Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

THE CASE OF THE VANISHING BEER BAR

Like most private eyes, I get more than my fair share of missing person cases. Thailand is a big country with a population of sixty million or thereabouts, and there are about ten million in Bangkok alone. But finding farangs who have gone missing is usually a fairly easy proposition because they represent a small percentage of the population. And they stick out. Often I’d be contacted by worried parents who hadn’t heard from their backpacking offspring for a few weeks. And more often than not said offspring would turn up on a beach somewhere stoned out of his or her mind living their own version of The Beach.

Finding missing Thais isn’t quite as easy. And what Peter from New Zealand asked me to do sounded next to impossible. He’d been in Thailand on holiday and had spent a few days bar-hopping in Bangkok. He’d visited the usual haunts-Nana Plaza, Patpong, Soi Cowboy-and one night he’d visited a complex of beer bars at Sukhumvit Soi 10. He’d strolled from bar to bar and then found a girl that he really liked. Her name was Apple and she worked as a cashier in one of the bars. He’d offered to pay her bar fine but Apple had told him that she wasn’t interested in ‘short-times’. Peter had spent the rest of the night in the bar, talking to her as she worked and buying her colas, then when she knocked off for the night she went with him to his hotel. Peter didn’t go into too much detail other than to say that it was the best night of sex that he’d ever had and that he realised there and then that Apple was the girl that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

He opened his heart to Apple, but she was sceptical. She saw hundreds of farangs pass through her beer bar, and knew that more often than not they were butterflies, flitting from girl to girl. She wasn’t working in the bar because she wanted a boyfriend, or because she enjoyed the job. She worked because she had to support her family upcountry. Peter was determined to show Apple that he was serious about her so he arranged to see her the next evening. She agreed to speak to her boss so that she could finish work early, and they could go and have dinner and talk.

Peter was over the moon. He went to a jewellery shop and bought an engagement ring which he planned to give her that night. He booked a table at a good restaurant, went for a haircut, and withdrew a stack of cash on his credit cards. The wind went out of his sails when he turned up at Sukhumvit Soi 10 that evening. The entire complex of bar beers had gone. It had been razed to the ground. A wire fence had been erected around the whole area warning people to keep out. At first Peter thought he’d gone to the wrong place. He looked around, scratching his head, but gradually realised that he was where he should be. The Ambassador Hotel was opposite, the Sky Train roared by overhead. But the bars had gone. Every one of them. Peter was distraught. All he knew of Apple was her name. She didn’t have a mobile phone, and when he’d asked her where she lived the name of her road seemed to have a dozen syllables.

He spent the night on his own in his hotel hoping that Apple would contact him, but his phone never rang. He went to the airport the next day, flew back to New Zealand and emailed me. I knew what had happened to the beer bars. The owner of the land-who also happened to own a big chunk of the city’s massage parlours-had decided that he could make more money by developing the site than renting it out to bar owners. Rather than waste his valuable time negotiating with the dozens of tenants, the landlord decided to send in bulldozers at dawn instead.

I told Peter that I might be looking for a needle in a haystack. If he’d had her full Thai name it would have been easier, but her one syllable nickname was all he had. Thais often have several nicknames, one for their family, one for their friends and another for work. There was every chance that Apple was only known as Apple at the bar. Peter was adamant that he wanted me to try so he wired over a retainer and I got to work.

Peter was able to tell me the approximate location of Apple’s bar, so my first stop was at Lumpini Police Station, which had responsibility for the Sukhumvit Soi 10 complex. I got there just after nine o’clock in the morning and found fifty irate Thai businessmen and women, all of them owners of various businesses in the flattened complex. One of them had a plan of the area and from Peter’s description I was able to figure out that Apple worked in the Mai Pen Rai Bar. The It Doesn’t Matter Bar, in English.

