The 38 Million Dollar Smile

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The first thing I realized was, they will kill Kawee first. He was a mere Thai lady-boy, and under the present circumstances, Timothy had greater bargaining value. I was ashamed that this realization came to me with a certain amount of relief.

Pugh got on his cell and called somebody who gave him a number, and then he called somebody else. After hanging up, he told me he would have a list of unfinished and abandoned tall buildings in Bangkok within two hours. He made another call and asked Ek to assemble a team of men and woman with, as he put it, “military skills and experience.” I thought of my American Express account limit, and I wondered if maybe I could simply borrow the money for a sizable military operation from China, like Bush.

The last dull orange light of day faded out as Pugh led me away from Sukhumvit Road and down a mixed commercial and residential soi. The air was still ferociously hot, and within minutes my shirt was soaked through again. Pugh’s dark face shone with a light sheen, but below the neck he didn’t seem to be sweating at all. How did the Thais do that?

We passed Indian tailor shops, gold and gem emporiums, restaurants, flower stalls, bars and massage parlors. A number of the masseuses who were camped on stools outside their storefronts gabbing with one another or watering their plants grinned at Pugh and me and chimed, “ Hallo, massaagge? ” The curbside food stall aromas of chicken sizzling on grills with lime juice and herbs would have been pleasing under better circumstances, but now the smells were just cloying. How could Thai normal life dare to go on so cheerfully, so deliciously, when elements of Thai society that were completely rotten were threatening to kill two gentle and decent souls?

We entered a lower-rent district of three- and four-story concrete apartment buildings with drying laundry hanging over the balcony railings next to the flowering plants. Pugh stopped 142 Richard Stevenson at a van parked on the street and the waiting driver opened the window. Seeing me, the driver told Pugh in English that one of Kawee’s roommates said the moto man who delivers money to Kawee had not yet turned up, and if he arrived and Pugh’s crew somehow missed him the roommate would notify the van on his cell phone. The roommate, an older katoey named Nongnat, had said she was worried about Kawee. Sometimes Kawee stayed out overnight with a new boyfriend, Nongnat had said, but not without phoning first. Pugh’s people did not tell Nongnat that Kawee was being held hostage, thus avoiding any off chance that certain elements of the police might learn of the abduction and decide to meddle unhelpfully.

Pugh led me down the soi to where it ended at a chain-link fence along an expressway. Propped up next to the last apartment building on the block was a tin-roofed bamboo shanty that had a big open-front window and a counter. The place apparently served as a neighborhood convenience store.

You could get Colgate, condoms, a variety of beverages — including one made of bird saliva, according to the colorful sign next to it — as well as under-the-counter whiskey that Pugh said was distilled nearby in somebody’s flat.

Another of Pugh’s fleet of vans was parked nearby, and he checked in with the driver. The moto money man had not turned up at this location either, and the whiskey seller had been put on a retainer to make sure he pointed out the man if and when he appeared.

We were headed back toward Kawee’s apartment when Pugh’s cell phone rang, and after a brief exchange in Thai he indicated that we should pick up the pace and trot.

“The moto man has arrived at Kawee’s room with Kawee’s money from Mr. Gary.”

“Oh, terrific. Does he know where Griswold is?”

“Not exactly.”

“Thailand seems to be the land of not exactly.”

“Exactly.”

“So if Griswold is sending Kawee’s weekly payment, apparently he knows nothing of the kidnapping.”

“Yes, unless he is simply — what’s the term? — keeping up appearances.”

“We can ask him about that.”

Now even Pugh was sweating a bit. The moto man was standing next to his bike in front of the entrance to Kawee’s building. He had on a dark jacket, impractical in the heat, it seemed, but apparently a fixture of every Bangkok motorcycle-taxi driver’s getup. He had the serene look of a man who lived in chaos but had mastered the ability to float though it. The katoey Nongnat had come downstairs and was also calm but worried looking. She had the sloe-eyed, elegantly honed good looks of a honey-colored Vogue model who happened to have a prominent Adam’s apple.

