The 38 Million Dollar Smile ds-10

by Richard Stevenson

  Pugh gave the driver some instructions in Thai, and that’s when Griswold, apparently understanding Pugh’s words, said evenly, “Not a good idea.”

  “Why should we not take you to your condo in Sathorn? It is your real home.”

  Griswold studied us and said, “Who are you? Before I say anything else, I need to know that.”

  “We are not your enemies. We are your friends,” Pugh told him and then instructed the driver in English to take us to Pugh’s office in Surawong, and to use the garage entrance.

  148 Richard Stevenson

  Griswold took this in and then looked at me curiously.

  “Yeah. Okay. I think I understand what’s going on here. You

  — Mr. Buttinski-Farang. What’s your name? Is it what I think it is?”

  “Donald Strachey. I’m a private investigator. I was hired by your former wife and current sister-in-law Ellen Griswold to find you and to protect you if necessary, and to persuade you to stop acting like a ninny.”

  Griswold laughed mirthlessly. “Ah, yes. The Albany private eye. I’ve heard about you. I thought you went home. You were supposed to fold up your tent and carry it back to the Hudson Valley. And yet here you are. I really need to talk to my former wife about her lax hiring practices.” He shook his head and pushed some sweat off his forehead with the backs of his cuffed hands.

  “You are in spectacularly big trouble, Griswold. You do grasp that, do you not?”

  “Am I in spectacular trouble? Well, yeah, I guess I am. How thoughtful of you to fly all the way across the Pacific Ocean to point that out to me. Thanks loads.”

  My impulse was to grab the sarcastic asshole and bash him one, but I wasn’t sure what all he knew. And of course, Timmy would have disapproved of my striking a pacifist — if Griswold really was that. I seemed to be surrounded by peace-loving Buddhists who found room in their hearts to smack people with phone books, and others who hurled soothsayers and farang retirees off balconies.

  I said, “My partner — boyfriend — Timothy Callahan has been abducted by violent criminals. This is entirely your fault, Griswold. These criminals are people who are in fact looking for you and have not been able to locate you — because you are hiding out from them — and they want to swap Timothy and your young friend Kawee for you. If recent events are any guide, once they get hold of you these people intend to toss you off a tall building. So we have developed two plans. Plan A is to rescue Timmy and Kawee and then to protect you. You’ll be happy to know that handing you over to these goons is only

  Plan B. But before any of us carries out any plan at all, we need badly to understand exactly who and what it is we’re dealing with here. Griswold, you have some extensive explaining to do.

  You can begin when I say go. Go.”

  He looked surprisingly at ease. Griswold’s breathing had evened out now, and he lay on a straw mat in the back of the van with his head propped on a sack of rice. As I spoke, he listened carefully, his mouth dropping open when I told him Timmy and Kawee had been kidnapped and the kidnappers were willing to release the two once they had taken possession of Griswold. Unless he was faking it more brilliantly than seemed likely, Griswold was hearing about the kidnappings for the first time.

  “Oh no,” Griswold said. “Poor Kawee. This is awful. He’s such a sweet-natured soul.”

  “Apparently that is the case. And I can tell you that Timothy Callahan is a nice guy, too. So let’s get them both back real, real fast.”

  “I was so naive,” Griswold said and shook his head. Then he looked up at me and said, “Please tell me. What is Timothy Callahan’s birth date?”

  I thought, Oh, good grief, here we go. “I’m not telling you that. We’re not going to screw around with any astrology bullshit. What we’re going to do is get to the point, and we are going to do so starting right now.”

  Griswold gazed up at me serenely. I was pathetic in his eyes.

  A rationalist, a literalist, a lost soul. He said, “I’m just trying to get some perspective on where you and your friend fit into all of this. Nothing more.”

  Then Pugh said, “I too am interested, Mr. Don. If you revealed to us where and on what date Mr. Timothy was born, this could help clarify the larger picture. I appreciate and respect your Western rationalist outlook, but just indulge us. And then we can proceed using more universal means. Phone books or whatever.”