I chatted to the tenants, all of whom were livid at the way their livelihoods had been taken away from them. Sadly, that’s the way it is in Thailand. The rich assume that they have the Buddha-given right to ride roughshod over the poor. And the quality of justice you get in the courts often has as much to do with your wealth as it does with the quality of your case. They were talking about mounting a media campaign, and hiring a top legal firm to represent them. But it was clear that they had an uphill struggle ahead of them. And even if they were successful in the courts, their businesses were still gone for ever. A fair number of the beer bars had been owned by farangs and I asked why there were no farangs at the police station. The consensus seemed to be that the farangs didn’t get up before noon. I figured that the farang tenants had realised that their chances of getting their money back was close to zero and they had simply given up.

I managed to find one chap who told me that the Mai Pen Rai Bar had been owned by a Taiwanese guy and that his Thai girlfriend had run the bar. No one seemed to know his name, or hers.

The investigating officer was having a hard time. The tenants were hounding him, and newspaper and television journalists were yelling questions at him whenever he appeared from his office. I hung around until midday by which time most of the tenants and journalists had drifted away to eat. I used my very best Thai and a bag of freshly cut pineapple to persuade his assistant to allow me a few minutes of her boss’s time. He was an affable fifty-year-old, and became even more affable after I slipped him a 1,000-baht note (for the widows and orphans fund, naturally) and asked him if he could get me a phone number for the Taiwanese owner of the Mai Pen Rai Bar. I told him that I’d left a bag in the guy’s care, figuring that would get me more sympathy than a lovelorn farang on the hunt for a bargirl. He pocketed the banknote (on behalf of the widows and orphans, naturally) and told me to call him back the next day.

He was as good as his word, and the following afternoon I was on the phone to Lek, the Taiwanese guy’s girlfriend. Lek was fairly sure that she knew who Apple was but told me that all the girls were casual labour, pretty much free to come and go as they pleased. The bar kept no records, and all the staff were paid in cash. Lek only had phone numbers for a few of the girls and Apple wasn’t one of them. According to Lek, a lot of the Soi 10 girls had gone to work at Soi Zero and Soi Asoke.

I did the rounds of Soi Zero. It was never one of my favourite places, it has to be said. Despite the attempts of various bar owners to put some life into the place, it remained a dingy, dirty unattractive area under a busy freeway and the only people who made any money out of the area were the Thai middlemen who bought and sold the bars, usually to farang tourists who had been talked into buying a lease for their bargirl friend in an attempt to get her to go straight. Anyway, after half a dozen JDs I’d only managed to find two girls who’d worked in Soi 10, but neither had worked at the Mai Pen Rai Bar and neither remembered a girl called Apple.

The following night I headed for Soi Asoke, a rough and ready collection of beer bars that was itself demolished a year or so after Soi 10 bit the dust. Soi Asoke was as soulless a place as Soi Zero. I quite enjoy the buzz of Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza, with their go-go bars and shows and endless supply of beautiful dancers. The beer bars at Soi Asoke were short on pretty girls, and most of them were freelancers. The bars didn’t pay them a wage, they sometimes earned a small commission on drinks that farangs bought for them but the bulk of their money was earned on their backs. As a result the girls were pushier and every girl I spoke to did her utmost to persuade me to take them short time, long time, any time.

Eventually I found a bar where two former Mai Pen Rai girls worked. That was the good news. The bad news was that neither were there that night. One had just gone off with a customer, the other hadn’t been seen for a couple of days. I came back the next day, but the girls were still AWOL. The next day I struck gold and found Top, who remembered Apple and who had the mobile phone number for a friend of Apple’s. I phoned the friend who told me that Apple had left Bangkok and gone back to stay with her parents in Udon. The friend didn’t know the address, or Apple’s full name, and trying to track down a girl called Apple in a city as big as Udon really would be needle in a haystack time. I offered the friend 1,000 baht if she could get me Apple’s full Thai name and she said she’d ask around. She phoned me back the next day and told me that she had the name but that she wanted the 1,000 baht first. Clever girl. She lived in Soi 101 so we arranged to meet at Onut Skytrain station. I waited on the train side of the barrier so that I didn’t have to pay for the journey until Apple’s friend appeared. It was like handing over a ransom demand. She had the name written on a piece of paper and she wouldn’t pass it over the barrier until I’d given her the money. She grinned once she had the cash, gave me a pretty wai and handed me the piece of paper. Apple’s full name was Miss Areerat Phromcharoen. And Apple’s friend had also come up with her date of birth as an added bonus. Tracking down Apple had moved from being an outside chance to a dead cert.

