The 38 Million Dollar Smile ds-10 Page 9

  Again, I wondered how much these guys had in common with Nostradamus and how much with Karl Rove.

  I printed out some of the data on the seers and stuffed the pages into my pocket before venturing outside and walking around the corner to the food stalls on hectic Rama IV Road.

  The sun was setting, but the traffic-fouled air was still suffocating. I thought Timmy and Kawee might appreciate some eats, so I picked up some cold diced pork salad with lime juice and galangal, a bag of cooked jasmine rice, and a half liter of fish soup in a plastic sack. For a snack, I had some pineapple chunks on a stick, passing up the deep-fried cicadas.

  When I walked back to the Internet shop, I saw Pugh there looking up and down the street. His car was illegally parked, half on the narrow strip of sidewalk and half sticking out in the soi, and plainly he was looking for me. When he spotted me, he urgently beckoned. As I walked up to Pugh, I could not tell what the look on his face meant, only that his news, if any, was going to be bad.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Both of them?” I said. “They took both Timmy and Kawee?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes, Mr. Don.”

  “But why Timmy? They may think Kawee can lead them to Griswold. But what’s the point of dragging Timothy along? To me, that doesn’t add up.”

  We were in Pugh’s Toyota banging along Sathorn Soi 1 toward Griswold’s condo. The call had come to Pugh from one of his innumerable police department snitches — the Johnny Walker brigades, he had called them — alerting him that four armed men had arrived at Griswold’s building half an hour earlier. They had pistol-whipped the security guard and ordered Mr. Thomsatai to take them up to Griswold’s apartment and let them in. They then forced the condo’s two occupants, a Thai lady-boy and an older farang, to leave with them in the black SUV they had arrived in.

  I said, “Thomsatai. That degenerate. They bought him.”

  “Possibly.”

  We lurched around the corner onto Soi Nantha. The sun was down now, and the sky was infused with a gold even richer than that of the spires on the temples over near the king’s palace along the Chao Phraya River, a mile or two north of us.

  Pugh slowed a bit for the speed bump behind the Austrian Embassy, then hurtled past Paradisio, its entryway thick with Sunday day-off comings and goings.

  “But it was Thomsatai who phoned the police?” I asked.

  “He had to. The security guard would have notified his superiors, who would have acted. They have a reputation to protect, for business reasons.”

  “And the guard is okay?”

  “Apparently.”

  98 Richard Stevenson

  “That’s good. It means they are not simply gunning people down. They want to get what they want to get. In some cases, anyway.”

  Neither of us spoke out loud of the balcony-plunge deaths of Geoff Pringle and then the famous fortune-teller.

  I asked if anybody got a description of the car.

  “Generally, but no tag number. The traffic police have been alerted to watch for a black four-by-four with tinted windows containing four men and their two abductees.”

  “Is anything likely to come of that?”

  As Griswold’s building came into view, Pugh said, “It’s a pricey car. Some enterprising officer might view it as a mark for a quick two-hundred-baht hit and then discover it has captives inside it. We would need good luck for that,” Pugh added, and tooted his car horn three times, one for the Buddha, one for the Dharma, his teachings, and one for the monks who preserve the Buddha’s wisdom.

  We pulled in behind a cop car that was parked in front of the apartment building, pink bougainvillea petals from a nearby bush already gathering on its blue hood. A second car from GUTS security services was parked nearby, and a new younger and bigger guard stood watch at the sentry hut. A few of the building’s occupants and some neighbors had gathered, but they seemed to be keeping their distance.

  “There must have been witnesses,” I said, as we headed into the building. “There was still some daylight when they did it.”

  Pugh said, “Do you really think any of these people would describe what they saw, and by so doing establish their existence inside what most of my fellow countrymen regard as the diseased and capricious minds of the police? Dream on, Khun Don, dream on.”

  A plainclothes detective and his uniformed associate had Mr.

