Текст книги "The 38 Million Dollar Smile "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Pugh sent several of his men into town to search for
Griswold, and he called people he knew and trusted to be on
the lookout for a sweaty farang on a stolen bike. Griswold was
carrying next to nothing with him, but he did have his shoulder
bag with his multiple ATM cards. He did not have his passport
with him, however, and he would need that to check into a
hotel. Unless, of course, he crammed his bag full of bahts at an ATM and bribed his way past a desk clerk. Griswold could also,
Pugh said, phone someone he knew and trusted to come and
pick him up. Plainly he had friends in high places in Thailand.
Those people presumably could keep Griswold safe until April
27 when General Yodying supposedly would be neutralized.
“But what about us?” was Timmy’s reasonable question to
Pugh. “We aren’t exactly off the hook, I don’t think.”
“No, Mr. Timothy. We are indeed still very much up shit
creek. Even if we were to inform General Yodying that Khun
Gary is no longer in our custody, he would be unimpressed.
First, he might not believe us. Second, it is not Khun Gary
running around loose that the top cop desires, and we are the
enablers of Griswold’s freedom. Third, there is the not
inconsequential matter of our having snatched the general’s
missus and left her stranded in a closet clad only in a garbage
bag. I think that that monstrous affront alone is the main
reason he plans on drilling holes in our souls before hurling
them – and their present corporeal manifestations – into a
hell beyond our imagining but not quite beyond his.”
I told Pugh about the phone call from Bob Chicarelli and
my belief that Griswold and some Thai investors were behind
the takeover of Algonquin Steel. “So Griswold, I think, is so
obsessed with this corporate raid and using it to punish his
brother, and to atone for some long-ago Griswold family sin,
that he’ll do anything to be able to operate freely until the
twenty-seventh of this month.”
206 Richard Stevenson
“Ah, yes,” Pugh said. “Two and seven.” He seemed to think
this explained a lot.
Ek appeared with the take-out food he had picked up before
Griswold bolted. As he spread the containers of rice and soup
out on a table near the pool, along with spoons and chopsticks,
Ek spoke to Pugh in Thai in a tone of self-deprecation and
apology. He was plainly mortified that he and Egg had let Pugh
get away, but Pugh spoke back to him consolingly.
Pugh said in English, “Ek blames himself for Khun Gary’s
flight. But it was a collision of karmas – his bad, Griswold’s
good – and he is not to blame. Not, at least, in the present
circumstances. I told him, however, that he should (a) make an
offering to the spirit of the Enlightened One at the earliest
opportunity, and (b) get his ass back out there and drag that
SOB Griswold back here pronto. The guy couldn’t have gone
far. Though first, of course, Ek must have rice.”
We all dug in, the Thais considering their food as they ate it
as if it was both fun to eat and holy.
Kawee had stripped to his thong and had been enjoying a
swim with Mango, and soon they both came over to the table
for some eats. Noting the uncommonly large bulge in skinny
little Kawee’s thong, I glanced at Timmy, who nodded, and I
thought, Holy Moses.
Ek ate quickly and soon left to help with the search for
Griswold.
Pugh said, “The chances are good that if Griswold has
phoned someone in Bangkok for assistance, it will take two or
three hours for them to get somebody down here. Word is out
around Hua Hin that we are looking for Griswold. This could
speed locating him, but it also runs the risk of one of Yodying’s local admirers being tipped off as to our presence and also to
Griswold’s being on the loose.”
I said, “If Griswold has friends in Bangkok who can protect
him in these circumstances, why couldn’t the same people have
protected him while he was hiding out over the past six
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 207
months? There seems to be a piece of all this that we don’t yet
know about.”
“A single piece? Khun Don, you are such an optimist.”
While we all ate, the Thais who had known him talked about
Griswold and what a bundle of contradictions he was to them.
Pugh said, “He was a man of the mysterious Occident.”
