from him.”
I asked Pugh if he could use sources in the banks where Griswold kept his money to check on large withdrawals or transfers around the time of the visit by the two Americans.
“That would be illegal,” Pugh said. “Banking privacy laws preclude any such inquiries.”
“Yes, but can you do it?”
“Of course.”
“It would help,” I said, “if we knew exactly when these two guys were in Bangkok. Is there any way of figuring that out?”
Kawee said, “October fifteen.”
“How do you know that?”
“I remember. One and five. It was day of unlucky sixes. The bad Americans come. My Aunt Sunthorn have birthday number sixty. She fall in cinema and break leg.”
Pugh said, “Did the Americans arrive on October fifteenth or depart on that date?”
“They come Bangkok on fourteen, I think. They phone Mr.
Gary. They come condo fifteen. They go way sixteen maybe.”
Timmy looked at me and said, “Who needs computers?”
I said, “I’m pretty sure that the bulk of Griswold’s funds are in Bangkok Bank Unless he’s been moving his money around.
Plus, he had all those ATM cards from multiple Thai banks.”
Pugh got on his cell phone, speed-dialed a number, and carried on a rapid conversation in Thai. Then he repeated this conversation a second, third and fourth time with others he phoned. “This could take overnight,” he said. “Nobody I know has access to bank records from home. But we may know what we need to know in the morning after folks arrive at their workplaces.”
Now Miss Nongnat appeared from the house. She had taken time to make herself presentable, she said, after the bus ride from Bangkok. She was hungry and ready for some rice, she told us. She pulled up a chair and had a beer. She was dressed in a pretty blue skirt and a loose white slipover and had a monk amulet dangling from her neck similar to Kawee’s. In her makeup, Miss Nongnat looked like a beauty pageant contestant, and I recalled how one evening during my first visit to Thailand I had come upon a cheering crowd at an outdoor plaza. Lovely young Thai women were parading across a stage in traditional Siamese costumes as the audience clapped and yelled enthusiastically. I stopped to watch and soon became aware that the beauty queens were not in fact lovely young Thai women but were lovely young Thai men. It was one of my earliest indications that the Siamese were in a number of ways far ahead of the rest of us.
Miss Nongnat told Kawee that if he wanted to do his toenails, she had his color of polish up in her luggage. Kawee hoisted a foot up, and we all — even Pugh — examined Kawee’s pretty toes and spoke of them admiringly.
Miss Nongnat said she had to do her toenails almost daily these days. She had been dating a Korean who insisted that if she was going to paint her toenails, the polish had to be edible, and edible polishes just didn’t last.
I caught Timmy’s quick glance at me that said, “We’re a long way from the Archdiocese of Albany now.”
Soon Pugh’s wife and three children arrived. The kids were all happy to be having an unexpected visit to the seashore. Pugh was about to accompany them up to the second guesthouse when his cell phone rang.
Pugh conversed briefly and then rang off. “That was Egg.
He has located Khun Gary. He is unconscious in Hua Hin hospital. We should go there, I think, and make sure that Mr.
Gary is not injured any more than has already been the unhappy case.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Griswold had been speeding down a road near Jack and Jackie’s summer palace when a drunk in an old Nissan came barreling out of a side street with his lights off and knocked Griswold and his stolen bike into a banyan tree. Griswold had not been wearing a helmet and may have suffered a slight concussion, Egg had learned. He had been identified by the ATM cards in his bag, and one of Pugh’s Hua Hin police sources had alerted Egg.
Pugh himself drove Timmy and me into town. The small hospital was an entirely modern facility, spick-and- span, with young female greeters in pale lavender uniforms who smiled like angels at visitors and exuded solicitude like a delicate perfume.
Timmy said, “Take note, Senate Republican caucus.”
“They’re otherworldly. Can you imagine this kind of treatment at Albany Medical Center? Or any US hospital?”
“And they’re as lovely to look at as Miss Nongnat. I wonder if they have dicks.”
Ek, Egg and Nitrate were positioned outside Griswold’s room. Ek said he learned from a doctor that Griswold had no broken bones but had been badly scraped and bruised. He had been slipping in and out of consciousness and, when awake, had been muttering to the nurses incoherently. The doctor had said this mental fog was from both the painkillers Griswold was on and the concussion.
Pugh and Ek had an exchange in Thai, and then Pugh told me, “Mr. Gary has been intermittently gaga. He has been babbling about falling.”
“That sounds rational enough. After what happened to Geoff Pringle and to soothsayer Khunathip — and almost to Timmy and to Kawee — a fear of falling sounds sensible. Also, Griswold himself was hurt falling off his bike — twice, in fact.
And his parents died in a plane that went down.”
214 Richard Stevenson
“Khun Gary also, Ek says, has been going on confusedly about rounding or surrounding or something like that. It’s hard to make out. Ek wasn’t even sure it was English. But it didn’t seem to be Thai either. And Mr. Gary said it repeatedly in a distressed tone of voice. Rounding. What’s that about?”
A nurse came out of Griswold’s room and said that he was more alert now than he had been earlier, and if we wished to greet him and wish him well we could enter the room two at a time.
Pugh and I went in first. Griswold was bandaged on his left arm and shoulder and had a bad scrape on his left cheek. He had another bandage across his nose and a blackened left eye. A large bandage was wrapped around his head. He was on an IV drip of what I guessed were painkillers and antibiotics.
Griswold immediately recognized Pugh and me and moaned, “Oh no, you guys,” and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Khun Gary, we were so sorry to learn of your unfortunate accident. Mr. Donald and I are here to extend our heartfelt sympathies and our many good wishes for a speedy recovery.”
“You can both go fuck yourselves.”
“Not just yet.”
I said, “Griswold, you are totally out of control and it’s getting the best of you. At this point, all we are trying to do is keep you alive until April twenty-seventh. Then you’re on your own. You and your latest astrologer-of-the- moment can take it from there.”
He looked at me balefully out of his battered face. “I was handling this myself until you showed up, Strachey. You are the reason I’m lying in this bed with a headache to end all headaches. You and my clueless ex-wife and my evil brother.
Everything was proceeding more or less smoothly until you were air-dropped into Thailand like some kind of sheriff’s SWAT team with the wrong address.”
“What would the right address be?”
Ignoring that, Griswold said, “All I need at this point is to be left alone to oversee a series of financial transactions that are of the utmost urgency. I need a computer and a phone, and above all I need privacy. And now here I am stuck in this medical Grand Central Station with even less opportunity to concentrate and control what I need to control than I had back when I was hiding out in Bangkok. I can only begin to tell you just how much you
