The 38 Million Dollar Smile ds-10

by Richard Stevenson

  I asked him, “Have other people been in the apartment besides us? Someone has watered the plants. And left offerings.

  Or do you do that?”

  “No, no. Kawee has a key. Kawee comes sometimes.”

  “Who is Kawee?”

  “Kawee is Mr. Gary’s friend.”

  “Thai?”

  “Of course.”

  “When does Kawee come?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I see him. He has a key.”

  “No one else comes?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Have others such as myself come looking for Mr. Gary?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who?”

  “Thai man. I don’t know his name. He comes sometimes and asks where is Mr. Gary. He comes on a motorbike. He is unfriendly. I don’t like him. He asked me to phone his mobile if Mr. Gary comes.”

  “How much did he pay you?”

  “One thousand baht. Like you.”

  I produced another note. “Have you got this man’s phone number?”

  “Of course.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I’m confused,” I said to Rufus Pugh. “I thought you were probably American.”

  “Yeah, ha-ha. This happens all the time. Some clients get up and walk out.”

  “I find it reassuring that you’re Thai.”

  “Yes, it helps to be Thai if you’re operating in Thailand.

  You’ll see.”

  Pugh, Timmy, and I were in the Topmost dining room for the breakfast buffet. Timmy had his papaya and yogurt, I my omelet, and Pugh four slices of pineapple and a side of bacon.

  “So, is Rufus your real name?” Timmy asked. “It sounds so…I guess American.”

  “No, the name my parents gave me was Panchalee Siripasaraporn.” Pugh spelled it out, letter by letter. “But we Thais are not so rigid about names as you foreigners are. It can be confusing, I know. Sometimes Thais change their names.

  And we have different nicknames for different situations and relationships. Am I making myself unclear?” He laughed.

  Pugh was a wiry little man who looked tough as old lemongrass. I could imagine somebody trying to fish bits of him out of their tom yam kung. He had the dark-faced, flat-nosed look of the North, meaning he was a man who got what he needed in Thai society with his wits and industry and not with his looks or his family history. What he had that was almost universally Thai was his humor.

  “But why ‘Rufus Pugh’?” Timmy asked. “It doesn’t sound anything like your real name.”

  “I picked the name up when I went to Duke,” Pugh said.

  “Oh, you went to Duke? I went to Georgetown.”

  “How long were you there?” Pugh asked.

  “How long? Four years.”

  66 Richard Stevenson

  “Well, I was only at Duke for a week. I was visiting my friend Supoj. He had a roommate named Rufus Pugh. I liked the sound of it. Oh, have I confused you gentlemen again?

  When I say I went to Duke, I mean I went to Duke on a Greyhound bus.” He chuckled.

  I said, “Where did you take the bus from, Rufus? Not Bangkok.”

  “From Monmouth College, in West Long Branch, New Jersey. I was there for one semester. Then I came home and completed university at Chulalongkorn in Bangkok. It was cheaper. That way, my three sisters had to fuck only three thousand seven hundred and twelve overweight Australians to put me through college instead of five thousand two hundred and eleven.”

  Timmy said, “I’m sorry. God.”

  “No need. This was twenty years ago. Now two of them are back in Chiang Rai with their lazy husbands, and the other married one of the large mates and lives in Sydney. I help them out — I look forward to getting my hands on some of the Griswold megabucks — and my wife and children are not big spenders. Neither is my girlfriend. But I do need to hustle.

  That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  “How did you turn into a PI?” I asked.

  “I was in the police, but eventually I started feeling guilty about being on the wrong side of the law. How about you, Mister Don?”

  “Army Intelligence originally. I also had ethical issues.”

  “I’ll bet. That must have been the US Army.”

  “In the seventies. I was here a few times.”

  “In Bangkok?”

  “Bangkok and Pattaya.”

  “I was a child at the time. But maybe you fucked one of my sisters. Or me. I picked up some spare change on a few occasions.”

