Smells of fish sauce and wok-charred stir fry wafted from street stalls as the tuk-tuk threaded through traffic. Our driver wrestled taxis, mopeds, and black-fumed buses. At one stop, we came alongside a tuk-tuk containing a large Western man. He lay limp in the back. A woman was screaming. She was German.
“He has hit his head; he needs a doctor.” Blood spilled from the man’s forehead.
Somchai yelled something in Thai to our driver, and our tuk-tuk lurched forward.
We span away before I could properly see the damage.
The day had started benignly enough, when Somchai came up to me to ask where I was from. It had been my third day in Bangkok, and until then, I had been alone. I was standing in a wide-open grassy area in Sanam Luang Park when he approached, no one around me, and I was facing away from the Grand Palace.
Somchai introduced himself casually. I noticed that he was wearing a formal grey suit. He had a generous smile and he spoke English fluently, with a hint of the BBC. When I told him I was from London, he asked which team I supported. He was a Liverpool fan; he knew all the players. “Rush, Dalglish, spaghetti-legs Grobbelaar,” he announced.
He knew the players that a casual fan would not remember. “John Wark like Dalglish is Scottish, yes?”
He kicked an imaginary ball, but his kick looked awkward, and I could tell that he didn’t play football himself. “But old spaghetti-legs I like best. He’s from Zimbabwe. I want to visit his country.”
He knew my own team, Tottenham. “We’ll always beat you,” he teased.
We spent the better part of an hour talking football, after which I asked him, “So what do you do?”
“Rubies,” he replied. “And other jewels, but most of the time I trade rubies.”
Somchai was the manager of a gem factory a couple of miles away. He asked where I was headed next. “Hong Kong,” I volunteered, and he described how travellers take gems to Hong Kong because you can get a better price for them there. “Most of the time they take rubies, but other jewels too if you are experienced,” he said.
I had heard of the gold run and of the milk run, where travellers would transport goods between countries because they would not arouse the suspicion of customs. It was okay for Westerners to be dripping in gold as they crossed a border, but not a local. Other items too, could be exchanged for profit, such as brand-name clothing, furs, and simple things that were not illegal but were simply not as available. Alternatively, there were the drug runs, but that was plain stupid. Instant death if you were caught bringing drugs into or out of Thailand.
So, rubies were not a big deal.
“I have to take you to my factory,” Somchai offered, and that was when he hailed the tuk-tuk to take me away from the traveller comforts of Banglamphu, to his headquarters in the Bang Rak district.
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