Disappearance in the East

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i ago, while flying from Bangkok to Phnom Penh, I read what could be called a local novel by a Bangkok private investigator named Byron Bales. The Family Business KkPP ^^^"W was written with an entertainingly mania­cal attention to detail and a world-weariness perfectly matched to its material: an American couple who plot to stage the husband's death in Manila in order to claim insurance money back in the United States. The British call this kind of faked death "doing a Reginald Perrin," after a 1970s sitcom hero who stages his own suicide and then comes back to life to start all over again. The British, after all, can never forget government minister John Stonehouse, who disappeared on a Miami beach in 1974. Stonehouse was later found in Australia, using a forged passport under the name Clive Mildoon. It's the ultimate travel experience: reincarnation in a distant place as an insurance scam. Insurance agents call it "pseudocide."

Bales spent more than 30 years as an investigator, 10 of them in Bangkok, tracking down people who had disappeared, faking their own deaths in order to dupe America's gullible and often chaotic insurance companies (it's an industry in decline, he insinuates). I learned from the back cover of The Family Business that it was based on several cases that Bales himself had investigated. So people really do disappear, I thought, and they really do collect the money.

It's a travel idea you can't resist. You fly to an exotic country, check into your hotel and then you die. Having died, you do a Reginald Perrin. You get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by a clueless corporation 8,000 miles away and then carry on living in the country where you were vacationing. Certainly, you'd never see

your children or your old mother again. But look on the bright side. You'd have no debts and you could start again, and if you were lucky you'd have turned a profit.

For years I wondered if this were really possible. In many bars in Bangkok, Vien­tiane and Phnom Penh I would run into characters who claimed they had run away from their lives. Some had changed their names; others wouldn't admit how they had gotten there—they would tap their noses and say, "I'm not the man I was." I've always thought there was a dark pleasure in being an impostor, like traveling on a train and telling people you meet that you are an invented character. When I was a child traveling on English trains I used to tell strangers that I was "Prince Prinzapolka," and it was always satisfying to see them buy it. These grown men had done the same.

But how many of them had staged their own deaths? It seems like a stunt that would

be both disarmingly easy and inexpressibly complicated, even in Bangkok. Bales had pointed out that as soon as you were "dead" you could no longer use a credit card. You could not walk insouciantly down a city street or make a phone call to your fam­ily. In a social sense, you really would be dead, and you'd have to adapt to the fact. Crossing borders loaded with cash would be nerve-racking, airport security would be an ordeal, and your intimate relations would have to begin at ground zero.

Yet real-life cases of insurance-fraud disappearance are not hard to find in the public record. One of the cases Bales worked on several years ago was that of the Kongsiris, a Thai-American couple who traveled to Thailand from their home in Easton, Pennsylvania to enjoy a vacation in the mother country. There was nothing remarkable about Lee and Phatcha, an American retiree and housewife on a tour of the northern provinces in 1995. They rode elephants and appreciated sunsets. They visited relatives. But while enjoying these innocuous pursuits, Lee Kongsiri was rumored to have gone on a sudden spree of "drinking and womanizing," as the press later described it. He overdid it to such an extent that after a succession of such ecstasies he suffered a fatal heart attack, much like a famous president of France. Some dry souls might call it an ignominious death. But what made him go berserk?

What role Phatcha had played in the priapic excesses of her husband was unclear,

but she had no difficulty obtaining a death certificate from local authorities and using

it to obtain a Death of an American Citizen Abroad document from the U.S. Embassy

in Bangkok. Lee's was just another death on the tourist circuit. There were thousands

like it: overdoses in cheap hotels, suicides on remote beaches, sexpat slayings at the

hands of bar-girl boyfriends (a particular specialty of Bangkok). The wild East, as a

matter of fact, is a commodious place to die. (continued on page 124)

HOW TO

DISAPPEAR

SEVEN STEPS TO YOUR NEW LIFE

GET A BIRTH CERTIFICATE

DRDER A PA55PDRT

BOY LIFE mSORAOCE

The more policies the merrier.

Thailand and the Philippines are popular.

GET A BODY

You'll need it for a death certificate.

COLLECT LIFE IO5ORAOCE

You'll need an accomplice.