  “No, no youngsters for me. Anyway, I’d remember you.

  You make an impression, Rufus.”

  He smiled again, briefly, then said, “If you were in the American military, then you must know that the Thai military has its corrupt elements.”

  “I do know that.”

  “Parts of it are busy ruthlessly stamping out the drug trade, and parts of it are busy buying and selling drugs. Some elements do both. The police are often involved, and also our authoritarian neighbors, the Burmese generals, as well as the Burmese generals’ authoritarian friends, the Chinese.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “I bring this up,” Pugh said, “because you told me that your Mr. Gary Griswold planned on investing thirty-eight million US dollars and making a quick killing.”

  “That’s what he told someone. It may not be true.”

  “With that kind of money, we may be talking drug deal.

  Heroin, yaa-baa, who knows? If that is the case, his family is correct to fear for his well-being. So let’s hope he was up to something else.”

  “A drug deal,” I said, “would be seriously out of character for this guy.” I told Pugh about Griswold’s discovery of Buddhist philosophy and meditation, his deepening interest in past lives, astrology and numerology, and on top of all that his infatuation and then de-infatuation with the mysterious Mango.

  “I think,” I said, “that Griswold would consider heroin dealing, what with all the social harm involved, unethical if not downright evil. Unless, of course, it’s Mr. Mango who’s the gangster here, and it was Griswold’s discovery of that that led to his disillusionment with Mango. And he actually believed he was investing in something else.”

  Pugh chewed on a slice of bacon. I had some too, with my omelet. It was the most flavorsome bacon I had ever eaten. I had once seen listed on a Thai menu “deep-fried pig vermiform appendix.” Bacon seemed like a classically American food, yet it was plainly the Thais who knew exactly what to do with a pig.

  68 Richard Stevenson

  “Yeah,” Pugh said, “I think you’re right that Mango’s involvement means something here. Or nothing. Well, not nothing. A warm smile, a pretty dick, and a shapely butt, it could be. Or maybe more; we’ll have to see. As for ethical considerations, it sounds like you know your man. But with your permission, may I please point out that when our own esteemed Prime Minster Samak was asked how Thailand could do so much business with the Burmese generals — who run what might be the nastiest police state in the world — the PM said, oh, the generals are praying Buddhists, after all, so how bad can they be?”

  “Point taken,” I said. “But Griswold has no history of being a hypocrite.”

  “The Buddha never specifically listed hypocrisy as a sin,”

  Pugh said. “Though I think we have to consider it within the penumbra of Dharma teachings. See, I’m not at all a spiritual strict constructionist.” He grinned at us and chortled.

  I told Pugh about Griswold’s consulting a Thai fortune-teller

  — renowned, supposedly — and the seer’s dire predictions of

  “bloodshed” and “great sorrow” in Griswold’s life.

  “You have no name of this man?”

  “No, unfortunately.”

  “He could be a charlatan. Or perhaps not. It would be good to know which one it is. If Mr. Gary consulted him previously and is now in distress, he will almost certainly consult him again.”

  I
said, “So, some Thai fortune-tellers are frauds and some are not?”

  “Are some American corporate CEOs frauds, and some are not?” Pugh asked. I had no clue from his look what he was thinking.

  “Then let me ask you this. Do fortune-tellers ever give financial advice?”

  “If it’s requested. Generally on small matters. When to buy a lottery ticket. What’s a lucky number for a lottery ticket.

  Perhaps on larger financial matters on some occasions. The scale of the question and the scale of the answer could both conceivably flow from the depth of the seer’s client’s pockets.”

  Timmy said, “Thailand looks like it’s awash in money — all this urban building and development. Couldn’t Griswold have been involved in something completely legitimate that then fell apart? And he’d gotten other investors involved, and now they want their money back or something, and Griswold is afraid of them? I read that sometimes in Thailand business disputes turn violent. Business-related drive-by shootings are not unheard of here. Isn’t that a possibility?”

