recognized any of them. Not the security guard, not Mr.
Thomsatai.”
I said to Thomsatai, “Could one of them possibly have been
the unfriendly man on the motorcycle who paid you to phone
him when Mr. Gary came around? He sounds like a good bet to
me — the sort of man who, if there was a good kidnapping in
100 Richard Stevenson
the works, wouldn’t dream of being left out. Wasn’t Mr.
Unfriendly Motorbike perhaps one of the four?”
Thomsatai looked up and lied so unconvincingly that beads
of sweat popped out on his forehead. He was his own human
polygraph. “No, no. I would recognize that bad man. These
men were others. No motorbike man, no, no.”
Pugh motioned for Panu to step aside and spoke to him
quietly. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the detective nodded at the uniformed officer. The cop then walked over and picked
up a fat Bangkok telephone book from a desk and smashed it
against the side of Mr. Thomsatai’s head.
Timmy wasn’t there to object, so I had to do it. “Rufus,
don’t, please. What happened to the elephant and the
grasshopper?”
“Who were they?” Panu demanded of Mr. Thomsatai, who
sat looking stunned and close to tears. Panu then switched to
Thai and barked a string of orders I could not understand. The
cop picked up the phone book again, and when I stepped in his
direction, Panu snapped something to Pugh in Thai that from
his body language plainly meant, “Get this farang dickhead out
of here.”
Pugh, not looking as embarrassed as I wanted him to,
indicated that I should follow him out of the cubicle.
That’s when Mr. Thomsatai said, “Yes, now I remember!
Yes, yes, one of them was the man on the motorbike who was
looking for Mr. Gary.”
I looked at Pugh in a funny way whose meaning he correctly
understood to be, “Can we trust any of this?”
Then my cell phone rang. I checked the number but the
caller’s ID was blocked. They all watched me — they knew it
wasn’t going to be a lovely invitation for Sunday brunch, and I
knew it too. As Panu pointed and the uniformed cop quickly
led Mr. Thomsatai out of the cubicle, I flipped open the phone.
“Hello.”
“Don?”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 101
“Yes, yes.”
“It’s Timothy.”
“Timmy, can you talk?”
“Well, yes. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Of course. So what’s the deal?”
“The deal is, they want Griswold. They will trade Kawee and
me for Griswold.”
“I see.”
“That’s about it. I’m not supposed to say any more. Oh,
except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“They said I should tell you that we are on the fourteenth
floor.”
“Uh-huh. Okay.”
“So that’s about it, I guess. God, it’s good to hear your
voice.”
“It’s so good to hear yours.”
“Just…please get Kawee and me out of this, if you can.
Okay?”
“We will, we will. Can you tell me anything more about
where you are?”
“No.”
“Is Kawee okay? Are they treating you well enough?”
“Yes. We’re both all right. So far. But one of the gentlemen
hosting us just handed me a note asking me to tell you this. You have forty-eight hours to hand over Griswold.”
“I understand.”
“The note also has a big ‘fourteen’ on it. As in fourteenth
floor. Get it?”
“I sure do.”
“I’m supposed to hang up now. Bye.”
“Good-bye, Timothy.”
102 Richard Stevenson
And then he was gone.
I repeated the conversation to Pugh and Detective Panu.
“They’re on the fourteenth floor somewhere. We’re supposed
to believe, apparently, that if we don’t hand over Griswold
within forty-eight hours, Timothy and Kawee will be shoved off
a high balcony.”
Pugh and Panu looked grim. “So sorry,” Panu said.
“How many buildings are there in Bangkok fourteen or
more stories high? Any idea?”
Pugh and Panu looked at each other. “Many hundreds,”
Pugh said. “Twenty-five years ago this would have been easy.
Today Bangkok is Houston or Miami in that regard.”
“Yes, but all you have to do is check all the fourteenth floors
in Bangkok. That limits it, right? Even if there are, say, thirty-five hundred buildings with fourteenth floors, you’d need only
thirty-five hundred or, even better, sixty-five hundred officers to do a sweep. That doesn’t seem insurmountable, does it? How
many cops are there in Bangkok?”
Again, both Pugh and Detective Panu looked at each other
gravely, and then at me. Panu said, “It’s a matter of priorities.”
He gave a wan apologetic shrug.
“What we’re talking about here,” Pugh said, “is a declasse
Thai lady-boy, a nobody. And Mr. Timothy is a mere tourist,
less than a nobody in Thailand. While it is true that tourists are gods in Thailand collectively speaking, individually they do not merit a tremendous amount of interest, particularly by the
police. Am I putting that too harshly, Khun Panu?”
“A little, perhaps.”
I said, “What if we paid for the services of the police?
Would that help? Perhaps some senior officer, a captain or even
general.”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Pugh said and glanced at Detective Panu,
who shrugged mildly.
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 103
“Okay, you locate that official and I’ll come up with the
payoff. How much are we talking here? Twenty cases of Johnny
Walker? Sixty? Or is it cash — US dollars? Euros?”
Panu said, “Bahts make a nice gift.”
“How many bahts?”
“I’ve heard that fifty thousand can be helpful. That’s about
sixteen thousand dollars, I believe. Unless the US dollar has
grown even weaker in the past hour.”
“It’s not just a question of national pride,” Pugh said. “The
baht is currently a sounder currency than the dollar. So your
client, Mrs. Griswold, will provide the funding for this
additional expense?”
I told them about the e-mail from Ellen Griswold calling me
off the case because, she claimed, she had heard from her ex-
husband, and he insisted he was in no danger and was merely
embarrassed over some personal matter.
“Therefore,” I said, “any further expenses will have to be
met by Gary Griswold himself, who plainly is in big trouble.
What this means is, we have to find Griswold fast. Then, (a)
extract cash from him to pay off your for-profit police
department to prod it to do its job, (b) find out from him what
the hell is going on here so that we can help get him out of the rotten situation he’s in, and (c) — if those two approaches fail
— have Griswold in hand so that we can trade him for Timmy
and Kawee and hope that he can hand over to these people,
whoever they are, whatever it is they want from him, thus keeping Griswold from being shoved off a balcony.”
Pugh said, “I like your tour d’horizon, Mr. Don. It’s dead-on.
And your willingness to sacrifice poor Mr. Gary, if necessary, in order to save your boyfriend and the katoey is admirable. There
are degrees of innocence in this complex situation. And Mr.
Gary, should he perish, would be fulfilling a karma plainly
nudged into existence by his own klutziness. Not that we
shouldn’t do everything we can to save this wayward farang’s
sorry ass from whatever mishigas he has waded into of his own volition.”
104 Richard Stevenson
“Timmy, of course, would have a few choice words for me
if he were here,” I said. “He’s a bit of a moral absolutist. He
would allow for no cold-blooded choices of the type I have
described. But let’s just get him back, and then he can lecture all of us to his heart’s content.”
