time before I hit traffic or a red light.

I could feel sweat trickling down my bike. Life is cheap in Bangkok. That’s not a cliché, it’s an economic truth. The going rate for a professional hit is two thousand baht for a Thai, ten thousand if it’s a farang. But amateurs were also happy to use bullets to solve a quarrel because most murderers end up serving seven years at most, and that was in the unlikely event of them being caught. All of this was running through my mind as I drove through the streets at high speed. Along with wondering why I hadn’t chosen another profession, why I’d moved to the Land of Smiles in the first place, and why I hadn’t read the manual for the camera before taking it on the job.

The best I could hope for was to run across a police patrol car but even that was no guarantee that I’d be safe. For all I knew, the four guys in hot pursuit could well be off-duty cops.

The second bike drew up on my passenger side and the pillion passenger waved a large automatic at me. I swung the car to the right. I had a really, really bad feeling about the way this was going to play out. They were getting madder and madder and all it would take would be one shot to a tyre and it would all be over.

Suddenly I saw a sign for the Pattaya Expressway and realised that it was my best hope: bikes aren’t allowed on the expressway and even if they ignored the law and followed me I’d be able to get the car up to full speed and with them being two up on small bikes they wouldn’t be able to keep up with me.

I kept on going straight, accelerated, then as the ramp approached I slammed on the brakes and pulled the car hard to the left, just missing the concrete dividing wall that separated the ramp from the road. The bikes continued to roar down the road then I saw the brake lights go red as they realised what had happened. I sped towards the line of toll booths, pulling my wallet out of my pocket and flicking through the notes. The toll was forty baht but I flung a red hundred baht note at the toll booth attendant and yelled at her to keep the change as I sped on through.

As I accelerated down the expressway I kept looking in the rear view mirror but there was no sign of my pursuers, and after twenty minutes barrelling along at more than 140 kms an hour I started to relax. I left the expressway at the third exit, then parked up and had a bowl of noodles and pork and a bottle of Chang beer at a roadside vendor to calm my nerves. My hands stopped shaking by the time I’d put the third bottle away.

I waited a couple of hours before driving back to the city, and I caught a few hours sleep after e-mailing a full report to the Australian agency along with the photographs I’d taken.

I was woken by the phone ringing. It was one of the Australian operatives – the client had booked himself on an afternoon flight to Bangkok and he wanted to confront his wife, ideally while she was in bed with her lover. I’ve never understood that, but it’s happened time and time again. It’s not enough for the wronged guy to know that his wife has been unfaithful, he wants to rub her face in the fact that he knows. If it was me, I’d just up and leave. Okay, I’d clear out the bank accounts first and maybe take a razor blade to all her clothes, but I wouldn’t bother with a confrontation. That’s just me, though, and in this business the client is always right. Even when he’s wrong.

I got up and showered, then returned the rental car. The guy who ran the rental company was an old friend and he agreed to swap my paperwork with that of an American tourist who’d just flown back to Seattle so I was covered just in case the bike guys had taken my registration number.

The Australians had told me to take good care of the client so I booked a Mercedes and driver and got to Don Muang Airport an hour before the flight was due, holding a piece of card with his name on it as I sipped my black coffee. The man who walked over to me and introduced himself was just about the fattest guy I had ever set eyes on. He wasn’t big. He wasn’t even huge. He was obese and must have weighed at least four hundred pounds straight out of the shower. He was in his early forties, with slicked back hair and half a dozen chins. He was wearing a light blue suit that was stretched like a sail in a high wind I figured he must be at least five times the weight of the his wife and I couldn’t imagine how they went about having sex. We shook hands. His was the size of a small shovel but the fingers were soft, like underdone pork sausages. He had no luggage and hadn’t shaved on the plane, but he said he wanted to head straight out to the apartment. I sat up front as we drove out to Bangna. The client didn’t say anything and only grunted at my attempts to start a conversation so after I while I just let him sit there in silence.

It isn’t unusual for a pretty young Thai girl to marry an older guy. Like girls all over the Third World they want someone to take care of them and their families and there’s no doubt that a few thousand dollars in the bank can help add to a man’s attractiveness to the opposite sex. But there was no way on earth that the match between the lovely girl we were going to see and the blimp I had in the back of the Mercedes was a marriage made in heaven. He must have known that. Every time he caught a glimpse of the two of them in a mirror it must have hit home that he was simply too big for her. If it had been me, I’d have just been grateful for the fact that I was allowed to sleep with a woman as beautiful as her, and if the downside meant that she had the occasional fling with a man nearer her own age, well then I’d just put that down to the price I had to pay. The Australians hadn’t managed to catch her being unfaithful in Sydney, which meant that she was probably only fooling around in Thailand. I wanted to tell the client that he’d be better off turning a blind eye to the occasional indiscretion and that the best thing he could do would be to go straight back to Sydney, but I kept quiet.

