Текст книги "The 38 Million Dollar Smile "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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CHAPTER TWENTY
Time was running out for Timmy and Kawee, and my fear
kept me awake as I lay on a mat through much of the night in
Pugh’s office. He slept nearby, as did Griswold. A large man
named Sek had been brought in to watch over Griswold, who,
as I lay trying not to tremble, snored grotesquely. I could hear snoring from the outer office, too. It was late Monday night
now, but even with the air-conditioners whirring I could hear
the fuck-show and pussy-show crowds exiting the nearby clubs
and moving noisily about in the street below. Eventually I sank
just below the surface of consciousness for a few hours. I might have sunk even deeper had Pugh not jostled me just after six in
the morning with a cheery, “Rise and shine, Khun Don, rise
and shine. Time to head on out and find the bad guys and put
up your dukes.”
Somebody went over to Silom for coffee, and Griswold was
led into the outer office where he was to wait for further
developments under Sek’s supervision.
Coffee, pineapple chunks and rice gruel arrived, and Ek
soon called and told Pugh that he had located the building
where Timmy and Kawee were most likely being held. It was
one of two unfinished and abandoned fifteen-story condos in a
complex off Rangnum Road about a mile north of Siam Square.
Ek had learned from a source at one of the security services
watching over Bangkok’s abandoned high-rises that the guards
at one site had been instructed by an agent for the building’s
owner, a bank, to take a few days off and had been replaced by
unknown amateurs who were described by one security officer
as “gangsta boys.”
Pugh put Ek on hold while he took a call from Khun
Thunska. While I listened in on an extension, the computer ace
reported that nearly a thousand women would turn sixty in
Bangkok on April 27. He said he would go over the list more
thoroughly over the next few hours, but a preliminary once
172 Richard Stevenson
over showed that only one of these women was wed to a
Bangkok big shot. That was Paveena Hanwilai, wife of General
of the Royal Thai Police Yodying Supanant.
Pugh got Ek back on the line and said, “Time to move.”
§ § § § §
We headed north toward Rangnum Road in two vans. A
broad-shouldered youth named Nitrate drove the one with
Pugh, me and Miss Aroon. She was dressed in shorts and a tank
top and appeared ready to don the costume she would need for
the rescue operation. The van following us held Griswold, Sek,
Egg and four well-toned young men who normally performed
in the gay fuck show at Dream Boys but also moonlighted as
muscle boys for Pugh. Pugh said only two of them were gay,
but the money at Dream Boys was good, and life in show
business beat driving a truck around in the heat. I watched these guys load lengths of rope into their van before we left the
office, along with several bamboo poles.
The morning traffic was thick and moved in fits and starts.
Pugh said he remembered that when he was a boy large herds
of cattle were driven up Rama IV Road to the city’s main slaughterhouse, and now it often seemed as if the city hadn’t
modernized at all but had just substituted Toyotas for cows. We
could have taken the speedy SkyTrain up to Rangnum Road,
but our flying squad needed more flexibility than that afforded
by public transportation.
It didn’t much matter that our progress was slow. We didn’t
need to be in place at Rangnum Road, Pugh said, until eleven
o’clock, when Ek would arrive with his own captive, the
soothsayer Surapol Sutharat. I asked Pugh about seer Surapol’s
public prediction that no coup could be expected in Thailand
anytime soon, when apparently some change of government
that would send General Yodying packing was in the works for
April 27.
“It’s disinformation,” Pugh said. “That’s how these guys
work. Their charts may show one thing, but publicly they say
whatever their clients want the public to hear. It’s soothsayingslash-spin.”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 173
“But this other seer, Pongsak Sutiwipakorn, has forecast a
coup before the end of April. What’s his deal? If he has a line to the coup plotters, why are they giving the game away? Isn’t
surprise a crucial element in any government overthrow?”
“It’s swagger. When upper-echelon Thais brazenly tip their
hands, it’s the same as when lower-class Thai men rip off their
shirts and brandish their ogreish tats to give opponents the
heebie-jeebies. Much of the time, however, this tactic is bluff.
But you can never be sure if it’s real or not, so you’re never sure how or even whether to respond. It’s part of what makes civic
life in Thailand so endlessly fascinating.”
“Griswold is apparently convinced that a coup is imminent.
How else would he know that General Yodying is going to lose
his job on the twenty-seventh?”