  Thomsatai in a cubicle off a polished marble lobby of the type that once must have housed royalty but was common now in luxury apartment buildings. Was there a finite supply of marble in the world, as with fossil fuels? This was surely the case, but which would run out first? If Timmy had been there, he would have had an informed opinion on this question. But he wasn’t, and I wanted to strangle to death until he lay in a heap on the shiny marble floor whoever had taken him from me.

  Mr. Thomsatai glanced at Pugh and me when we came in, then away. This guy was guilty of something, probably practically everything. Why had the condo association hired this conscienceless crook? Thomsatai had violated two of the five explicit moral precepts of Buddhism — no lying, no stealing — and yet here he was, playing the aggrieved victim. I did not, however, walk over and kick him hard, as I was impelled to do.

  Pugh politely wai- ed the plainclothes officer — raised palms together, a small bow — and the cop wai — ed him back. A round-faced man in his forties with an expertly shaped pile of gleaming black hair on his head, the detective was the senior Thai in the room, but he plainly knew and respected Pugh, for his abilities perhaps, or his Johnny Walker.

  Pugh introduced me to the two cops as the “boyfriend” of Timothy Callahan. It was given as a neutral description and received that way. Pugh also told Detective Panu Pansittivorakul that I was a private investigator searching for a missing American, Gary Griswold.

  “I am aware of that,” Panu said with no particular expression. “How are you making out with your search, Mr.

  Don?”

  “Nothing yet,” I said. “But we have some ideas. I think we can assume that this abduction is in some way tied to Gary Griswold’s having gone into hiding. Has anybody IDed any of the four goons?”

  “Unfortunately, no. We have descriptions, but no one recognized any of them. Not the security guard, not Mr.

  Thomsatai.”

  I said to Thomsatai, “Could one of them possibly have been the unfriendly man on the motorcycle who paid you to phone him when Mr. Gary came around? He sounds like a good bet to me — the sort of man who, if there was a good kidnapping in 100 Richard Stevenson the works, wouldn’t dream of being left out. Wasn’t Mr.

  Unfriendly Motorbike perhaps one of the four?”

  Thomsatai looked up and lied so unconvincingly that beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. He was his own human polygraph. “No, no. I would recognize that bad man. These men were others. No motorbike man, no, no.”

  Pugh motioned for Panu to step aside and spoke to him quietly. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the detective nodded at the uniformed officer. The cop then walked over and picked up a fat Bangkok telephone book from a desk and smashed it against the side of Mr. Thomsatai’s head.

  Timmy wasn’t there to object, so I had to do it. “Rufus, don’t, please. What happened to the elephant and the grasshopper?”

  “Who were they?” Panu demanded of Mr. Thomsatai, who sat looking stunned and close to tears. Panu then switched to Thai and barked a string of orders I could not understand. The cop picked up the phone book again, and when I stepped in his direction, Panu snapped something to Pugh in Thai that from his body language plainly meant, “Get this farang dickhead out of here.”

  Pugh, not looking as embarrassed as I wanted him to, indicated that I should follow him out of the cubicle.

  That’s when Mr. Thomsatai said, “Yes, now I remember!

  Yes, yes, one of them was the man on the motorbike who was looking for Mr. Gary.”

  I looked at Pugh in a funny way whose meaning he correctly understood to be, �
��Can we trust any of this?”

  Then my cell phone rang. I checked the number but the caller’s ID was blocked. They all watched me — they knew it wasn’t going to be a lovely invitation for Sunday brunch, and I knew it too. As Panu pointed and the uniformed cop quickly led Mr. Thomsatai out of the cubicle, I flipped open the phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Don?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “It’s Timothy.”

  “Timmy, can you talk?”

  “Well, yes. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “Of course. So what’s the deal?”

  “The deal is, they want Griswold. They will trade Kawee and me for Griswold.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s about it. I’m not supposed to say any more. Oh, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They said I should tell you that we are on the fourteenth floor.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay.”

  “So that’s about it, I guess. God, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “It’s so good to hear yours.”

  “Just…please get Kawee and me out of this, if you can.

  Okay?”