Pugh spoke with both of them in Thai and then told me that the moto man, Pichet Suthat, had indeed seen Gary Griswold just an hour earlier. Griswold had phoned him to arrange for the weekly pickup of an envelope — Pichet apparently did not know that it contained cash — and he had met Griswold at the corner of Sukhumvit Road and Ekamai Soi 63 near the Ekamai bus station. It seemed possible that this transaction had been taking place even as Pugh and I paused overhead at the Ekamai SkyTrain stop.

Pichet said he did not know exactly where Griswold lived, but he thought he had seen him a few times coming out of an apartment block just a short way up Soi 63 from Sukhumvit Road. We hired Pichet on the spot to take Pugh there, and we flagged down another moto taxi for me to ride. Nongnat asked in English where Kawee was and why we were looking for him.

Pugh told her that Kawee was in some trouble and might need help, and we were friends of Gary Griswold prepared to do what we could. Pugh asked Nongnat if she knew where Griswold lived. She said no, and now she was even more worried about Kawee, she told us, and insisted on climbing on the second bike behind me.

144 Richard Stevenson

Nongnat had on pink shorts — avoiding the need for womanly sidesaddle on the motorcycle — and pressed herself up against me as we took off. Her floral aroma as she nuzzled the nape of my neck was distinctly feminine, though as the motorcycle bounced and swayed and stopped short a couple of times it soon became apparent lower down that Nongnat was biologically still male. Once when I shifted in my seat a bit — I was also concerned that I might alarm or embarrass the moto driver I myself was wedged up against — Nongnat gave me a playful poke at the base of my spine and chuckled sweetly.

Pugh had arranged for his two surveillance vans in the neighborhood to follow us to Griswold’s supposed residential block, even as his team at the On Nut Internet cafe maintained its vigil, and a separate flying squad was assembling under Ek’s direction for an assault on abandoned tall buildings across Bangkok.

Traffic along Sukhumvit Road was heavy under the elevated SkyTrain line, and we bobbed and weaved among the cars and tuk-tuks, pausing only briefly for traffic signals and once detouring around a jam-up by jouncing over the curb and pinballing among the pedestrians, narrowly missing several. I thought of big Yai, who had run down a complaining Austrian tourist on the sidewalk and then turned around and driven over the prostrate and injured Viennese a second time. I wondered if soon I would meet sociopathic Yai face-to-face.

Pichet led us to the apartment building he thought Griswold might be living in. It was one of the posher ones in the neighborhood, not far from a cineplex and a couple of big international chain hotels. The lobby had a security door, but Pugh bounded off Pichet’s bike and followed a man who looked like Wayne Newton into the lobby and then held the door open for the rest of us. The two vans pulled up out front, and one of Pugh’s drivers joined Pugh, me and Nongnat as we approached a uniformed security man who appeared around a corner looking alert. Pugh spoke to the guard in rapid Thai and I heard him mention Gary Griswold.

Pugh said to me, “No Griswold here, he says, but let’s try this.” Pugh pulled a photo of Griswold out of his pocket and showed it to the guard.

The guard’s face showed instant recognition, and he said,

“Ah, Mr. Gray.”

“Mr. Gray?” Pugh said.

“Mr. Gray Winsocki. Fifth floor. You want me call up to him? But I think he not here.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Bicycle. Mr. Gray go out on bicycle. His bike not here.”

I said to Pugh, “So he’s likely to be back, right? He won’t be biking to Cambodia or anything like that, it looks like.”

The guard said, “Bangkok not so good for bicycle. Too much car. Too much motorbike. But Mr. Gray, he like bicycle.

He go fast around cars. I think he come back later.”

Pugh indicated to the guard that he’d like to speak with him privately, and they walked over to an alcove.

Nongnat said to me, “Kawee okay? I worry Kawee. Kawee say Mr. Gary good man, but why he hide? Why he change name? Farang not change name, just Thai.”

“These are exactly the questions Khun Rufus and I hope to have answers to soon. Within minutes, with luck.”

Nongnat wrinkled her elegant nose. “Mr. Gary he trouble. I tell Kawee he big trouble.”

“Why did you think Mr. Gary was trouble?”

“No fuck, just pray. I tell Kawee be careful this type.”

“Yes, that is a universal basis for caution.”

Pugh and the guard came back and Pugh said, “This gentleman has refused us admittance to Mr. Gary’s flat. It seems that one of life’s most challenging quests is finished for us, Mr.

