The 38 Million Dollar Smile

CHAPTER TEN

“Khun Khunathip’s,” Pugh said, “is a death that will reverberate. Thai television will be all over it an hour from now, and tomorrow the Bangkok newspapers will be draped in jasmine and marigolds. This is a man whose counsel was sought by ministers of state, by generals of the army, by girl groups in hot pants. It’s been rumored that even Jack has had his astrological chart blessed by Khun Khunathip.”

We were seated in the front seat of Pugh’s Toyota, parked in the soi outside Paradisio with the air-conditioning blasting.

Timmy and Kawee had slogged through the heat over to Griswold’s apartment to wait for me while I tried to figure out where they — and I — would be safest from whoever it was in Griswold’s life who now seemed to be going around causing people to fall over railings and die.

I said, “Who is Jack?”

Pugh winked at me. “I hope you won’t think less of me.”

“Why would I not continue to hold you in high esteem?”

“Jack is how His Majesty the King is referred to by people I know who wish to discuss him in less-than-reverential tones and not pay a price for their insolence.”

“I wasn’t aware such people existed in Thailand.”

“They do. But it’s a crime to insult the king. People have gone to prison for it. Lese majeste. You no longer run into this concept all that often in the twenty-first century. Not outside of Thailand.”

“But flippantly calling King Bhumibol ‘Jack’ would seem to qualify as a slur, wouldn’t it?”

“The queen,” Pugh said, snickering now, “is Jackie. And the crown prince is Jack Junior.”

“And the royal family has consulted this now-deceased famous soothsayer?”

90 Richard Stevenson

“I have heard that this is so. I realize it sounds eerily like Macbeth. Or Lear. Or Duck Soup. ”

“Rufus, what did you major in at Chulalongkorn University?

And Monmouth College? And let’s not leave out Duke.”

“I majored in English, minored in criminology. Does that explain a few things, Mr. Don?”

“It’s a start.”

“The thing about Khun Khunathip,” Pugh went on, “is that the guy was good. His track record as a prophet was far better than most. This was partly a consequence, I believe, of his intuitive grasp of the way human lives are intertwined with astral forces most of us lack the subtlety of mind to discern. But it’s long experience, too. Khun Khunathip had been a successful seer in third-century BC Nepal — what is now the Kingdom of Nepal — as well as in Mayan Mexico a millennium or so later. So the guy has simply had the time and opportunity to really get his shit together.”

I looked over at Pugh, who remained poker-faced. His Toyota had a seated Buddha figure behind the steering wheel obscuring the speedometer, and some kind of stony doodad dangling by a pink string from the rearview mirror.

I said, “So I guess Mr. Khunathip will be sorely missed by many.”

“He will.”

“But only until he turns up elsewhere in time and geography to resume his career as a seer?”

“That depends. Khun Khunathip’s karma could include some slippage, if I read this guy correctly. His returning as a moody bacterium on a monkey’s hangnail cannot be ruled out.”

Pugh went on to explain that his police sources had phoned him about the seer because they knew Pugh had been making inquiries about Gary Griswold. His sources had told him that Griswold’s name had not turned up in any other context but that he figured in the fortune-teller’s financial records. A Bangkok Bank check for the baht equivalent of six hundred fifty thousand US dollars had been made out to Khunathip and drawn on Griswold’s account. The notation in the seer’s records said the amount was a “fee.”

I said, “How come the cops are so interested in Khunathip’s financial records? In your mind, does this confirm that they suspect foul play?”

“Naturally they suspect foul play. That’s what the police are in the business of suspecting. It must be said that the lives of the Royal Police of Thailand bustle with far more compelling pastimes, such as entrepreneurial activity. But foul play is still a thing that interests them in an offhand way, and this death looks funny. Khun Khunathip was not an imbiber, so an accidental tumble eighteen stories from his apartment balcony at three twenty a.m. is not a likely scenario. Was he watering his plants and slipped? The police think not. Suicide also appears unlikely. Khun Khunathip was a confident and contented man, according to his soothsayer colleagues. He was not at all displeased with his being afforded the opportunity to live out his present-day putrid corporeal existence consorting with the likes of generals and rock stars, not to mention Jack and Jackie.

He showed no indication of wishing to take premature leave of any of that. That pretty much leaves getting tossed.”

“So,” I said, “will tomorrow’s newspapers be burning up with speculation as to who might have done the tossing?”

Pugh snorted with amusement. “Oh no. First, it must be determined who the likeliest suspects are. Then, depending on who they are and on their exact position in Thai society — and depending on no other thing, really — speculation will or will not be permitted. Stay tuned, Mr. Don. Just you stay tuned.”

