I had a beer, but Timmy tried the bird-spit juice and said, “I guess this is as close to kissing a bird as I’ll ever get.”
“That depends on how long you remain in Thailand,” Pugh said, and the Thais all laughed, though I wasn’t sure why.
Mango had come out into the hot night wearing a skimpy yellow bathing suit. As the rest of us sat drinking and kidding around, he approached the pool, and I fully expected him to execute a perfect godlike swan dive. Instead he climbed onto the diving board and jumped in holding his nose. He came to the surface glistening in the moonlight and then hoisted himself out of the pool and — with the un-self-consciousness and easy grace of a gifted athlete — remounted the board and jumped in again holding his nose.
I wondered if there might be some tension between the two when Griswold came out and encountered the man with whom he was once in love and who had, Griswold believed, destroyed that love with Mango’s devotion to Donnutt and with his money-boy activities involving a number of other farangs. Pugh said, however, that Griswold had gone into town with Ek and Egg to use the Internet cafe and look at documents from the other investors in the Sayadaw U project. So we had at least a brief reprieve from any awkward meeting between the two.
Any worries over a confrontation soon became moot, however. Pugh took a call from Ek, who said that outside the Internet cafe, as they were leaving, Griswold was admiring the rented bicycle of a Swedish tourist, and suddenly grabbed it, jumped on, and sped off. They chased him on foot, but Griswold was both deft and fast on the bike, and they lost him.
Once they retrieved their van, Griswold had already been lost in the crowds of tourists pouring in and out of the Hua Hin hotels, bars, massage parlors, and schnitzel joints.
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.”
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“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 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.”
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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 c
ry? 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 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.”
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“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.”
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.”
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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.”
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