The 38 Million Dollar Smile

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The second sweep of fourteenth floors had been completed and no trace of Timmy or Kawee had been found.

Pugh said, “Sorry, Mr. Don. It was worth a try. Truly.”

“Yeah, it seemed to make sense. I guess there are going to be just too many holes in a dragnet of this amorphous type.”

“General Yodying is himself disappointed. He wants to take you to dinner at the Oriental Hotel when you have the time.

Perhaps you view this as a mordant touch, bordering on the macabre. But the general’s intentions are good.”

“I’ve never been to the Oriental. Timmy wants to go there.

Maybe we’ll all go.”

“I’m sure General Yodying will be happy to include Mr.

Timothy once he is safe and sound.”

“Timmy told me a story about Noel Coward at the Oriental.

The manager phoned him and asked if it was true that there was a gentleman in his room. Coward replied, ‘Just a moment and I’ll ask him.’”

Pugh laughed and said, “There is much entertaining farang lore in Bangkok. We Thais know it too. We are as amused by visiting farangs as you are by one another.”

“I know that Thailand was never colonized, thanks largely to the cleverness of King Chulalongkorn. Maybe that’s why foreigners here are seen mainly as sources of amusement, in addition of course to serving as reliable sources of hard currency.”

“Yes, and more importantly the latter. We are good at providing our own laughs. But hard currency from the West is needed to keep our upper classes roaming about in automobiles built in Bavaria and sipping satiny fluids distilled in Scotland.”

“If you were a wealthy foreigner, Rufus, and showed up in Thailand with thirty-eight million US dollars and were going to 134 Richard Stevenson invest it in a sure thing that was legal — no heroin, no arms smuggling, no adult or pedophile international sex trafficking — what would that investment be?”

“A legal investment? Hmm. Tourism infrastructure?

Computer technology? Transportation? Perhaps entertainment

— such as Hollywood movie palaces the likes of which L.B.

Mayer is surely swooning over, if somehow his soul is extant in Bangkok today in some sentient form. Or grandiose retail outlets would perhaps be the smartest investment of all. An American journalist once told me he had been in Thailand for several weeks but had not yet been able to figure out what was percolating inside the minds of the Thai people. I told him, oh, that’s easy. Going to the mall. That’s what modern Thais spend much of their spare time thinking about or doing. Going shopping. The writer was disappointed, I think.”

“And which of these investments that you have listed would provide the quickest return?”

Pugh looked doubtful. “None of the above, Mr. Don. Sorry.

If you’re talking getting your money back in months or even a few years, no such investments are likely to pay off that fast.

Land deals, of course, can be ways of making a quick killing in Thailand, as in most places, if you are privy to inside information on some government project — a highway, an airport, a SkyTrain extension, say. But you said legal investment, and using insider information, while common here, is against the law. And it sounds as if Mr. Gary Griswold is a far better Buddhist than are some of Thailand’s leading lights who were raised in clouds of incense with garlands of marigolds dangling from every orifice. You believe him to be a truly moral man, and perhaps he is that. Of course, there are legal gray areas available to investors here, also. And perhaps Mr. Gary was not too pious to eschew one of the murkier financial pursuits to be found here in the kingdom.”

“Like what?”

“For instance, real estate development that’s not meant to result in actual finished construction. Investors are lined up for, say, a large condominium project. A construction company is formed that embarks on the project and inflates its start-up costs by a thousand percent. All the condo units are sold for tidy sums, many of them to unsuspecting foreign retirees.

Escrow laws here are weak, so the organizers of the project put up part of the building, then abandon the skeletal structure and walk away with millions. You see these half-finished concrete towers throughout Bangkok. Attempts have been made to tighten the escrow laws, but powerful people who profit from these corrupt but barely legal schemes have so far prevented the laws from being updated. It’s a way of raking in big money fast, and perhaps someone talked Mr. Gary into investing in one of these cunningly conceived scams.”