DISAPPEARANCE

(continued from page 102)

A death certificate is usually treated at face value by many embassies, as Western functionaries have little idea how easily they can be forged in Asian backwaters. But Lee Kongsiri had purchased $1,886,493 in life-insurance policies from nine different insurance companies in the U.S. His "widow" collected $ 1,586,947 of it—two companies, Allstate and Prudential, suspected fraud and launched investigations.

Newly rich—in Thai terms, anyway—the Kongsiris bought a condo in Bangkok and another in the provincial town of Phetburi. They scarcely bothered to conceal themselves in Bangkok. They had reinvented dieir lives, and there was no reason for them to fear retribution or even discovery. Bangkok is a city of almost 10 million people, and unlike Western cities it is not stifled by surveillance systems and prying bureaucracies.

The list of insurers the Kongsiris hit up is impressive: Aetna Life Insurance ($404,858), Bankers Security/ReliaStar ($302,980), Amer­ican Guardian Life Assurance ($300,677), Ohio Life Insurance ($300,454), Cigna Group Insurance ($146,970), Central National Life Insurance of Omaha ($100,000) and Cuna Mutual ($31,006). These companies paid up on the basis of documentation issued by the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, and that might have been that had not the Kongsiris commit­ted an act of superlative foolishness.

In 1996 they greeted a party of relatives at Bangkok's Don Muang airport without informing them of Lee's "death." The relatives filmed the whole thing, and the tape made its way into investigators' hands. The FBI asked Thailand for an arrest, and the hapless couple was extradited after die Pennsylvania attor­ney general's Insurance Fraud Section filed charges that eventually imprisoned them. The Kongsiris had shown how easy it was to defraud American insurance companies out of astronomical sums of money by faking one's own death and disappearing. As for the unhappy pair, they each received 14 years.

There was a twist in this story, however. It turned out Mrs. Kongsiri's real name was not Phatcha but Silivai. She had changed it after staging her own death in Thailand in 1985, claiming a modest insurance payout and then disappearing back to the U.S. Hav­ing performed the scam immaculately once, she decided to repeat it with die husband she had remarried under her new name. The statute of limitations had run out on die 1985 fraud, and Phatcha was never tried for it. She and her husband kept the money.

Bales is a Bangkok character. A former marine born in 1942, he has become per­haps the definitive investigative expert on vanishing and its psychology, at least in Asia. He founded his own investigation firm, called First Services, in 1979 and ran its Asia bureau in Bangkok between 1989 and 2004, work­ing out of Los Angeles for the last five years before retiring. I tracked him down in a seaside Thai village called Ban Krut, which is where he ended up with his Thai wife, Kasama. They run a small New York-style

pizzeria that bears her name. There's nothing in Ban Krut except a wat on a hill, a few des­ultory resorts for overweight Germans and a distant view of the hills in Burma.

It's an unlikely place for a private eye to retire to, one of the sedate family resorts that punctuate the coast south of the royal beach town of Hua Hin. There's a Victorian train station straight out of Mary Poppins but no Radissons or girlie bars with names like Sex for You and Press My Buttons. It's a fine place for a man who is sick of Bangkok, and perhaps a fine place for a man who is sick of people in general. It is the kind of place to which a man who has seen too much retires. It implies a gentle disgust.

The Baleses bought land behind a laid-back resort on the beach road and built a villa alongside a creek. It's the expatriate's dream. A self-built house, a patch of tropi­cal water and jungle, a corner of the world utterly still and stagnant and fertile. There are a couple of beach bars with cheap Singha beer and nofarang tourists. Inside the house are walls covered with Marine Corps memo­rabilia and yellowing snapshots of a younger Byron sporting a shoulder holster in Starsky 6f Hutch poses. I've always found it strange the way people make these disconcerting col­lages of their past lives, displayed in offices and kitchens, with a younger self peering out at the present as if to challenge its cred­ibility. It made me curious about what Bales remembers of his professional life in Asia. Did the expat dream, for example, have anything to do with the dreams of disap­peared people who went to live in far-off countries offering a more enjoyable way of life? The answer was swift.

"Maybe it does," he says. "Why would you want to retire somewhere other than Thai­land? It's the easiest country. You're going to retire in the United States? Good luck."

