picked up that morning at Stuyvesant Books. In the “Dangers and Annoyances” section that Lonely Planet quaintly and helpfully includes in all its guidebooks, unscrupulous tuk-tuk drivers were listed, as well as fake-gem scams. No mention was made of drive-by shootings or police-run massacres. The emphasis in Lonely Planet’s Thailand was on the green landscape, the golden temples, and the smiles.
“I have to admit,” Lou Horn said, “that in retrospect we should have seen it coming — Gary mentally and physically sailing off into the blue. There were signs.”
Marcie Weems added, “Thailand, swell — nice people, nice place. And Buddhism, that’s fine, too — the ethics of tolerance and acceptance and nonviolence. And, of course, all those cute monks with their shaved heads and gorgeous orange robes. But astrology? Numerology? I don’t think so.”
“And before his transformation Gary was so even-keeled most of the time,” Janice Romeo said. “And smart and fun to be around. The four of us took trips together, and Gary was always a delight. He was focused, yes, even obsessive about some things, like his bike racing and his good causes. But he was never really muddleheaded. And after he got out of the Algonquin Steel power job sturm and drang and opened the gallery, he was pretty relaxed too. Of course, it was also around that time that he started getting into the weirdness.”
“He was weird, but still not weird,” Weems put in. “Gary was Mister Moderate-and-Conventional with most things — food, alcohol, dress. Key West is famous for its eccentrics, but Gary was hardly one of the seventeen thousand four hundred and twelve local characters.”
“And men,” Romeo said. “Don’t forget men — another area where Gary was Mister Middle-of-the-Road. No Mangos or Pomegranates or Pomolos for the Gary we knew. He went for Lou, to cite a nearby example. An excellent, levelheaded choice. Lou, are you hurt that we all think of you as a merely reasonable object of desire?”
They all laughed as Horn digested the ambiguous compliment. We were seated at a table at Salute, an open-air mainly Italian place along the Atlantic Avenue beach on the nocruise-ships quiet side of Key West. A half- moon hung in the evening sky behind palm fronds rustling in a warm breeze. I had my Sam Adams and the others their Ketel One vodka with a side of ice, apparently the national beverage of the Conch Republic.
Horn was a broad-faced man in his late forties with a salt-and-pepper beard, a few skin-cancer scars scattered about, a one-time middleweight wrestler’s build now starting to respond to the tug of gravity, and a twinkle in both his eyes and his step.
He had brought along Griswold’s two other closest friends in the keys. Both Weems and Romeo had moved to Key West twelve years earlier when the New York publishing house where Weems had been a senior editor was bought by Argentinean beef producers and most of the house’s functions were moved 28 Richard Stevenson to Buenos Aires. Now they ran a small B and B, Romeo said, and only served pork products for breakfast.
Easy to look at in their pale cottons and silks, the two women seated across from me, one olive-skinned and ample, one creamy and svelte, were also merrily festooned with skin cancer Band-Aids, apparently a small price to pay for life in what was still a pretty good place for getting away from it all.
Key West still had allure, despite cruise ships the size of the Pentagon lumbering in daily, and the influx of millionaires who had left the island unaffordable for lesser new arrivals. Gary Griswold had seemed more or less at home there, and his three friends said they were stunned when Griswold suddenly announced, after a vacation trip to Thailand, that he was abandoning them and his life there for a country on the other side of the world.
Horn said, “Gary and I were no longer partners in the personal sense by the time he left. So, emotionally it was more or less okay. That part of our relationship had petered out more than a year earlier, and we both had been seeing other people.”
“ Seeing, ” Weems said. “Such a darling way of putting it.”
“Anyway, I had always been the one to play around,” Horn said. “Gary, being more serious and focused about everything he undertook, was more of a serial monogamist.”
“This is true,” Romeo said. “Marcie and I once certified Gary as an honorary lesbian.”
“I sometimes wonder,” Horn said, “what would have happened if Geoffrey Pringle had never invited Gary over to Bangkok. Though, of course, Gary had begun to change almost a year before that. At the time, we thought maybe it had something to do with Gary falling off his bike, screwy as that might sound. Another biker ran into him in a race up near Ocala, and Gary wiped out and landed on his head. He was wearing a helmet, but he had a bad concussion, and the whole thing seemed to throw him for a loop like nothing else we’d ever seen. He went around in a daze for a week after he got out of the hospital. And it was not too long after that that he got the astrology bug, and he started seeing a woman on Stock THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 29
Island who claims to help people get in touch with their past lives. I’ve read that head injuries can sometimes cause personality changes, temporary or even permanent, and we all wondered at the time if Gary hitting his head had somehow jarred loose his bullshit detector.”
I asked, “Who is Geoffrey Pringle?”
“A longtime Key West full-timer who moved to Thailand four or five years ago,” Horn said. “It was Geoff who invited Gary over for a two-week visit.”
“What does Geoff do in Thailand?”
“He’s retired,” Romeo said. “His family in Chicago made a fortune in grain futures years ago. A while back, Geoff inherited forty or fifty mil, and bingo, off he flew.”
I asked if anybody had checked with Pringle about Griswold’s current situation. Wasn’t this guy likely to know something?
“We tried,” Horn said. “But Geoffrey won’t really talk to us.
Apparently he and Gary had some kind of falling-out. I got Geoff on the phone in Bangkok about a month ago. He said he didn’t know where Gary was, and he ‘couldn’t care less,’ his words. Geoff also told me in no uncertain terms that the day I phoned him was not an auspicious date for him to be taking a transoceanic telephone call, and he just hoped that I had not fucked up his entire month.”
Romeo laughed and said, “And Geoff didn’t even land on his head, as far as we know.”
Some food arrived, an aromatic bounteous antipasti for the table.
“Don’t be dainty,” Romeo said. “Shovel it down. There’s more where that came from. Plus, the pasta dishes.”
As we dug in, Horn said, “The numerology thing with Gary was especially uncomfortable for all of us whenever nine-eleven came up. Gary had bought into a theory bouncing around the Internet about the date, eleven, and the shape of the two New York towers, and some supposed prediction by Nostradamus made in the fourteenth century that historians say was fake.
30 Richard Stevenson
There was even more to it — something about the flight numbers of the crashed planes adding up to something significant — and Gary took it all very seriously.”
“After a while, of course, Gary didn’t really talk to us about any of that,” Romeo said. “When we were casually dismissive, or just unresponsive, he tended to drop the subject for a while.
We didn’t want to insult him or hurt him. But we weren’t about to indulge this looniness, either. What do you do? What do you say? We loved Gary, but we were just flabbergasted. Some people are susceptible to these notions and some aren’t, and we happen to fall into the latter category. It just got terribly awkward.”
“He obviously cared what you thought of him,” I said. “And after he moved to Thailand, he stayed in touch. But you said, Lou, that Gary gave indications that things were starting to go wrong. What were those indications?”
They looked at each other. Horn said, “You know about Mango, right? From Ellen Griswold.”
“I do. Apparently Gary was head over heels for the guy.”
“He was,” Janice said, “and then later he wasn’t. In one email he sent me late last summer — I’ve got a hard copy for you to take with you — Gary said Mango might not be who he said he was. This was extremely distressing for Gary. He had trusted this guy, he said. Gary had also been to a seer — that’s the word he used. And what the seer predicted was ‘bloodshed’ in Gary’s life, and ‘great sorrow for people close to him.’ Again, the seer’s words.”
That’s all? No specifics?”
“No.”
“Did Gary tell anybody the seer’s name?”