I emailed Peter and told him that I was on the case, but that if I was going to find Apple I’d have to go up to Udon. Absence had truly made the heart grow fonder and Peter promised to wire me another three-day retainer and enough money to pay for a plane ticket to Udon and a night in a reasonable hotel.

I caught a motorcycle taxi to the Pathumwan District office and found my friendly computer worker. I gave her the piece of paper and a 500-baht note and my winning smile. Fortunately, much of Ubon Ratchathani’s data was linked to the main network so she could call up all Apple’s info on her computer screen. Within seconds I had Apple’s place of birth and the sub district where the family home was. It was a big step forward, but to get the exact address I’d have to pay a visit to the district office.

I bought a ticket to Udon and hired a taxi driver from the airport to the district office. Another 500 baht and the taxi driver and I were on our way to Apple’s house. It was in a tiny, dusty village in the middle of nowhere, just a couple of handfuls of wooden shacks. Apple was at home, and amazed to have a strange farang turn up on her doorstep.

Her mum was there and so was a younger brother so to save her any embarrassment I said that I was a reporter for the Bangkok Post writing a story about people who had lost their jobs as a result of the trashing of the Soi 10 complex.

While her mum went off to fetch me some food, I gave the young lad 100 baht and asked him to go and buy a Coke. While we were alone I quickly explained the real reason for my visit; that Peter wanted to see her again. Apple sighed and said that yes she remembered Peter but that she had a big problem.

I said that Peter really liked her and hat I was sure that he’d be able to help her.

Apple started to get a bit tearful then. Her father had a gambling problem and had run up debts of almost 50,000 baht, a small fortune for a rural Thai. That was why she’d gone to Bangkok in the first place, to earn enough to pay off her father’s debts. The man who her father owed the money to had an obnoxious and overweight son who fancied Apple and if the debt wasn’t paid off quickly the man wanted Apple to marry the boy with the 50,000-baht written off as the sin sot, or dowry. Apple’s father was happy enough to accept the deal, but Apple herself was horrified at the idea. I could practically see the wheels turning behind her eyes as she realised that Peter was a much better option.

I checked my cell phone and was pleasantly surprised to find that I was actually getting a weak signal. I wouldn’t normally call overseas on a cell phone but the expense would be down to Peter so I rang him and explained that I had found the elusive Miss Apple. I ran the situation by him and gave the phone to Apple.

To be honest, if it was down to me you wouldn’t have seen me for dust. Gambling is an addiction and even if Peter paid off the father’s debts, there’d be more down the line. Apple was a nice enough girl and I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed, but she was a poorly educated farm girl and I couldn’t see that she’d have much in common with Peter. They’d spent only a few hours together and while I was sure the sex had been good, there’s a world of difference between a night of steamy sex and a lifetime of companionship.

Tears were welling up in Apple’s eyes and she started telling Peter how much she loved him and missed him. ‘I have you, only one,’ she said. ‘I want you help me and my family.’

They spoke for a while and then Apple handed the phone back to me. Peter said that he’d agreed to give her 50,000 baht to pay off the debt and that he’d send her another 20,000 baht a month until he came back to Thailand. He was hooked. I figured he was throwing his money away. Thailand is full of pretty girls, girls with university degrees and good jobs and respectable parents who don’t run up gambling debts with local shylocks. He thought he was helping Apple, riding to her rescue like a white knight. But I thought that he was buying her affection and that he’d only have her so long as he continued to hand over cash. But Peter was old enough to make his own decisions and who was I to rain on his parade?