Bales is a fast-talking charmer with some­thing still faintly military about him: The cropped white hair, the crisp manners and the rapid deployment of statistics suggest a

man more comfortable with concrete reali­ties than abstract arguments.

He drifted into investigation work because, he says, he liked the idea of decoding human nature by following the behavior of fugitives. He began in the 1970s investigating corrupt cops and drug dealers and then moved into traveling the world to pursue insurance claims. First Services now has offices around the globe. The company runs on foot soldiers known as "men on the ground," snoopers who are not quite good enough to be investigators but who do the humdrum work of informants.

One hundred and seventy countries over 20 years have yielded a bizarre panorama of human vice and folly. In Syria, for example, Bales investigated a Damascan businessman who put out contract killings on his two sons to collect the life insurance, and succeeded. In Taipei people had their relatives bumped off for a handy dividend, and in Manila you could have someone killed for 5,000 pesos, about $115. People would insure imaginary brothers and aunts and get away with it. They'd pack caskets with rocks and stage elaborate funerals for people who didn't exist. They'd insure their own children and declare them dead to collect the cash.

"The thing to remember about criminals," Bales explains, "is that they are always being criminals. A scammer is always scamming, no matter where he is. His behavior will always betray him in the end."

His moral response to this incontrovert­ible proof that humans will stop at nothing to procure money without working for it is a needle-fine gallows humor mixed with an Asian fatalism that leaves room for a certain amused patience. Parents killing their chil­dren for cash—why not? Hundred-dollar assassinations in a city of 14 million—why be surprised? Faking your own death is mild by comparison.

"How many do it?" I ask.

"Who knows? It's a conspiracy of silence. No one wants to talk about it very much."

The statistics of staged vanishings and

insurance payouts are difficult to determine because insurance companies are reluctant to admit how much money they lose each year—and how they lose it—through such scams. The private investigators they hire to track down disappeared people are a tiny fraternity of tight-lipped operators whose livelihoods are threatened by the most triv­ial disclosures. Even anonymously, they rarely comment on cases. Predators and prey— investigators and scammers—are locked in a battle that neither side wants to elucidate to an outsider. "I'm talking to you," Bales says, "because I'm retired."

First Services estimates that prior to 1999 it was handling up to 20 cases a month (it's more like one a week now). The trade was global. Scammers operated out of many Afri­can countries, as well as the Middle East, until new immigration laws in the U.S. and 9/11 stemmed the flow of fraudsters flowing into the country to file claims. Now, however, new cases are on the rise again. It's possible—and it's anecdotally suggested—that the financial crisis will see more troubled souls doing what former hedge fund manager Samuel Israel III did, writing a suicide note on his car and disappearing from Bear Mountain Bridge in New York on June 9, 2008, only to reappear wretchedly a few days later. His pithy note, drawn from the title of the MASH theme song, was "Suicide is painless." Which is cer­tainly true if you don't actually commit it.

One retired FBI agent, who now runs a restaurant in Bangkok, says that during 20 years of duty specializing in Indonesia she heard of disappearance cases only through the grapevine. "We knew they were there, but they were sort of underground. We knew people came to Asia to do it," she says. Another FBI agent based in Manila tells me his office is focused mostly on terrorism issues, not disappeared people. "But we hear about such cases from time to time. There's usually little we can do, however."

Bales explains how a case might look. Let's say an American salesman who has lost his job decides to fake his death. Usually it's a husband-and-wife team because someone has to cash in the claim. It is pretty much impossible to collect your own life insurance in person.

The couple live in Maryland, so they start by looking for a courthouse in the continental U.S. that has burned down. It doesn't mat­ter where, so long as they are certain all birth and death certificates have burned as well. According to Bales, they are quite easy to find. Courthouses burn down all the time.

The salesman finds someone who has died from that courthouse's jurisdiction and whose family has moved away, preferably someone who died young. He writes to the present courthouse and requests a duplicate birth certificate. When he gets the duplicate, he applies for a passport. This too is surpris­ingly easy. Equipped with a new passport, the prospective disappearer begins to develop a second persona. The second persona has to have some affinity with his real persona, or he is likely to slip up at critical moments (unexpected interviews at security check­points, visits to hospitals, etc.). It takes about two years for all these elements to fall into place, and by that time he has eased himself into the mind-set of his invented person. He

has learned to think differently, to answer to a dead person's name.

