The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 14
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“Yes, it helps to be Thai if you’re operating in Thailand.
You’ll see.”
Pugh, Timmy, and I were in the Topmost dining room for
the breakfast buffet. Timmy had his papaya and yogurt, I my
omelet, and Pugh four slices of pineapple and a side of bacon.
“So, is Rufus your real name?” Timmy asked. “It sounds
so…I guess American.”
“No, the name my parents gave me was Panchalee
Siripasaraporn.” Pugh spelled it out, letter by letter. “But we
Thais are not so rigid about names as you foreigners are. It can be confusing, I know. Sometimes Thais change their names.
And we have different nicknames for different situations and
relationships. Am I making myself unclear?” He laughed.
Pugh was a wiry little man who looked tough as old
lemongrass. I could imagine somebody trying to fish bits of him
out of their tom yam kung. He had the dark-faced, flat-nosed
look of the North, meaning he was a man who got what he
needed in Thai society with his wits and industry and not with
his looks or his family history. What he had that was almost
universally Thai was his humor.
“But why ‘Rufus Pugh’?” Timmy asked. “It doesn’t sound
anything like your real name.”
“I picked the name up when I went to Duke,” Pugh said.
“Oh, you went to Duke? I went to Georgetown.”
“How long were you there?” Pugh asked.
“How long? Four years.”
66 Richard Stevenson
“Well, I was only at Duke for a week. I was visiting my
friend Supoj. He had a roommate named Rufus Pugh. I liked
the sound of it. Oh, have I confused you gentlemen again?
When I say I went to Duke, I mean I went to Duke on a
Greyhound bus.” He chuckled.
I said, “Where did you take the bus from, Rufus? Not
Bangkok.”
“From Monmouth College, in West Long Branch, New
Jersey. I was there for one semester. Then I came home and
completed university at Chulalongkorn in Bangkok. It was
cheaper. That way, my three sisters had to fuck only three
thousand seven hundred and twelve overweight Australians to
put me through college instead of five thousand two hundred
and eleven.”
Timmy said, “I’m sorry. God.”
“No need. This was twenty years ago. Now two of them are
back in Chiang Rai with their lazy husbands, and the other
married one of the large mates and lives in Sydney. I help them
out — I look forward to getting my hands on some of the
Griswold megabucks — and my wife and children are not big
spenders. Neither is my girlfriend. But I do need to hustle.
That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“How did you turn into a PI?” I asked.
“I was in the police, but eventually I started feeling guilty
about being on the wrong side of the law. How about you,
Mister Don?”
“Army Intelligence originally. I also had ethical issues.”
“I’ll bet. That must have been the US Army.”
“In the seventies. I was here a few times.”
“In Bangkok?”
“Bangkok and Pattaya.”
“I was a child at the time. But maybe you fucked one of my
sisters. Or me. I picked up some spare change on a few
occasions.”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 67
“No, no youngsters for me. Anyway, I’d remember you.
You make an impression, Rufus.”
He smiled again, briefly, then said, “If you were in the
American military, then you must know that the Thai military
has its corrupt elements.”
“I do know that.”
“Parts of it are busy ruthlessly stamping out the drug trade,
and parts of it are busy buying and selling drugs. Some elements do both. The police are often involved, and also our
authoritarian neighbors, the Burmese generals, as well as the
Burmese generals’ authoritarian friends, the Chinese.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I bring this up,” Pugh said, “because you told me that your
Mr. Gary Griswold planned on investing thirty-eight million US
dollars and making a quick killing.”
“That’s what he told someone. It may not be true.”
“With that kind of money, we may be talking drug deal.
Heroin, yaa-baa, who knows? If that is the case, his family is correct to fear for his well-being. So let’s hope he was up to
something else.”
“A drug deal,” I said, “would be seriously out of character
for this guy.” I told Pugh about Griswold’s discovery of
Buddhist philosophy and meditation, his deepening interest in
past lives, astrology and numerology, and on top of all that his infatuation and then de-infatuation with the mysterious Mango.
“I think,” I said, “that Griswold would consider heroin dealing, what with all the social harm involved, unethical if not
downright evil. Unless, of course, it’s Mr. Mango who’s the
gangster here, and it was Griswold’s discovery of that that led to his disillusionment with Mango. And he actually believed he
was investing in something else.”
Pugh chewed on a slice of bacon. I had some too, with my
omelet. It was the most flavorsome bacon I had ever eaten. I
had once seen listed on a Thai menu “deep-fried pig vermiform
appendix.” Bacon seemed like a classically American food, yet it was plainly the Thais who knew exactly what to do with a pig.
68 Richard Stevenson
“Yeah,” Pugh said, “I think you’re right that Mango’s
involvement means something here. Or nothing. Well, not
nothing. A warm smile, a pretty dick, and a shapely butt, it
could be. Or maybe more; we’ll have to see. As for ethical
considerations, it sounds like you know your man. But with
your permission, may I please point out that when our own
esteemed Prime Minster Samak was asked how Thailand could
do so much business with the Burmese generals — who run
what might be the nastiest police state in the world — the PM
said, oh, the generals are praying Buddhists, after all, so how
bad can they be?”
“Point taken,” I said. “But Griswold has no history of being
a hypocrite.”
“The Buddha never specifically listed hypocrisy as a sin,”
Pugh said. “Though I think we have to consider it within the
penumbra of Dharma teachings. See, I’m not at all a spiritual
strict constructionist.” He grinned at us and chortled.
I told Pugh about Griswold’s consulting a Thai fortune-teller
— renowned, supposedly — and the seer’s dire predictions of
“bloodshed” and “great sorrow” in Griswold’s life.
“You have no name of this man?”
“No, unfortunately.”
“He could be a charlatan. Or perhaps not. It would be good
to know which one it is. If Mr. Gary consulted him previously
and is now in distress, he will almost certainly consult him
again.”
I said, “So, some Thai fortune-tellers are frauds and some
are not?”
“Are some American corporate CEOs frauds, and some are
not?” Pugh asked. I had no clue from his look what he was
thinking.
“Then let me ask you this. Do fortune-tellers ever give
financial advice?”
“If it’s requested. Generally on small matters. When to buy a
lottery ticket. What’s a lucky number for a lottery ticket.
Perhaps on larger financial matters on some occasions. The
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 69
scale of the question and the scale of the answer could both
conceivably flow from the depth of the seer’s client’s pockets.”
Timmy said, “Thailand looks like it’s awash in money — all
this urban building and development. Couldn’t Griswold have
been involved in something completely legitimate that then fell
apart? And he’d gotten other investors involved, and now they
want their money back or something, and Griswold is afraid of
them? I read that sometimes in Thailand business disputes turn
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