I said I would do that, but meanwhile it seemed more urgent than ever that we locate Gary Griswold and help him extricate himself from whatever terrible trap he apparently had been caught in. That is, find Griswold plus his thirty-eight million, or whatever was left of it.

I told Pugh that Griswold had been sending Kawee money each week via motorbike messenger. I suggested that the next time the messenger showed up, we intercept him and use whatever means practicable to get him to lead us to Griswold.

Pugh liked that idea and told me again he thought I was much more competent than the other drunken-stumblebum farang PIs he knew in Bangkok. I thanked him for the compliment.

I phoned Kawee on his mobile and learned that the messenger’s visits were not entirely predictable, but he usually turned up on a Monday or Tuesday in the early evening. And if Kawee wasn’t home, the messenger would leave the envelope with the whiskey seller who had a stall at the end of the soi.

Kawee said Timmy wanted to speak with me and put him on the phone.

“I don’t know what this might be worth,” Timmy said, “but Kawee showed me the crate in a ground-floor storage room where Griswold kept some of his excess belongings. There was a laptop computer inside its carrying case inside the box. I brought it upstairs for you to have a look at.”

“Excellent. Great. Was there anything else of interest?”

“Not so far as I could tell. It was mostly books and empty suitcases.”

“Guard that computer with your life,” I said, “until I can get over there. I’m going to check e-mails at the Internet cafe by the Topmost, and then I’ll be right over.”

I told Pugh what Timmy had found, and he said, “Now you guys are cookin’ with gas.”

Pugh drove me the few blocks over to the Topmost. While he drove, he took a call from a friend at AIS, Kawee’s mobile phone service. Pugh learned that the digital Skype phone through which Griswold communicated with Kawee was on an account at an Internet cafe in On Nut, in eastern Bangkok, on the way to Suvarnabhumi Airport. Pugh said that within three hours he would have a surveillance team in place inside and outside the cafe, with each team member carrying a copy of the photo of Griswold that Ellen Griswold had provided for me.

“We’re on our way,” I said to Pugh.

“Ih.” This was the common Thai word, or just sound, that was somewhere between an exhalation and a grunt, and whose meaning seemed to land somewhere between “yes” and “I acknowledge that at this moment you physically exist in my presence.”

I said, “Your team will tail Griswold if he shows up at the cafe, but they won’t spook him, right?”

“Ih.”

Pugh said he needed an hour or two in his office, about a mile away on Surawong, to bring his team together and get photos of Griswold copied and distributed. I said I would stay at the Internet cafe until he picked me up, that I needed to check my mail. And anyway I wanted to do some online digging.

The Internet cafe was a small storefront family operation, with eight or nine computers and farang tourists and Thai teenagers seated at several of them. Two of the owners’ kids were snoozing on straw mats in the middle of the floor, and a middle-aged Thai woman sat operating a sewing machine just inside the front door. Here was an Internet cafe where you could check your MySpace or Facebook accounts and have your hemline lowered at the same time.

My Hotmail account was up to here with the usual crap, but my eye snagged on EllenG1958, and I clicked open the message. It read:

Dear Don,

This is to thank you in advance for everything I am assuming you have done to locate Gary, but it turns out that all your good exertions have been unnecessary. We have heard from Gary, and he is perfectly okay! Isn’t that terrific news?

Gary is fine, his assets are intact, and he is just incredibly embarrassed over his being out of touch and with all the fuss that’s been raised. You must have been closing in on him, because he heard about your being in Bangkok and your searching for him on Bill’s and my behalf. Gary is feeling like such a dope at this point, in fact, that he would rather not see you personally and urges that you settle up with any expenses incurred in the course of your investigation and just come on home to Albany — where spring is finally showing signs of breaking out!

94 Richard Stevenson

Look, I know. You’re saying, what kind of BS is this? So let’s just cut to the chase. What I’m saying to you is, I accept Gary’s explanation for his freak-out — it had to do with a personal rather than financial crisis — and Bill and I are choosing to wrap this up.

It’s my money, so it’s my cal. Enjoy a few more days in the Land of Smiles, if you like, on my nickel. And be assured that the terms of your contract with me will be honored in all respects.

Let me know, please, that you have received this message, and reply with an Albany ETA when you have one.

Thanks again for your professionalism and for your keen interest in my incorrigible ex-husband’s continued well-being.

