Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (13 page)

“Velly funny joke! Velly funny joke!” Narith yelled after me in delight, as I made my way towards a much needed drink. Jesus! I thought, mightily relieved that I hadn’t gone with plan one and the boot in the bollocks. If this is the Cambodian sense of humour Chantavy and Chavy are going to be washing a great deal of boxer shorts on this visa run. Despite the motodop drivers’ hilarity, I wasn’t sure the joke was velly funny, at all.

I doubt that Louis, the tough French owner of the bar that had become my local would have even batted an eyelid if Narith had played the same trick on him. He was one of the most villainous looking characters I have ever seen. Both his muscles and craggy face could have been carved from granite. His arms were criss-crossed with thin, white scars from previous knife fights, and his wrists were as thick as my forearms. He was obviously not a man you would want to cross and when I first arrived on The Hill I took one look at him and thought “I’ll give
that
bar a miss”. However, by the end of my stay in Sihanoukville I had realised despite his fearsome reputation and the fact that he looked like a character out of ‘Papillon,’ Louis was one of the good guys and only switched on the darker side of his character if someone made a problem in his bar. Normally, the Frenchman was polite and friendly to all his customers and the ‘Shark Bar’ was one of the most popular places on The Hill. I knew the brawny gangster couldn’t be all bad, because all his girls seemed to love him, as did his many friends. One night Louis was in a particularly amicable mood and in a husky voice heavy with an accent from the darker streets of Paris he told me how he had come to be a bar owner in this back of beyond place.

“My name is Louis, but in the underworld of Paris I have always been known as ‘Le Requin’ which means ‘The Shark’. I have been in Cambodia for eight years now. It was tough in the beginning, because I missed the bright lights and action of Paris and it was so very quiet in this country I felt I had been buried alive. Now the tourists have begun to arrive in more numbers and since I moved from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville and became a bar-owner, life has been more interesting.

Yes, I am a French gangster and I am proud of it. My father was a well-known safe-cracker. He was a great friend of Jaques Mesrine, who used to bounce me on his knee and show me fighting moves when I was a young boy whenever he came to our house to talk over jobs with my Papa. I cannot remember my grandfather, but I know he ran women in Montmarte so I guess I am carrying on the family tradition. Papa told me grandfather killed a fellow over a girl way back in the thirties and died in French Guiana
—
that’s Devil’s Island to you
—
where he spent fifteen years with men such as Belbenoit, La Grange and Milani. So you see, I have a good pedigree, my friend, and it was inevitable I should follow in their footsteps. It is in our blood to find our way around society.

Because of my background, life in Paris was very good to me. I was offered all the big jobs going and I could take my pick from a string of beautiful women. I was brought up on nightlife, and I always had a taste for the best restaurants and the finest wines. Even when I was a very small kid I used to run messages and errands for the big boys.

One night, not so very long ago, a damn fool of a drunkard who had ripped me off over some jewelry he fenced for me insulted me in a restaurant in front of all my friends and he fell onto my knife. It seemed that the silly bastard who killed himself was
—
although a petty crook
—
the husband of a woman whose father was a ‘flic’ and she put pressure on her Papa to bring me to justice. Even if I had known the mug’s father-in-law was a cop I would have still killed him anyway because the honour of both myself and my family were at stake. After the cops fished him out of the river Seine they started looking for me in earnest. They didn’t much seem to like the fact that I had taken his hands from him before he had died as a warning to anyone else who thought they might like to wet their beak at my expense. It wasn’t long before the net began to close and I barely had time to pick up a pay-off from a big job I had pulled with some friends before leaving France for Cambodia.

I arrived in Phnom Penh and I hated it. When I walked the streets in Paris I was known, feared and respected. On the streets of Cambodia I could have been just another ten-dollar-a-day backpacker. I found the city cramped, dirty and tedious. I took to drinking more and more to alleviate the boredom and I began to lose my sharpness and physique.

