The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard (е книги TXT) 📗
“A guy with thirty-eight mil is bound to stand out among
the rice paddies.”
“Why don’t you come along?” I said. “You’ve got some
leave time built up. You could do legwork for me. Brain work,
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 19
too, as is your habit. It would be a legitimate expense. And it’s a fascinating part of the world, as I have gone on and on and on
about on countless occasions.”
“What on earth could you possibly be referring to?” he said
and transferred another kaffir lime leaf onto his mulch pile.
“Also, the war’s over. I’d like to see Bangkok without it
being overrun by drunken, drug-addled, horny American GIs
such as myself. I’m sure the place is very different now, and we could check it out together.”
“But what if,” Timmy wondered, “we got over there and
Griswold’s situation turned out to be something really
complicated and dangerous and ugly? That certainly seems
possible with somebody vanishing with that amount of money.”
“It’s true,” I said, “that the Bangkok I knew in the seventies
had a harsh underside. You could, for instance, have somebody
bumped off for a few hundred dollars. That would be for killing
a Thai. A farang might be double that. It’s also a fact — I suppose I should mention — that the Land of Smiles, home to
some of the sweetest people in the world, has one of the most
corrupt police forces in Asia — which is saying a lot — and
some of the most nightmarish prisons anywhere. Few people
emerge from Thai prisons sane, or even alive. It’s also a sad
reality that in legal disputes between Thais and foreigners, the foreigner is always wrong and may have to lay out big bucks —
backhanders, they call them — just to save his own neck. There
is a lot about the Thai paradise that’s not so heavenly, I know.
And it’s entirely possible that Gary Griswold has fallen victim
to some aspect of that not-so-delectable Thailand.”
Now Timmy had set down his soupspoon and was giving
me one of his looks. “You’re not making any of that up, are
you?”
“No. But otherwise it’s a lovely country. The Thais have
their rice, their Buddha, their beloved king, and their well-
developed sense of fun. That’s the Thailand I’ll bet Griswold
fell in love with — until something somehow went awry.”
“Oh, awry,” Timmy said.
20 Richard Stevenson
“Look, if it turns out that Griswold has fallen into
something grisly and there’s real danger, then you’ll get back on the plane and fly home. That would be simple enough.”
“I understand. And you?”
“Well, we’d have to see. It would depend on if I could be helpful or not, or what I might have to do to earn my fee.”
Timmy looked down at his tom yam kung and said to it,
“Here we go again,” and my heart went out.
§ § § § §
Back at the house on Crow Street, it took me under ten
minutes to come up with the name of Gary Griswold’s most
recent boyfriend in Key West. Ellen Griswold thought the
man’s name might be Horn, and she was right. When I called an
old friend of Timmy’s living in Key West — one of the former
Peace Corps mafia whose humanistic tentacles are everywhere
— she confirmed that Griswold had been a well-known
presence in Key West over a period of about a decade and had
had a boyfriend named Lou Horn. Horn now owned and
managed the art gallery the two had founded together, which
now was named Toot Toot.
I got Horn on the phone with no trouble. He not only didn’t
mind being called at ten forty at night, but said he was very
worried about Griswold and fearful about what might have
happened to him. Horn was relieved, he said, that I would be
searching for Griswold. He said he and two other Key West
friends had been in occasional contact with Griswold until
about six months earlier, when all communication from
Griswold’s end had inexplicably ceased.
I asked Horn if, before his disappearance, Griswold had said
anything to anybody in Key West that seemed out of character
or otherwise odd or set off alarm bells. Horn said, “Well,
maybe.” When he assured me that he and other of Griswold’s
Key West friends would willingly tell me what little they knew, I thanked him, called Delta, and booked a flight for the next day.
I also phoned a PI friend in New York City who I’d done
work for and obtained a list of reputable investigative firms and THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 21
individuals operating in Bangkok. I had just begun checking
these agencies out online when I became aware of an eerie
silence above me. Normally, at this time of night, Timmy was
upstairs in the bedroom guffawing at The Daily Show, and frequently so was I. Instead, when I went up, I found the
television off and Timmy with his wireless laptop open on the
bed.
“Working late for the people of New York State?” I said. “If
so, we thank you.”
His look was grave. “I Googled Bangkok crime statistics.
Holy Mother!”
“Timothy, this is not going to help.”
“Oh yes, it is. I’m not going, and I’m not sure you should,
either.”
This was my fault. I should only have told him about the
golden reclining Buddhas. I said, “You’re getting a distorted
picture. New York City looks sinister and forbidding on a police blotter, too. I sometimes do work there. So do you. We like New York.”
“It’s true,” he said, “that there’s very little street crime in
Bangkok. It’s peaceful in that respect. But if you’re doing business there — as Griswold may have been doing — look
out. A favorite way of settling money disputes is for one party
to hire a guy on a motorcycle to drive by and shoot the other
party in the head. Extrajudicial killings by the police are routine.
Get this: in July two thousand one, a Bangkok newspaper ran a
front-page story with the headline, ‘Police Death Squads Run
Riot.’ In one region, the police general dealt with drug dealers by sending cops out to shoot them. ‘Our target,’ this police
official said, ‘is to send one thousand traffickers to hell this year, to join some three hundred fifty before them.’ Could Griswold
have gotten enmeshed in some gigantic drug deal? That could
explain the so-called quick return on investment. If so, he could be six feet under in the backyard of a police station. Land of
Smiles, my ass, Donald. The Thailand I am seeing in front of
me here is bloody treacherous.”
22 Richard Stevenson
I leaned over his shoulder. “Timothy, this is great stuff.
Really helpful. Would you mind printing this for me? I’ll read it on the plane to Key West tomorrow. I’m going down to talk to
Griswold’s friends there. It turns out they’re quite worried
about him, too.”
“And then” — Timmy went right on — “I came across a
book I think you should read. I’m ordering it tomorrow from
Stuyvesant Books. It’s My Eight Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison.
It’s by some American bozo who got on the wrong side of
somebody over there, and he landed in some nightmare
Midnight Express situation he didn’t have enough ready cash to buy his way out of, the way the rich Thais do.”
“Well,” I said. “All this stuff is frightening, sure. It makes
me apprehensive too. But it’s also all the more reason to worry
about Gary Griswold. He sounds like a basically good guy —
adventurous in a harmless way, a spiritual searcher. Maybe too
naive and susceptible, but that’s hardly a moral crime. And he
may have been victimized by the Thai subculture displayed so