  150 Richard Stevenson

  Pugh had used the word us, meaning Griswold and himself.

  What was going on here? Wasn’t Pugh in a very real sense my contract employee?

  I could hear Timmy snickering over all this, but I could also hear him bellowing, “Just tell them what they want to hear!”

  I recited the year of Timmy’s birth and told Griswold,

  “Timothy was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on November eleventh, at ten fourteen a.m. So?”

  The van was making its way through the Monday night traffic northward and westward toward Surawong. We were traveling at a normal rate of speed now, observing all the traffic laws, blending in, not attracting attention.

  Pugh and Griswold looked at each other and then at me.

  Pugh said, “It would help if a professional did Mr.

  Timothy’s chart and blessed it. But even without that, I do believe that there is hope.”

  Griswold nodded in agreement. “There’s a good chance that you can pull off a successful rescue. The date today is four-fourteen, a numerologically benign period for a Sagittarius.

  However,” he said, “if the rescue doesn’t work, I think I can work something out with these people. I’m quite certain I know who they are — or at least who they represent — and there’s some chance I can make a deal with them and save myself as well as Timothy and Kawee.”

  This didn’t sound right. If there was a way for him to negotiate with these people, why wouldn’t he have done it sooner? I said, “So, who are they, and what would this so-called deal be?”

  Pugh said, “Please do tell the truth, Mr. Gary. We will be very pissed off if you lie through your teeth and this quickly becomes apparent, which surely it will. Egg won’t like it either, I am thinking.” We all looked over at nicely toned Egg, who sat rock still, glowering at Griswold.

  “I’m familiar with the Five Precepts, Khun…?”

  “Rufus Pugh.”

  “I do understand, Khun Rufus, that to tell an untruth is reprehensible. And much more important than irritating you or your muscular young friend here, it would put me at grave risk of offending the spirit of the Enlightened One.”

  Pugh smiled weakly. “Said like a true farang dilettante Buddhist. No Thai would utter any such words. We would say if we lie, we might later turn into a buffalo turd and the ghost of our mother might slip and fall on us and break some bones. But never mind. You seem to get the point about truthfulness being an all-around better approach than going around telling big whoppers. So let’s have it.”

  Griswold lay back now and looked up at the ceiling of the van. He was either organizing his true thoughts or he was formulating some cunning net of falsehoods that would have his late mother turning fecal-footed cartwheels in hell.

  He said, “I reneged on a financial agreement in which I was to be the prime investor. A number of people had already put money into the same project. And when I unexpectedly decided to pursue an entirely different project and backed out of the original scheme just before I was to transfer my funds, the first project collapsed before others could get their money back and they lost many millions of dollars. And now a major group of losers blames me instead of the group that cheated them. They want me either to reimburse them — which I am not about to do — or they want me to die horribly as a warning to others not to trifle with them. It’s as simple as that.”

  True or not, this sounded plausible. “So why,” I asked,

  “don’t you simply leave Thailand? If this is such a dangerous place for you, why are you choosing to hang around Bangkok?”


  “To complete an extremely worthy nonprofit project,”

  Griswold said. “When this project is done, I might leave Thailand for another Buddhist country — Laos, maybe, or Cambodia, despite my having been Thai myself in several past lives. Or I may remain here and let my karma play out in a way that would lead to my remaining safely in Thailand, my truest home, although in a form that might be other than human. To 152 Richard Stevenson the extent to which any of these matters is within my control, I haven’t yet decided how I will choose.”

  I noted Griswold’s fine Italian bicycle in the back of the van, scratched and bent from having been whacked by the motorbike, and his helmet on the floor next to him. While I was thinking brain damage, I saw Pugh gazing at Griswold, rapt and solemn. A minute earlier, Pugh had been dismissing Griswold as a silly farang dilettante, and now he was looking at him as if he was some kind of spandexed holy man.

  I said, “So what was the scheme that went awry, and who are the people who are mad at you?”