“Maybe. Though with his family history, Griswold would likely know the difference between ethical and nonethical business practices. And surely he’s been around Thailand long enough to grasp what’s a sleazy con job and what isn’t a con job within the local context. No, I’m inclined to think that whatever he was planning to invest in was on the up-and-up, or at least was presented to him in a way that allowed him to think it was.”

“Mr. Gary is apparently a far better Buddhist than many of us whose Buddhism one would reasonably expect to be more organic to our daily lives.”

“Yes, unless he’s fooling us all. That’s a possibility, too.”

“This has occurred to me also. I hope you won’t be too disappointed if we track down Mr. Gary and he turns out to be a cad. Or at least a bit of a pill.”

“If Griswold was a scheming big jerk, it would certainly make it easier to exchange him for Timmy and Kawee. There is that.”

“This is a very Thai way of looking at it, Mr. Don. Now you’re talkin’ turkey.”

Suddenly I saw Timmy’s face, his eyes narrowing with disapproval over my brazen moral relativism, and I wanted to hold him and beg him not to judge me so harshly. And I wanted to beg his forgiveness for bringing him to this benighted land of violence and superstition. Then I heard him 136 Richard Stevenson say, “Violence and superstition? You’d better be careful not to compare Thailand to the land of the NRA, Pat Robertson, slavery, Jim Crow and Rush Limbaugh.” It was at that point that I asked him to please just shut up for one minute so that I could simply luxuriate in my profound relief over his being safe and well and once again by my side.

Pugh and I joined his team for the stakeout at the On Nut Internet cafe from which Griswold made his phone calls. Pugh had an illegally parked van with tinted windows situated half on the sidewalk directly in front of the cafe. A uniformed cop stopped by for a handout and was soon on his way. The place was in the shadow of the towering concrete On Nut SkyTrain station. This was the terminus of the Sukhumvit Road line, and whenever a train pulled in crowds came down the steps and dispersed up and down the street, many of them passing within inches of where we waited and watched. A few people went into the Internet cafe and sat down at computers. Nearly all were Thais. One was a male Westerner in sandals, cargo shorts, and a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival T-shirt, but he wasn’t Gary Griswold.

Pugh had the air-conditioning humming and sent out for eats from a nearby food stall. We had some nice pork larb and green papaya salad. I was so comfortable that I drifted off into semiconsciousness for an hour or so. To the extent that I was conscious, I tried to come up with another way of locating Griswold — or Timmy and Kawee — but I could not. There was one other avenue of hope. It was Monday, so I knew there was a fifty-fifty chance that the moto messenger that Griswold sent every Monday or Tuesday evening with cash for Kawee’s housekeeping and other expenses would likely show up within a few hours at Kawee’s room or at the whiskey seller’s stall down the soi from his place. Pugh had additional crews covering both locations.

I gave some thought as to how I might be able to pay Pugh for his extensive services in the event I never saw another dime from any of the Griswolds. That was going to be a sizable

dilemma. I did recall that I was in Timothy’s will, but that thought didn’t help.

By early evening there was no sign of Griswold, and Pugh said, “Let’s you and I head over to Kawee’s place. That looks like a better bet at this point. The moto messenger with Kawee’s stipend may well know where Griswold lives, or at least where he is likely to turn up. Ek and Noo can keep an eye out here.”

“What if,” I said, “Griswold only shows up at a particular place once a week to hand over the cash delivery? The moto guy may know when and where that is, but what if Griswold won’t show himself there again until next week?”

Pugh shrugged. “Then we go to Plan B.”

“Which is?”

“We kidnap former Minister of Finance Anant na Ayudhaya, and in order to find out what he knows, Ek goes after him with a telephone book.”

“Is that really feasible?”

“No. Not for us it isn’t. Not exactly.”

I let that go and followed Pugh out of the van onto the baking sidewalk. We climbed the steps of the SkyTrain station, and Pugh changed enough baht notes into coins to extract from the ticket machine two passes to the Sukhumvit station a couple of miles away. At the end of the workday, there weren’t many passengers on our car riding toward central Bangkok. Most people were heading the other way. The car was pleasantly frigid. One elderly woman was speaking Thai into a cell phone while everyone else sat mute. The view out the windows was more Miami Beach-modern, except for the occasional temples with their whitewashed stupas and golden spires.

