Bangkok Busted: You Go To Jail For Sure by William John Stapleton

Author:William John Stapleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature
ISBN: 9781456610111
Published: 2013-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

MAI PENH RAI – NEVER MIND

Michael had first been alerted to the fact that something had gone down when he caught the repeated “Mai Kooeys”, don’t talk, which surrounded him while he dawdled away an hour or two at the bottom of Soi Twilight.

The Thais were inveterate gossips and assumed no foreigner could understand a single word of what they said. This piece of gossip was about as good as it got: the news that the hated foreigner who dared, after being systematically robbed, to suggest they were a pack of thieves busily ruining their own businesses had been targeted and humiliated once again.

He maintained a calm exterior.

Inside, Michael’s head was doing hand stands high above a frozen Arctic wasteland.

Rivulets of molten ice glinted as the frigid sun drifted towards the horizon.

In the back of a taxi, a new acquaintance he had befriended, explained exactly how the Thai police made it look like you had had a heart attack while in custody.

His passing friend demonstrated the use of electronic prods on certain muscles, a discreet way for them to dispose of people they did not like.

Like many an aging or reformed junkie his new friend remained attune, like a weather vane in a Hitchcock movie, to the surrounding networks of criminals and police.

Insider knowledge you could say.

The police used his friend to pass a message: “You are not safe. You are about to have an accident. Stop writing what you’re writing.”

“If anyone stole my laptop I would kill them,” Michael’s fresh acquaintance said. “Do you need any help?”

“No, I don’t want to harm anyone,” Michael said. Remarkable how many times he had been asked: “Do you want him killed?” Only in Bangkok. He never bit. Who needed to be double crossed in a place like this.

He always responded: ‘Mai Penh Rai, never mind, mai bahnhah, no problem. Buddha take care.”

Those proffering their services would have pocketed his money and dobbed him into the police in a single breath.

His new friend nodded, casting him a penetrating look. Better to play a safe deck and not take the risk, even in a land where life was cheap and getting someone knocked off only cost a few hundred dollars, a thousand at the most.

In the broader world of Thailand a debate over the most appropriate form of democracy and the role of the monarchy filled the opinion pages of newspapers. There had been several major busts of the drug “ice”. There was a shoot-up between rival high schools in which two students were killed and a number injured while on a school bus.

The king, the world’s longest reigning monarch, was out of hospital after months of convalescence, and the Thais Michael observed would laugh or smile for no particular reason.

The sense of drifting into anarchy as the much revered king drifted towards an unimaginable death evaporated.

Dignified and still erudite, the king was now well into his eighties. Most of Thailand’s population had never known a world without him. To imagine such a thing frightened them.

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