“Former Finance Minister Anant would know such things if
he was involved in the conspiracy. And soothsayer Pongsak
would know from consulting his charts. Whether it’s a coup or
an unfortunate accident on April twenty-seventh that causes
General Yodying to – dare I once again use the word fall? —
either way he seems to be a goner, practically speaking.”
I recalled the long-ago days of the old O’Connell
Democratic machine that befouled civic life in Albany for much
of the twentieth century. It, too, routinely played rough,
although surely it would have met its match tangling with
Minister Anant, General Yodying and the politico-soothsayers
of Bangkok. The civic reformers who finally succeeded at de-
corrupting Albany in the 1980s would have been eaten alive by
this Thai crew. And tossed over a high ledge near the top of the Al Smith State Office Building.
We parked both vans in a soi a couple of blocks from the
condo complex. A Burmese travel agency was on one side of us
and a small open-front restaurant on the other. Some of the
cooking was being done in raised kettles on the sidewalk, and
the air was hot and rich with the aroma of the chilies,
cardamom and cinnamon in a Massaman curry. It was only just
after ten, so the rescue crew climbed out of the vans and
headed to the restaurant for a snack. Despite the tension
174 Richard Stevenson
generated by our task, the several men and one woman were
kidding around in the Thai manner, joshing one another and
casually ha-ha-ing. It was as if all the good food Thais ate
produced not just generally good health but good humor, too.
Pugh also got out of the van and found a flower seller
nearby. He bought a garland of jasmine blossoms and walked
over to the spirit house in front of a store that sold running
shoes and flip-flops. Pugh placed the garland before the
Buddha figure, wai-ed the statue, and bowed his head for some
minutes. He had placed his cell phone next to the garland and
other offerings that had been left by others: candles, rice, a
cardboard carton of guava juice. He wasn’t planning to leave
the phone behind, I surmised, but wanted to have it handy in
case Ek called.
At ten to eleven, Ek did call. At Pugh’s signal, the rescue
crew quickly gathered around him for their instructions. He
spoke to them in Thai. Most of them spoke some English, but
it was limited and there was no room for misunderstandings or
screwups. And they were no longer kidding around.
The group broke up into units of two each. One pair carried
the ropes and bamboo poles. The men wore cargo pants and T-
shirts and could have passed for construction workers or
window washers.
Pugh, Egg, Griswold, Miss Aroon and I walked a bit ahead
of the others on the opposite side of Rangnum Road. When we
reached the private soi leading to the abandoned condo
complex, my heart began to race and my impulse was to sprint
into one of the buildings and tear up fourteen flights shouting
Timmy’s name. I took a deep breath of the muggy Bangkok air
and maintained my steady pace next to Pugh. I saw Ek’s fourby-four parked up ahead next to one of the tall concrete shells, as well as other vehicles I did not recognize. One was another
dark SUV and then a blue Mercedes. A motorcycle was parked
behind the Mercedes.
Ek stood in the entryway to one of the buildings with two
more of Pugh’s operatives. He beckoned for us to move with
him into the shadows. He said, “That one,” and indicated the
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 175
structure forty or fifty feet across the driveway. We moved
forward a few steps and peered up, and I could sense that, like
me, everybody was counting to fourteen.
When the men with the ropes and bamboo poles arrived, Ek
signaled for them to follow one of his team into our building.
Miss Aroon joined this group now and was handed a bulging
Central World shopping bag by Ek. I watched as all of them
entered a stairwell and disappeared.
We were far enough off Rangnum Road that passersby
would not be aware of anything out of the ordinary going on in
the complex. We had the privacy we needed to do what we
needed to do. Just as the kidnappers had the privacy they had
needed to hold Timmy and Kawee captive for the previous
forty hours, and the privacy they would need to hurl them off a
fourteenth-floor balcony after sunset.
I said to Pugh, “Where’s the seer? He’s up where Ek is
heading?”
“Khun Surapol was snatched as he approached Wat
Mahathat, his neighborhood temple, for morning prayers. He
was told that he was needed to bless a construction project and
would soon be released and even amply rewarded. Then Ek and
his lads hauled him over here and marched the eminent seer up
to the fourteenth floor of this building. Its balcony looks
directly across to the balcony of the condo where the captives
are being held.”