He will need a death certificate, but in some instances he will also need a corpse to back it up. There are a number of ways to acquire one. In the wild East, he can dis­creetly approach a cop in one of the big cities and make an offer: For, say, $2,000 he can request that the cop find him a Cau­casian corpse more or less the same height as himself. It's the height that counts, Bales says. You can mutilate the corpse or have it quickly cremated, but it will always be measured first. The corrupt cop on the American's books can switch IDs, grease the wheels and make sure no one pokes their nose too deeply into the scam, but he can rarely avoid having the body measured. You can fake anything except a body's height.

How does someone get a body in the first place? No problem, Bales says. It's called body shopping. "In Bangkok we used to have a farang death in the city's hotels almost every week. We used to call the Dynasty Inn on Soi 4 Nana, where all the sex tourists go, the Die Nasty Inn. We'd get a white corpse there quite reliably most weeks, and any corrupt cop could have switched the IDs. I'm not saying they ever did. Not on the record, anyway."

It is the same in Manila and Phnom Penh. Cause of death could be anything. "There are," he adds, "a lot of deaths in resorts. Who knows why?" Maybe it's the food or the all-around merriment.

But if a convenient-size corpse doesn't show up on time, you can always have one custom delivered for $10,000 and often for much less. In this scenario the cop will actually go out and kill someone for you. It's a dirty busi­ness, murdering a total stranger who happens to be the same race and height as yourself. But for a payout of $1 million, people will do it. No one knows how many people dis­appear every year from body shopping, and

Bales is grimly agnostic: "It's more than you think." Dozens a year? "Impossible to say. But it really does happen."

The cop on the body shopper's payroll will plant his ID on whatever corpse he has selected. Two people, in effect, will have dis­appeared: the shopper and his body double. What is left is the shopper's invented per­sona, who is now free to thrive as he likes. He is the dejected American salesman in a different envelope.

Meanwhile, the grieving wife puts on an act for local authorities and for the slackers at the local embassy, and she ends up with a shiny new death certificate. There was a time, Bales claims, when the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok was handing them out like candy wrappers. This is no longer quite as true, however. The Philippines, he says, offers bet­ter hunting grounds.

What happens next is in some ways even more bizarre. Scammers target American companies because there are so many of them and because their underwriting is so haphaz­ard. When it comes to investigating claims, they compete against one another. There is no digital cross-referencing system, and— according to Bales—insurers, investigators and immigration authorities in the U.S. do not collaborate in any meaningful way. This makes for a criminal's paradise.

Recently, a man in Pakistan insured himself with 37 different American companies for a minor hospitalization and billed all of them at once for a huge sum. He was paid. Insurance companies have recently scaled back hospital­ization and disability policies, and there is a two-year waiting period in the case of suicides before payment is made. "But at the same time," says Bales, "insurance companies hate publicity, so they are inclined to pay if things get sticky. And every con man knows it."

Armed with a death certificate from a country like the Philippines, however, the

scammer's wife has little to do but wait patiently for the check—provided, of course, the company doesn't hire someone like Bales to hunt her husband down. "I can usually find them," he says. "I have the nose and I know when something isn't right. It's only when they collect, however, that things get dangerous for me. A scammer who has col­lected can be prosecuted."

But what about the American salesman and his body double?

"They didn't get the money. But they nearly did. Because no felony was commit­ted from the insurance point of view, nothing was investigated. No one was murdered."

It would be fair to say Bales's richest territory has been the Philippines. Sprawling, difficult to traverse, spectacularly corrupt, the archi­pelago is the perfect place to fake a death, disappear or have a body double cremated as you. The Philippines, he says almost with admiration, is unlike any other place in Asia or even the world. It's even cheaper than Thailand, and it's English-speaking. The girls are gorgeous and the cops even more delight­fully corrupt. Where better to vanish?

Once he was sent to the Philippines to track down the wife of an Australian citi­zen who had supposedly died of cancer at the age of 27 and whom the husband had insured for $750,000 with American com­panies. Her death had been reported in the local papers, and there had been a seemingly bona fide burial. Bales went to the cemetery, where the headstone carried a photograph of her, as is usual in the Philippines. But the plate on the stone itself was obviously fake. Bales ripped it off easily and then went to the National Statistics Office to see if her name had been registered as a death. It turned out they hadn't registered because they wanted to bring her back to life—with her own name.

