The 38 Million Dollar Smile

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The first shots were fired at our minivan no more than fifteen minutes later as we drove south on Ratchaprasong Road.

Nitrate sensed what was about to happen when motorcyclists pulled up on either side of us simultaneously. As he gunned the engine, I caught just a millisecond’s glimpse of the raised long-barreled revolver pointed at my side of the van. Nitrate did an instant U-turn — southbound traffic was heavy, northbound lighter — and shot northward. The second van in our convoy followed, and I could hear shots fired behind us.

Ek, in the seat behind me, had shoved open his window and was ready to fire at anybody within sight who was firing at us, but Pugh said something in Thai and Ek held his fire. Pugh told me, “We’re not gonna kill anybody on the street. We’ll get on the expressway. No motos are allowed on the expressway.”

Pugh was on his cell phone now, consulting the second minivan, driven by Egg. Griswold was in the second van, Timmy and Kawee were in ours. Kawee was taking all this in with a look of intense curiosity. Timmy just looked numb.

Still on his phone, Pugh said to us, “Egg’s van took fire, but no one was hit.”

Timmy was next to me, clutching my thigh. Kawee, on the other side of Timmy, was hanging onto an armrest and looking this way and that.

One of the motos came at us again from the left. As the driver raised his arm, Ek veered into him hard, and the attacking moto went over on its side and slid at high speed into the oncoming southbound traffic. There was a lot of crashing and banging behind us, but Ek straightened out the minivan and sped ahead. The other minivan was close on our tail, with the expressway entrance just ahead.

At the last second, Nitrate swerved onto the freeway, where motorcycles were not permitted. The second van was keeping pace with us, and so was the second moto guy, not a law

182 Richard Stevenson abiding citizen. As we shot down the ramp and onto the expressway, the gun-wielding cyclist was making a pass at the van Egg was driving. I turned around and watched as Egg slowed briefly, and an object shot out the side window of the second minivan and hit the moto gunman hard on the side of the head. The object splattered and the motorcycle flipped end over end, its driver doing cartwheels parallel to the vehicle, a horrifying choreography of metal and flesh dancing in tandem along a long ribbon of concrete.

Kawee exclaimed, “Oi, oi, oi. He in hell now.”

Timmy had been looking more traumatized by the minute, though I knew he would survive all this when he peered over and said to me, “I feel as if I’ve gone to the movies for a picture I really wanted to see, and first I had to sit through an entire day and a half of noisy, stupid trailers for movies I would not dream of paying money to look at.”

“It’s the story of your life with me, Timothy. You moved in with Marcello Mastroianni and woke up with Bruce Willis.”

He laughed lightly.

I asked Pugh, “What was it that hit that guy on the bike?”

“Miss Aroon’s durian. Normally I discourage my employees from carrying this large, spiky, melonlike fruit along on operations. Some Thais find its pungent smell enchanting, and some Thais — like most farangs — consider its stench revolting. But Miss Aroon needs her durian and usually has one stowed under the seat of the vehicle she’s in. She had one along today, and of course, she has a strong right arm and impeccable aim.”

One of the Thais in the car said something in Thai that made the others guffaw. Pugh said, “He asked, ‘How do we know she used her arm?’”

We had slowed to a normal speed now and the other minivan was close behind as we moved steadily eastward and then, I noted on the overhead signs, southward. Pugh’s phone sounded and he spoke briefly and then instructed Ek to pull over to the shoulder of the highway. He did so, and the second minivan followed us. I looked back to see the guardrail-side door open on the other vehicle, and the soothsayer Surapol Sutharat step out and stand by the roadside. Then the door closed and both vans drove on.

I said, “Do you think Khun Surapol predicted this turn of events, Rufus?”

“He would have had an inkling. The man is not stupid. He’s corrupt, but not entirely incompetent with his charts.”

“So now what? Do we ride around on the freeways of Bangkok until April twenty-seventh? We’ll run out of gas.”

“Nope. Not necessary. What I think is, we all deserve a few days at the seashore.”

“Sounds good. Can we pick up our bathing suits at the hotel?”

“No, Khun Don. I am sorry. We must proceed directly to Hua Hin. It is a pleasant town a few hours’ drive south of Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand. Hua Hin is such a desirable getaway spot that Jack and Jackie themselves have quite an impressive palatial hideaway there.”

“Well, if it’s good enough for Jack.”

“Others will be in danger, also, and will need to join us there. In fact, I must make some calls now. My wife and children will be along, as well as my girlfriend Furnace, a delightful woman you will enjoy tremendously. Furnace will, of course, be housed separately from the rest of us, though with luck your paths will cross. Kawee, you should invite Miss Nongnat to visit. And it might be wise for Khun Gary’s old paramour Mango to attend our seaside holiday also. The general is sure to be ripshit over today’s developments, and his agents will tend toward impatience and extreme violence toward anyone who might be expected to know of our whereabouts.”

Pugh got on his cell phone and made several calls in Thai.

This was the first time since Timmy’s rescue that we could speak with each other without the risk of gunfire erupting, and the first thing I said was, “Okay. Yes. You were right.”

He said nothing.

184 Richard Stevenson

“I’ll spend the rest of my life making this up to you, Timothy. You name it. It’s yours. Plus, of course, I’ll listen to you in the future when you talk sense. Really, I’ll try harder to do that.”

He was breathing evenly but was still sweaty and didn’t smell so great.

I looked across Timmy and said to Kawee, “I’m really so sorry I got you two into this. It must have been very frightening.”

Kawee said, “We think we die.”

“Yes.”

“I tell Timothy he live better life next time.”

“I know he’d like some improvements.”

“He say okay. But he ask if you be there, too.”

“In his next life?”

“Yes, he want next life with you. You his soul mate, he say.”

“That would be my preference also. What did you tell him?

Will we be together?”

“Yes, maybe. But maybe not human. Maybe you both snake.”

“Two snakes?”

“Timothy and Donald spirit in snakes. Or other animals. All depend on karma.”

“If we were mammals, it might be okay. We’d manage.

Mammals with small brains and large penises.”

Timmy was too polite and respectful toward other decent people’s deepest beliefs to roll his eyes, but I knew he was doing it mentally.

Finally, Timmy said, “Kawee was very thoughtful and supportive during our captivity, Donald. He enlarged my perspective.”

I wondered if he had also massaged his prostate, but this was no time for that discussion. I said, “How so?”

“I just have a better understanding now of the way the human mind can both retreat into itself when that’s the only way it can stay safe, and at the same time how any one mind is only a temporary partial manifestation of something far larger and longer lasting.”

“Oh. Well, good. Except, that doesn’t sound Buddhist. It sounds Jungian.”

“You and your Western insistence on labels. God.”

“Are you putting me on?”

“Yes, a little. But, really, Kawee did help me with the whole idea of acceptance. Acceptance of how temporary any one human life is, and how the transitory nature of life should be nothing to fear. There’s actually something quite beautiful about it. All that gorgeous fluidity.”

Pugh was in the front seat with Nitrate, who was driving, and when Timmy said this, Pugh reached over to the steering wheel and hit the horn three times.