Three years later I met Jean, an old aquaintance from Paris, who was in a similar situation to myself. He was a fraudster who had been playing his games for a good long time, but was now under investigation. Like myself, he needed to flee France before he lost his freedom. Jean told me he had opened a couple of bars and restaurants in Sihanoukville, which although very quiet, was a much more pleasant location than Phnom Penh. Jean is a very smart guy but has always used brains rather than brawn and a bunch of ex-foreign legion boys turned up and started showing a little too much interest in his business. He asked me if I would like to become his partner. He knew with me looking over his shoulder the soldier boys would soon forget any ideas they had been cooking up.

A year ago Jean found out through a bent cop that the ‘flics’ had shelved his case due to the death of their main witness and it was safe for him to return home. I bought him out, so here I am. The sole owner of three bars and a restaurant we built up together, which makes me a pretty big man in Victory Hill. Back in Paris, my old friends call me ‘The King of the Dirt Roads,’ but to my surprise I find am happy here now. Cambodia has every chance of becoming a major tourist destination in the future and I want a slice of the action.

A while ago I took a trip across the border and visited a friend who has a bar in Pattaya. In the future I will use the same system as he does
—
bar fines and girls
—
because Pattaya is where most of our customers are going to come from. I plan to give them a home from home and I believe this will make me a rich man one day. Jean was sure that if all goes well in a decade or so Victory Hill will boast a nightlife to rival that of Thailand’s premier beach resort. Eventually, we hope Sihanoukville will provide an alternative to the pollution and overcrowding that will eventually drive many holidaymakers and residents away from a city which is growing far too quickly. If I can keep the control I have now this could make me a very important guy one day. There is a community of us here now as well as a few legionaires who are on the fringes, but my backround, reputation and contacts put me at the top of the pile.

There is no way the cops are going to come looking for me here. My grapevine alerts me to any possible trouble and The Hill is way too small for anyone to hide around corners. Killers in Cambodia are a dollar a dozen and the body of a nosy character could be lost in the sea without trace very quickly and easily.

You people from Pattaya are the type of tourists we want here and in the past few years you are beginning to arrive. Backpackers are often too frugal to spend a buck or two on a drink or a girl and we don’t want perverts who come here to fuck children for a couple of dollars. I believe my bars are the way forward. It is quite possible that one day the Chicken Farms will be forced to close and that is going to give me a hell of a lot of femmes to choose from. I never employ underage girls in my bars although with my contacts it would be possible for me to do so. It is simply my belief. Guys who fuck children get their balls cut off in my world and just because I have been forced to change countries doesn’t mean I have changed my principles. All my girls are over seventeen and most of them work to make money for their families.

So, my friend, go back to Pattaya and next time bring your buddies. Tell them we try to keep The Hill clean and safe and that the paedophile reputation is slowly dying. Invite them to come and have a night and maybe a girl in the Shark Bar, where there is a Frenchman known as La Requin who will be pleased to have a drink with them. True, I am a fort-a-bras and a gangster, but your pleasure is my business. Be sure that if you come to enjoy yourself and put some money in my till, I will shake your hand and welcome you to my new world.”

What a night! As well as witnessing the brutal, piscatorial murder of The Professor’s two previously unrecorded specimens and being scared shitless by Narith’s bizarre idea of a joke, I had found the conversation and insights into the life of the fearsome Frenchman fascinating. I had expected Louis to be rough and ignorant, but after our tete-a-tete I realised there was much more to Le Requin than a pair of iron fists. I found myself wondering why such an intelligent and principled man had deemed it necessary to live his life on the wrong side of the law. The man had such charisma and energy he would probably have made a success of any legal form of business or employment he turned his hand to.

My musings kept me awake and I had difficulty sleeping, even after my usual quota of a dozen draft beers and a couple of funny smokes had been partaken of. This insomnia was partly caused by my reflections on the life of the French gangster and partly due to Srey-Leak’s daughters. Chantavy and Chavy had not yet got over their cruel vengeance on The Professor, and the giggles and laughter from the room next-door continued unabated for hours, until they finally faded away in the early hours of the morning.

