The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard (е книги TXT) 📗
But I did not. In fact, I drove over here following my own
sixtieth birthday celebration at the Dusit Thani to deal with
Khun Gary and to assure the rest of your group that in the
morning I will be totally out of your hair. I could have gone
straight home with my wife or to my delightful girlfriend’s
house. So don’t complain too much.”
Pugh said, “Today is your sixtieth birthday, general? Please
let me offer my heartiest congratulations.”
“My birthday is actually tomorrow, the nineteenth,” the
general said. “Ah, it’s after midnight now. If I may say so, happy birthday to me!”
Pugh sang out, “How wonderful!”
Pugh’s enthusiasm seemed weirdly misplaced, until we got
back to our cell and he explained to me that the confluence of
events he had just learned of was heavy with auspiciousness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
True to his soiled word, the deeply corrupt General Yodying
had Griswold escorted out of our cell at nine Saturday morning.
Griswold’s passport had been retrieved from his apartment in
Sukhumvit, and the police had picked up clean clothes for him
too. He was also handed ten twenty-dollar bills for his
immediate expenses once he arrived in Frankfurt. After that, he
was on his own. The general said he would not notify Interpol
that Griswold was a notorious sex offender, so long as
Griswold left Thailand forever and didn’t raise a fuss about his having been bilked out of thirty-eight million dollars.
We all said good-bye to Griswold, and I told him how sorry
I was that it had all turned out so badly for him. I asked him
what I should tell Ellen and Bill.
He thought about this, and said, “Just tell them I said mai
pen rai. And that I hope they enjoy the rest of their stay in
Thailand. It’s really a lovely country.”
Griswold was led away, and we thought we would be leaving
at the same time and stood ready to go. But a guard said, “You
wait.”
Around nine thirty, a whole squad of corrections officers
arrived at our cell. The sergeant in charge told us to take off all our clothes and hand them out. What was this? Were we going
to be deloused? Hosed down? Gang-raped?
Anxiously, we disrobed and handed out our garments,
including — as we were ordered to do — our underwear. One
of the guards then passed out large plastic garbage bags, one to each of us. Holes had been cut for our arms to protrude, and
when instructed to do so, we donned the garbage bags. Our
money, wallets and keys, confiscated the day before, were
returned to us.
We were then led out to a convoy of police vans and driven
to Wat Pho, the magnificent temple that housed the largest
reclining Buddha in Thailand. Hundreds of tourists were
270 Richard Stevenson
queued up outside in the sunshine waiting their turn to enter
the sacred shrine. They pointed and laughed as we were
dropped off and the police vans drove away, and the tourists all got some great snapshots.
We had enough money among us to take taxis back to the
safe house, where we had all left a few belongings. Timmy’s and
my plan was to return to the Topmost, clean up, and then track
down Ellen and Bill Griswold and try to explain how and why
they had lost control of the family company despite their not
being murderers, and why Gary Griswold was en route, or soon
to be en route, to Germany.
My cell phone was at the safe house, and it had one
message, from Ellen: “Call me at the hotel immediately.” I did call and when the Griswolds didn’t answer the phone in their room,
I left a message at the Oriental for them to try me again. Maybe, I thought, they were among the throngs at Wat Pho waiting for
a glimpse of the giant reclining Buddha and they didn’t
recognize Pugh, Timmy and me dressed in garbage bags.
Pugh got on his own phone, made a call to people close to
Seer Thammarak Visetchote, the soothsayer working with the
younger, anticorruption army officers. Then he hung up and
gave me thumbs-up. “Four nineteen!” he shouted and gave a
little hop.
Kawee, Mango and Miss Nongnat shared a cab back to
Sukhumvit, though Kawee said he wanted to drop by
Griswold’s condo on the way and water the plants and light
some candles.
Just after noon, as Timmy and I were walking back to the
Topmost, we noticed military vehicles moving in convoys up
ahead on Rama IV Road. We walked on past the hotel and
watched as the trucks soon pulled over on the main
thoroughfare and soldiers poured out of the trucks across the
road near the kickboxing arena and the night market. We could
make out other groups of soldiers down the road toward the
Silom metro station, as well as four tanks.
Timmy said, “Tanks. There’s something we don’t see on
Central Avenue in Albany.”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 271
People were coming out of all the restaurants now, and the
shops and 7-Elevens, and traffic was starting to clog up. Small
groups were forming, and some of the people in them had
radios and every few minutes a cheer went up. There were
occasional bursts of laughter. We overheard somebody say in
English that in just a few minutes His Majesty King Bhumibol
would be making a statement to the nation about the change in
government.
Timmy said, “It’s a Land of Smiles coup d’etat. It’s the best
kind, if you’re going to have one.”
Soon there were sirens, and traffic parted for an army
convoy of SUVs with flashing lights coming from the north. In
the mess of traffic, the convoy had to slow briefly to a crawl as it went by us, and we caught a glimpse of a big man in a police
uniform inside the middle vehicle seated between two smaller
army commandos. No other police were visible anywhere. The
senior police officer in the SUV appeared to be in army custody, and Timmy said, “Could that be who I think it is?”
“It does appear to be who you think it is.”
“It looks like he’s under arrest.”
“Yeah, unless this is yet another feint.”
“The politics here do resemble Albany politics in the mid–
twentieth century when the O’Connell machine ran it.”
“But the O’Connells didn’t smile so much.”
“I guess we’d better wait and see how all this shakes out,”
Timmy said. “But have our bags packed just in case.”
“You really like this place, don’t you? And these sweet,
formal, spiritual, humorous people.”
“I do like Thailand. A lot. If we had come here under any
other circumstances, I can imagine being totally smitten with
the place.”
“You predicted back home that we might get hurt by the
culture’s nasty underside. And we did. You especially. Will you
ever forgive me for almost getting you tossed off a balcony?”
272 Richard Stevenson
“I think I will. Not quite yet, Donald. But soon enough.
Anyway, I’ve become much more philosophical about dying
since I’ve been here. I can’t say I’ll ever believe in reincarnation, but being around people who do believe in it and who accept
death as a natural part of being human has been good for my
perspective. I feel more at peace here than anywhere I’ve ever
been.”
“And the undercurrent of violence and corruption doesn’t
just make you want to scream? Or run away?”
Timmy thought about this. Crowds were moving now
toward the soldiers gathered in front of the kickboxing arena.
From where we stood, we could make out people starting to
throw things at the soldiers. At first it seemed as if something was wrong and we had misunderstood the situation, and
