The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard (е книги TXT) 📗
in Bangkok Bank Unless he’s been moving his money around.
Plus, he had all those ATM cards from multiple Thai banks.”
Pugh got on his cell phone, speed-dialed a number, and
carried on a rapid conversation in Thai. Then he repeated this
conversation a second, third and fourth time with others he
phoned. “This could take overnight,” he said. “Nobody I know
has access to bank records from home. But we may know what
we need to know in the morning after folks arrive at their
workplaces.”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 211
Now Miss Nongnat appeared from the house. She had taken
time to make herself presentable, she said, after the bus ride
from Bangkok. She was hungry and ready for some rice, she
told us. She pulled up a chair and had a beer. She was dressed in a pretty blue skirt and a loose white slipover and had a monk
amulet dangling from her neck similar to Kawee’s. In her
makeup, Miss Nongnat looked like a beauty pageant contestant,
and I recalled how one evening during my first visit to Thailand I had come upon a cheering crowd at an outdoor plaza. Lovely
young Thai women were parading across a stage in traditional
Siamese costumes as the audience clapped and yelled
enthusiastically. I stopped to watch and soon became aware that
the beauty queens were not in fact lovely young Thai women but were lovely young Thai men. It was one of my earliest
indications that the Siamese were in a number of ways far ahead
of the rest of us.
Miss Nongnat told Kawee that if he wanted to do his
toenails, she had his color of polish up in her luggage. Kawee
hoisted a foot up, and we all — even Pugh — examined
Kawee’s pretty toes and spoke of them admiringly.
Miss Nongnat said she had to do her toenails almost daily
these days. She had been dating a Korean who insisted that if
she was going to paint her toenails, the polish had to be edible, and edible polishes just didn’t last.
I caught Timmy’s quick glance at me that said, “We’re a long
way from the Archdiocese of Albany now.”
Soon Pugh’s wife and three children arrived. The kids were
all happy to be having an unexpected visit to the seashore. Pugh was about to accompany them up to the second guesthouse
when his cell phone rang.
Pugh conversed briefly and then rang off. “That was Egg.
He has located Khun Gary. He is unconscious in Hua Hin
hospital. We should go there, I think, and make sure that Mr.
Gary is not injured any more than has already been the unhappy
case.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Griswold had been speeding down a road near Jack and
Jackie’s summer palace when a drunk in an old Nissan came
barreling out of a side street with his lights off and knocked
Griswold and his stolen bike into a banyan tree. Griswold had
not been wearing a helmet and may have suffered a slight
concussion, Egg had learned. He had been identified by the
ATM cards in his bag, and one of Pugh’s Hua Hin police sources
had alerted Egg.
Pugh himself drove Timmy and me into town. The small
hospital was an entirely modern facility, spick-and-span, with
young female greeters in pale lavender uniforms who smiled like
angels at visitors and exuded solicitude like a delicate perfume.
Timmy said, “Take note, Senate Republican caucus.”
“They’re otherworldly. Can you imagine this kind of
treatment at Albany Medical Center? Or any US hospital?”
“And they’re as lovely to look at as Miss Nongnat. I wonder
if they have dicks.”
Ek, Egg and Nitrate were positioned outside Griswold’s
room. Ek said he learned from a doctor that Griswold had no
broken bones but had been badly scraped and bruised. He had
been slipping in and out of consciousness and, when awake, had
been muttering to the nurses incoherently. The doctor had said
this mental fog was from both the painkillers Griswold was on
and the concussion.
Pugh and Ek had an exchange in Thai, and then Pugh told
me, “Mr. Gary has been intermittently gaga. He has been
babbling about falling.”
“That sounds rational enough. After what happened to
Geoff Pringle and to soothsayer Khunathip — and almost to
Timmy and to Kawee — a fear of falling sounds sensible. Also,
Griswold himself was hurt falling off his bike — twice, in fact.
And his parents died in a plane that went down.”
214 Richard Stevenson
“Khun Gary also, Ek says, has been going on confusedly
about rounding or surrounding or something like that. It’s hard
to make out. Ek wasn’t even sure it was English. But it didn’t
seem to be Thai either. And Mr. Gary said it repeatedly in a
distressed tone of voice. Rounding. What’s that about?”
A nurse came out of Griswold’s room and said that he was
more alert now than he had been earlier, and if we wished to
greet him and wish him well we could enter the room two at a
time.
Pugh and I went in first. Griswold was bandaged on his left
arm and shoulder and had a bad scrape on his left cheek. He
had another bandage across his nose and a blackened left eye. A
large bandage was wrapped around his head. He was on an IV
drip of what I guessed were painkillers and antibiotics.
Griswold immediately recognized Pugh and me and
moaned, “Oh no, you guys,” and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Khun Gary, we were so sorry to learn of your unfortunate
accident. Mr. Donald and I are here to extend our heartfelt
sympathies and our many good wishes for a speedy recovery.”
“You can both go fuck yourselves.”
“Not just yet.”
I said, “Griswold, you are totally out of control and it’s
getting the best of you. At this point, all we are trying to do is keep you alive until April twenty-seventh. Then you’re on your
own. You and your latest astrologer-of-the-moment can take it
from there.”
He looked at me balefully out of his battered face. “I was
handling this myself until you showed up, Strachey. You are the
reason I’m lying in this bed with a headache to end all
headaches. You and my clueless ex-wife and my evil brother.
Everything was proceeding more or less smoothly until you
were air-dropped into Thailand like some kind of sheriff’s SWAT
team with the wrong address.”
“What would the right address be?”
Ignoring that, Griswold said, “All I need at this point is to
be left alone to oversee a series of financial transactions that are THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 215
of the utmost urgency. I need a computer and a phone, and
above all I need privacy. And now here I am stuck in this medical Grand Central Station with even less opportunity to concentrate
and control what I need to control than I had back when I was
hiding out in Bangkok. I can only begin to tell you just how
much you two are fucking up my project and…and… my entire
life!”
I said, “Griswold, you and a group of Thai investors are
trying to take over Algonquin Steel. Why is that?”
Griswold was hooked up to a machine monitoring his pulse,
brain waves, and who knew what else, and when I said this the
machine practically projectile vomited. It began to flash and
beep something awful, though Griswold himself just stared at
me with a small round O formed by his lips. He apparently wanted to say something, but his vocal apparatus had gone
numb.
I said, “Several years ago, you wanted out of the steel
business, and you got out, and you had a nice art gallery in Key West. Then you came over to Thailand presumably without
