The 38 Million Dollar Smile

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The two motorcycle guys at the foot of Monkey Mountain were not assassins. They were moto-taxi drivers, and since it was dark now Timmy and I hired them to take us back to the compound. My phone rang just as we reached the house, and it was Bob Chicarelli.

“Can you hear me, Strachey?”

“Perfectly.”

“Good, because you’ll want to know about this. Are you still working for any of the Griswolds?”

“Yes, but not Ellen and Bill. Nothing has changed since they pretty much cut me off yesterday morning. According to Ellen, I’m supposed to tie up any loose ends here and then head home. But now I’m working for Gary Griswold. I’m helping protect him — for the moment anyway. He’s not too crazy about having me around, either, so there’s no telling how long this job — if you can even call it a job — is going to last. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just as well that you’re not counting on Bill and Ellen for fees or expenses. Algonquin Steel has been in total turmoil over the last twenty-four hours. The Albany Griswolds are struggling to retain control of the company, with this offshore group buying up shares by the shitload. Whoever the buyers are, they’re paying premium prices and money seems to be no object to these people. So just do understand that Ellen is going to be plenty distracted until all this comes to a head at the company’s annual meeting at the end of this month, when it is very likely that Bill will lose control of the company. I don’t know whether any of this affects what you’re doing over there, but since I basically got you into this I thought you should be kept up to speed.”

“Yeah. This might be helpful, I’m beginning to think.”

200 Richard Stevenson

“Hey, Strachey, that’s great news that you were able to spring your boyfriend and that Thai kid. How did you pull that off?”

“It’s this Thai PI, Rufus Pugh, I’m working with. He knows his way around Bangkok the way you know your way around Albany. Except he’s also got muscle-boy gunsels and acrobats and an arsenal of smelly fruit. Tell me something, Bob. You said Algonquin Steel’s annual meeting is at the end of the month.

Do you mean the very end, like April thirtieth?”

“No, I think it’s the twenty-seventh.”

“Uh-huh. What do you know about the group that’s trying to take over the company?”

“Nothing, really. I’m told they’re based in the Caymans. But that’s probably just a front, and the buyers could be anybody anywhere in the world.”

“Is Algonquin in such good shape that it would be all that desirable to foreign investors? Why is the company suddenly so red-hot?”

“That’s a bit murky,” Chicarelli said. “Algonquin is solid and profitable and I would say an excellent long-term investment.

But it’s not so flashy that anybody is likely to make a quick killing on it. The company is almost blue chip-like in the way it’s likely to keep paying out modest but dependable dividends for decades to come.”

“It sounds as if Algonquin would make a nice conservative addition to any institutional endowment.”

“I’d say so, yes. But I doubt if it’s Yale or the Ford Foundation that’s going after Algonquin now. Whoever these buyers are, they are very, very aggressive.”

I asked Chicarelli if he had informed Ellen Griswold that her brother-in-law Gary had been located and, at least for the moment, was in Pugh’s and my protective custody.

“I left a message with Ellen, but I have yet to hear back.

Which is odd, since it was her hiring you to find the guy that got all these strange turds flying around in the air in the first place. I’m assuming she’s pleased but currently distracted.

Maybe she’ll call you directly when she has a spare moment.

Meanwhile, if I find out more, should I call you and let you know?”

“Yes. By all means.”

Timmy was laid out on a chaise back in the poolside gardens, studying the night sky. The stars were blurry in the warm haze but offered up the same northern hemisphere constellations visible in upstate New York.

I said, “Are you attempting to discern your future up there?”

“Yes. The stars are saying: Timothy, tonight you will get a good night’s sleep.”

I sat down and told him about my conversation with Bob Chicarelli. “I do believe,” I said, “that Gary Griswold is behind the attempted takeover of Algonquin Steel. Probably in partnership with Anant na Ayudhaya, the ex-minister of finance Griswold was going to do the currency speculation deal with and then didn’t. Once they get hold of Algonquin, they can donate it to the Sayadaw U Buddhism center Griswold is sponsoring, and it will support the center in perpetuity, or at least as long as capitalism lasts. Griswold builds the center, and he and these Thai investors keep it solvent. It’s good for Buddhism in Thailand, and Griswold and his cohorts earn so much merit they’ll be sitting pretty for tens or even hundreds of lives in the future.”

