The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 48

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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.”

THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 211

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 THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 215

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 two are fucking up my project and…and… my entire

life!”

I said, “Griswold, you and a group of Thai investors are

trying to take over Algonquin Steel. Why is that?”

Griswold was hooked up to a machine monitoring his pulse,

brain waves, and who knew what else, and when I said this the

machine practically projectile vomited. It began to flash and

beep something awful, though Griswold himself just stared at

me with a small round O formed by his lips. He apparently wanted to say something, but his vocal apparatus had gone

numb.

I said, “Several years ago, you wanted out of the steel

business, and you got out, and you had a nice art gallery in Key West. Then you came over to Thailand presumably without

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