Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True stories from the case files of Warren Olson by Warren Olson

Author:Warren Olson [Olson, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814358002
Publisher: Monsoon Books Pte. Ltd.
Published: 2006-07-27T17:00:00+00:00

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.

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