The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 30
- Предыдущая
- 30/62
- Следующая
Maybe we’ll all go.”
“I’m sure General Yodying will be happy to include Mr.
Timothy once he is safe and sound.”
“Timmy told me a story about Noel Coward at the Oriental.
The manager phoned him and asked if it was true that there was
a gentleman in his room. Coward replied, ‘Just a moment and
I’ll ask him.’”
Pugh laughed and said, “There is much entertaining farang
lore in Bangkok. We Thais know it too. We are as amused by
visiting farangs as you are by one another.”
“I know that Thailand was never colonized, thanks largely to
the cleverness of King Chulalongkorn. Maybe that’s why
foreigners here are seen mainly as sources of amusement, in
addition of course to serving as reliable sources of hard
currency.”
“Yes, and more importantly the latter. We are good at
providing our own laughs. But hard currency from the West is
needed to keep our upper classes roaming about in automobiles
built in Bavaria and sipping satiny fluids distilled in Scotland.”
“If you were a wealthy foreigner, Rufus, and showed up in
Thailand with thirty-eight million US dollars and were going to
134 Richard Stevenson
invest it in a sure thing that was legal — no heroin, no arms
smuggling, no adult or pedophile international sex trafficking —
what would that investment be?”
“A legal investment? Hmm. Tourism infrastructure?
Computer technology? Transportation? Perhaps entertainment
— such as Hollywood movie palaces the likes of which L.B.
Mayer is surely swooning over, if somehow his soul is extant in
Bangkok today in some sentient form. Or grandiose retail
outlets would perhaps be the smartest investment of all. An
American journalist once told me he had been in Thailand for
several weeks but had not yet been able to figure out what was
percolating inside the minds of the Thai people. I told him, oh, that’s easy. Going to the mall. That’s what modern Thais spend
much of their spare time thinking about or doing. Going
shopping. The writer was disappointed, I think.”
“And which of these investments that you have listed would
provide the quickest return?”
Pugh looked doubtful. “None of the above, Mr. Don. Sorry.
If you’re talking getting your money back in months or even a
few years, no such investments are likely to pay off that fast.
Land deals, of course, can be ways of making a quick killing in
Thailand, as in most places, if you are privy to inside
information on some government project — a highway, an
airport, a SkyTrain extension, say. But you said legal investment, and using insider information, while common here, is against
the law. And it sounds as if Mr. Gary Griswold is a far better
Buddhist than are some of Thailand’s leading lights who were
raised in clouds of incense with garlands of marigolds dangling
from every orifice. You believe him to be a truly moral man,
and perhaps he is that. Of course, there are legal gray areas
available to investors here, also. And perhaps Mr. Gary was not
too pious to eschew one of the murkier financial pursuits to be
found here in the kingdom.”
“Like what?”
“For instance, real estate development that’s not meant to
result in actual finished construction. Investors are lined up for, say, a large condominium project. A construction company is
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 135
formed that embarks on the project and inflates its start-up
costs by a thousand percent. All the condo units are sold for
tidy sums, many of them to unsuspecting foreign retirees.
Escrow laws here are weak, so the organizers of the project put
up part of the building, then abandon the skeletal structure and walk away with millions. You see these half-finished concrete
towers throughout Bangkok. Attempts have been made to
tighten the escrow laws, but powerful people who profit from
these corrupt but barely legal schemes have so far prevented the laws from being updated. It’s a way of raking in big money fast, and perhaps someone talked Mr. Gary into investing in one of
these cunningly conceived scams.”
“Maybe. Though with his family history, Griswold would
likely know the difference between ethical and nonethical
business practices. And surely he’s been around Thailand long
enough to grasp what’s a sleazy con job and what isn’t a con job within the local context. No, I’m inclined to think that whatever he was planning to invest in was on the up-and-up, or at least
was presented to him in a way that allowed him to think it was.”
“Mr. Gary is apparently a far better Buddhist than many of
us whose Buddhism one would reasonably expect to be more
organic to our daily lives.”
“Yes, unless he’s fooling us all. That’s a possibility, too.”
“This has occurred to me also. I hope you won’t be too
disappointed if we track down Mr. Gary and he turns out to be
a cad. Or at least a bit of a pill.”
“If Griswold was a scheming big jerk, it would certainly
make it easier to exchange him for Timmy and Kawee. There is
that.”
“This is a very Thai way of looking at it, Mr. Don. Now
you’re talkin’ turkey.”
Suddenly I saw Timmy’s face, his eyes narrowing with
disapproval over my brazen moral relativism, and I wanted to
hold him and beg him not to judge me so harshly. And I
wanted to beg his forgiveness for bringing him to this
benighted land of violence and superstition. Then I heard him
136 Richard Stevenson
say, “Violence and superstition? You’d better be careful not to
compare Thailand to the land of the NRA, Pat Robertson,
slavery, Jim Crow and Rush Limbaugh.” It was at that point
that I asked him to please just shut up for one minute so that I could simply luxuriate in my profound relief over his being safe and well and once again by my side.
§ § § § §
Pugh and I joined his team for the stakeout at the On Nut
Internet cafe from which Griswold made his phone calls. Pugh
had an illegally parked van with tinted windows situated half on the sidewalk directly in front of the cafe. A uniformed cop
stopped by for a handout and was soon on his way. The place
was in the shadow of the towering concrete On Nut SkyTrain
station. This was the terminus of the Sukhumvit Road line, and
whenever a train pulled in crowds came down the steps and
dispersed up and down the street, many of them passing within
inches of where we waited and watched. A few people went
into the Internet cafe and sat down at computers. Nearly all
were Thais. One was a male Westerner in sandals, cargo shorts,
and a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival T-shirt, but he wasn’t Gary
Griswold.
Pugh had the air-conditioning humming and sent out for
eats from a nearby food stall. We had some nice pork larb and
green papaya salad. I was so comfortable that I drifted off into semiconsciousness for an hour or so. To the extent that I was
conscious, I tried to come up with another way of locating
Griswold — or Timmy and Kawee — but I could not. There
was one other avenue of hope. It was Monday, so I knew there
was a fifty-fifty chance that the moto messenger that Griswold
sent every Monday or Tuesday evening with cash for Kawee’s
housekeeping and other expenses would likely show up within a
few hours at Kawee’s room or at the whiskey seller’s stall down
the soi from his place. Pugh had additional crews covering both
locations.
I gave some thought as to how I might be able to pay Pugh
for his extensive services in the event I never saw another dime from any of the Griswolds. That was going to be a sizable
- Предыдущая
- 30/62
- Следующая