Now knowing she wasn't dead, Bales set off to the Visayan islands, where she was orig­inally from, hopping from island to island looking for a girl called Lolita. Her husband was at home in Australia, and she certainly wasn't there, so Bales found her home village near Roxas City, setded in and began asking the inhabitants if anyone had seen her.

"In the Philippines everyone knows the insurance-scam game," he says. "They even have a phrase for it: tago ng tago, 'hiding and hiding.' When I asked them if they had seen diis girl, they all just winked and tapped their noses. She had been there six months after deadi, all right. But could I find her myself?"

He never did find her, but he was able to disarm the claim. Since nothing was collected, Lolita and her husband were not subject to prosecution, and Bales is certain they tried it a second time. Scammers know they won't be prosecuted without collecting the money, and so they have no hesitation in repeating the same stunt until they get it right. In this case, at least they didn't kill anyone.

As the sun went down we retired to an open-air beach bar. Bales drifted back to the stories that really grip him, tales of fraud that seem to illustrate a part of the human mind we wish weren't there. Like the businessman in Syria. Or the eeriness of disappearance itself. Take Richard Bingham, seventh Earl of Lucan, who disappeared in 1974 after his

nanny was found murdered in the Lucan house in London. There have been countless sightings of Lord Lucan all over the world since, including one involving a man living in his car in New Zealand who was actually investigated by a detective. There is a cottage industry devoted to Lord Lucan sightings, much like Elvis and the Loch Ness monster. And yet Lucan has never surfaced. He had the nerve to stay disappeared.

"It seems counterintuitive that anyone can disappear in today's world," says Bales, "so when they do, it makes the world seem more primitive, more dangerous. It make us think our security is an illusion—and it is."

Consider a recent example of exactly this kind of planned disappearance. In 2002, a 51-year-

old former teacher and prison officer named John Darwin, living in a small beach town near the holiday resort of Hartlepool in northeast Eng­land, disappeared in the North Sea while canoeing by himself. He was a noted ama­teur canoeist, and he disappeared on a calm day, in perfect conditions. Darwin was subsequently declared dead without evidence of a corpse or foul play. His wife, Anne, assumed it was suicide, and this was ruled as a possibil­ity. In April 2003 an inquest recorded an open verdict and for­mally declared that Darwin was dead. The life insurance paid out. The mort­gage was cleared, his debts were erased— and his wife was left in possession of two substantial properties and a pension from the prison service of £8,000 a year.

But Darwin was still

alive. For five years he lived in a cubbyhole in his wife's house, cultivating an alternate iden­tity under the name of John Jones and going for midnight walks on the beach dressed in a shabby overcoat and woolly hat. He was seen occasionally in the tiny town, but peo­ple assumed he was a homeless man or an eccentric they didn't know. The wife even­tually sold the house and disappeared. The couple moved to Panama and, with the insur­ance money, bought an estate they intended to develop as a tourist resort. Locals who met them described them as a normal, affa­ble couple with a good sense of humor and a love of the good life. Like the Kongsiris, they seemed mightily pleased with them­selves and remarkably at ease in their new, improved life. The Darwins' scheme was a smooth

success, and they were caught only when John began to miss his two sons, whom he had not informed of his scam. He flew back to the U.K. and turned himself in. It's a classic pattern. Disappearing is relatively easy, but staying that way is not. The question, though, is how many cases do we not hear of precisely because they are perfectly executed? How many Lord Lucans are out there, men who have vanished overnight and who have made their peace with that fact?

After talking with Bales, I was naturally curious to see how easy it is to be declared dead. I didn't want to disappear, but I was fas­cinated by the idea that I could. What would it feel like to see one's name on a death ceru'6-cate and know that one's demise was officially recorded in a government database?

Because I have a long association with Thai-

land, I didn't want to try there. Instead, I flew to Manila a few months later and sublet an apartment in Makati City behind the imposing fire station on Ayala Avenue—one of Manila's most upscale and internationalized but suitably anonymous neighborhoods. The apartment was in a high-rise tower, and outside the front door was an unremarkable side street.