  “Very good,” Pugh said. “You two have done your homework. I’ve been shot at eleven times and hit twice.” He hiked up his polo shirt and then tugged it down again, giving us a quick glimpse of a jagged scar on his mocha-colored rib cage.

  “This one was in broad daylight right over on Sukhumvit Road, not far from here. Timothy, I’ll show you the other scar sometime, if you’re interested. You’ll get quite an eyeful.”

  “Oh, I don’t have to.”

  “Aren’t you just a little bit curious?” He leered mischievously.

  Timmy actually blushed. “Oh, I can’t really say.”

  Pugh laughed and had some more bacon. He said, “We can speculate all we want about what Griswold was, or is, involved in financially. I think, though, that our most fruitful approach will simply be to find the guy, sit him down, and say, ‘Hey, Bud, what the heck is going on here?’ And then, one way or another, get him to tell us.”

  I described to Pugh our findings of the night before: The visit to Geoff Pringle’s building and the night security guard’s apparent suspicion that there was something very odd or even sinister about Pringle’s fatal fall from his balcony; the visit to Griswold’s apartment and our discovery that he himself had been there briefly as recently as two weeks earlier; the revelation that someone named Kawee was watering Griswold’s plants and praying at a shrine in his apartment; then the news that an

  “unfriendly” man on a motorbike had been trying to locate 70 Richard Stevenson

  Griswold. I told Pugh I had obtained a potentially useful piece of data — the unfriendly man’s mobile telephone number.

  Pugh said, “You’re off to a good start. Very professional.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I think I’d like to work with you on this.”

  “Great. But I thought it was I who would be interviewing you, in a sense. To make sure you were the real thing. I assumed on the phone and from your Web site that you were. And obviously you are legitimate — despite the confusion that your name inevitably produces.”

  “Yeah, well, Mr. Don, it works both ways. I needed, also, to see if you were the real deal and not one of the doofus-y, alcohol-besotted farang shmucks we often see doing PI work here in Bangkok. And you certainly are for real, which is excellent. So, let’s do it. Understand, though, that you’ll need me a whole lot more than I’ll need you in finding Mr. Gary and providing a good outcome for his situation, whatever it turns out to be.”

  This all sounded plausible enough. But I had to ask Pugh,

  “What is it that you think you’ll be able to bring to the investigation that I won’t be able to manage?”

  “Your survival, my friend,” he said. “Your survival.”

  Pugh and I agreed on the financial terms and carved out a division of labor for the next day or two. He would identify the owner of the phone number I’d gotten from Griswold’s building manager. He would use police sources to find out if Gary Griswold’s name had appeared in any police report in the past six months. (Pugh said reporters were sometimes bribed to keep the deaths of foreigners from turning up in newspapers and scaring the tourists away.) And he would get hold of the police report on Geoff Pringle’s death — which had been reported in the Key West Citizen but not in any of the Bangkok papers.

  One of my jobs would be to track down plant-watering, shrine-visiting Kawee by purchasing the promise of Griswold’s super and his security guard to phone me when Kawee showed up again. I had brought along my international cell phone and had picked up a SIM card and five thousand baht worth of minutes at a 7-Eleven. My other job would be to find Mango.

  Pugh said it was not a common Thai name or nickname. He would call a number of gay sources — mainly bar and massage-parlor owners — and try to come up with leads among the Bangkok ex-pat gay population that I could follow up on. Pugh guessed that Mango had had other farang admirers.

  When Pugh had eaten all his bacon and strolled out of the hotel, Timmy said, “Mr. Rufus might have an easier time finding Mango than we will. Don’t you think Rufus might be gay? I’m sure the guy was flirting with me.”

  “Yeah, he was, a little. But I wouldn’t make anything of it.

  With all his wives and girlfriends, I’d be surprised if it was any kind of invitation. It’s just that Thais are a casually sexualized people. They are generally modest about it in public, but they are very comfortable in their own sexual skin. Puritanism, Catholic guilt, all that — it’s as if they never heard of any of it.

