shrine in his apartment; then the news that an
“unfriendly” man on a motorbike had been trying to locate 70 Richard Stevenson
Griswold. I told Pugh I had obtained a potentially useful piece of data — the unfriendly man’s mobile telephone number.
Pugh said, “You’re off to a good start. Very professional.”
“Well, yes.”
“I think I’d like to work with you on this.”
“Great. But I thought it was I who would be interviewing you, in a sense. To make sure you were the real thing. I assumed on the phone and from your Web site that you were. And obviously you are legitimate — despite the confusion that your name inevitably produces.”
“Yeah, well, Mr. Don, it works both ways. I needed, also, to see if you were the real deal and not one of the doofus-y, alcohol-besotted farang shmucks we often see doing PI work here in Bangkok. And you certainly are for real, which is excellent. So, let’s do it. Understand, though, that you’ll need me a whole lot more than I’ll need you in finding Mr. Gary and providing a good outcome for his situation, whatever it turns out to be.”
This all sounded plausible enough. But I had to ask Pugh,
“What is it that you think you’ll be able to bring to the investigation that I won’t be able to manage?”
“Your survival, my friend,” he said. “Your survival.”
Pugh and I agreed on the financial terms and carved out a division of labor for the next day or two. He would identify the owner of the phone number I’d gotten from Griswold’s building manager. He would use police sources to find out if Gary Griswold’s name had appeared in any police report in the past six months. (Pugh said reporters were sometimes bribed to keep the deaths of foreigners from turning up in newspapers and scaring the tourists away.) And he would get hold of the police report on Geoff Pringle’s death — which had been reported in the Key West Citizen but not in any of the Bangkok papers.
One of my jobs would be to track down plant-watering, shrine-visiting Kawee by purchasing the promise of Griswold’s super and his security guard to phone me when Kawee showed up again. I had brought along my international cell phone and had picked up a SIM card and five thousand baht worth of minutes at a 7-Eleven. My other job would be to find Mango.
Pugh said it was not a common Thai name or nickname. He would call a number of gay sources — mainly bar and massage-parlor owners — and try to come up with leads among the Bangkok ex-pat gay population that I could follow up on. Pugh guessed that Mango had had other farang admirers.
When Pugh had eaten all his bacon and strolled out of the hotel, Timmy said, “Mr. Rufus might have an easier time finding Mango than we will. Don’t you think Rufus might be gay? I’m sure the guy was flirting with me.”
“Yeah, he was, a little. But I wouldn’t make anything of it.
With all his wives and girlfriends, I’d be surprised if it was any kind of invitation. It’s just that Thais are a casually sexualized people. They are generally modest about it in public, but they are very comfortable in their own sexual skin. Puritanism, Catholic guilt, all that — it’s as if they never heard of any of it.
And when it comes to gender, they can be pretty fluid about it.
They enjoy the humor of sex, too, and you were getting some of that from Rufus.”
“It’s a bit startling.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t know whether I can adapt. All I know of Asian gay sexuality is India, a nation of Larry Craigs.”
“You won’t have to work hard adjusting. Other than over in the fuck-show district, there’s nothing at all insistent about Thai sexuality. This is not Provincetown during carnival week. It’s just part of what’s in the air. And you need do nothing more than breathe it, if you so choose.”
“Oh, so it’s only one element in addition to the scent of jasmine and the occasional whiff of raw sewage.”
“Ah, there’s my observant Georgetown grad.”
72 Richard Stevenson
“What do you think Pugh meant when he said he needed to help you survive? That certainly got my attention.”
“He meant survive in the professional sense, would be my guess,” I said, apparently unconvincingly, given the look I got back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The word voluptuous when used about a person suggests amplitude, and yet here was maybe the most voluptuous human being I had ever met, and he was quite small. Kawee Thaikhiew was Lolita, he was a Caravaggio boy siren, he was the twentyyear-old Truman Capote draped over that recamier in the 1948 dust jacket photo for Other Voices, Other Rooms. And all of the above weighed in at no more than a hundred twenty pounds.
Kawee wore ironed jeans and a pristine white tank top over his delicate brown chest. Around his neck, an amulet dangled on a gold chain with what looked like the image of an aged monk. He had flip-flops on his feet, so all could see and admire his toenails, carefully painted a resplendent fuchsia. His face was finely crafted and his luminous black eyes lightly mascaraed, his lips perceptibly glossier than most Thai lips, male or female.
Kawee was the living, breathing embodiment of ambigenderal sensuality, and yet it was impossible to imagine any actual sex with this person who looked as if, during the act, he might easily snap in half.
Timmy and I had gone over to Griswold’s condo to make a deal with Mr. Thomsatai on notifying us if Kawee turned up.
After pocketing another thousand baht, Mr. Thomsatai said,
“This is lucky for you. Kawee is upstairs now.”
At first the boy — or boy-girl-man-woman; katoey is the nonjudgmental Thai term — tried to make a quick exit. We had badly frightened him. I tried to reassure him by brandishing my New York State PI license — he stared at it as if its script were in ancient Pali — and I also produced a letter from Ellen Griswold attesting that I represented her in a search for her missing brother-in-law.
“I don’t know where Mr. Gary go,” Kawee told us in a breathy voice, his eyes fixed not on Timmy and me but on the exit. We had found him placing offerings at Griswold’s shrine.
74 Richard Stevenson
He had left one marigold garland, a lotus bud, and an open can of Pepsi with a straw sticking out of it.
I said, “Mr. Gary may be in trouble — we know that — but we are not the trouble. We need to let him know that we can help him with his trouble. You can help him by helping us do that. Don’t you want to help Mr. Gary? Isn’t he your friend?”
“Yes, he my friend.”
“How do you talk to him? By telephone?”
“No, no telephone. He tell me no telephone.”
“When did he tell you this? Have you seen him?”
“He just phone me. On my mobile. But he doesn’t have phone. He call from Internet shop.”
“In Bangkok?”
“I don’t know.”
“When was the last time?”
“Before two days.”
I asked Kawee if Mr. Gary was his boyfriend.
“No, no boyfriend. Friend friend. Mr. Gary help me so much. He is kind man.”
“Where did you meet Mr. Gary?”
“At Paradisio. That gay sauna for meet people for sex. Most farang just want to fuck Thai boy. But Mr. Gary, he love the Buddha. He is kind. I help him, and he help me. I take care of flowers and I make offerings until he come back.”
“When will he come back? Did he say?”
