Pugh said, “Let’s you and I, Khun Don, lead the way and make a memorable first impression on these boorish fellows.”
In what would have been the lobby of the apartment building, we passed the two openings to the empty elevator shafts. All around us was raw concrete with its limestone smell.
It was damp in the Bangkok pre-monsoon humidity and smelled like the inside of a wet cave. It took me back to my spelunking days in college, and I wondered what in the world I had in mind back then crawling around in those claustrophobic spaces, cold and muddy, and in danger in the rainy spring months of being crushed or, more likely, trapped and drowned.
Which was the most awful way of dying? Drowning? Being compressed and suffocated? Falling? As we climbed upward and passed the exposed elevator shafts on each floor, I thought to myself, Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall.
We were all getting winded in the heat, except for Griswold, the manic cyclist. He was more fit than any of us and probably had never smoked. Pugh, Sek, Egg and I were soon panting, and I finally got to see a Thai perspire. I thought of Timmy and Kawee, who two days earlier had been force-marched up these same stairs, probably unsure whether once they got to where they were going, they might be hurled down an elevator shaft or off a balcony.
Pugh was quietly counting off the floors. When he got to the twelfth, he said, “Fourteen is next.”
Sek and Egg had drawn their revolvers by now and were following Pugh, me and Griswold closely. As we turned onto the stairs leading to the fourteenth floor, four men appeared above us and we stopped. Two of them held guns, and the other two held good-sized bamboo canes.
There was a rapid back-and-forth in Thai between Pugh and one of the men holding a revolver. He was large and sullen, and I thought, yes, finally, the knocker-over of Austrian tourists.
As we climbed the final flight of stairs, I said to Pugh,
“That’s Khun Yai?”
“The one and only.”
We were led into what would have been — and I assumed what might one day still become — a large fourteenth-floor apartment. The place was set up like a campsite. Camp stoves were on a table in one corner next to a portable refrigerator. I could smell the soup in a pot. Straw mats were spread around on the floor. There were gas lanterns atop a pile of crates next to a card table with stools around it. Apparently we had interrupted a poker game, for four hands lay facedown around the table with a pile of bahts in the middle..
With two of their men pointing guns and two of ours doing likewise, any shoot-out would have been short and ugly.
Everyone in the room must have been acutely aware of this, though nobody lowered his revolver.
I saw no sign of Timmy and Kawee and figured they were in another section of the apartment.
Pugh said something in Thai, and Yai apparently indicated that one of his goons should go and fetch the captives. One of them kept looking at Griswold and then down at a photo he had, apparently to make sure we had not delivered a fake Griswold. It was plain that Pugh had done what he had told me earlier he was going to do. In Thai, he had informed these men that we were turning Griswold over to them in return for Timmy and Kawee. He said Griswold was not resisting because he now realized it was his fate to pay for his sins. He had caused important men to lose both money and face, each an unforgivable violation in the Thai moral universe. And he knew he would have to pay, and he was prepared to do so.
178 Richard Stevenson
Griswold said nothing. Apparently he was fluent in Thai, for he followed the conversation with a look that was fascinated though faintly bug-eyed.
Big Yai got on his cell phone to somebody — General Yodying? — and seconds after he rang off, one of the gang came back leading Timmy and Kawee. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were bound at the ankles too, so they had to take little dainty steps. They weren’t in the clothes I had last seen them in but were in cargo shorts and T-shirts.
They were both sweating. Timmy’s hair was a rat’s nest and Kawee’s lip gloss looked chewed off. On the front of Timmy’s yellow T-shirt were the words Thailand — Land of Smiles.
When Timmy and Kawee saw us, their faces fast-forwarded through shock, relief, joy, apprehension and fright. Then they just stared at us, hyperalert.
I said, “We’re getting you guys out of here. It won’t be long now.”
“And with hours to spare,” Timmy said. “Thank you for that.”
Yai indicated that his gang should free Timmy and Kawee from their bonds. They quickly did so, using sharp knives from the food preparation area to slice through the ropes. Timmy and Kawee began rubbing their wrists and moving their legs about, as if they were warming up for a ping-pong tournament.
Next, Yai directed two of his men to tie Griswold up.
That’s when Pugh said something in Thai that made Yai look out the door to the balcony with a start.
We had a clear view across the way to the second building in the condo complex. From the balcony opposite us, two people were dangling. Each was upside down. Ropes were tied around their ankles, and the ropes were attached to bamboo poles held in place by four of Pugh’s men, Nitrate, Ek and two others.
One of the dangling people was Khun Surapol Sutharat, the seer who had been providing ace astrological advice to the kidnappers. The other dangling person was a middle-aged woman in a fashionable Siamese gold- colored blouse and long THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 179 green skirt, the skirt now semicomically bunched up above her waist, exposing the woman’s black panties. Someone had lowered a cell phone on a wire to Khun Surapol and we could see him frantically trying to hold it up — down, really — to his ear.
Pugh took out his own phone and hit a speed-dial number.
After a moment, he handed the phone to Yai and gestured toward the dangling soothsayer. “Somebody wants to palaver with you,” he said.
Yai spoke some Thai into the phone and then listened. He looked confused, bordering on panicky. It didn’t help his frame of mind when the men holding the bamboo pole across the way began to bob it up and down, as the seer and the woman next to him gesticulated and clawed at the side of the building.
Yai took out his own phone now and frantically dialed.
Pugh said, “Tell the general that that is his wife Paveena Hanwilai over there, the birthday girl herself. If you and the general don’t do as we say, we’ll drop her skinny ass fourteen floors to the pavement below. And Khun Surapol will accompany her soul to paradise or to purgatory or to Newark Liberty International Airport — wherever. In any event, both of their corporeal worldly remains will leave an impression, for the general and for many others in the vicinity of Rangnam Road.”
Now Yai spoke into his phone in rapid Thai. He scowled furiously then said in English, looking at Griswold and me,
“Wait.”
The general was no doubt phoning his wife to see if she had actually been abducted. She had in fact been snatched, Pugh had told me, from Wat Mahathat, where she prayed each morning with her soothsayer. She was not, however, hanging from a pole across the way. She was locked in a janitor’s closet in a disused primary school next to the temple, minus her cell phone, her skirt and blouse and — just to play it safe — her black underwear. To preserve her modesty, Mrs. Paveena had been provided a large plastic garbage bag with a hole on top for her head to stick out and holes on the sides for her arms. The woman dangling next to Khun Surapol in Paveena Hanwilai’s garments was Miss Aroon — who had never been an acrobat exactly, but had for a time some years earlier fired ping-pong balls from her vagina to the cheers of drunken tourists at a club in Patpong.
Suddenly Yai was listening closely on his phone and nodding. He soon said something to Pugh in Thai. Pugh smiled amiably and said — I knew this much Thai — “ Capkun kap, Khun Yai.” Thank you so much, Mr. Yai.
Then Yai narrowed his eyes and hissed out two or three more brief sentences. Pugh shrugged and said something that from his look could have been “I’ll take note of that.”
Pugh said to me, “Mr. Yai has informed me that today the general is going to release all of us. But by the end of the month he will have killed every last one of us. What do you think of that?”
“I find that pronouncement unsettling, Rufus. What do you think of it?”
“Well, I think the general has another think coming.”
Griswold had followed all this with a look of bemused fascination. Kawee looked more or less relaxed by now,