When the train stopped briefly at Ekamai station, I asked Pugh about the big bus station we could see down below on our left.

“That’s the Eastern Bangkok bus station. If you’re going to Pattaya or on to Cambodia, that’s where you go to get the bus.”

138 Richard Stevenson

I imagined Elise Flanagan with her Antioch alumna group down below us climbing onto a coach three weeks earlier and then spotting Gary Griswold at the Thai-Cambodian border.

That is, spotting either Gary Griswold or Raul Castro.

We sped across one of the city’s few remaining canals, and I caught a quick glimpse of houseboats lining the dark waterway.

Might Gary Griswold be hiding out on one of them, I wondered? Or might Raul Castro?

We arrived at Sukhumvit station and were headed down the long flight of steps to the busy commercial neighborhood below when my cell phone rang. I wanted to believe it was going to be Ellen Griswold calling me back with news of her ex-husband’s location and his eagerness to help us free Timmy and Kawee and his profuse apologies for getting us into this goddamn mess in the first place.

We halted on the midlevel platform, and I stood out of the way of the surging crowds as best I could.

“Hello?”

“Donald, it’s Timothy.”

“Oh God.”

“They told me to call you again.”

“Yes. Good. Are you all right?”

“So far. But I’m supposed to remind you that now you have just twenty-four hours. You have until just after the sun sets tomorrow. They said they will not do what they have to do with us in the daylight. Do you understand what I’m saying? We’re on the fourteenth floor.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“They will phone you this time tomorrow. And you will tell them that you have Griswold and are ready to hand him over.”

“What is it they want with Griswold?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, I am not allowed to tell you anything else.”

“Okay.”

“Just get us out of this Millpond hell, will you?”

“We’re trying. Do they know we’re having trouble finding Griswold?”

“They seem to know that. And they said you should try harder.”

“Oh.”

“I have to hang up now.”

“Okay. Good-bye, Timothy. I heard what you said.”

“Good. Bye, Don.”

I looked at Pugh and said, “I know where they are. Timmy told me where they are.”

I repeated the conversation to Pugh and added, “Timmy said he was in Millpond hell. Millpond is the name of an Albany, New York development company that tried to put up a mall on some suburban farmland a number of years ago. That project fell through, but eventually the company got hold of the farmland when the elderly owners moved into Albany, and then Millpond started building a group of luxury condos on the land.

But the company was way overextended, and it went bust in the Poppy Bush recession. The unfinished condos stood vacant for years — an eyesore and an attractive nuisance for kids liable to break their necks climbing around on the tall concrete shells.

These buildings were just like the unfinished condos you described to me here in Bangkok. I believe that Timothy and Kawee are being held on the fourteenth floor of one of them.”

“This is possible,” Pugh said. “These structures have security services meant to look after them. But security services perhaps can be bought — or simply replaced by the building’s owner. Or the owner may not even know what’s going on in his building. Or it may not even be known who the owner is.”

“How many of these unfinished tall buildings are there in Bangkok? You told me earlier that they’re all over the place. But I’ve only seen a few.”

“You’re right, Mr. Don. More than a few is more than enough, but I’m guessing there aren’t more than a dozen. And 140 Richard Stevenson not all of them will have fourteenth floors. So that will narrow it down somewhat. I can readily find out from people I know in the city building inspector’s office how many such abandoned buildings are out there and exactly where they are.”

“Can you get this information fast? Won’t those offices be closed for the day?”

“For a fee, someone can speed back to the office and look up this data. Though then, of course, we run into our next set of difficulties.”

“Which are?”

“Arriving at the correct building to effectuate a rescue and having either Timmy or Kawee shoved off the balcony, and then the captors threatening to kill the remaining one unless we produce Griswold and let them all go on their way.”

“You think they would do that?”

“Of course. Why not? I think these people are not such good Buddhists.”