The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard (е книги TXT) 📗

sin that he said he had to atone for. It might have something to do with that.”

“You mean he’s both atoning and getting even?”

“It’s not that rare a combination in family affairs.”

Several figures approached us across the tile terrace behind

the guesthouse where most of us were staying. None of them

was Griswold. I wanted to tell him that I had figured out how

he was planning on financing his Buddhist center. And I wanted

to assure him that since he — not his sister-in-law — was my

client now, I was not about to spill the beans. Unless, of course, he was planning on misbehaving in some annoying way and

somehow putting all of us in immediate terrible jeopardy yet

again.

Pugh, Kawee and Mango joined us by the pool. Mango had

just come by bus from Bangkok, and Pugh said Miss Nongnat

had also arrived. “She’s upstairs powdering her nose,” Pugh

said. Pugh’s wife and children were on the way and would arrive

soon, and his girlfriend Furnace was in a friend’s house up the

road with Miss Aroon keeping her company.

“Have you had rice yet?” Pugh asked and said that Ek had

gone into town to pick up some eats for everybody.

Nitrate brought drinks out — beer, Coke, fruit juices,

bottled water, and bird-spit beverage. Timmy asked, “How do

they get the birds to spit into that small container? Are there

bird charmers who make a profession of this?”

“When elephant mahouts grow old and are forced to retire,”

Pugh said, “many of them switch careers and become bird

mahouts. It’s so much less rigorous a life. As with the elephants, a bird mahout develops a long-term relationship with one bird

and can make it spit into one of these little bottles on

command.”

The Thais all had a good laugh over this, and they seemed

pleased when Timmy laughed too.

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 203

“No, really,” Pugh said, “the birds use their saliva as mortar

when building their nests. The nests are filched — regrettably

for the birds, I must say — and then boiled, and the resulting

fluid is the basis for this tasty beverage.”

I had a beer, but Timmy tried the bird-spit juice and said, “I

guess this is as close to kissing a bird as I’ll ever get.”

“That depends on how long you remain in Thailand,” Pugh

said, and the Thais all laughed, though I wasn’t sure why.

Mango had come out into the hot night wearing a skimpy

yellow bathing suit. As the rest of us sat drinking and kidding

around, he approached the pool, and I fully expected him to

execute a perfect godlike swan dive. Instead he climbed onto

the diving board and jumped in holding his nose. He came to

the surface glistening in the moonlight and then hoisted himself out of the pool and — with the un–self-consciousness and easy

grace of a gifted athlete — remounted the board and jumped in

again holding his nose.

I wondered if there might be some tension between the two

when Griswold came out and encountered the man with whom

he was once in love and who had, Griswold believed, destroyed

that love with Mango’s devotion to Donnutt and with his

money-boy activities involving a number of other farangs. Pugh

said, however, that Griswold had gone into town with Ek and

Egg to use the Internet cafe and look at documents from the

other investors in the Sayadaw U project. So we had at least a

brief reprieve from any awkward meeting between the two.

Any worries over a confrontation soon became moot,

however. Pugh took a call from Ek, who said that outside the

Internet cafe, as they were leaving, Griswold was admiring the

rented bicycle of a Swedish tourist, and suddenly grabbed it,

jumped on, and sped off. They chased him on foot, but

Griswold was both deft and fast on the bike, and they lost him.

Once they retrieved their van, Griswold had already been lost in the crowds of tourists pouring in and out of the Hua Hin

hotels, bars, massage parlors, and schnitzel joints.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Pugh sent several of his men into town to search for

Griswold, and he called people he knew and trusted to be on

the lookout for a sweaty farang on a stolen bike. Griswold was

carrying next to nothing with him, but he did have his shoulder

bag with his multiple ATM cards. He did not have his passport

with him, however, and he would need that to check into a

hotel. Unless, of course, he crammed his bag full of bahts at an ATM and bribed his way past a desk clerk. Griswold could also,

Pugh said, phone someone he knew and trusted to come and

pick him up. Plainly he had friends in high places in Thailand.

Those people presumably could keep Griswold safe until April

27 when General Yodying supposedly would be neutralized.

“But what about us?” was Timmy’s reasonable question to

Pugh. “We aren’t exactly off the hook, I don’t think.”

“No, Mr. Timothy. We are indeed still very much up shit

creek. Even if we were to inform General Yodying that Khun

Gary is no longer in our custody, he would be unimpressed.

First, he might not believe us. Second, it is not Khun Gary

running around loose that the top cop desires, and we are the

enablers of Griswold’s freedom. Third, there is the not

inconsequential matter of our having snatched the general’s

missus and left her stranded in a closet clad only in a garbage

bag. I think that that monstrous affront alone is the main

reason he plans on drilling holes in our souls before hurling

them — and their present corporeal manifestations — into a

hell beyond our imagining but not quite beyond his.”

I told Pugh about the phone call from Bob Chicarelli and

my belief that Griswold and some Thai investors were behind

the takeover of Algonquin Steel. “So Griswold, I think, is so

obsessed with this corporate raid and using it to punish his

brother, and to atone for some long-ago Griswold family sin,

that he’ll do anything to be able to operate freely until the

twenty-seventh of this month.”

206 Richard Stevenson

“Ah, yes,” Pugh said. “Two and seven.” He seemed to think

this explained a lot.

Ek appeared with the take-out food he had picked up before

Griswold bolted. As he spread the containers of rice and soup

out on a table near the pool, along with spoons and chopsticks,

Ek spoke to Pugh in Thai in a tone of self-deprecation and

apology. He was plainly mortified that he and Egg had let Pugh

get away, but Pugh spoke back to him consolingly.

Pugh said in English, “Ek blames himself for Khun Gary’s

flight. But it was a collision of karmas — his bad, Griswold’s

good — and he is not to blame. Not, at least, in the present

circumstances. I told him, however, that he should (a) make an

offering to the spirit of the Enlightened One at the earliest

opportunity, and (b) get his ass back out there and drag that

SOB Griswold back here pronto. The guy couldn’t have gone

far. Though first, of course, Ek must have rice.”

We all dug in, the Thais considering their food as they ate it

as if it was both fun to eat and holy.

Kawee had stripped to his thong and had been enjoying a

swim with Mango, and soon they both came over to the table

for some eats. Noting the uncommonly large bulge in skinny

little Kawee’s thong, I glanced at Timmy, who nodded, and I

thought, Holy Moses.

Ek ate quickly and soon left to help with the search for

Griswold.

Pugh said, “The chances are good that if Griswold has