The 38 Million Dollar Smile

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Griswold had been speeding down a road near Jack and Jackie’s summer palace when a drunk in an old Nissan came barreling out of a side street with his lights off and knocked Griswold and his stolen bike into a banyan tree. Griswold had not been wearing a helmet and may have suffered a slight concussion, Egg had learned. He had been identified by the ATM cards in his bag, and one of Pugh’s Hua Hin police sources had alerted Egg.

Pugh himself drove Timmy and me into town. The small hospital was an entirely modern facility, spick-and-span, with young female greeters in pale lavender uniforms who smiled like angels at visitors and exuded solicitude like a delicate perfume.

Timmy said, “Take note, Senate Republican caucus.”

“They’re otherworldly. Can you imagine this kind of treatment at Albany Medical Center? Or any US hospital?”

“And they’re as lovely to look at as Miss Nongnat. I wonder if they have dicks.”

Ek, Egg and Nitrate were positioned outside Griswold’s room. Ek said he learned from a doctor that Griswold had no broken bones but had been badly scraped and bruised. He had been slipping in and out of consciousness and, when awake, had been muttering to the nurses incoherently. The doctor had said this mental fog was from both the painkillers Griswold was on and the concussion.

Pugh and Ek had an exchange in Thai, and then Pugh told me, “Mr. Gary has been intermittently gaga. He has been babbling about falling.”

“That sounds rational enough. After what happened to Geoff Pringle and to soothsayer Khunathip — and almost to Timmy and to Kawee — a fear of falling sounds sensible. Also, Griswold himself was hurt falling off his bike — twice, in fact.

And his parents died in a plane that went down.”

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“Khun Gary also, Ek says, has been going on confusedly about rounding or surrounding or something like that. It’s hard to make out. Ek wasn’t even sure it was English. But it didn’t seem to be Thai either. And Mr. Gary said it repeatedly in a distressed tone of voice. Rounding. What’s that about?”

A nurse came out of Griswold’s room and said that he was more alert now than he had been earlier, and if we wished to greet him and wish him well we could enter the room two at a time.

Pugh and I went in first. Griswold was bandaged on his left arm and shoulder and had a bad scrape on his left cheek. He had another bandage across his nose and a blackened left eye. A large bandage was wrapped around his head. He was on an IV drip of what I guessed were painkillers and antibiotics.

Griswold immediately recognized Pugh and me and moaned, “Oh no, you guys,” and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Khun Gary, we were so sorry to learn of your unfortunate accident. Mr. Donald and I are here to extend our heartfelt sympathies and our many good wishes for a speedy recovery.”

“You can both go fuck yourselves.”

“Not just yet.”

I said, “Griswold, you are totally out of control and it’s getting the best of you. At this point, all we are trying to do is keep you alive until April twenty-seventh. Then you’re on your own. You and your latest astrologer-of-the-moment can take it from there.”

He looked at me balefully out of his battered face. “I was handling this myself until you showed up, Strachey. You are the reason I’m lying in this bed with a headache to end all headaches. You and my clueless ex-wife and my evil brother.

Everything was proceeding more or less smoothly until you were air-dropped into Thailand like some kind of sheriff’s SWAT team with the wrong address.”

“What would the right address be?”

Ignoring that, Griswold said, “All I need at this point is to be left alone to oversee a series of financial transactions that are of the utmost urgency. I need a computer and a phone, and above all I need privacy. And now here I am stuck in this medical Grand Central Station with even less opportunity to concentrate and control what I need to control than I had back when I was hiding out in Bangkok. I can only begin to tell you just how much you two are fucking up my project and…and… my entire life!”

I said, “Griswold, you and a group of Thai investors are trying to take over Algonquin Steel. Why is that?”

Griswold was hooked up to a machine monitoring his pulse, brain waves, and who knew what else, and when I said this the machine practically projectile vomited. It began to flash and beep something awful, though Griswold himself just stared at me with a small round O formed by his lips. He apparently wanted to say something, but his vocal apparatus had gone numb.

I said, “Several years ago, you wanted out of the steel business, and you got out, and you had a nice art gallery in Key West. Then you came over to Thailand presumably without giving steel fabricating and the home- and building-supply business a backward glance. Now you not only want to get back into the family business in a big way, but you want to force your brother out of it and replace him with yourself and a group of Thai investors that perhaps includes former finance minister Anant na Ayudhaya. Griswold, what’s going on?”

Now the machine wasn’t beeping and flashing so much, and the drooping line on one of its electronic graphs looked like the Dow Jones was having a bad day. Still Griswold said nothing.

I said, “It looks like you’re taking over Algonquin Steel to finance the Sayadaw U project. Algonquin’s earnings will make a nice endowment for the Buddhism center. If this is the case, why not just say so? It’s no skin off my nose.”

After a moment, Griswold croaked out, “Who told you this crazy shit?”

“Nobody, but it makes sense. I heard from Albany that there’s a hostile takeover of Algonquin Steel under way.”