Don. We have found an honest man. This dude won’t let us into Griswold’s place even in exchange for a substantial consideration. Well, fuck ’im if he can’t take a bribe. Meanwhile, however, he is granting us permission to hang around here and 146 Richard Stevenson nab Mr. Gary when he turns up again. Which my disappointingly ethical friend here expects to be soon. Mr. Gary normally takes his bike out for no more than a few hours. So I suggest that we position ourselves discreetly and wait.”

It was mid-evening now, with daylight gone and less than twenty-four hours left before the kidnappers’ deadline. Pugh’s driver stayed behind in the lobby, and the rest of us went out front, and Pugh and I got into the air-conditioned van. Nongnat went down the street for some food and came back with jasmine rice and yellow curry with fish and bamboo shoots. We ate it eagerly — I was hungry by now and so no longer found the local food smells off-puttingly indifferent to our plight — and Pugh spelled his man in the lobby while he came out and also ate with steady concentration. This man observed his food admiringly as he ate it. It seemed as though any second he might actually speak to the rice and curry approvingly, even tenderly. The food was Thai all the way, and so was he.

At ten thirty Griswold still had not returned, and we were all wondering about that. What was he doing out riding his bike around Bangkok this late at night? But a call came in from one of Pugh’s operatives, reporting that the list of abandoned partially constructed buildings at least fourteen stories high was on its way to where we were stationed. The list was expected within fifteen minutes, so Ek was summoned and told to wait up the street with his SWAT teams.

When the list arrived in a shoulder bag carried by a tiny young woman on a motorbike, Pugh and I got out and carried the bag up the soi to meet Ek. He had a convoy of three large four-by-fours, the type of swaggering road hogs Timmy would have immediately labeled socially irresponsible. Timmy, however, was not there to complain.

Some of Ek’s small army of muscular guys in T-shirts and cargo pants got out of the SUVs and stood on the sidewalk looking formidable, even menacing, just as a male farang on a bicycle rounded the corner from Sukhumvit Road, approached our assemblage, seemed to take in the scene at a glance, and quickly swooped around and began peddling furiously back up the soi. Pugh saw this and yelled something in Thai to the girl on the motorbike who had brought the bag. She was off like a shot after the man on the bicycle, and we jumped into the van and took off after both of them.

Pugh’s driver was so reckless that a couple of the taxi drivers we cut off actually honked their horns at us hot-heartedly and glared as we lurched down Sukhumvit Road. Within a block, we spotted Pugh’s little moto woman, who had knocked Griswold off his bicycle and was wrestling with him on the sidewalk in front of a 7-Eleven. We pulled up, hopped out, elbowed aside a dozen or so alarmed bystanders, and hauled both Griswold and his bike into the back of the van. We required privacy for what was about to transpire, so we sent Nongnat back to her place with Supornthip, the moto driver who had chased down Griswold. They climbed on Supornthip’s bike and sped away, and we took off close behind.

Griswold, who I recognized from his photographs, was in spandex biking shorts and a tank top, and he carried a shoulder bag, which Pugh wrenched away from him as one of Pugh’s muscle guys, who had the word Egg stenciled on his T-shirt, wrapped plastic handcuffs around Griswold’s wrists. Sweaty and decidedly nonaromatic, Griswold said nothing but was breathing fast. His bike helmet had slipped down low over his forehead, and Pugh carefully removed it and set it aside. Under his gleaming mess of helmet hair Griswold’s eyes were wide open, and he kept glancing at me.

Pugh gave the driver some instructions in Thai, and that’s when Griswold, apparently understanding Pugh’s words, said evenly, “Not a good idea.”

“Why should we not take you to your condo in Sathorn? It is your real home.”

Griswold studied us and said, “Who are you? Before I say anything else, I need to know that.”

“We are not your enemies. We are your friends,” Pugh told him and then instructed the driver in English to take us to Pugh’s office in Surawong, and to use the garage entrance.

148 Richard Stevenson

Griswold took this in and then looked at me curiously.

“Yeah. Okay. I think I understand what’s going on here. You

— Mr. Buttinski-Farang. What’s your name? Is it what I think it is?”

