Behind the Night Bazaar (27 page)

Some of the cops who’d entered the club with Ratratarn re-emerged with more patrons in tow—those too far from the door or too drunk to flee when they’d burst in. One was bleeding from a cut above the eye, another clutched at his bloodied nose, while a third had to be dragged to the van between two officers. The Thai man who’d been the auctioneer four nights earlier was among those arrested, as was Kelly’s bouncer, who allowed himself to be led away by a skinny officer whose neck he could have crushed with one hand.

Mark couldn’t bear to watch any longer. Returning his gun to its holster, he slumped against the wall of the booth with his head in his hands. After several minutes, he heard the vehicles moving and the sound of a siren. He looked up to see Simone still staring at the spectacle through her camera lens.

‘What’s happening now?’ he said dully.

‘One of the vans is full. It’s pulling out. Looks as if they’re arresting everyone in the place, though I haven’t seen Kelly yet.’ She paused. ‘God, I can’t believe how quickly these guys get around.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The media. They’re arriving in droves. There’s a Channel 4 van pulling up and a couple of others—’

A volley of gunshots rang out from inside the club.

Mark sprang up, instinctively placing an arm around Simone’s shoulders. Trembling beneath his touch, she kept her gaze through the camera. He looked again through a crack in the wall. Everyone in the street—the cops, their captives, the press—seemed to hold a collective breath. Mark felt for his gun with his free hand as Ratratarn marched out of the club.

The lieutenant colonel made a beeline for one of the squad cars, reached through the window and grabbed the radio handset. In the eerie silence that descended on the scene, Mark could hear him barking orders.

‘Can you understand what he’s saying?’ he whispered.

‘He’s calling for an ambulance,’ Simone said.

Nervous chatter started up in the crowd and the journalists took it as their cue to get to work. A small clique surrounded Ratratarn and began firing questions at him, while the cameramen and photographers set about getting visuals. At first Ratratarn seemed to be fending off the journalists’ inquiries. But when the ambulance arrived, he signalled for them to wait by the entrance while he accompanied two paramedics inside the club.

After a minute or so, Ratratarn reappeared in the doorway, ushering out a police officer who was carrying a young girl. Mark recognised her as the one whose virginity had been auctioned off. The officer cradled the girl in his arms like a baby, and Mark suspected this whole episode was staged for the press. Indeed, no sooner was the first officer’s photo taken in a barrage of flashing cameras than the second appeared, his arms around the shoulders of another child. Then six other young girls were herded out, one dressed as a baby bride. Pale and frightened, they shuffled through the crowd, clutching at each other and shielding their eyes from the glare of the cameras. The two police officers—both handsome men, no doubt hand-picked by Ratratarn for the occasion—slowed and smiled benevolently for the photographers before steering their pathetic little wards into the waiting squad cars.

A second procession followed, led by Ratratarn. A combination of police and ambulance officers carried two stretchers between them, a couple more cops bringing up the rear. The photographers switched their attention to the bodies on the stretchers, covered from head to toe in blankets. In what seemed to Mark like another orchestrated detail, the left arm of one corpse had been allowed to slip from under the covers, revealing the chocolate-brown shirt of a police uniform.

Standing between the two stretchers, illuminated by the glare of television lights and camera flashes, Ratratarn gave a brief statement in Thai, before a wave of his hand sent the press scampering back to their vehicles.

As the bodies were loaded into the ambulance, the remaining police van drove away with its siren on, escorted by a cavalcade of motorcycle cops. Ratratarn’s squad car pulled out in the wake of the ambulance; the clamour of sirens resonated through the streets.

Two police officers posted as sentries set about cordoning off the entrance to the club with orange plastic tape, watched by a small crowd of onlookers, mostly Kitten Club staff who hadn’t been arrested. A jacket lay in a heap in the middle of the street, dropped by one of the punters, and the air was hazy with churned-up dust.

Mark was still staring at the scene when he felt Simone standing beside him.

‘Kelly’s dead,’ she said flatly.

‘The second body on the stretcher?’

She nodded. ‘I heard Ratratarn tell journalists that Kelly pulled out a gun and shot one of their officers. They returned fire and he was killed.’

‘Oh, shit!’ Mark said. ‘Do you know—?’