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“And people in Albany think I’m behind it?”

“Not as far as I know. My source — who is not one of your family members — just alerted me to the takeover but said nothing about opinions in Albany on who the buyers might be.”

“Do you have any idea if my brother thinks that’s what I’m doing — grabbing the company out from under him?”

“I don’t know. Should I feel him out? I could talk to your ex-wife and see what she and Bill know or don’t know. I’m working for you now, not them. I think.”

Griswold shook his head and then grimaced from the pain of moving it. “What a goddamn screwup. And it’s your fault.

Though why am I surprised? You may not be aware of it, Strachey, but I had trouble with you in Thailand once before.”

“You were here in the seventies? I don’t remember you.

What were you? Army? State Department? Viet Cong?”

“No, it was the eighteen fifties. Apparently you have not taken the trouble to examine your past lives. But I have examined mine and I remember you distinctly. You came from London ostensibly on a trade mission but basically you wanted to get your hands on a number of Siamese antiquities, including an emerald Buddha you were planning on grabbing for a private collector in East Kent.”

Pugh was just inside my peripheral vision and I thought I picked up his suppressing a smile.

I said, “Well, Griswold, this is your second concussion from flying off a bicycle and whacking your head. But apparently this concussion did not reverse the effects of the last one.”

Now Pugh actually chuckled. Griswold just looked at me hard and said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

I said, “I heard that one of your aims with the Sayadaw U project is to atone for a great sin that was committed by one of your family members. It must have been a pretty spectacular sin if it’s going to take a project costing tens of millions of dollars to set things right in your family, karma-wise. Would you like to shed some light on all that? I’m a skeptic on these matters, but Khun Rufus is likely to be impressed.”

Pugh said, “Well put. I’m all ears.”

“No,” Griswold said and shut his eyes again.

“No, what?”

“No, I will not shed some light on something there is no need for you to know about, and if you did know you would just go charging around standing in the way of justice.”

“Charging around and standing. Weird.”

“I have a headache. Please go away.”

“What do you mean by justice? Karmic? Legal?”

“Karmic and Hebrew. They are sometimes similar. It would be hard to say, in fact, which one can be the more interestingly lurid.”

“You referred to your brother Bill as evil. How come?”

Griswold looked at me directly. “Don’t mess with my brother. Believe me, you’ll regret it. You aren’t planning to tell him any of this, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not. Were the two seedy Americans who visited you six months ago your brother’s pals or representatives? The bleach blonde and the other guy who were staying at the Malaysia Hotel and then moved to the Grand Hyatt? Did they come to Thailand with some kind of information or threat from Bill?”

Griswold’s machine got excited again — bleep bleep bleep bleep

— and his Dow Jones graph jumped around some more.

“April twenty-seventh,” Griswold said. “That’s all you need to know. Now please let me rest. I am so, so exhausted.” He closed his eyes and turned his head away.

Out in the corridor, I described the encounter to Timmy. He said, “You’ve nailed it. Jeez, Don, you’ve figured it out.”

“Maybe. But even if I have, what is it that I’ve figured out?”

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Pugh said, “Khun Don, perhaps it would all be clearer if you understood the dynamics of your last troubled encounter with Mr. Gary. Back in the court of King Mongkut.”

“I’ll work on that. I may have to fly back to Key West and talk to a woman named Sandy. Though I suppose you have people here in Thailand, Rufus, who could help me out in that regard.”

Pugh laughed. “Mr. Don, I do believe that you think all of us Thais have fallen off our bicycles and landed on our heads.”

“Not at all. Buddhism is in your DNA, Rufus. It’s not in Griswold’s.”

“How can you be so sure? In our belief system, a man can as easily return to earth as an Upstate New York American steel magnate as a Thai rice farmer or a rat in the sewers of Vientiane. It all depends on the man’s karma, which is dictated by his behavior in present or past lives. A man could even return to earth as a silly farang dilettante dabbling in Buddhism in a shallow way that’s embarrassing both to true Buddhists and to skeptics such as yourself. Which is the case with Mr. Gary? I am undecided about that.

“I must say,” Pugh went on, “that it is unusual for Thais such as former Minister Anant to accept unquestioningly the Buddhism of any foreigner. Most Thais are skeptical themselves of the genuineness of farang Buddhism beyond the proven benefits of meditation and of course the adoption of decent ethical practices. And many traditional Thais are skeptical of — even hostile to — grandiose semicommercial schemes such as the one Mr. Gary is planning out by the new airport. I’m a bit surprised, actually, that Khun Anant, an old-fashioned man in many ways, is up to his eyebrows with a foreigner in this supposedly deeply spiritual project. It has occurred to me, in fact, that somehow Khun Anant is not out to assist Mr. Gary but perhaps to fleece him.”

Ek had been on his cell phone, and now he interrupted Pugh and me and spoke in an urgent tone to Pugh in Thai.

Pugh said to me, “We have to get Mr. Gary out of here.

Fast.”