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