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

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 149

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.”

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 151

“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