  “There is no need for you to hear the particulars,” Griswold said. “It had to do with currency speculation and involved certain insider information. I have to admit that the scheme was ethically borderline, but I saw it as justified by the opportunity to invest the proceeds in meritorious works on a very large scale.”

  Timmy’s voice again in my head: “A Buddhist Augustinian. How unusual.”

  I said, “And what makes you think you might talk your way out of having these people who think you screwed them make a violent example of you?”

  “I can tell them I’m going to cut them in on a new deal I’ve come up with that they will find irresistible. I know these people. The proceeds from this project will mainly benefit humanity. But even twenty percent should be enough to get these people off my case for the time being. And all we need, really, is a little time.”

  “And that new deal would be what?”

  “I just can’t go into it. Sorry. My partners would consider it a breach of confidentiality. Let’s just say it has to do with international finance.”

  I had gotten a C in economics at Rutgers and looked at Pugh for help. I didn’t even know what questions to ask. Pugh was still studying Griswold and looking impressed. Where had all this guy’s Thai street savvy gone?

  It hadn’t gone anywhere, for now Pugh looked hard at Griswold and said, “Former Minister of Finance Anant na Ayudhaya. Is that thieving crumb-bum your partner in this so-called humanitarian venture, or was he a partner in the deal that went sour?”

  Griswold froze ever-so-briefly. He recovered instantly and said mildly, “Why would you possibly assume anything like that? How bizarre that you would think that.”

  I said, “We got into your laptop. There’s a picture of you together with this ex-minister and Khunathip the seer. I expect you know what happened to Khun Khunathip. So what’s the story of you three looking like you’re jollying it up at some Cornell class reunion on Khunathip’s balcony?”

  At the mention of Khunathip’s name, Griswold seemed to breathe a little faster. Or was it the mention of a balcony? “That was a social occasion. I’m impressed by your chutzpah, Strachey. Getting into my computer was really an extraordinarily sleazy thing to do.”

  “Griswold, I was simply trying to save your dumb ass. That’s what I was hired by your sister-in-law to do. Of course I was going to look anywhere that might offer any clue as to what kind of idiotic mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Anyway, what was your relationship to Khunathip the seer? The police say you turned up in his financial records. You paid him a fee, so-called, of six hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

  Now Griswold looked grim. “The fee had nothing to do with the investment. That was simply my payment for a series of readings this extremely keen-minded and profoundly farseeing man did for me over a period of more than a year. His sad fate had nothing to do with any of that. Khun Khunathip should not have died. That was just so, so wrong.”

  “Was he killed by the same people who are after you?”

  “He was a party to the original currency speculation scheme.

  He invested in it. In fact, it was Khun Khunathip who led me to it in the first place. When I came up with a much better investment project — one that was not only financially sound 154 Richard Stevenson but morally uncompromised — and I pulled out of the currency speculation scheme before actually transferring any cash, Khun Khunathip tried to get his money back, too. It was about one million US, I believe. When the original investors refused to give the million dollars back to him — they laughed at him and called it overhead — he became uncharacteristically angry and did new astrological charts for each of them, and then cursed the charts. Then he sent each member of the investment group the cursed charts. Apparently the investors then hired their own astrologer, whose charts indicated that Khun Khunathip would have to be killed in order to erase his curses. I have to admit that I brought a certain amount of naivete to all of this, but I was shocked that Khun Khunathip didn’t know any better than to cross these ruthless and powerful people. This is an aspect of Thai society I failed to appreciate when I came here, and I have to say I still don’t know what to make of it.”

  The van was stalled now in a big jam-up at Silom and Rama IV Roads. We had been stuck for several minutes, but there was no honking and there were no muttering drivers sticking their heads out their windows to see what in God’s name the bloody holdup was. People sat quietly in their air-conditioned cars or in their fuming tuk-tuks. A low-fare, un-air-conditioned municipal bus idled nearby, and the steaming passengers sat by the open windows uncomplainingly inhaling that evening’s portion of each person’s annual allotment of small particulates.