“Donald Strachey. I’m a private investigator. I was hired by your former wife and current sister-in-law Ellen Griswold to find you and to protect you if necessary, and to persuade you to stop acting like a ninny.”

Griswold laughed mirthlessly. “Ah, yes. The Albany private eye. I’ve heard about you. I thought you went home. You were supposed to fold up your tent and carry it back to the Hudson Valley. And yet here you are. I really need to talk to my former wife about her lax hiring practices.” He shook his head and pushed some sweat off his forehead with the backs of his cuffed hands.

“You are in spectacularly big trouble, Griswold. You do grasp that, do you not?”

“Am I in spectacular trouble? Well, yeah, I guess I am. How thoughtful of you to fly all the way across the Pacific Ocean to point that out to me. Thanks loads.”

My impulse was to grab the sarcastic asshole and bash him one, but I wasn’t sure what all he knew. And of course, Timmy would have disapproved of my striking a pacifist — if Griswold really was that. I seemed to be surrounded by peace-loving Buddhists who found room in their hearts to smack people with phone books, and others who hurled soothsayers and farang retirees off balconies.

I said, “My partner — boyfriend — Timothy Callahan has been abducted by violent criminals. This is entirely your fault, Griswold. These criminals are people who are in fact looking for you and have not been able to locate you — because you are hiding out from them — and they want to swap Timothy and your young friend Kawee for you. If recent events are any guide, once they get hold of you these people intend to toss you off a tall building. So we have developed two plans. Plan A is to rescue Timmy and Kawee and then to protect you. You’ll be happy to know that handing you over to these goons is only

Plan B. But before any of us carries out any plan at all, we need badly to understand exactly who and what it is we’re dealing with here. Griswold, you have some extensive explaining to do.

You can begin when I say go. Go.”

He looked surprisingly at ease. Griswold’s breathing had evened out now, and he lay on a straw mat in the back of the van with his head propped on a sack of rice. As I spoke, he listened carefully, his mouth dropping open when I told him Timmy and Kawee had been kidnapped and the kidnappers were willing to release the two once they had taken possession of Griswold. Unless he was faking it more brilliantly than seemed likely, Griswold was hearing about the kidnappings for the first time.

“Oh no,” Griswold said. “Poor Kawee. This is awful. He’s such a sweet-natured soul.”

“Apparently that is the case. And I can tell you that Timothy Callahan is a nice guy, too. So let’s get them both back real, real fast.”

“I was so naive,” Griswold said and shook his head. Then he looked up at me and said, “Please tell me. What is Timothy Callahan’s birth date?”

I thought, Oh, good grief, here we go. “I’m not telling you that. We’re not going to screw around with any astrology bullshit. What we’re going to do is get to the point, and we are going to do so starting right now.”

Griswold gazed up at me serenely. I was pathetic in his eyes.

A rationalist, a literalist, a lost soul. He said, “I’m just trying to get some perspective on where you and your friend fit into all of this. Nothing more.”

Then Pugh said, “I too am interested, Mr. Don. If you revealed to us where and on what date Mr. Timothy was born, this could help clarify the larger picture. I appreciate and respect your Western rationalist outlook, but just indulge us. And then we can proceed using more universal means. Phone books or whatever.”

150 Richard Stevenson

Pugh had used the word us, meaning Griswold and himself.

What was going on here? Wasn’t Pugh in a very real sense my contract employee?

I could hear Timmy snickering over all this, but I could also hear him bellowing, “Just tell them what they want to hear!”

I recited the year of Timmy’s birth and told Griswold,

“Timothy was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on November eleventh, at ten fourteen a.m. So?”

The van was making its way through the Monday night traffic northward and westward toward Surawong. We were traveling at a normal rate of speed now, observing all the traffic laws, blending in, not attracting attention.

Pugh and Griswold looked at each other and then at me.

Pugh said, “It would help if a professional did Mr.

Timothy’s chart and blessed it. But even without that, I do believe that there is hope.”

Griswold nodded in agreement. “There’s a good chance that you can pull off a successful rescue. The date today is four-fourteen, a numerologically benign period for a Sagittarius.

However,” he said, “if the rescue doesn’t work, I think I can work something out with these people. I’m quite certain I know who they are — or at least who they represent — and there’s some chance I can make a deal with them and save myself as well as Timothy and Kawee.”