Kawee told about how he had met Griswold at Paradisio
and how Griswold had been forthright in telling him that he
was attracted to very butch men and Kawee was too feminine
for them to have any kind of sexual relationship. Kawee said
this even as he stood up to reach for more rice and his
enormous bulge all but brushed my nose. He went on to tell in
his breathy voice how he and Griswold had become friends,
based on their spiritual quests and yearnings, and that each had learned from the other’s stories of suffering in life and how
each had come to understand how suffering is the beginning of
wisdom. Kawee told of losing his friend Nonkie to malaria, and
he said Griswold told of losing his first Thai lover to a disease with similar symptoms: fever, chills and weakness. They
commiserated with each other, and they learned to fully
appreciate what they had when they had it but also to accept the transitory nature of all things.
I said, “Griswold had a Thai boyfriend who died? I didn’t
know that.”
“It was long time past,” Kawee said. “Maybe eighteen fifty-
eight.”
“Back when he was Thai himself?”
“Of course.”
Mango recounted the sad tale of his time together with
Griswold, whom he admired for his spiritual depth and
searching, and told of the breakup over the question of sexual
fidelity. “I was too sorry for the bust-up,” Mango said. “Mr.
Gary was nice man and good lover. Also, he very rich. Lot of
money is big plus.”
208 Richard Stevenson
I said, “Apparently something else very bad happened soon
after you two broke up, Mango. Something that actually
changed the way Griswold saw his life.”
“Yes, and that was when bad men find me and ask me
where Mr. Gary go. Bad luck for me. Bad luck for Mr. Gary.
Khun Khunathip saw it in chart. Sadness and blood coming.
Soon they come.”
Kawee said, “Mr. Gary too sad for Mango, too sad for other
things. Then also everything be worse. That when two farangs
come.”
“Two Westerners?”
“Two farangs come and Mr. Gary crying. Too, too sad when
farangs come from America.”
“Two Americans made him cry? What was that about?”
“I don’t know,” Kawee said. “He no tell me. But two men
come. Then Mr. Gary change big investment plan. He go bank
every day. He meditate at wat. Soon he leave condo and hide.
He change. He angry. He sad. I make offerings and I water
plants.”
“Did you ever meet these two men?”
“One time.”
“What were their names?”
“They no say. They not nice. They say, where good gay
massage? I say where and they go. My friend Tree say they try
fuck him no condom. He say no, and they no tip.”
Pugh asked, “Were these men living in Thailand or visiting?”
“Just come from America,” Kawee said. “Then go back
America. They no stay long. Two days, maybe three.”
I asked Kawee to describe the two. Doing so was beyond
the limits of his English, so he did it in Thai and then Pugh
translated. “The men seemed to be in their early forties,” Pugh
said. “Definitely American – Kawee knows the accents of the
Westerners who sojourn in Thailand – and a bit rough around
the edges. Not the sort of international business types you
might expect to come calling at Griswold’s condo. One was a
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 209
dark-haired man who had bleached his hair blond. They looked
like they had been muscle boys once but were over-the-hill.
Drinkers, too, Kawee believes, with unmistakable beer breath at
high noon. Shady characters, it seems, and I suppose we can
surmise, intimately connected with whatever sent Khun Gary
spinning off into financial, spiritual and personal mysterious
activities the minute these two nasty pieces of work left town.”
I asked Kawee if he knew where these men had been staying
in Bangkok. “At the Malaysia Hotel,” he said. “First Malaysia,
then Grand Hyatt. They move, they tell Mr. Gary. I hear them
say this, and they laugh.”
“The Malaysia,” Pugh explained, “is a midrange tourist hotel
not far from the Topmost. The Grand Hyatt is what the name
sounds like. It’s a high-end international business travelers and tourist hotel near Siam Square. Apparently these scruffy
characters were upwardly mobile even during their brief,
unpopular stay in Bangkok.”
Timmy said, “It looks as if Griswold may have given them
money. Or they must have gotten it from somebody else during
their short stay in Thailand. Could they have been investors in
the currency speculation scheme that was abandoned, and they
were the first ones to demand and receive their money back?
Though, from Kawee’s description, they don’t sound all that
Wall Street.”
I said, “The currency speculation deal was just local, I’d
guess. Wouldn’t you say, Rufus?”
