Private Dancer PDF - The Pattaya Pages

Stephen Leather Private Dancer
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This is where I played it just right. If I'd made off with the car he'd have got together with
some other taxi drivers, beaten the shit out of me and then handed me over to the cops. So I drive
off real slowly, just above walking pace, watching him in the mirror. He sees what I'm doing and
comes haring after me, waving his arms and shouting. I let him run for a hundred yards or so,
then I pull up and wind down the window. I smile. A big, big smile, Thai style. I give him a
thumbs up. "Car okay," I say. "I car doctor. I fix."
He looks at me. He smiles. He knows that I know. I know that he knows that I know. But I
don't confront him with it, I don't rub his face in it. "Car okay?" he says.
"Oh yes. No problem now. I fix."
I get out of the driver's seat, and move into the back. He gets into the driver's seat, puts the car
in gear and drives off. He smiles. "Okay now," he says, nodding approvingly.
We drive all the way in without any more hassles. Now, the guy was right, of course: we hit
traffic and it took us more than hour to cover three miles. And when he did finally drop me off, I
gave him a huge tip. He smiled. I smiled. Face was saved on both sides. A situation that could
have turned really nasty became an object lesson in how to get what you want in the Land of
Smiles.
Anyway, I liked Pete. He was a pleasant change from the expatriates you normally run into in
Bangkok. Face it, most of the guys who choose to come to Thailand are thinking with their
dicks, not their heads. It's different if they're sent here, then they come on a full expat package:
accommodation, flights home, all the perks. But anyone who chooses to live here has to work on
local terms, and that means shit money. Guys like Nigel. He pretends he's a wheeler-dealer, he's
always on the verge of setting up his own company that's going to make him a fortune, but when
all's said and done he's just here to get laid. I doubt he has much luck with women back in the
UK because of his missing eye, but out here he can get laid every night of the week for the price
of a decent bottle of Scotch. Pete was sent out by his company and that makes all the difference.
You can see from the way he behaves in the bars, he barely notices the girls, he’s more interested
in what I have to say. Nigel can't sit down without shoving his hand down some bird's bikini and
he spends more time fondling them than he does drinking.
I'm the same as Pete. I was running a handbag factory in Newcastle, and we'd started
subcontracting some of our manufacturing to a couple of suppliers in Thailand. One of the Thai
guys came over to see us and we got on like a house on fire. Saravoot his name was. Before he
went back, he offered me a job running one of his factories outside Bangkok. I was divorced and
the kids were grown up, so I thought what the hell.
I’m still not sure how things are going to work out here. Saravoot's a nice enough guy, but
sometimes he's a bit strange. I'm not quite sure how to explain it, but I can give you an example.
His factory was way overstaffed. There's a feeling out here that the more people you have
working for you, the more important you are. Staff equals status. So Saravoot would take great
pride in the fact that he had almost five hundred people working for him, even though the same
amount of work could have been done by half that number if they worked efficiently. Now, one
of the reasons that Saravoot brought me over to Bangkok was that he'd seen how we operated in
Newcastle, and one of the first things I did was to draw up a proposal to restructure the sewing
side that would pretty much double productivity. We had to let thirty people go, all of them
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