This didn’t sound right. If there was a way for him to negotiate with these people, why wouldn’t he have done it sooner? I said, “So, who are they, and what would this so-called deal be?”

Pugh said, “Please do tell the truth, Mr. Gary. We will be very pissed off if you lie through your teeth and this quickly becomes apparent, which surely it will. Egg won’t like it either, I am thinking.” We all looked over at nicely toned Egg, who sat rock still, glowering at Griswold.

“I’m familiar with the Five Precepts, Khun…?”

“Rufus Pugh.”

“I do understand, Khun Rufus, that to tell an untruth is reprehensible. And much more important than irritating you or your muscular young friend here, it would put me at grave risk of offending the spirit of the Enlightened One.”

Pugh smiled weakly. “Said like a true farang dilettante Buddhist. No Thai would utter any such words. We would say if we lie, we might later turn into a buffalo turd and the ghost of our mother might slip and fall on us and break some bones. But never mind. You seem to get the point about truthfulness being an all-around better approach than going around telling big whoppers. So let’s have it.”

Griswold lay back now and looked up at the ceiling of the van. He was either organizing his true thoughts or he was formulating some cunning net of falsehoods that would have his late mother turning fecal-footed cartwheels in hell.

He said, “I reneged on a financial agreement in which I was to be the prime investor. A number of people had already put money into the same project. And when I unexpectedly decided to pursue an entirely different project and backed out of the original scheme just before I was to transfer my funds, the first project collapsed before others could get their money back and they lost many millions of dollars. And now a major group of losers blames me instead of the group that cheated them. They want me either to reimburse them — which I am not about to do — or they want me to die horribly as a warning to others not to trifle with them. It’s as simple as that.”

True or not, this sounded plausible. “So why,” I asked,

“don’t you simply leave Thailand? If this is such a dangerous place for you, why are you choosing to hang around Bangkok?”

“To complete an extremely worthy nonprofit project,”

Griswold said. “When this project is done, I might leave Thailand for another Buddhist country — Laos, maybe, or Cambodia, despite my having been Thai myself in several past lives. Or I may remain here and let my karma play out in a way that would lead to my remaining safely in Thailand, my truest home, although in a form that might be other than human. To 152 Richard Stevenson the extent to which any of these matters is within my control, I haven’t yet decided how I will choose.”

I noted Griswold’s fine Italian bicycle in the back of the van, scratched and bent from having been whacked by the motorbike, and his helmet on the floor next to him. While I was thinking brain damage, I saw Pugh gazing at Griswold, rapt and solemn. A minute earlier, Pugh had been dismissing Griswold as a silly farang dilettante, and now he was looking at him as if he was some kind of spandexed holy man.

I said, “So what was the scheme that went awry, and who are the people who are mad at you?”

“There is no need for you to hear the particulars,” Griswold said. “It had to do with currency speculation and involved certain insider information. I have to admit that the scheme was ethically borderline, but I saw it as justified by the opportunity to invest the proceeds in meritorious works on a very large scale.”

Timmy’s voice again in my head: “A Buddhist Augustinian. How unusual.”

I said, “And what makes you think you might talk your way out of having these people who think you screwed them make a violent example of you?”

“I can tell them I’m going to cut them in on a new deal I’ve come up with that they will find irresistible. I know these people. The proceeds from this project will mainly benefit humanity. But even twenty percent should be enough to get these people off my case for the time being. And all we need, really, is a little time.”

“And that new deal would be what?”

“I just can’t go into it. Sorry. My partners would consider it a breach of confidentiality. Let’s just say it has to do with international finance.”

I had gotten a C in economics at Rutgers and looked at Pugh for help. I didn’t even know what questions to ask. Pugh was still studying Griswold and looking impressed. Where had all this guy’s Thai street savvy gone?

It hadn’t gone anywhere, for now Pugh looked hard at Griswold and said, “Former Minister of Finance Anant na Ayudhaya. Is that thieving crumb-bum your partner in this so-called humanitarian venture, or was he a partner in the deal that went sour?”

Griswold froze ever-so-briefly. He recovered instantly and said mildly, “Why would you possibly assume anything like that? How bizarre that you would think that.”