Like Le Requin, the beautiful moon girl and the little angel had taken their revenge.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

After I had been on Victory Hill a week, I was seriously beginning to doubt my chances of finding Psorng-Preng at all. I really had done my best. I had shown Ron’s photograph around all the bars on The Hill and downtown and to anyone else I happened to bump into who I thought might know her, and now the number of places on the list Ron had given me back in Pattaya was becoming smaller and smaller.

When I first arrived in town I thought the prospect of my success was pretty good. The Hill was so small I guessed surely somebody must know of Psorng-Preng, but although nearly everyone I showed the picture to remembered Ron, so far the face of his girl had produced only vacant looks and head-shaking. I wasn’t sure if—similar to the Thai people—the residents of Sihanoukville were reluctant to divulge the whereabouts of a fellow Cambodian and were deliberately feigning ignorance, or if they had really hadn’t seen her. Either way, up until now my best efforts had drawn a complete blank.

My lack of good fortune in locating Ron’s girl was matched only by my equally pitiful attempts at getting to know the Cambodian girls better. Joe Bucket was learning a lesson. In Thailand, wangling cheapies and freebies had become almost a way of life and my ability to speak Thai enabled me to get myself both into and out of countless sticky situations, many of them pleasurable, and some not so. To date—here in Cambodia—the only lovers tryst I had enjoyed so far that could be regarded as any kind of a triumph at all had been a ten minute shag with a five dollar taxi-girl in the Chicken Farm. I had been sneering at the ‘newbies’ to Thailand who blundered into diabolical positions with the bar-girls for years now, but Sihanoukville had already made me realize it was not only stupidity that dropped blokes in the shit with the Pattaya girls but sometimes simply lack of familiarity with the city and her people. Of course, it was undeniable that
some
of the Pattaya punters were just plain dumb.

I was rapidly getting the message that I was neither as clever nor attractive to women as I liked to think. The ruses that had become second nature in Thailand just didn’t seem to work in a strange country where I couldn’t make myself understood; and it was plain that I only did so well with the Pattaya bar-girls because I had made a detailed study of the species and their language for the past twenty-five years. Suddenly, over here in Cambodia, I was not the know-it-all man about town anymore but simply another stupid
farang
on a visa run. Yet strangely enough, despite my recent lamentable track record with the Sihanoukville lasses, I was amazed to find I was thoroughly enjoying this lack of understanding and even all the mistakes I was making. I was surprised to find myself becoming aware that perhaps you don’t need to know a place and its people inside out to have a great time there after all.

There was certainly no question that the bar-girls in Cambodia were less street-wise than those in Pattaya. In the old days on the Eastern Seaboard, a Thai bar-girl thought she was doing well if she managed to score a buffalo or a bicycle out of her
farang
. Nowadays, most of them think they are under-achieving unless they have been given a house, a car, a motorcycle or all three—and admitting to your friends you haven’t got the latest mobile phone in your pocket is tantamount to saying you don’t possess a vagina.

Incredibly, there are an increasing number of
farangs
in Pattaya who are coming up with the goods. It never ceases to amaze me how so many mean bastards—who when previously married back in their respective countries never bought their ex-wives anything more expensive than a birthday box of chocolates—seem to lose all sense of reality. They present their latest Thai girlfriends with up-country townhouses, four-wheel drive pick-up trucks, Honda Wave motorcycles and gold jewelry. I can only put this phenomenom down to some strange form of hypnosis, although I have been told how many Pattaya girls employ the services of a spirit doctor to cast a spell over their
farangs
in order to part them from their wordly goods. I don’t laugh like I used to when people tell me this anymore. Whatever the reason, it is a fact of life that Thai pussy seems to turn the head of even the wisest, and as many of the
farangs
who come to Pattaya these days don’t seem too blessed in the brains department to start with, what chance do they stand? I can only assume that for these guys, happiness is a happy penis and to hell with the consequences.

