“Oh, you went to Duke? I went to Georgetown.”
“How long were you there?” Pugh asked.
“How long? Four years.”
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“Well, I was only at Duke for a week. I was visiting my friend Supoj. He had a roommate named Rufus Pugh. I liked the sound of it. Oh, have I confused you gentlemen again?
When I say I went to Duke, I mean I went to Duke on a Greyhound bus.” He chuckled.
I said, “Where did you take the bus from, Rufus? Not Bangkok.”
“From Monmouth College, in West Long Branch, New Jersey. I was there for one semester. Then I came home and completed university at Chulalongkorn in Bangkok. It was cheaper. That way, my three sisters had to fuck only three thousand seven hundred and twelve overweight Australians to put me through college instead of five thousand two hundred and eleven.”
Timmy said, “I’m sorry. God.”
“No need. This was twenty years ago. Now two of them are back in Chiang Rai with their lazy husbands, and the other married one of the large mates and lives in Sydney. I help them out — I look forward to getting my hands on some of the Griswold megabucks — and my wife and children are not big spenders. Neither is my girlfriend. But I do need to hustle.
That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“How did you turn into a PI?” I asked.
“I was in the police, but eventually I started feeling guilty about being on the wrong side of the law. How about you, Mister Don?”
“Army Intelligence originally. I also had ethical issues.”
“I’ll bet. That must have been the US Army.”
“In the seventies. I was here a few times.”
“In Bangkok?”
“Bangkok and Pattaya.”
“I was a child at the time. But maybe you fucked one of my sisters. Or me. I picked up some spare change on a few occasions.”
“No, no youngsters for me. Anyway, I’d remember you.
You make an impression, Rufus.”
He smiled again, briefly, then said, “If you were in the American military, then you must know that the Thai military has its corrupt elements.”
“I do know that.”
“Parts of it are busy ruthlessly stamping out the drug trade, and parts of it are busy buying and selling drugs. Some elements do both. The police are often involved, and also our authoritarian neighbors, the Burmese generals, as well as the Burmese generals’ authoritarian friends, the Chinese.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I bring this up,” Pugh said, “because you told me that your Mr. Gary Griswold planned on investing thirty- eight million US dollars and making a quick killing.”
“That’s what he told someone. It may not be true.”
“With that kind of money, we may be talking drug deal.
Heroin, yaa-baa, who knows? If that is the case, his family is correct to fear for his well-being. So let’s hope he was up to something else.”
“A drug deal,” I said, “would be seriously out of character for this guy.” I told Pugh about Griswold’s discovery of Buddhist philosophy and meditation, his deepening interest in past lives, astrology and numerology, and on top of all that his infatuation and then de-infatuation with the mysterious Mango.
“I think,” I said, “that Griswold would consider heroin dealing, what with all the social harm involved, unethical if not downright evil. Unless, of course, it’s Mr. Mango who’s the gangster here, and it was Griswold’s discovery of that that led to his disillusionment with Mango. And he actually believed he was investing in something else.”
Pugh chewed on a slice of bacon. I had some too, with my omelet. It was the most flavorsome bacon I had ever eaten. I had once seen listed on a Thai menu “deep-fried pig vermiform appendix.” Bacon seemed like a classically American food, yet it was plainly the Thais who knew exactly what to do with a pig.
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“Yeah,” Pugh said, “I think you’re right that Mango’s involvement means something here. Or nothing. Well, not nothing. A warm smile, a pretty dick, and a shapely butt, it could be. Or maybe more; we’ll have to see. As for ethical considerations, it sounds like you know your man. But with your permission, may I please point out that when our own esteemed Prime Minster Samak was asked how Thailand could do so much business with the Burmese generals — who run what might be the nastiest police state in the world — the PM said, oh, the generals are praying Buddhists, after all, so how bad can they be?”
“Point taken,” I said. “But Griswold has no history of being a hypocrite.”
“The Buddha never specifically listed hypocrisy as a sin,”
Pugh said. “Though I think we have to consider it within the penumbra of Dharma teachings. See, I’m not at all a spiritual strict constructionist.” He grinned at us and chortled.
I told Pugh about Griswold’s consulting a Thai fortune-teller
— renowned, supposedly — and the seer’s dire predictions of
“bloodshed” and “great sorrow” in Griswold’s life.
“You have no name of this man?”
“No, unfortunately.”
“He could be a charlatan. Or perhaps not. It would be good to know which one it is. If Mr. Gary consulted him previously and is now in distress, he will almost certainly consult him again.”
I said, “So, some Thai fortune-tellers are frauds and some are not?”
“Are some American corporate CEOs frauds, and some are not?” Pugh asked. I had no clue from his look what he was thinking.
“Then let me ask you this. Do fortune-tellers ever give financial advice?”
“If it’s requested. Generally on small matters. When to buy a lottery ticket. What’s a lucky number for a lottery ticket.
Perhaps on larger financial matters on some occasions. The scale of the question and the scale of the answer could both conceivably flow from the depth of the seer’s client’s pockets.”
Timmy said, “Thailand looks like it’s awash in money — all this urban building and development. Couldn’t Griswold have been involved in something completely legitimate that then fell apart? And he’d gotten other investors involved, and now they want their money back or something, and Griswold is afraid of them? I read that sometimes in Thailand business disputes turn violent. Business-related drive-by shootings are not unheard of here. Isn’t that a possibility?”
“Very good,” Pugh said. “You two have done your homework. I’ve been shot at eleven times and hit twice.” He hiked up his polo shirt and then tugged it down again, giving us a quick glimpse of a jagged scar on his mocha- colored rib cage.
“This one was in broad daylight right over on Sukhumvit Road, not far from here. Timothy, I’ll show you the other scar sometime, if you’re interested. You’ll get quite an eyeful.”
“Oh, I don’t have to.”
“Aren’t you just a little bit curious?” He leered mischievously.
Timmy actually blushed. “Oh, I can’t really say.”
Pugh laughed and had some more bacon. He said, “We can speculate all we want about what Griswold was, or is, involved in financially. I think, though, that our most fruitful approach will simply be to find the guy, sit him down, and say, ‘Hey, Bud, what the heck is going on here?’ And then, one way or another, get him to tell us.”
I described to Pugh our findings of the night before: The visit to Geoff Pringle’s building and the night security guard’s apparent suspicion that there was something very odd or even sinister about Pringle’s fatal fall from his balcony; the visit to Griswold’s apartment and our discovery that he himself had been there briefly as recently as two weeks earlier; the revelation that someone named Kawee was watering Griswold’s plants and praying at a
