The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 28

Grinning, Pugh said, “You’ve had a run of bad luck, Mr.

Don, and you are defenseless in the face of it. Like most

farangs, you rely solely on your brainpower and your financial

assets, both of which are finite. I’m doing everything I can to

compensate for your limitations, however, and between the two

of us we’re going to pull the rabbit out of the hat. So, do not

despair, my friend, do not despair.”

I looked at Pugh and said, “Rufus, I have no idea what

you’re talking about.”

He guffawed. “You must be amazed that Thailand functions

at all.”

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 125

Miss Aroon came in leading another man into the office,

and Pugh got up to greet him, smiling and bowing and wai-ing.

Thunska Rujawongsanti, the computer consultant, was small

and round, and appeared to be somewhere between the ages of

fourteen and fifty-eight. He looked more Chinese than Thai. I

knew that there had been a certain amount of intermarriage

since the nineteenth century, when the Chinese began arriving

in Siam in great numbers to — as a Chinese-Thai journalist had

once explained it to me — teach the Thais how to count.

Khun Thunska had Griswold’s laptop with him and opened

it on Pugh’s desk.

“So, what was the password?” I asked.

Thunska shrugged. “I have no idea. We just dispensed with

that type of foolishness and spoke to this little honey of a Mac on a higher plane. It never knew what hit it.”

I gave Pugh an Is-this-guy-putting-me-on? look, and he said,

“No Thai juju was involved. Just some trade secrets and

perhaps some Johnny Walker for a Mac company representative

in Singapore.”

Thunska acted as if he hadn’t heard this. He was busy juicing

up the Mac. He quickly produced an image on the screen and

said, “I wanted you to lay eyes on this. I would have phoned it

in, but you have to see this to believe it.”

“Who is it?” I asked. “The foreigner appears to be Gary

Griswold. But who are the Thais? One does look familiar.”

Pugh said, “Oh, baby.”

The photo was of three men standing with drinks in their

hands on the balcony of an apartment. They were casually but

elegantly dressed, and they were relaxed and smiling. The digital image seemed to be of an unremarkable social occasion until

Pugh identified the two men standing with Griswold.

“The man on Griswold’s left is former Minister of Finance

Anant na Ayudhaya. He was removed from office in the coup

last year but is generally understood to control the ministry

under the current restored nominally democratic government.

The man on Griswold’s right is the one whose photo you have

126 Richard Stevenson

perhaps seen, Mr. Don. It is Khun Khunathip, the esteemed

fortune-teller who fatally went over a high railing just two days ago. Perhaps it was the very railing he is leaning against in this photo.”

“I believe, yes, that that is the unlucky railing,” Thunska

said. “You can make out the Westin Grande in the background,

suggesting that this photo was indeed taken in Khun

Khunathip’s apartment in Sukhumvit.”

I said, “This is big stuff, no? Shouldn’t the police be told

about this?”

Pugh and Thunska exchanged quick glances, and Pugh said

to me, “Mr. Don, you are half right.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I walked down to an ATM on Surawong and withdrew

another twenty-five thousand baht. I had nearly maxed out my

MasterCard, so I started in on my American Express account.

Pugh bundled the cash into a shopping bag and sent Ek over to

the police station on Sala Daeng Soi 1 with it.

Pugh phoned his own police sources to check on the

investigation into the death of the renowned seer, Khun

Khunathip. Miss Aroon had brought up the morning

newspapers, both Thai and English language, and while all the

papers had the soothsayer’s passing emblazoned across their

front pages, none speculated on the details or meaning of his

death. The great man had simply “died in a fall.”

Pugh’s police contacts told him that an actual investigation

was under way, as opposed to a fake investigation. Pugh said

this could mean that either important persons had nothing to

do with the apparent homicide and wanted justice done, or that

important persons had everything to do with the apparent

homicide and they wished to gauge how much was going to leak

out before they either declared the seer’s fall accidental or found a hapless scapegoat from the Thai lower social orders to take

the rap.

Ek drove Pugh and me inch by inch through the morning

traffic miasma over to the Topmost so that I could change

clothes and Pugh could fortify himself with the bacon at the

breakfast buffet. On the way, we tried to work up a story I

could tell the kidnappers so that we could buy time if we

needed it. Nothing we came up with sounded any more

convincing than the truth. Pugh said the kidnappers

undoubtedly had their own police sources — some of them

possibly the same as Pugh’s — and the kidnappers would know

that we had been unable to track down Griswold. They were

simply using us to accomplish what they had been unable to do,

128 Richard Stevenson

thinking that we had better information than theirs and more

resources. But we didn’t.

I repeated to Pugh what I had told him earlier during an

attempt to deconstruct Ellen Griswold’s phone call. “It had to

have been Thomsatai that tipped off Griswold that we were

looking for him. If so, Thomsatai has to have a phone number

or some other way of contacting Griswold. If we can get him to

talk, Thomsatai has to be our most reliable route to Griswold.”

“Possibly,” Pugh said. “Though Griswold may have a

friendly police contact who alerted him. As soon as I began

asking the cops about Griswold, word would have spread.

There’s a network of gay police officers, to cite one possible

mechanism for alarms being sent Griswold’s way.”

“There’s no stigma attached to being gay in the police

department?”

“There’s some, but not a lot. Once in a while you hear about

some prick senior officer who’s hard on gays. Some of them

picked up these bad attitudes from Christians or the Chinese or

the US military. But most cops couldn’t care less. When I was in the police, a bunch of us were at a drunken beach party where

all the guys ended up naked in a heap on the sand screwing and

getting screwed. It was like a kind of larky extension of that

day’s volleyball game, and everybody thought of it as just having a nice social occasion. Naughty but harmless. And nearly all

those guys were straight, I think. The tops outnumbered the

bottoms, as I recall, and I’m guessing that that’s significant.”

“I can see why Griswold emigrated here. Poor guy. He

thought he was coming to gay paradise and ended up in some

weird purgatory. What about Khun Khunathip? Do we know if

he was gay?”

“I’d say no. Word gets around about the hectic erotic lives

of Thailand’s mighty. Khunathip was not a monk, but if I had

to guess I’d make him for a celibate. He got off on celebrity and power, the ultimate getting-off devices even in our sanuk-loving society.”

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 129

“And Khun Anant, Griswold’s drinking companion on

Khun Khunathip’s balcony? Any chance he’s gay?”

As Ek pulled into the driveway of the Topmost, Pugh said,

“While I love the image of former finance minister and present-