Fondly,

Ellen Griswold

I closed and saved the message, logged off, and then sat there, the meter running at sixty baht an hour, about a buck seventy-five. One of the kids asleep on the floor behind me moaned, in the grip of a nightmare, I guessed. I sat for a while longer. The air-conditioning was far preferable to the pounding heat outside, though the cafe smelled of German underarm deodorant and Thai fish sauce.

I got up, paid my fee, and went outside. Now Bangkok felt not so much molten as molting, as if, in the heat, the city was shedding its skin or other outer layer in my presence, and what was now exposed was formless and incomprehensible to a wandering and lost farang like me. I loved Bangkok, but it seemed to be making a fool of me. I wished I knew why. What had I done to it?

Oh, but wait a minute. Now I had a rational thought. The thought was this: No, it’s not Bangkok that’s jerking me around in some cruel and unusual way. Nuh-uh. It wasn’t the place. Bangkok itself was just a large, traffic-choked Asian city full of basically nice Thai people — drive-by shooters notwithstanding — who loved to laugh and believed in ghosts and ate great food. No, it was not Bangkok making an ass of me. Of course it wasn’t.

What a silly thought. It was the Griswolds.

I looked around and then ducked into an alleyway leading to a couple of laundry service holes-in-the-wall. They were closed on Sunday and the area was relatively quiet. I had Ellen Griswold’s cell number and dialed it, 001 for the US, then the area code and number. It was six fifteen p.m. in Bangkok and — swiftly doing the math — seven fifteen a.m. the same day in Loudonville, New York.

“This is Ellen. Please leave a message.”

Beep.

I cut the connection and put my phone away. I walked out and stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes — or was it fifteen? — and then walked over to the Topmost. I retrieved the room key, took the elevator to the unlucky sixth floor, went into 606, and lay down on the bed with a mild headache. I lay there for half an hour or so. Then I took an aspirin and walked back over to the Internet cafe.

When I Googled Khun Khunathip, the Thai soothsayer, I got over a thousand hits. The man was indeed a big deal. There were news photos of him at Buddhist New Year outdoor gatherings bestowing tidings of good luck on the throngs. In his company on other occasions were ministers of state, princesses, movie stars, industrial magnates. Several news stories reported Khun Khunathip’s acumen in forecasting the military coup of a few years earlier that sent the thought-to-be-corrupt but still democratically elected prime minister into exile and installed the junta that had run the country until recently. You had to wonder if the seer’s prescience about the coup came from charting the heavens or from a discreet phone call.

Although Khun Khunathip seemed to be the foremost figure in the pantheon of Thai soothsayers, his was a crowded field of practitioners. One survey said about a quarter of Thais regularly sought life guidance from a mo duu, or “seeing doctor,” on matters ranging from family to love relationships to money to auspicious dates for marrying or having children. Some of the seers were neighborhood men and women, often with humble stalls outside Buddhist temples, who charged several dollars for a consultation. Others were big-time operators who advised the high-and-mighty and collected substantial fees for 96 Richard Stevenson themselves or for temples whose abbots were in a position to dispense next-life merit points to present-life sinners.

Among the other celeb seers was one Pongsak Sutiwipakorn, who had failed to predict the last military coup but had made headlines much more recently when he had publicly forecast yet another — upcoming — coup by the end of April. A third popular seer, Khun Surapol Sutharat, got the press’s attention by insisting that his charts offered incontrovertible proof that there would not be a military coup anytime soon. A fourth seer, Thammarak Visetchote, had recently been making a name for himself by advising a group of younger army officers who were known to be fed up with their older commanding officers and with the old guard’s corrupt ways. Seer Thammarak’s specialty was numerological forecasts.

Again, I wondered how much these guys had in common with Nostradamus and how much with Karl Rove.

I printed out some of the data on the seers and stuffed the pages into my pocket before venturing outside and walking around the corner to the food stalls on hectic Rama IV Road.

The sun was setting, but the traffic-fouled air was still suffocating. I thought Timmy and Kawee might appreciate some eats, so I picked up some cold diced pork salad with lime juice and galangal, a bag of cooked jasmine rice, and a half liter of fish soup in a plastic sack. For a snack, I had some pineapple chunks on a stick, passing up the deep-fried cicadas.

When I walked back to the Internet shop, I saw Pugh there looking up and down the street. His car was illegally parked, half on the narrow strip of sidewalk and half sticking out in the soi, and plainly he was looking for me. When he spotted me, he urgently beckoned. As I walked up to Pugh, I could not tell what the look on his face meant, only that his news, if any, was going to be bad.