“Hello.”
“Don?”
“Yes, yes.”
“It’s Timothy.”
“Timmy, can you talk?”
“Well, yes. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Of course. So what’s the deal?”
“The deal is, they want Griswold. They will trade Kawee and me for Griswold.”
“I see.”
“That’s about it. I’m not supposed to say any more. Oh, except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“They said I should tell you that we are on the fourteenth floor.”
“Uh-huh. Okay.”
“So that’s about it, I guess. God, it’s good to hear your voice.”
“It’s so good to hear yours.”
“Just…please get Kawee and me out of this, if you can.
Okay?”
“We will, we will. Can you tell me anything more about where you are?”
“No.”
“Is Kawee okay? Are they treating you well enough?”
“Yes. We’re both all right. So far. But one of the gentlemen hosting us just handed me a note asking me to tell you this. You have forty-eight hours to hand over Griswold.”
“I understand.”
“The note also has a big ‘fourteen’ on it. As in fourteenth floor. Get it?”
“I sure do.”
“I’m supposed to hang up now. Bye.”
“Good-bye, Timothy.”
102 Richard Stevenson
And then he was gone.
I repeated the conversation to Pugh and Detective Panu.
“They’re on the fourteenth floor somewhere. We’re supposed to believe, apparently, that if we don’t hand over Griswold within forty-eight hours, Timothy and Kawee will be shoved off a high balcony.”
Pugh and Panu looked grim. “So sorry,” Panu said.
“How many buildings are there in Bangkok fourteen or more stories high? Any idea?”
Pugh and Panu looked at each other. “Many hundreds,”
Pugh said. “Twenty-five years ago this would have been easy.
Today Bangkok is Houston or Miami in that regard.”
“Yes, but all you have to do is check all the fourteenth floors in Bangkok. That limits it, right? Even if there are, say, thirty-five hundred buildings with fourteenth floors, you’d need only thirty-five hundred or, even better, sixty-five hundred officers to do a sweep. That doesn’t seem insurmountable, does it? How many cops are there in Bangkok?”
Again, both Pugh and Detective Panu looked at each other gravely, and then at me. Panu said, “It’s a matter of priorities.”
He gave a wan apologetic shrug.
“What we’re talking about here,” Pugh said, “is a declasse Thai lady-boy, a nobody. And Mr. Timothy is a mere tourist, less than a nobody in Thailand. While it is true that tourists are gods in Thailand collectively speaking, individually they do not merit a tremendous amount of interest, particularly by the police. Am I putting that too harshly, Khun Panu?”
“A little, perhaps.”
I said, “What if we paid for the services of the police?
Would that help? Perhaps some senior officer, a captain or even general.”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Pugh said and glanced at Detective Panu, who shrugged mildly.
“Okay, you locate that official and I’ll come up with the payoff. How much are we talking here? Twenty cases of Johnny Walker? Sixty? Or is it cash — US dollars? Euros?”
Panu said, “Bahts make a nice gift.”
“How many bahts?”
“I’ve heard that fifty thousand can be helpful. That’s about sixteen thousand dollars, I believe. Unless the US dollar has grown even weaker in the past hour.”
“It’s not just a question of national pride,” Pugh said. “The baht is currently a sounder currency than the dollar. So your client, Mrs. Griswold, will provide the funding for this additional expense?”
I told them about the e-mail from Ellen Griswold calling me off the case because, she claimed, she had heard from her ex-husband, and he insisted he was in no danger and was merely embarrassed over some personal matter.
“Therefore,” I said, “any further expenses will have to be met by Gary Griswold himself, who plainly is in big trouble.
What this means is, we have to find Griswold fast. Then, (a) extract cash from him to pay off your for-profit police department to prod it to do its job, (b) find out from him what the hell is going on here so that we can help get him out of the rotten situation he’s in, and (c) — if those two approaches fail
— have Griswold in hand so that we can trade him for Timmy and Kawee and hope that he can hand over to these people, whoever they are, whatever it is they want from him, thus keeping Griswold from being shoved off a balcony.”
Pugh said, “I like your tour d’horizon, Mr. Don. It’s dead-on.
And your willingness to sacrifice poor Mr. Gary, if necessary, in order to save your boyfriend and the katoey is admirable. There are degrees of innocence in this complex situation. And Mr.
Gary, should he perish, would be fulfilling a karma plainly nudged into existence by his own klutziness. Not that we shouldn’t do everything we can to save this wayward farang’s sorry ass from whatever mishigas he has waded into of his own volition.”
104 Richard Stevenson
“Timmy, of course, would have a few choice words for me if he were here,” I said. “He’s a bit of a moral absolutist. He would allow for no cold-blooded choices of the type I have described. But let’s just get him back, and then he can lecture all of us to his heart’s content.”
Pugh said, “And what if Mr. Gary is unwilling or, God forbid, unable to underwrite our efforts and those of the hardworking Royal Thai Police? What if we track him down and he laughs in our faces and tells us all to go do what is anatomically impossible for most people — not that there aren’t exceptions to that rule at certain clubs I could mention in Surawong? Or what if we locate Mr. Gary and he is penniless?
This could get complicated, I think.”
“If Griswold can’t produce whatever cash that’s needed, then I’ll go down to the ATM on Rama IV Road near the Topmost and stand there for half an hour with my MasterCard pumping bahts into a bag. That won’t be a problem. Please go ahead right now and make whatever sleazy arrangements are appropriate with your sleazy police department’s sleazy higher-ups.”
Pugh and Panu both squinted at me and nodded.
I remembered Timmy’s warnings to me about getting mixed up in this case. Timothy, the grounded one. Timothy, the sensible one. Timothy, the seer.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“So, Bob. What’s the deal with the Griswolds? What I’m dealing with here seems to be not exactly what it seemed to be when you sent Ellen Griswold to me to track down her wayward ex-husband and wayward current brother in-law in Thailand.” I explained what had transpired in the previous twenty-four hours and asked the lawyer, “So, what I want to know from you is, can the Griswolds be trusted, or what?”
I had reached Chicarelli on the golf course Sunday morning in Clifton Park, near Albany. When I called his house, his wife was reluctant to violate the sanctity of Chicarelli’s Sabbath golf game by blabbing his cell phone number for a business matter.
But when I said the urgent situation I was calling about had to do with the Griswolds, a name of consequence in Albany, she recited the number pronto.
“They’ve got Timmy? Christ, Strachey, have you notified the US embassy? They’ve gotta bring in the FBI, would be my thinking. Going at this on your own sounds very risky to me.”
“It may come to that, but my Thai sources say the cops here are more effectively inspired by cash than by hectoring from farangs in suits. There’s a big DEA station here, but I’d probably have to convince those guys that there’s a major heroin shipment involved in order to get their attention.”
“You might want to consider saying just that.”
“I might, in the end. For all I know at this point, it could even be true. But what about the Griswolds? What’s the story with them? Ellen sends me flying over here and gives me pretty much carte blanche to do anything I can to save her ex and his thirty-eight mil. Then she e-mails me some lame crap about he’s A-okay, it’s all a misunderstanding, and come on home. Plainly the guy really is up to his ears in some stinking mess involving influential fortune-tellers and who knows what kind of criminal weirdos. It seems like half the goons in Bangkok want to get hold of Griswold and…I hate to think. Give him a shove. My 106 Richard Stevenson question to you is, why would Ellen call me off? What’s her game here? It’s possible that Gary lied to her about being safe, but why would she be so ready to believe the lie? Bob, I’m confused.”