But Simone rushed out of the booth into the street. He jammed his pistol back into its holster and followed to find her retching into the gutter.

K
elly’s death was a slap in the face so violent, it made Jayne throw up. While Mark went off to find a tuk-tuk, she forced herself to go back over the details of her conversation with Ratratarn.

‘All your conditions will be met,’ the lieutenant colonel had said. ‘I give you my word. Take it or leave it.’

She’d taken it, and now another two men were dead. One corpse was Kelly and she suspected the other was Sergeant Pornsak. She’d seen Pornsak kick in the door and enter the Kitten Club when the raid began, but she hadn’t seen him come out.

Ratratarn told journalists at the scene that Kelly’s death was accidental. It was clear to Jayne, though, that he’d never intended to arrest Kelly at all. Kelly had too much dirt on him and Ratratarn would never have risked putting him on trial. The raid on the club had been little more than a pretext for getting Kelly out of the way. That it meant having to account for the deaths of two foreigners—Didier and Doug Kelly—at police hands in the space of a week was a measure of Ratratarn’s confidence.

As for Sergeant Pornsak, something told Jayne that his death, too, was part of Ratratarn’s plan. The lieutenant colonel didn’t flinch at sacrificing his own sidekick. It was the thought of how narrowly she’d escaped the same fate that overwhelmed her.

By the time she cleaned herself up, Mark had returned with a tuk-tuk. He directed the driver to take them to the Riverside, squeezing her hand reassuringly as they drove through the streets. The first few fat drops of rain began to fall as they pulled up. A brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the sky and within seconds, the trickle turned into a downpour. It was only a short dash across the road to the shelter of the bar, but they were soaked by the time they reached it.

Mark found them a table by the edge of the balcony, which was under cover but only just; the rain bounced off the railings onto their feet. The house band, cranking up the volume to compete with the storm, was performing ‘We Are the Champions’. Over Mark’s shoulder, Jayne could see the lead singer—a bare-chested Thai man with a shaved head and handlebar moustache—belting his heart out in homage to the late Freddie Mercury. Jayne liked the band, but the song was so much at odds with how she knew Mark must be feeling, she silently begged them to stop.

‘We are the dickheads, more likely,’ Mark said, tilting his head towards the band. ‘Are you up for a drink?’

‘God, yes! Whisky.’

‘Make mine a double.’

When their order arrived, Mark raised his glass. ‘Here’s to yet another resounding victory for the forces of good over the forces of evil,’ he said. ‘Not.’

He gulped the contents and signalled the waiter to bring another. ‘I’m warning you, Simone,’ he said, ‘I intend to get plastered tonight. Can you handle that?’

In lieu of a reply, Jayne drained her own glass. The whisky felt like fire in her empty stomach and she held her breath until the blaze subsided.

‘Will you be OK for a minute?’ Mark took a mobile phone from his pocket. ‘I have to make a call.’

Jayne nodded and watched as he headed for the relative quiet of the bar’s main entrance. The Thai Freddie Mercury was singing ‘Can anybody find me somebody to love?’ The lyrics made Jayne maudlin. She lit a cigarette.

Lightning flashed like a strobe, followed by thunderclaps that reminded Jayne of the shots fired at the Kitten Club. Suddenly feeling cold, she shook the droplets from her hair and rummaged through her backpack for a jacket.

Condensation on the whisky refills had formed puddles on the table by the time Mark reappeared.

‘You know you smoke too much,’ he said, nodding at her cigarette as he sat down. He took his glass in hand. ‘Another toast,’ he said. ‘This one’s to the Chiang Mai police.’ He drank half the contents in one gulp. ‘I’ve gotta hand it to those bastards. They knew just when to strike. Totally fucked up my plans.’

‘So what will you do now?’ Jayne said, moving the ashtray to the corner of the table furthest from Mark.

‘Oh, I’ll be flying out tomorrow morning a little later than planned, and I’ll be travelling solo since Kelly can’t make it.’ He laughed cynically and finished his drink. ‘I still can’t believe it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I mean, the timing was un-fucking-believable. You’d think they knew exactly what I was planning down to the last minute.’

Jayne stared into her glass.