  Pugh said, “Khun Gary, welcome to Paradise. Like any paradise where human beings are present, Thailand is complicated. Mark Twain said, ‘Heaven for climate, hell for society.’ Here the two exist in a kind of rough harmony. As you seem to have discovered.”

  I said, “What about Geoff Pringle? You know about him, I take it.”

  “I read about him online in the Key West Citizen. For reasons of keeping up appearances for the farang tourists, I suppose, there was no report of Geoff’s death in the Bangkok newspapers, either Thai or English editions. I was very, very sorry to learn of Geoff’s passing. He was once a good friend of THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 155 mine. It was Geoff who turned me on to Thailand in the first place. But he was one of the people who lost money in the currency speculation scheme. He blamed me, which was totally fair. I had gotten him into it originally. Geoff, however, made the mistake of pestering both the Ministry of Justice and the US embassy about his losses — he believed that he had been swindled, and of course he had — and it must have become apparent that he was going to be a troublemaker on a scale somebody high up didn’t want to be bothered with. So Geoff had to go. It’s one of the Thai business practices that I have to say I’ll never get used to.”

  I said, “And now back to former Minister Anant. Where does he fit in here? Was he one of the participants in the original currency speculation scheme that was called off, or is he involved in the new project that’s going to accumulate both vast wealth and karmic merit?”

  I could all but see the wheels turning inside Griswold’s head.

  Before Griswold could come up with some half-truth or bald-faced lie, Pugh said matter-of-factly, “It was both. Khun Anant was involved with both schemes, the dubious one that was abandoned and got two people killed, and the supposedly worthy project that is ongoing and hasn’t gotten anybody killed just yet. Am I right, Khun Gary?”

  Griswold peered down at his handcuffs and said nothing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Up in Pugh’s office in Surawong, Griswold described for us his worthy project. It was a massive complex of temples, monasteries, and Buddhism study and meditation centers to be built on a drained cobra swamp on the outskirts of Bangkok near the new airport. A kind of Buddhism theme park would adjoin the main campus to help educate many of Thailand’s
fifteen million yearly foreign tourists about Buddhism. The monks from next door would participate in “monk chats” with the visiting farangs, explaining the tenets of Buddhism.

  Griswold said he had borrowed this last idea from an existing monastery in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, but his monk chats would be conducted on a much larger scale. Griswold himself would finance the construction of the complex, and the new business scheme he was planning along with Thai investors would serve as an endowment for the institution for decades or even centuries to come.

  Pugh said, “Your audacious plan is largely meritorious, Mr.

  Gary. You are to be commended. It will be compromised, of course, if you are flung off the side of a high building before your project reaches fruition.”

  “That’s one reason I’m trying to stay alive. Not just for myself but for the Sayadaw U Winaya project. That’s who the project will be named after.”

  Pugh nodded approvingly, but I was in the dark. Griswold saw my puzzlement and explained. “A sayadaw is the abbot of a monastery in Burma. Sayadaw U Winaya was the revered abbot of the Thamanyat monastery in southeastern Burma until his death several years ago. He was a supporter of democrat Aung San Su Kyi and an opponent of the evil junta that rules the country so savagely. After his death, the monk’s corpse was placed in a glass box and put on display in a shrine near the monastery, and was believed by Burmese Buddhists to have supernatural powers. Pilgrims came to Thamanyat from all over 158 Richard Stevenson the country. The paranoid ruling generals feared the dead monk’s magic and were probably behind the theft of the corpse by armed and masked intruders two years ago.

  “At U Winaya Park, we’ll have a replica of the great monk’s corpse in a box of glass and gold. It will serve as a place of solace and spiritual power, not just for Thai pilgrims but for millions of Burmese refugees who had fled the horrors of their homeland. It’s just barely possible that this project could go forward without me. But I’m providing most of the financing, and even more importantly the endowment cannot be set up without my guidance. So it’s best, Strachey, that not only should Timothy and Kawee be rescued, but that I also should continue breathing and walking around upright, if at all possible.”