  “We will, we will. Can you tell me anything more about where you are?”

  “No.”

  “Is Kawee okay? Are they treating you well enough?”

  “Yes. We’re both all right. So far. But one of the gentlemen hosting us just handed me a note asking me to tell you this. You have forty-eight hours to hand over Griswold.”

  “I understand.”

  “The note also has a big ‘fourteen’ on it. As in fourteenth floor. Get it?”

  “I sure do.”

  “I’m supposed to hang up now. Bye.”

  “Good-bye, Timothy.”

  102 Richard Stevenson

  And then he was gone.

  I repeated the conversation to Pugh and Detective Panu.

  “They’re on the fourteenth floor somewhere. We’re supposed to believe, apparently, that if we don’t hand over Griswold within forty-eight hours, Timothy and Kawee will be shoved off a high balcony.”

  Pugh and Panu looked grim. “So sorry,” Panu said.

  “How many buildings are there in Bangkok fourteen or more stories high? Any idea?”

  Pugh and Panu looked at each other. “Many hundreds,”

  Pugh said. “Twenty-five years ago this would have been easy.

  Today Bangkok is Houston or Miami in that regard.”

  “Yes, but all you have to do is check all the fourteenth floors in Bangkok. That limits it, right? Even if there are, say, thirty-five hundred buildings with fourteenth floors, you’d need only thirty-five hundred or, even better, sixty-five hundred officers to do a sweep. That doesn’t seem insurmountable, does it? How many cops are there in Bangkok?”

  Again, both Pugh and Detective Panu looked at each other gravely, and then at me. Panu said, “It’s a matter of priorities.”

  He gave a wan apologetic shrug.

  “What we’re talking about here,” Pugh said, “is a declasse Thai lady-boy, a nobody. And Mr. Timothy is a mere tourist, less than a nobody in Thailand. While it is true that tourists are gods in Thailand collectively speaking, individually they do not merit a tremendous amount of interest, particularly by the police. Am I putting that too harshly, Khun Panu?”

  “A little, perhaps.”

  I said, “What if we paid for the services of the police?

  Would that help? Perhaps some senior officer, a captain or even general.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” Pugh said and glanced at Detective Panu, who shrugged mildly.

  “Okay, you locate that official and I’ll come up with the payoff. How much are we talking here? Twenty cases of Johnny Walker? Sixty? Or is it cash — US dollars? Euros?”

  Panu said, “Bahts make a nice gift.”

  “How many bahts?”

  “I’ve heard that fifty thousand can be helpful. That’s about sixteen thousand dollars, I believe. Unless the US dollar has grown even weaker in the past hour.”

  “It’s not just a question of national pride,” Pugh said. “The baht is currently a sounder currency than the dollar. So your client, Mrs. Griswold, will provide the funding for this additional expense?”

  I told them about the e-mail from Ellen Griswold calling me off the case because, she claimed, she had heard from her ex-husband, and he insisted he was in no danger and was merely embarrassed over some personal matter.

  “Therefore,” I said, “any further expenses will have to be met by Gary Griswold himself, who plainly is in big trouble.

  What this means is, we have to find Griswold fast. Then, (a) extract cash from him to pay off your for-profit police department to prod it to do its job, (b) find out from him what the hell is going on here so that we can help get him out of the rotten situation he’s in, and (c) — if those two approaches fail

  — have Griswold in hand so that we can trade him for Timmy and Kawee and hope that he can hand over to these people, whoever they are, whatever it is they want from him, thus keeping Griswold from being shoved off a balcony.”

  Pugh said, “I like your tour d’horizon, Mr. Don. It’s dead-on.

  And your willingness to sacrifice poor Mr. Gary, if necessary, in order to save your boyfriend and the katoey is admirable. There are degrees of innocence in this complex situation. And Mr.

  Gary, should he perish, would be fulfilling a karma plainly nudged into existence by his own klutziness. Not that we shouldn’t do everything we can to save this wayward farang’s sorry ass from whatever mishigas he has waded into of his own volition.”