Manila is different from Bangkok. It has a gun culture with a more violent, reckless streak. There is a greater feeling of corrupt­ible chaos. The Philippines is one of the most bureaucratic countries in the world and therefore one of the easiest in which to get things done with the right tip. It's also much more Americanized. English is spoken as much as Tagalog among many classes. And most important, Manila is a megalopolis, with a population of 12 million. I could see why an

American would come here to disappear.

Not knowing where to begin, I started going out to bars in Makati. I trawled the KTVs (a sort of karaoke lounge cum brothel) in the Mile Long Arcade—places like Pharaoh, which seemed a likely hangout for off-duty cops, or foreigner joints like Handle Bar on Polaris Street in Bel-Air, where the outside tables were a fluid scene. One night I went to the infamous Air Force One by the airport, with its economy, business and first-class mas­sage parlors staffed by "flight attendants." I hung around waiting for the after-work offi­cial of my nightmares to come strolling up to ask what I wanted. But he didn't.

Eventually, within three nights of this lone bar-hopping, I was approached in the trendy M Cafe in the Ayala Museum by a young man who could have been a fashion

designer. He asked me inoffensively why I was in Manila. I lied, and he then asked me what I wanted that night. It's a common question in Asia, and there is the under­standing that if you simply say what it is you want it will be fur­nished without much complication. I said, "I'm shopping for a death certificate." Entirely unsurprised, he asked, "Real one or fake?"

I thought I would try the fake one first. They manufactured them on a certain street where it was not safe to go, and you could get birth certif­icates, credit cards, records, anything you wanted. I gave my new friend my address, and two days later a motorbike drew up outside my building and an envelope was sent up to my unit. It was a certificate of death with my name misspelled and the cause of death noted

as "massive heart attack." Cost: $10.

The problem with forged certificates is that they are not registered with the government. This means a scrupulous insurer, or its inves­tigator, could easily prove their illegitimacy. It might work for smaller scams, but for big money I'd need a real death certificate reg­istered with the local civil registry. In Manila, that means the registry in Manila City Hall. I would have to go there and try to turn a clerk. This is what many a scammer has done in the past. But it was possible that times had changed. Bales had told me all you needed was charm and a crisp new bill.

City Hall stands at the junction of Almeda-Lopez and Padre Burgos Street in the old part of town near the Spanish core of Intramuros. It's a decaying neoclassical pile with a poly­chrome Jesus in front and bamboo scaffolding

everywhere. Many of its windows are blocked with irrational cinder-block walls or plywood panels, and by the gates are coundess notices announcing no fixers allowed, which I thought was rather a shame because never would a fixer have been more useful.

I went through the courtyard in sunglasses and was directed by the armed police to the registry. It was packed with people seeking birth certificates. As I waited to see a clerk, I wondered what the prison term was for brib­ing them or whether it would all be brushed off in good humor. Eventually, one way or the other, I had my clerk: a youngish man in a nice shirt with blade-like creases. When he asked me what I wanted, I said, "I am doing research on statistics and was wondering if I could meet you for coffee outside."

There was no reaction of surprise. An hour later we were walking through the Cen­tral Terminal Station nearby, through dark arcades of fast-food outlets and vendors of empanadas especiales, the clerk in his pressed shirt, me with slightly shaking hands. There was a dingy eatery called Manileno, where horse races were being broadcast, and we sat there because no one would pay us any attention. I bought him lunch with a glass of milky buko juice, and he ate his squid balls slowly. We gazed out a little mournfully at a pawnshop called Palawan and a blind busker strumming a fake Stratocaster.

"So what are you researching?" he asked.

I said quite bluntly that I wanted a death certificate.

"What for?" he said.

"That's my business."

"No, actually, it's my business too."

I said I wanted to claim the insurance money. I figured any other explanation would sound false, and that he knew per­fectly well what I wanted it for.

"I see," he murmured and calmly gave me the price. It was 1,000 pesos for the certificate and 1,000 for himself. That made about $50 in total. I agreed, but as we sat there I felt he was changing his mind. He wasn't sure about me, and there was something, perhaps, in my man­ner that was not genuinely desperate. Then I realized I had forgotten to haggle. A real crimi­nal always haggles, even over a $25 certificate. I should have pushed him down to $15.