Although the Vietnamese girls around Sihanoukville seemed fairly street-wise, in comparison the Cambodian girls downtown and especially on Victory Hill were definitely still relatively naive compared to their Pattaya counterparts. For example, the way most of them still goggled with fascination into the television sets some of the bars boasted showed they hadn’t yet endured a lifetime of the idiot box. Fifteen years ago the Thai girls were very much the same. Very few of the Cambodian girls had mobile phones yet either, but there was no doubt the obsession was coming. A little later on, a girl I took back to the Crazy Monkey from the Mosquito Bar was in such a hurry to get down the mobile phone shop to spend the money I gave her, she barely remembered to pull her panties back on, which I thought was rather sad.

One of the nicer things about Cambodia was that the girls still lived off the local diet and therefore most of them still retained those lovely, slim figures that were so common to the Thai bar-girls just a couple of decades ago, before many of them started porking up on fast food and beer with their
farang
boyfriends. Looking around me in some of the bars in Soi Seven and Eight these days, I can’t help wondering if the Far East isn’t becoming the Fat East.

The first girl in Cambodia who I attempted to give the old Joe Bucket charm to was not in fact, a Khmer at all, but Vietnamese. I found her—or rather she found me—in a quiet little bar run by yet another dodgy Frenchman and his Cambodian side-kick at the top of the bar-strip. The two bosses seemed to spend all their time playing cards together and almost coming to blows in the corner. The music was good and the beer was cold and the small bar offered a good starting point for the nights’ entertainment where I could watch the world go by. I was doing just this one evening when I felt two slim arms encircle my waist, then someone blew softly into my ear. I turned around and there was Khwan.

I should probably have known better. Back in Pattaya I would never have fallen for the Vietnamese girl’s charms, but this visa run had become an adventure and I was enjoying doing some of the things I hadn’t experienced for years. In my defence, there was no doubt that Khwan was undeniably beautiful. Her high cheekbones were framed by hair as black as ink that was cut into a short, sexy style and her large, dark eyes and perfect cupid’s bow mouth twinkled and smiled at me as she listened to my every word with rapt attention. Her firm breasts jiggled around nicely when she laughed at my feeble jokes and the hand that slipped into my lap beneath the table caressed me with a tenderness and technique that ensured any reservations I’d harboured were immediately lost under the flow of my rising libido. That’s how things appeared to me after eight Angkor beers and a couple of gigantic spliffs anyway.

Looking back, perhaps I could have been a bit more suspicious. If I had taken the time to look a little harder I might have noticed the graphite hardness in those shining, black eyes and also might have wondered how Khwan could speak English almost as well as myself. What the hell did it matter anyway? I was on holiday, and all the lads back in Pattaya—most of whom had probably been no further from the border than the Chicken Farm at Koh Kong—had assured me you never paid a girl anymore than fifteen dollars in Cambodia, anyway. In fact, Jim the Perv assured me that Keeniaw Kevin even managed to barter the price down to two bucks on occasions, so I wasn’t at all worried at the impending expense. I had been searching for Psorng-Preng for seven days now and it was getting somewhat tedious. At the risk of offending the more sensitive reader, I decided it was high-time Joe Bucket had some action.

I have to hand it to Khwan. She was a total professional and within an hour she had convinced me she thought I was the nicest bloke she had ever met. Of course, I’m not a complete idiot and I knew her companionship would eventually have to be paid for, but the way her eyes sparkled and the sound of her endearing laughter rang out as she told me about some of the weirdoes she had met during the course of her chosen career (which she had to do of course, as her poor old grandpa was very sick and needed money for hospital bills) sucked me in completely.