  104 Richard Stevenson

  “Timmy, of course, would have a few choice words for me if he were here,” I said. “He’s a bit of a moral absolutist. He would allow for no cold-blooded choices of the type I have described. But let’s just get him back, and then he can lecture all of us to his heart’s content.”

  Pugh said, “And what if Mr. Gary is unwilling or, God forbid, unable to underwrite our efforts and those of the hardworking Royal Thai Police? What if we track him down and he laughs in our faces and tells us all to go do what is anatomically impossible for most people — not that there aren’t exceptions to that rule at certain clubs I could mention in Surawong? Or what if we locate Mr. Gary and he is penniless?

  This could get complicated, I think.”

  “If Griswold can’t produce whatever cash that’s needed, then I’ll go down to the ATM on Rama IV Road near the Topmost and stand there for half an hour with my MasterCard pumping bahts into a bag. That won’t be a problem. Please go ahead right now and make whatever sleazy arrangements are appropriate with your sleazy police department’s sleazy higher-ups.”

  Pugh and Panu both squinted at me and nodded.

  I remembered Timmy’s warnings to me about getting mixed up in this case. Timothy, the grounded one. Timothy, the sensible one. Timothy, the seer.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “So, Bob. What’s the deal with the Griswolds? What I’m dealing with here seems to be not exactly what it seemed to be when you sent Ellen Griswold to me to track down her wayward ex-husband and wayward current brother in-law in Thailand.” I explained what had transpired in the previous twenty-four hours and asked the lawyer, “So, what I want to know from you is, can the Griswolds be trusted, or what?”

  I had reached Chicarelli on the golf course Sunday morning in Clifton Park, near Albany. When I called his house, his wife was reluctant to violate the sanctity of Chicarelli’s Sabbath golf game by blabbing his cell phone number for a business matter.

  But when I said the urgent situation I was calling about had to do with the Griswolds, a name of consequence in Albany, she recited the number pronto.

  “They’ve got Timmy? Christ, Strachey, have you notified the US embassy? They’ve gotta bring in the FBI, would be my thinking. Going at this on your own sounds very risky to me.”

  “It may come to that, but my Thai sourc
es say the cops here are more effectively inspired by cash than by hectoring from farangs in suits. There’s a big DEA station here, but I’d probably have to convince those guys that there’s a major heroin shipment involved in order to get their attention.”

  “You might want to consider saying just that.”

  “I might, in the end. For all I know at this point, it could even be true. But what about the Griswolds? What’s the story with them? Ellen sends me flying over here and gives me pretty much carte blanche to do anything I can to save her ex and his thirty-eight mil. Then she e-mails me some lame crap about he’s A-okay, it’s all a misunderstanding, and come on home. Plainly the guy really is up to his ears in some stinking mess involving influential fortune-tellers and who knows what kind of criminal weirdos. It seems like half the goons in Bangkok want to get hold of Griswold and…I hate to think. Give him a shove. My 106 Richard Stevenson question to you is, why would Ellen call me off? What’s her game here? It’s possible that Gary lied to her about being safe, but why would she be so ready to believe the lie? Bob, I’m confused.”

  There was a long pause — was Chicarelli taking time out from my call to pick some grass off his four iron? — and then he said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this.” More silence.

  “Yeah?”

  “It could be financial.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Bill Griswold has serious money troubles, I’ve heard from people who would know. It’s possible all of a sudden that maybe the Griswolds think they cannot afford you.”

  “That sounds unlikely. I’m a monetary tiny speck in their scheme of things.”

  “No, this is big and it’s significant. There’s a hostile takeover underway at Algonquin Steel. A holding company operating out of the Caymans is busy rolling up shares in the Griswold’s zillion-dollar family store. Bill Griswold is fighting it, and there’s a high probability that the family’s assets will be tied up in litigation for years to come. Bill and Ellen may land on their feet eventually, but the family well is going to be shallow-borderingon-dry for the foreseeable future. All this just developed on Friday, so that could help account for Ellen’s change of plans.”