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 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 violent. Business-related drive-by shootings are not unheard of here. Isn’t that a possibility?”
“Very good,” Pugh said. “You two have done your homework. I’ve been shot at eleven times and hit twice.” He hiked up his polo shirt and then tugged it down again, giving us a quick glimpse of a jagged scar on his mocha-colored rib cage.
“This one was in broad daylight right over on Sukhumvit Road, not far from here. Timothy, I’ll show you the other scar sometime, if you’re interested. You’ll get quite an eyeful.”
“Oh, I don’t have to.”
“Aren’t you just a little bit curious?” He leered mischievously.
Timmy actually blushed. “Oh, I can’t really say.”
Pugh laughed and had some more bacon. He said, “We can speculate all we want about what Griswold was, or is, involved in financially. I think, though, that our most fruitful approach will simply be to find the guy, sit him down, and say, ‘Hey, Bud, what the heck is going on here?’ And then, one way or another, get him to tell us.”
I described to Pugh our findings of the night before: The visit to Geoff Pringle’s building and the night security guard’s apparent suspicion that there was something very odd or even sinister about Pringle’s fatal fall from his balcony; the visit to Griswold’s apartment and our discovery that he himself had been there briefly as recently as two weeks earlier; the revelation that someone named Kawee was watering Griswold’s plants and praying at a shrine in his apartment; then the news that an
“unfriendly” man on a motorbike had been trying to locate 70 Richard Stevenson
Griswold. I told Pugh I had obtained a potentially useful piece of data — the unfriendly man’s mobile telephone number.
Pugh said, “You’re off to a good start. Very professional.”
“Well, yes.”
“I think I’d like to work with you on this.”
“Great. But I thought it was I who would be interviewing you, in a sense. To make sure you were the real thing. I assumed on the phone and from your Web site that you were. And obviously you are legitimate — despite the confusion that your name inevitably produces.”
“Yeah, well, Mr. Don, it works both ways. I needed, also, to see if you were the real deal and not one of the doofus-y, alcohol-besotted farang shmucks we often see doing PI work here in Bangkok. And you certainly are for real, which is excellent. So, let’s do it. Understand, though, that you’ll need me a whole lot more than I’ll need you in finding Mr. Gary and providing a good outcome for his situation, whatever it turns out to be.”
This all sounded plausible enough. But I had to ask Pugh,
“What is it that you think you’ll be able to bring to the investigation that I won’t be able to manage?”
“Your survival, my friend,” he said. “Your survival.”
Pugh and I agreed on the financial terms and carved out a division of labor for the next day or two. He would identify the owner of the phone number I’d gotten from Griswold’s building manager. He would use police sources to find out if Gary Griswold’s name had appeared in any police report in the past six months. (Pugh said reporters were sometimes bribed to keep the deaths of foreigners from turning up in newspapers and scaring the tourists away.) And he would get hold of the police report on Geoff Pringle’s death — which had been reported in the Key West Citizen but not in any of the Bangkok papers.
One of my jobs would be to track down plant-watering, shrine-visiting Kawee by purchasing the promise of Griswold’s super and his security guard to phone me when Kawee showed up again. I had brought along my international cell phone and had picked up a SIM card and five thousand baht worth of minutes at a 7-Eleven. My other job would be to find Mango.
Pugh said it was not a common Thai name or nickname. He would call a number of gay sources — mainly bar and massage-parlor owners — and try to come up with leads among the Bangkok ex-pat gay population that I could follow up on. Pugh guessed that Mango had had other farang admirers.
When Pugh had eaten all his bacon and strolled out of the hotel, Timmy said, “Mr. Rufus might have an easier time finding Mango than we will. Don’t you think Rufus might be gay? I’m sure the guy was flirting with me.”
“Yeah, he was, a little. But I wouldn’t make anything of it.
With all his wives and girlfriends, I’d be surprised if it was any kind of invitation. It’s just that Thais are a casually sexualized people. They are generally modest about it in public, but they are very comfortable in their own sexual skin. Puritanism, Catholic guilt, all that — it’s as if they never heard of any of it.
And when it comes to gender, they can be pretty fluid about it.
They enjoy the humor of sex, too, and you were getting some of that from Rufus.”
“It’s a bit startling.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t know whether I can adapt. All I know of Asian gay sexuality is India, a nation of Larry Craigs.”
“You won’t have to work hard adjusting. Other than over in the fuck-show district, there’s nothing at all insistent about Thai sexuality. This is not Provincetown during carnival week. It’s just part of what’s in the air. And you need do nothing more than breathe it, if you so choose.”
“Oh, so it’s only one element in addition to the scent of jasmine and the occasional whiff of raw sewage.”