“If the esteemed former minister of finance was involved,
the scheme likely involved only a prestigious circle of Thai
scalawags. In any case, investors in that unfortunate incident
lost all their dough. And those who complained got a nice
shove from a precipice for their trouble.”
“But,” Timmy said, “maybe these visiting Americans were
the first ones in line and they threatened Griswold. He paid
them off with his own money and then went into hiding before
the other ripped-off investors went wild.”
210 Richard Stevenson
“The timing is wrong for that scenario,” I said. “We’re
confusing cause and effect. Griswold pulled out of the currency
speculation deal, causing it to collapse, just after these guys
showed up and may have received money from him.”
I asked Pugh if he could use sources in the banks where
Griswold kept his money to check on large withdrawals or
transfers around the time of the visit by the two Americans.
“That would be illegal,” Pugh said. “Banking privacy laws
preclude any such inquiries.”
“Yes, but can you do it?”
“Of course.”
“It would help,” I said, “if we knew exactly when these two
guys were in Bangkok. Is there any way of figuring that out?”
Kawee said, “October fifteen.”
“How do you know that?”
“I remember. One and five. It was day of unlucky sixes. The
bad Americans come. My Aunt Sunthorn have birthday number
sixty. She fall in cinema and break leg.”
Pugh said, “Did the Americans arrive on October fifteenth
or depart on that date?”
“They come Bangkok on fourteen, I think. They phone Mr.
Gary. They come condo fifteen. They go way sixteen maybe.”
Timmy looked at me and said, “Who needs computers?”
I said, “I’m pretty sure that the bulk of Griswold’s funds are
in Bangkok Bank Unless he’s been moving his money around.
Plus, he had all those ATM cards from multiple Thai banks.”
Pugh got on his cell phone, speed-dialed a number, and
carried on a rapid conversation in Thai. Then he repeated this
conversation a second, third and fourth time with others he
phoned. “This could take overnight,” he said. “Nobody I know
has access to bank records from home. But we may know what
we need to know in the morning after folks arrive at their
workplaces.”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 211
Now Miss Nongnat appeared from the house. She had taken
time to make herself presentable, she said, after the bus ride
from Bangkok. She was hungry and ready for some rice, she
told us. She pulled up a chair and had a beer. She was dressed in a pretty blue skirt and a loose white slipover and had a monk
amulet dangling from her neck similar to Kawee’s. In her
makeup, Miss Nongnat looked like a beauty pageant contestant,
and I recalled how one evening during my first visit to Thailand I had come upon a cheering crowd at an outdoor plaza. Lovely
young Thai women were parading across a stage in traditional
Siamese costumes as the audience clapped and yelled
enthusiastically. I stopped to watch and soon became aware that
the beauty queens were not in fact lovely young Thai women but were lovely young Thai men. It was one of my earliest
indications that the Siamese were in a number of ways far ahead
of the rest of us.
Miss Nongnat told Kawee that if he wanted to do his
toenails, she had his color of polish up in her luggage. Kawee
hoisted a foot up, and we all – even Pugh – examined
Kawee’s pretty toes and spoke of them admiringly.
Miss Nongnat said she had to do her toenails almost daily
these days. She had been dating a Korean who insisted that if
she was going to paint her toenails, the polish had to be edible, and edible polishes just didn’t last.
I caught Timmy’s quick glance at me that said, “We’re a long
way from the Archdiocese of Albany now.”
Soon Pugh’s wife and three children arrived. The kids were
all happy to be having an unexpected visit to the seashore. Pugh was about to accompany them up to the second guesthouse
when his cell phone rang.
Pugh conversed briefly and then rang off. “That was Egg.
He has located Khun Gary. He is unconscious in Hua Hin
hospital. We should go there, I think, and make sure that Mr.
Gary is not injured any more than has already been the unhappy
case.”
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.”
214 Richard Stevenson
“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 THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 215
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.”
216 Richard Stevenson
“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 THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 217
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?”
218 Richard Stevenson
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.
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 219
Pugh said to me, “We have to get Mr. Gary out of here.
Fast.”