‘And now Kelly’s dead,’ Mark said, ‘leaving no one to testify to the cops’ role in all of this. Without the photo of the pay-off, we don’t have a leg to stand on. Everything we’ve got is circumstantial. Or else it comes down to our word against theirs. And after tonight’s performance, I’d have to say the smart money’d be on the cops, wouldn’t you?’ He waved at a waiter and held up his glass, then leaned across the table and took Jayne’s free hand. ‘I’m really sorry, Simone,’ he said softly. ‘About your friend, I mean.’

‘I’m sorry, too,’ she said, ‘for both our sakes. I know how hard you worked on this, Mark.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘But maybe it’s better this way.’

She felt his muscles tense beneath her touch.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you said yourself the Thai government’s getting tougher on child prostitution. And this raid proves they’re serious about it.’

Mark snatched his hands away. ‘What? We both know Ratratarn doesn’t give a shit about child prostitution. He’s corrupt!’

Jayne glanced around the room. ‘Even so,’ she said in a low voice, ‘it’s ultimately up to the Thais to deal with that. I mean, it
is
their country.’

‘What are you saying? That we should all go home and let them sort it out for themselves? Jesus, Simone! That flies in the face of everything I’ve worked for—not to mention the whole philosophy underlying the Australian laws.’

The arrival of the waiter with another round of drinks gave Jayne a moment to choose her words.

‘Of course there’s value in your work,’ she said carefully. ‘The problem is, you can launch a police operation in this part of the world on perfectly reasonable grounds, only to find that things are far more complicated than they seem—’

‘I can’t see what’s so fucking complicated!’ Mark interrupted her. ‘Corrupt cops shouldn’t be allowed to get away with murder.’

‘Oh, what?’ she said, losing her patience. ‘And that doesn’t happen in Australia? For Chrissake, Mark, you worked in Brisbane! What about all the scandals under the Bjelke-Petersen government?’

‘It’s not the same thing!’ he said.

‘On the contrary, there’s a lot in common between what happened in Brisbane in the eighties and what’s happening in Chiang Mai today. If I remember rightly, the Queensland police were found to be instrumental in running illegal prostitution rackets there, too.’

Mark took a swig from his third whisky. ‘So there’s police corruption in Australia as well as Thailand. So what? That doesn’t make any of it right.’

‘No,’ Jayne said, ‘it doesn’t. The point is, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over what happened here.’

He scoffed.

‘No, really,’ she said. ‘Truth is, you probably had about as much chance of bringing down Ratratarn as a Thai cop would’ve had going up against…oh, what was the Queensland police commissioner’s name?’

‘Terry Lewis?’

‘Yeah, Terry Lewis.’

Mark narrowed his eyes. ‘You didn’t seem to feel that way before.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that a few nights ago, you were all for trying to bring down Ratratarn and the other cops. Why the sudden change of heart?’

‘I guess I didn’t realise what we were up against. Or maybe I just didn’t want to admit it.’ She forced a smile. ‘I mean, who’d have predicted Ratratarn would bite off the hand that feeds him?’

She realised, too late, that it was a mistake to try to make light of it.

‘Jesus, Simone! We’re talking about the arsehole who killed your friend. Don’t you care about that any more?’

‘Of course I care!’ She felt her face redden.

‘Then how the fuck can you joke about it?’ Mark banged his empty glass on the table. ‘In fact, how come you’re so bloody calm about the whole thing? It’s as if what happened tonight didn’t really come as a surprise to you at all.’

It took all the nerve Jayne had to look him in the eye. ‘What are you implying?’

Mark held her gaze and Jayne was sure he could see right through her. The whisky in her stomach turned to acid and she felt a trickle of sweat run down her back. She couldn’t even trust herself to butt out her cigarette, sure her trembling hands would give her away.

But in the next moment, Mark appeared to deflate. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, slumping back into his chair. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that I’m…I’m so pissed off…and tired. I’m so tired…’

‘It’s OK,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette and reaching for his hands.

He looked up with such a sad smile that Jayne could have kicked herself. Mark didn’t need her to rationalise why the operation didn’t work. He only wanted her reassurance that everything was going to be all right—even if they both knew it wasn’t.

‘Why don’t you finish this,’ she said gently, pushing her third, untouched whisky towards him, ‘and we’ll get out of here.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Look, I really am sorry—’