Timmy sat up but looked puzzled. “That is very weird.”

“It’s the best explanation we have for the timing of Griswold’s big investment project and its coming to fruition this month. It also explains his secrecy. He doesn’t want us to find out about it, because he thinks we might blab to his brother and sister-in-law, and for some reason he doesn’t want them to know that he’s the man behind the takeover.”

“Jeez, Donald. It’s his own family. What could possibly be going on that would lead Griswold to force his own brother out of the business their father founded? I know this kind of thing happens in families — all-out bloody wars, even, over control 202 Richard Stevenson of a family business. But don’t we know that Griswold actually washed his hands of Algonquin Steel several years ago?”

“Kawee told you there was some kind of Griswold family sin that he said he had to atone for. It might have something to do with that.”

“You mean he’s both atoning and getting even?”

“It’s not that rare a combination in family affairs.”

Several figures approached us across the tile terrace behind the guesthouse where most of us were staying. None of them was Griswold. I wanted to tell him that I had figured out how he was planning on financing his Buddhist center. And I wanted to assure him that since he — not his sister-in-law — was my client now, I was not about to spill the beans. Unless, of course, he was planning on misbehaving in some annoying way and somehow putting all of us in immediate terrible jeopardy yet again.

Pugh, Kawee and Mango joined us by the pool. Mango had just come by bus from Bangkok, and Pugh said Miss Nongnat had also arrived. “She’s upstairs powdering her nose,” Pugh said. Pugh’s wife and children were on the way and would arrive soon, and his girlfriend Furnace was in a friend’s house up the road with Miss Aroon keeping her company.

“Have you had rice yet?” Pugh asked and said that Ek had gone into town to pick up some eats for everybody.

Nitrate brought drinks out — beer, Coke, fruit juices, bottled water, and bird-spit beverage. Timmy asked, “How do they get the birds to spit into that small container? Are there bird charmers who make a profession of this?”

“When elephant mahouts grow old and are forced to retire,”

Pugh said, “many of them switch careers and become bird mahouts. It’s so much less rigorous a life. As with the elephants, a bird mahout develops a long-term relationship with one bird and can make it spit into one of these little bottles on command.”

The Thais all had a good laugh over this, and they seemed pleased when Timmy laughed too.

“No, really,” Pugh said, “the birds use their saliva as mortar when building their nests. The nests are filched — regrettably for the birds, I must say — and then boiled, and the resulting fluid is the basis for this tasty beverage.”

I had a beer, but Timmy tried the bird-spit juice and said, “I guess this is as close to kissing a bird as I’ll ever get.”

“That depends on how long you remain in Thailand,” Pugh said, and the Thais all laughed, though I wasn’t sure why.

Mango had come out into the hot night wearing a skimpy yellow bathing suit. As the rest of us sat drinking and kidding around, he approached the pool, and I fully expected him to execute a perfect godlike swan dive. Instead he climbed onto the diving board and jumped in holding his nose. He came to the surface glistening in the moonlight and then hoisted himself out of the pool and — with the un-self-consciousness and easy grace of a gifted athlete — remounted the board and jumped in again holding his nose.

I wondered if there might be some tension between the two when Griswold came out and encountered the man with whom he was once in love and who had, Griswold believed, destroyed that love with Mango’s devotion to Donnutt and with his money-boy activities involving a number of other farangs. Pugh said, however, that Griswold had gone into town with Ek and Egg to use the Internet cafe and look at documents from the other investors in the Sayadaw U project. So we had at least a brief reprieve from any awkward meeting between the two.

Any worries over a confrontation soon became moot, however. Pugh took a call from Ek, who said that outside the Internet cafe, as they were leaving, Griswold was admiring the rented bicycle of a Swedish tourist, and suddenly grabbed it, jumped on, and sped off. They chased him on foot, but Griswold was both deft and fast on the bike, and they lost him.

Once they retrieved their van, Griswold had already been lost in the crowds of tourists pouring in and out of the Hua Hin hotels, bars, massage parlors, and schnitzel joints.