I stepped into the sunlight and looked up again, and
wondered if we shouldn’t be rigging circus trapeze nets around
the building across the way. I guessed, though, that no net
would support an adult plummeting from fourteen floors up. I
said, “Wouldn’t the kidnappers have spotted us by now?”
“It doesn’t matter. They may phone General Yodying, but
he will be neutralized within a matter of minutes.”
“Rufus, I’ll have to trust you that you can get away with
this.”
Pugh said, “Ih.”
176 Richard Stevenson
After a few minutes, Pugh’s cell phone chirped. He spoke
briefly in Thai, then said to me, “That was Ek. It’s time to make our move.”
At Pugh’s signal, Sek and Egg accompanied Griswold out
from the shadows. Both men wore shoulder holsters containing
long-handled Chinese revolvers. We walked across the
unfinished driveway and entered the second unfinished
apartment building.
Pugh said, “Let’s you and I, Khun Don, lead the way and
make a memorable first impression on these boorish fellows.”
In what would have been the lobby of the apartment
building, we passed the two openings to the empty elevator
shafts. All around us was raw concrete with its limestone smell.
It was damp in the Bangkok pre-monsoon humidity and
smelled like the inside of a wet cave. It took me back to my
spelunking days in college, and I wondered what in the world I
had in mind back then crawling around in those claustrophobic
spaces, cold and muddy, and in danger in the rainy spring
months of being crushed or, more likely, trapped and drowned.
Which was the most awful way of dying? Drowning? Being
compressed and suffocated? Falling? As we climbed upward
and passed the exposed elevator shafts on each floor, I thought
to myself, Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall.
We were all getting winded in the heat, except for Griswold,
the manic cyclist. He was more fit than any of us and probably
had never smoked. Pugh, Sek, Egg and I were soon panting,
and I finally got to see a Thai perspire. I thought of Timmy and Kawee, who two days earlier had been force-marched up these
same stairs, probably unsure whether once they got to where
they were going, they might be hurled down an elevator shaft or
off a balcony.
Pugh was quietly counting off the floors. When he got to the
twelfth, he said, “Fourteen is next.”
Sek and Egg had drawn their revolvers by now and were
following Pugh, me and Griswold closely. As we turned onto
the stairs leading to the fourteenth floor, four men appeared
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 177
above us and we stopped. Two of them held guns, and the
other two held good-sized bamboo canes.
There was a rapid back-and-forth in Thai between Pugh and
one of the men holding a revolver. He was large and sullen, and
I thought, yes, finally, the knocker-over of Austrian tourists.
As we climbed the final flight of stairs, I said to Pugh,
“That’s Khun Yai?”
“The one and only.”
We were led into what would have been – and I assumed
what might one day still become – a large fourteenth-floor
apartment. The place was set up like a campsite. Camp stoves
were on a table in one corner next to a portable refrigerator. I could smell the soup in a pot. Straw mats were spread around
on the floor. There were gas lanterns atop a pile of crates next to a card table with stools around it. Apparently we had
interrupted a poker game, for four hands lay facedown around
the table with a pile of bahts in the middle..
With two of their men pointing guns and two of ours doing
likewise, any shoot-out would have been short and ugly.
Everyone in the room must have been acutely aware of this,
though nobody lowered his revolver.
I saw no sign of Timmy and Kawee and figured they were in
another section of the apartment.
Pugh said something in Thai, and Yai apparently indicated
that one of his goons should go and fetch the captives. One of
them kept looking at Griswold and then down at a photo he
had, apparently to make sure we had not delivered a fake
Griswold. It was plain that Pugh had done what he had told me
earlier he was going to do. In Thai, he had informed these men
that we were turning Griswold over to them in return for
Timmy and Kawee. He said Griswold was not resisting because
he now realized it was his fate to pay for his sins. He had caused important men to lose both money and face, each an
unforgivable violation in the Thai moral universe. And he knew
he would have to pay, and he was prepared to do so.
178 Richard Stevenson
Griswold said nothing. Apparently he was fluent in Thai, for
he followed the conversation with a look that was fascinated
though faintly bug-eyed.
Big Yai got on his cell phone to somebody – General
Yodying? – and seconds after he rang off, one of the gang
came back leading Timmy and Kawee. Their hands were tied
behind their backs and they were bound at the ankles too, so
they had to take little dainty steps. They weren’t in the clothes I had last seen them in but were in cargo shorts and T-shirts.