  And when it comes to gender, they can be pretty fluid about it.

  They enjoy the humor of sex, too, and you were getting some of that from Rufus.”

  “It’s a bit startling.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t know whether I can adapt. All I know of Asian gay sexuality is India, a nation of Larry Craigs.”

  “You won’t have to work hard adjusting. Other than over in the fuck-show district, there’s nothing at all insistent about Thai sexuality. This is not Provincetown during carnival week. It’s just part of what’s in the air. And you need do nothing more than breathe it, if you so choose.”

  “Oh, so it’s only one element in addition to the scent of jasmine and the occasional whiff of raw sewage.”

  “Ah, there’s my observant Georgetown grad.”

  72 Richard Stevenson

  “What do you think Pugh meant when he said he needed to help you survive? That certainly got my attention.”

  “He meant survive in the professional sense, would be my guess,” I said, apparently unconvincingly, given the look I got back.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The word voluptuous when used about a person suggests amplitude, and yet here was maybe the most voluptuous human being I had ever met, and he was quite small. Kawee Thaikhiew was Lolita, he was a Caravaggio boy siren, he was the twentyyear-old Truman Capote draped over that recamier in the 1948 dust jacket photo for Other Voices, Other Rooms. And all of the above weighed in at no more than a hundred twenty pounds.

  Kawee wore ironed jeans and a pristine white tank top over his delicate brown chest. Around his neck, an amulet dangled on a gold chain with what looked like the image of an aged monk. He had flip-flops on his feet, so all could see and admire his toenails, carefully painted a resplendent fuchsia. His face was finely crafted and his luminous black eyes lightly mascaraed, his lips perceptibly glossier than most Thai lips, male or female.

  Kawee was the living, breathing embodiment of ambigenderal sensuality, and yet it was impossible to imagine any actual sex with this person who looked as if, during the act, he might easily snap in half.

  Timmy and I had gone over to Griswold’s condo to make a deal with Mr. Thomsatai on notifying us if Kawee turned up.

  After pocketing another thousand baht, Mr. Thomsatai said,

  “This is lucky for you. Kawee is upstairs now.”

  At first the boy — or boy-girl-man-woman; katoey
is the nonjudgmental Thai term — tried to make a quick exit. We had badly frightened him. I tried to reassure him by brandishing my New York State PI license — he stared at it as if its script were in ancient Pali — and I also produced a letter from Ellen Griswold attesting that I represented her in a search for her missing brother-in-law.

  “I don’t know where Mr. Gary go,” Kawee told us in a breathy voice, his eyes fixed not on Timmy and me but on the exit. We had found him placing offerings at Griswold’s shrine.

  74 Richard Stevenson

  He had left one marigold garland, a lotus bud, and an open can of Pepsi with a straw sticking out of it.

  I said, “Mr. Gary may be in trouble — we know that — but we are not the trouble. We need to let him know that we can help him with his trouble. You can help him by helping us do that. Don’t you want to help Mr. Gary? Isn’t he your friend?”

  “Yes, he my friend.”

  “How do you talk to him? By telephone?”

  “No, no telephone. He tell me no telephone.”

  “When did he tell you this? Have you seen him?”

  “He just phone me. On my mobile. But he doesn’t have phone. He call from Internet shop.”

  “In Bangkok?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Before two days.”

  I asked Kawee if Mr. Gary was his boyfriend.

  “No, no boyfriend. Friend friend. Mr. Gary help me so much. He is kind man.”

  “Where did you meet Mr. Gary?”

  “At Paradisio. That gay sauna for meet people for sex. Most farang just want to fuck Thai boy. But Mr. Gary, he love the Buddha. He is kind. I help him, and he help me. I take care of flowers and I make offerings until he come back.”

  “When will he come back? Did he say?”

  “No. Maybe long time. He send me money for offerings — and for me. He help me very much.”

  “But he does come here sometimes, late at night. Do you know why?”