I had the driver park around the corner from the apartment block, and pulled on a pair of shades and a Singha Beer baseball cap before I got out of the car. The client guy was obviously used to sitting in the back of expensive vehicles because he didn’t make a move to open his door himself, he just sat staring straight ahead until I opened it for him. He wheezed as he hauled himself out of the car, and I swear the suspension sighed with relief. ‘I burn easily,’ I said, explaining away the cap and sunglasses, but the real reason was that I didn’t want to risk being recognised if Machete Man and his gun-wielding buddies were back in the restaurant. They weren’t, and I relaxed a little when I saw that the restaurant was closed.

A receptionist buzzed us into the apartment block and a purple five hundred baht note got us the room number. We rode up in the lift in silence to the fourth floor. I looked around to see if there was a weight limit for the lift, and I kept having visions of the cables snapping and us both plummeting to our deaths.

There were a couple of dozen rooms on either side of a long corridor. We walked slowly along to the room. I waited at the side of the door as the client knocked, twice.

The door opened. The girl was there wearing a white t-shirt and blue denim shorts. She stared at him sleepily, then her jaw dropped as she realised who it was.

‘Darling…’ she said, but then the words dried up and her mouth open and closed silently.

‘Don’t “darling” me, you whore!’ hissed the client, and he pushed the door open. It was a studio apartment and the waiter was lying on the double bed, wrapped in a towel. The waiter leapt to his feet as the old man strode into the room and rushed out, his bare feet slapping on the tiled floor as he bolted down the corridor.

I stayed where I was. The client had left the door open so I could hear everything that was being said. The girl began pleading that there’d been a mistake, that the waiter was just a friend, that she was only staying in the room until she could get a flight to Chiang Mai. The client let her beg and plead, then silenced her with an outburst of expletives that suggested he’d had an army career in his younger, and probably thinner, days.

‘You were a whore when I met you, and you’re a whore now!’ he shouted once he’d finished swearing. ‘I gave you everything. I gave you the clothes on your back, the watch on your wrist. I gave you money for your parents, I paid for your brothers to go to school. Anything you needed, anything I wanted, I gave to you. And you do this to me? You fuck around behind my back.’

She started to cry.

‘You’re dead to me, you bitch!’ he shouted. ‘When I get back home I’m destroying everything of yours. Every dress, every handbag, every shoe, everything I ever gave you, I’m burning. Every photograph of you, I’m destroying. You’re dead to me. I’m divorcing you and you won’t get a penny. The best lawyers in the country work for me, and if I get my way you’ll lose your Australian citizenship.’

There was a dull thud and I took a quick look into he room just in case she’s beaten him over the head with a blunt object but she was the one on the floor, slumped down next to the bed, her hands over her face, sobbing her heart out.

He waddled over to a dressing table and grabbed her handbag. He pulled out and Australian passport and ripped it into several places, went over to the toilet and flushed away the pieces. Then he threw the handbag into the toilet for good measure.

‘Please, darling…’ sobbed the girl.

The client sneered at her and walked out of the room, his ham-sized hands clenched into fists. I followed him back to the lift. I saw the waiter in the stairwell, anxiously looking in our direction, his hands clutching the towel around his waits. I waved for him to keep out of the way.

The lift doors opened and we rode down. ‘Bitch,’ said the client, venomously. His face was bathed in sweat and there were damp patches under the arms of his jacket.

I said nothing. I could see his point, but I figured that of the two of them, he’d lost the most. She’d lost a sugar daddy, but then she wouldn’t have to satisfy the sexual urges of a man big enough to crush her if he rolled over in his sleep. And a girl as pretty as her wouldn’t have to look too hard to find another husband. He’d lost a beautiful young gold-digger but now he’d have to sleep with nothing more than his right hand for company. Swings and roundabouts? I didn’t think so. If ever there was a Phyric victory, this was it.

We walked out of the block and over to the Mercedes. ‘I don’t need you any more,’ he wheezed. ‘I can take care of myself at the airport. Thank you. For everything.’ He handed me a fistful of Australian dollars which I guessed was my cab fare home.

I opened the rear door of the Mercedes and he hauled himself slowly into the back. The suspension groaned in protest. I closed the door behind him and the car moved away from the kerb. I got one last look at the client as the car drove off. There were tears streaming down his fleshy cheeks.

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