It was a mistake, and as we walked back to City Hall along Villegas Street and through the tropical park next to the university, I felt he was getting cold feet. Finally he said he couldn't do it, but he asked for my number all the same. He could ask someone to ask someone to ask someone, and perhaps they could help. He smiled the whole time, with the gentle irony of the Filipinos, and there was no judgmental distaste in his refusal. It was too risky for him to undertake. I said I was sorry, and he said, "No problem."

Two days later the phone rang. A cheerful woman's voice. She asked me what I wanted. I gave her my details, and then she asked, "When did you die? And how?"

"Yesterday," I blurted out. "I died yester­day and I think it was a heart attack."

"You think?"

"I wasn't there," I said, and she laughed.

"I'll see what I can do," she concluded. "It's 1,000 pesos for the certificate, and you can give me the same if you like."

The next 24 hours felt like my last on earth, or at least how my last 24 hours of normal life would feel if I were about to disappear. There was the slight fear I had blundered too far and that a police car would arrive downstairs look­ing for the gringo insurance fraudster.

But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the same woman called me back and told me my death certificate was ready and would be delivered to my apartment by a courier who would anonymously leave it at the front desk of my apartment block. I would see no one and ask no questions.

As I went down to collect it I thought of Steven Chin Leung, the Hong Kong national who had managed to have himself named as one of the 650 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who had perished in the World Trade Cen­ter on September 11, 2001. What had gone through Leung's mind as he saw himself plas­tered over the national media as a dead person?

Glee, ecstatic satisfaction or unnameable dread? He later claimed he was using his death certifi­cate to avoid a prior offense related to obtaining a U.S. passport, but there might well have been more to it than that. For myself, there was an acute anticipation at the idea of being declared nonexistent I was sure it was going to feel like walking through an open door on the far side of which lay a possibility that could be savored without being seized. My own certificate was in a pale blue envelope stapled at both ends. I took it upstairs with a morbid unease.

This was an official death notice signed by a doctor in a hospital in the Sampaloc neighborhood in Manila, and it bore offi­cial government stamps. I was identified as a Catholic who had succumbed to a condi­tion named as "pulmonary acute," and my body was designated as ready for burial. My closest relative was named at the bottom of the form as one 'Jasmin Osborne," my "aun­tie" whose delicate signature appeared above. I wondered how they had guessed that far from having a weak heart I do actually suffer from acute and chronic emphysema. I had died at midnight, needless to say.

It was then that the mentality of tago ng tago—hiding and hiding—finally set in, and I felt strangely emboldened to assume the pleasures of fakery and pseudocide. Like Reginald Perrin, I started to go out under an assumed name, telling people I met in bars and clubs that I was John Jones and worked as a banker at a Singapore firm. I could have said Prince Prinzapolka and they would not have batted an eyelid. It was easy to tell peo­ple whatever you wanted. It was disturbingly easy to imagine carrying on like this indefi­nitely. The pleasure, deep down, was not that of making illicit money but simply of no lon­ger being who you had been.

It's a fantasy, and a dangerous one. A male fantasy, perhaps, that involves not only a repressed desire for nomadism and vagrancy but also a knowledge of how expendable and cheap one's life really is. One's disappearance might not matter much.

I kept my death certificate by my bedside for a long time, glancing at it every night before sleep. I remembered a story Bales had told me on our last night together in Ban Krut. He had often traveled to Nige­ria to search for disappeared people. Once, he had driven the dangerous road between Lagos and the oil town of Port Harcourt. It passed through immense sugarcane fields where cars were often ambushed by bandits and made to disappear. People, spare parts, traces of blood—they all vanished into thin air. Bales stopped at a shantytown in the mid­dle of these cane fields for a beer, and there was a terrifying screeching of brakes as two cars nearly hit each other.

"At that moment," Bales said, shivering at the memory, "everyone in the shanty started screaming at exactly the same pitch as the sound of the brakes. It went on for minutes, and the Africans told us it must be some kind of mourning for the disappeared. It's like when people disappear we have to deal with it in some way. They were acknowledg­ing them, and although it made me afraid, I understood the feeling. Every disappear­ance makes us superstitious."