They were both sweating. Timmy’s hair was a rat’s nest and
Kawee’s lip gloss looked chewed off. On the front of Timmy’s
yellow T-shirt were the words Thailand – Land of Smiles.
When Timmy and Kawee saw us, their faces fast-forwarded
through shock, relief, joy, apprehension and fright. Then they
just stared at us, hyperalert.
I said, “We’re getting you guys out of here. It won’t be long
now.”
“And with hours to spare,” Timmy said. “Thank you for
that.”
Yai indicated that his gang should free Timmy and Kawee
from their bonds. They quickly did so, using sharp knives from
the food preparation area to slice through the ropes. Timmy
and Kawee began rubbing their wrists and moving their legs
about, as if they were warming up for a ping-pong tournament.
Next, Yai directed two of his men to tie Griswold up.
That’s when Pugh said something in Thai that made Yai
look out the door to the balcony with a start.
We had a clear view across the way to the second building in
the condo complex. From the balcony opposite us, two people
were dangling. Each was upside down. Ropes were tied around
their ankles, and the ropes were attached to bamboo poles held
in place by four of Pugh’s men, Nitrate, Ek and two others.
One of the dangling people was Khun Surapol Sutharat, the
seer who had been providing ace astrological advice to the
kidnappers. The other dangling person was a middle-aged
woman in a fashionable Siamese gold-colored blouse and long
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 179
green skirt, the skirt now semicomically bunched up above her
waist, exposing the woman’s black panties. Someone had
lowered a cell phone on a wire to Khun Surapol and we could
see him frantically trying to hold it up – down, really – to his ear.
Pugh took out his own phone and hit a speed-dial number.
After a moment, he handed the phone to Yai and gestured
toward the dangling soothsayer. “Somebody wants to palaver
with you,” he said.
Yai spoke some Thai into the phone and then listened. He
looked confused, bordering on panicky. It didn’t help his frame
of mind when the men holding the bamboo pole across the way
began to bob it up and down, as the seer and the woman next
to him gesticulated and clawed at the side of the building.
Yai took out his own phone now and frantically dialed.
Pugh said, “Tell the general that that is his wife Paveena
Hanwilai over there, the birthday girl herself. If you and the
general don’t do as we say, we’ll drop her skinny ass fourteen
floors to the pavement below. And Khun Surapol will
accompany her soul to paradise or to purgatory or to Newark
Liberty International Airport – wherever. In any event, both of
their corporeal worldly remains will leave an impression, for the general and for many others in the vicinity of Rangnam Road.”
Now Yai spoke into his phone in rapid Thai. He scowled
furiously then said in English, looking at Griswold and me,
“Wait.”
The general was no doubt phoning his wife to see if she had
actually been abducted. She had in fact been snatched, Pugh
had told me, from Wat Mahathat, where she prayed each
morning with her soothsayer. She was not, however, hanging
from a pole across the way. She was locked in a janitor’s closet in a disused primary school next to the temple, minus her cell
phone, her skirt and blouse and – just to play it safe – her
black underwear. To preserve her modesty, Mrs. Paveena had
been provided a large plastic garbage bag with a hole on top for her head to stick out and holes on the sides for her arms. The
woman dangling next to Khun Surapol in Paveena Hanwilai’s
180 Richard Stevenson
garments was Miss Aroon – who had never been an acrobat
exactly, but had for a time some years earlier fired ping-pong
balls from her vagina to the cheers of drunken tourists at a club in Patpong.
Suddenly Yai was listening closely on his phone and
nodding. He soon said something to Pugh in Thai. Pugh smiled
amiably and said – I knew this much Thai – “Capkun kap,
Khun Yai.” Thank you so much, Mr. Yai.
Then Yai narrowed his eyes and hissed out two or three
more brief sentences. Pugh shrugged and said something that
from his look could have been “I’ll take note of that.”
Pugh said to me, “Mr. Yai has informed me that today the
general is going to release all of us. But by the end of the month he will have killed every last one of us. What do you think of
that?”
“I find that pronouncement unsettling, Rufus. What do you
think of it?”
“Well, I think the general has another think coming.”
Griswold had followed all this with a look of bemused
fascination. Kawee looked more or less relaxed by now, too.
Timmy just looked queasy.
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
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 183
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?”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 185
“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.