I listened with amusement as with a complete lack of embarrasment, Khwan told me about the astonishing selection of perverts, spankers and dildo-wielding fiends a girl in her profession was bound to come across. I shook my head in astonishment when she told me about the customer who insisted on wearing full combat gear—including a helmet and boots—whilst he was in bed with her. I guffawed my appreciation when she revealed the story of yet another punter who could only achieve satisfaction if both partners involved were equipped with rubber diving masks and snorkels. And I sniggered in bafflement when Khwan put her dark, fragrant head close to mine and whispered the tale of the deviant she never even had to touch, but who got his kicks by merely watching her strut around his bed making chicken noises with a large cockerel’s feather protruding from the crack in her shapely buttocks. I was no innocent, but I honestly hadn’t realised there were so many freaks in the world.

It wasn’t long before I was totally enraptured by Khwan’s unique combination of honesty, beauty and coarseness and I began seriously considering spending the whole of my visa run with this fascinating girl.

Perhaps I should have smelled a rat when Khwan insisted we walk the long way around back to the Crazy Monkey instead of past the bar-strip. Maybe I should have been a little suspicious when knowing glances were exchanged between the French owner of the bar and his Cambodian henchman as we left. Possibly I should have remembered the old chestnut that tells you to remember when things seem too good to be true they probably are; and certainly I should have had the prudence to fix a price with the freelancing good-time girl before we set off for my room.

It is always easy to be wise following the event, but after a gallon of beer and a couple of joints, when a cool, slim-fingered hand slips into your own and a sweet voice whispers, “Come on darling, let’s go to bed now,” Joe Bucket’s caution is inevitably thrown to the winds.

It would only be fair to Khwan to relate how nothing went wrong until after the main event. The Vietnamese bar-girl’s body was simply perfect and she looked even better than she did when decorated with her rather classy looking clothes. She made love with a feeling and attentiveness that seemed to back up her interest in me in the bar, and I was now sure I would ask her to stay with me until I returned to Pattaya. However, when the deed was done (and with a lot of clever tricks, Khwan made sure it didn’t last very long) and I was preparing to curl up next to this beautiful girl in a haze of post-coital satisfaction, Khwan quickly began pulling on her clothes.

“That will be thirty-five dollars, please,” she told me expressionlessly, as she wriggled that perfect little behind into a pair of pants so tight they could have been painted on.

I sighed and reached for my wallet. Unless I wanted a major scene, I knew it was pointless to argue with Khwan, even though I knew I was being ripped off in the nicest possible way. Salt was further rubbed into the wounds in my ego when the contents of my wallet revealed only twenty dollar bills and Khwan took advantage of the situation to quickly pluck two of the notes from my fingers.

“I’ll give you back five dollars in the bar tomorrow,” she assured me, as I unlocked the side door for her. Then, the artful bargirl gave me a quick peck on the cheek and disappeared into the blackness of the deserted street.

“I won’t be seeing that again,” I called after her, just to let her know I wasn’t a complete cretin. The only answer was the sound of her happy laugh as it rang through the quiet of the dark night and of course, that was the last I ever saw of her.

I did turn up in the bar at the end of the strip as usual at my normal time the next evening but not surprisingly, there was no sign of either Khwan or my five bucks. As I sat there sipping on a beer, the tough Cambodian barman approached me. He spoke English quite well, although he mixed his words up a bit and his grammar was all over the place.

“You looking for Khwan?” he asked me, with some interest.

“No, not really,” I answered ambiguously.

“That is good, because she is now the girlfriend of Didier,” he told me, naming the violent looking French gangster I’d seen knock out the hapless beggar with one blow on my first night on The Hill.

“And he tell me if he see you with she again, maybe he cut off your testicle,” he finished.

Ah well, perhaps I’m better off out of that one after all, I decided, taking a large gulp of beer and lighting up a Sihanoukville special. After all, I have always been very attached to my ‘testicle,’ and at least I’ve got a good story to tell the boys back in Pattaya, I consoled myself.

As did Didier’s Vietnamese girlfriend. No doubt added to the stories she had told me about the fowl fetishist and Private Pervert—and the guy who gave a completely new meaning to the phrase ‘muff diving’—Khwan would tell her next victim the tale of Joe Bucket; the English fool on a visa run from Pattaya, whom she had blagged out of forty bucks.