Griswold said, “Get me my bag.”
Pugh had already been through Griswold’s shoulder bag. It contained a bottle of water, some vile PowerBar sort of thing with a Malaysian label, and Griswold’s wallet. Griswold selected an ATM card from the six or seven in his wallet and wrote the password on a piece of paper Pugh provided.
“If you think you might help yourself to a million or two I’ve got sitting around in that account,” Griswold said, “you can forget it. That account holds no more than US seventy thousand dollars.”
“And your withdrawal limit is?”
“There is no limit.”
166 Richard Stevenson
“Khun Gary, you are a god.”
“No, just a good businessman.”
I said, “And the son of Max and Bertha Griswold. That helped.”
At the mention of family and money, Griswold grew solemn. “Yes, my parents worked hard and became wealthy, and I was the beneficiary of nearly half their wealth. I have never felt anything but grateful for, and unworthy of, my inheritance. And I’ve always tried to share that wealth in a responsible way. And I intend on continuing to do so if I possibly can.”
“This is where our interests intersect,” I said. “Keeping you alive to perform more good works, and keeping Timothy and Kawee alive so they can scratch around in the dust in their far humbler ways.”
“You’re a somewhat bitter man,” Griswold said. “If you remain in Thailand, I could direct you to people who would help you do something about that.”
“My bitterness is temporary, and my bitterness is rational. It has to do with the possibility of the sweet man I have made my adult life with ending up as a pile of broken bones and useless bloody tissue on a Thai sidewalk or roadway.”
Griswold looked momentarily stricken and said, “You know, my parents died in a fall. In an airplane that crashed.”
“I heard about that. From Lou Horn.”
“Oh. Lou. How is he? Is Lou all right?”
“Yes, except for wondering why you totally cut him off and acted like you had just…”
I let the words hang, and Pugh said it. “Fallen off the face of the earth.”
“All that will be cleared up soon enough,” Griswold said. “I do feel very, very bad about the way I treated my old friends.”
“You should.”
“I really need to get a competent reading soon. All this falling. It’s hard to believe. My parents. Khun Khunathip.
Geoff. And now these threats against Kawee and your boyfriend. It’s just too much falling to write off as what most people might call coincidence.”
“You’re a faller too, Griswold. A couple of years ago you fell off your bike. And got a good whack to your noggin. Don’t leave that one out.”
“Funny,” Griswold said. “Lou and my friends Marcie and Janice in Key West talked about that. A bike accident. But I really have no memory of it happening.”
By now, Pugh had one of his crew in the office and was instructing her on how and where to extract the fifty thousand dollars worth of baht from an ATM. Griswold began to make a move toward the outer office and the bathroom when Pugh asked him to wait just one moment.
Before Griswold left the room with Egg at his side, Pugh said, “In addition to the funds, I need one other thing from you, Khun Gary, if we’re going to fish your butt out of the soup. I need to know who exactly we are dealing with here. I have reason to believe that Police General Yodying Supanant is the head of the investors who got screwed and who want you to make good on their lost investments. Am I correct?”
Shaking his head, Griswold said, “Oh God. I should never have mentioned that part of it. You know about Paveena and her birthday celebration, don’t you?”
“I read the Post, just like you.”
“Yes. Damn. But it’s just as well. I suppose you do have to know everything if you’re going to get all of us out of this fuckall with no more falling from high places.”
“Precisely. And no more of this falling-off-the-face-of-theearth hugger-mugger.”
Griswold was led out of the room, looking dazed.
As soon as Griswold was gone, Pugh got on the phone with Khun Thunska. He asked him to do a quick check of computerized city records of who in Bangkok besides Paveena 168 Richard Stevenson
Hanwilai would have a sixtieth birthday on April 27 and had a powerful husband.
Next, Pugh called Ek and they had a quick exchange in Thai.
Pugh explained to me that he had instructed Ek to locate the abandoned building in which Timmy and Kawee were being held. A helpful employee in the Bangkok building inspector’s office had come up with a list of nine buildings that fit Timmy’s
“Millpond” description. Ek would narrow the list down through surveillance and trustworthy contacts at security firms, but he would not act until told to do so by Pugh. Pugh told me he now had a plan for rescuing Timmy and Kawee that involved some risk for them and for us, and would have repercussions we would all have to cope with.
I said, “So, you don’t like my idea of having Griswold turn himself over to the kidnappers and leaving it up to him to talk his way out of this? I thought you might see a kind of karmic logic to that one.”
Pugh shot me a quick, tight smile. “It wouldn’t work. They would likely grab Griswold and renege on their promise to release their captives. As Khun Gary predicted, they would torture him and extract as much cash from him as they could in a short time. Then they would throw all of them off a building
— Griswold, Timmy and Kawee — as a kind of fuck-you gesture to all of us. Then the police would miraculously appear on the scene and arrest you for some type of visa violation and me for trout fishing without a license. A financial settlement of perhaps fifty K or so would soon be agreed to, and we would both be released. Life would go on for me, and you would be placed on a Lufthansa flight for Frankfurt in the middle of the night, coach class. So, Khun Don, commonsensical as your ostensibly hardheaded formulation might be on its face, you’d better forget it. Here in the Land of Smiles, it just ain’t gonna fly.”
I said to Pugh that if my desperate, fatalistic and admittedly selfish solution was not the answer, then what was? The scenario he laid out for me over the next three minutes sounded outlandish, although it occurred to me that it would not have surprised Timmy.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Time was running out for Timmy and Kawee, and my fear kept me awake as I lay on a mat through much of the night in Pugh’s office. He slept nearby, as did Griswold. A large man named Sek had been brought in to watch over Griswold, who, as I lay trying not to tremble, snored grotesquely. I could hear snoring from the outer office, too. It was late Monday night now, but even with the air-conditioners whirring I could hear the fuck-show and pussy-show crowds exiting the nearby clubs and moving noisily about in the street below. Eventually I sank just below the surface of consciousness for a few hours. I might have sunk even deeper had Pugh not jostled me just after six in the morning with a cheery, “Rise and shine, Khun Don, rise and shine. Time to head on out and find the bad guys and put up your dukes.”
Somebody went over to Silom for coffee, and Griswold was led into the outer office where he was to wait for further developments under Sek’s supervision.
Coffee, pineapple chunks and rice gruel arrived, and Ek soon called and told Pugh that he had located the building where Timmy and Kawee were most likely being held. It was one of two unfinished and abandoned fifteen- story condos in a complex off Rangnum Road about a mile north of Siam Square.
Ek had learned from a source at one of the security services watching over Bangkok’s abandoned high-rises