I said, “We got into your laptop. There’s a picture of you together with this ex-minister and Khunathip the seer. I expect you know what happened to Khun Khunathip. So what’s the story of you three looking like you’re jollying it up at some Cornell class reunion on Khunathip’s balcony?”

At the mention of Khunathip’s name, Griswold seemed to breathe a little faster. Or was it the mention of a balcony? “That was a social occasion. I’m impressed by your chutzpah, Strachey. Getting into my computer was really an extraordinarily sleazy thing to do.”

“Griswold, I was simply trying to save your dumb ass. That’s what I was hired by your sister-in-law to do. Of course I was going to look anywhere that might offer any clue as to what kind of idiotic mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Anyway, what was your relationship to Khunathip the seer? The police say you turned up in his financial records. You paid him a fee, so-called, of six hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

Now Griswold looked grim. “The fee had nothing to do with the investment. That was simply my payment for a series of readings this extremely keen-minded and profoundly farseeing man did for me over a period of more than a year. His sad fate had nothing to do with any of that. Khun Khunathip should not have died. That was just so, so wrong.”

“Was he killed by the same people who are after you?”

“He was a party to the original currency speculation scheme.

He invested in it. In fact, it was Khun Khunathip who led me to it in the first place. When I came up with a much better investment project — one that was not only financially sound 154 Richard Stevenson but morally uncompromised — and I pulled out of the currency speculation scheme before actually transferring any cash, Khun Khunathip tried to get his money back, too. It was about one million US, I believe. When the original investors refused to give the million dollars back to him — they laughed at him and called it overhead — he became uncharacteristically angry and did new astrological charts for each of them, and then cursed the charts. Then he sent each member of the investment group the cursed charts. Apparently the investors then hired their own astrologer, whose charts indicated that Khun Khunathip would have to be killed in order to erase his curses. I have to admit that I brought a certain amount of naivete to all of this, but I was shocked that Khun Khunathip didn’t know any better than to cross these ruthless and powerful people. This is an aspect of Thai society I failed to appreciate when I came here, and I have to say I still don’t know what to make of it.”

The van was stalled now in a big jam-up at Silom and Rama IV Roads. We had been stuck for several minutes, but there was no honking and there were no muttering drivers sticking their heads out their windows to see what in God’s name the bloody holdup was. People sat quietly in their air-conditioned cars or in their fuming tuk-tuks. A low-fare, un-air-conditioned municipal bus idled nearby, and the steaming passengers sat by the open windows uncomplainingly inhaling that evening’s portion of each person’s annual allotment of small particulates.

Pugh said, “Khun Gary, welcome to Paradise. Like any paradise where human beings are present, Thailand is complicated. Mark Twain said, ‘Heaven for climate, hell for society.’ Here the two exist in a kind of rough harmony. As you seem to have discovered.”

I said, “What about Geoff Pringle? You know about him, I take it.”

“I read about him online in the Key West Citizen. For reasons of keeping up appearances for the farang tourists, I suppose, there was no report of Geoff’s death in the Bangkok newspapers, either Thai or English editions. I was very, very sorry to learn of Geoff’s passing. He was once a good friend of THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 155 mine. It was Geoff who turned me on to Thailand in the first place. But he was one of the people who lost money in the currency speculation scheme. He blamed me, which was totally fair. I had gotten him into it originally. Geoff, however, made the mistake of pestering both the Ministry of Justice and the US embassy about his losses — he believed that he had been swindled, and of course he had — and it must have become apparent that he was going to be a troublemaker on a scale somebody high up didn’t want to be bothered with. So Geoff had to go. It’s one of the Thai business practices that I have to say I’ll never get used to.”

I said, “And now back to former Minister Anant. Where does he fit in here? Was he one of the participants in the original currency speculation scheme that was called off, or is he involved in the new project that’s going to accumulate both vast wealth and karmic merit?”

I could all but see the wheels turning inside Griswold’s head.

Before Griswold could come up with some half-truth or bald-faced lie, Pugh said matter-of-factly, “It was both. Khun Anant was involved with both schemes, the dubious one that was abandoned and got two people killed, and the supposedly worthy project that is ongoing and hasn’t gotten anybody killed just yet. Am I right, Khun Gary?”

Griswold peered down at his handcuffs and said nothing.