“No,” Weems said. “It had to be something else. Was Elise sure it was Gary she saw?”
“Elise said it was definitely Gary. Elise has been getting forgetful in recent years, but she certainly knows Gary as well as any of us. I mean, she bought art from Gary and Lou for years and was in the gallery at least once a month, wasn’t she, Lou?”
“Elise would certainly know Gary,” Horn said somberly.
“Maybe this means he’s been in Cambodia for six months, and that’s why nobody has heard from him.”
Romeo said, “For chrissakes, Cambodia surely has telephones and post offices. Even the Internet, I’ll bet. Am I right, Don?”
“In the Khmer Rouge era, it didn’t. But now Cambodia is not so cut off, no.”
“So, what’s going on with Gary?” Weems said, and they all looked at me.
CHAPTER FOUR
Despite creeping gentrification, Stock Island, just east of Key West, had one of the few remaining low-rent districts in the lower keys. It had dockage for fishing and pleasure boats, some warehouses, and a few good seafood restaurants. But it wasn’t yet, Horn told me, one of the fashionable, high-cost addresses for habitation.
Sandy Tessig lived in one of the island’s two-story plain-concrete multiunit townhouses built on stilts to be safe from storm surges. So far, the design had worked; the place had not been swept away by rampaging seas. Tessig had no big sign up, just a discreet notice next to her door buzzer that read Sandy -
Past, Present, and Future Knowledge — The Freedom to Know and to Be.
Tessig had agreed on the phone to talk to me, and Lou Horn dropped me off at ten in the morning, planning to pick me up in an hour. Tessig had said she was worried about Griswold too, and was willing to help if she could. And, she said, maybe while I was there I would like a reading.
Sandy’s apartment didn’t give me the kind of willies I was expecting, and neither did she. There were a couple of astrological charts on the living room wall over the couch, but no rooms painted black and no sinister aromatherapy. I could see Disney-character decals on the side of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the only smell was of the orange Doritos in a dish on the coffee table. The CD box on the player next to the goldfish bowl was an early Barbra Streisand collection.
I relaxed on the couch and Sandy brought me a cup of Nescafe. She was pleasantly beefy in tight jeans and a Conch Nation T-shirt. She had clear skin, a big expressive face, and streaked hair cut short.
She perched on a hassock across the coffee table from me and told me she was excited to have me in the same room with her.
38 Richard Stevenson
“Why?” I asked.
“You’ve been everywhere. You’ve done everything. Oh, my God!”
I knew what was coming, but I said, “I was in the army, and I’ve always enjoyed travel.”
“Wait. Don’t tell me. Lithuania?”
“Nope. Never Lithuania.”
“No, no. Fifteenth century. The royal court.”
“I’m not aware of this.”
“No, but I am. I have the gift. That’s why Gary came to me.
It’s why you’re here, Donnie.”
“Nobody has called me Donnie for a number of years. You must have me mixed up with someone else,” I said in a kidding way, trying to get her off this track.
“Are you saying you are not that person anymore? You will always be little Donnie. Always were, always will be. And many other little Donnies in time and space too.”
“You’re sounding a little too much like my mother, Sandy,”
I said, trying again for a jocularity that did not come across as too disrespectful. “Can we talk about Gary Griswold? You said you were as worried about him as so many of his other friends have been.” I told her that a Key West woman apparently had seen Griswold alive at the Thai-Cambodian border two weeks earlier, but that his noncommunicativeness and apparent secretiveness were still a serious cause for concern.
“Gary is home where he belongs. Home is where the heart is.”
“True enough.”
“He told me after he got back from his first trip to Thailand that I had been right to urge him to go there, and that he had found his spiritual and ancestral true home. Here he suffered from dislocation. I’m not knocking Key West; don’t get me wrong. I grew up a quarter of a mile from where we’re sitting, and it’s fine that I’m here now, because I’ve been in Monroe THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 39
County for most of my past lives. This place has been good to me, except for once in the thirteen forties.”
“That’s pre-Columbian,” I said.
“What? You think there were no people in Monroe County before Columbus got here?”
“No, in fact I’m impressed. And who can argue with firsthand experience?”
She gave me a smile that appeared genuine. “You’re a doubter, I can see. But that’s okay. Your skepticism in no way alters reality.”
“That’s been my experience.”
“But you’re missing out on something fantastic, Donnie.
Full self-knowledge. It’s liberating. Knowing not just who you are but who you were enables you to see yourself in your natural place in the cosmos. Once you grasp this, you’ll never feel dislocated again. Or alone.”
I said, “How come people in your line of endeavor, Sandy, tend to locate clients in a cozy royal court? Couldn’t I have been a rural Lithuanian Jew getting speared in the neck by marauding Cossacks?”
“Of course,” she said. “That’s what happened to me in 1343, until forty-six. Not in Lithuania but here in Florida. It wasn’t Cossacks, it was Seminoles. It accounts for a good deal of my present back pain. But I sense strongly that you were either royalty or were close to royalty. You have also lived many other lives, of course, some of them perhaps replete with rage and physical agony. But rediscovering those lives would require time and effort.”
“I’m afraid my immediate concern has to be Gary Griswold.”
“I couldn’t agree more. It would be so, so sad if Gary’s bliss had gone by.”
I said, “So it was you who suggested that Gary vacation in Thailand? I was under the impression that former Key West resident Geoff Pringle had invited him for a visit.”
40 Richard Stevenson
She adjusted her back — were the Seminoles the problem, or the hassock? — and let loose a grin of pure satisfaction. “I knew Geoff was over there. He, too, is a client of mine. But it was Gary’s journey back to his young life at the nineteenth-century court of King Mongkut that made him realize his bliss awaited him in Siam.”
“So, Gary was royalty too?”
“Gary himself was not of the Chakra dynasty. He was the child of a minor court official. But one of his classmates in the court school run by the incredible Anna Leonowens was the future King Chulalongkorn, and Gary later became King Chulalongkorn’s palace art curator. So, you see? Running an art gallery in Key West was really nothing new for Gary.”
“You know,” I said, “most of that Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I saga was hooey. Leonowens made nearly all of it up, and later Rodgers and Hammerstein ran with it.
Tunefully, to be sure. But I know that the Thais think it’s a crock.”
Tessig was unruffled by this additional evidence that I was just another doubter. She said, “Gary remembers Anna as being a wonderful woman. If she embellished, that’s only natural.
After all, she loved a king and was loved in return by His Majesty.”
“Thai scholars say the woman was demented. There was no romance. And Mongkut never hopped around blurting ‘Is a puzzlement!’”
