The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 15

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.

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 71

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