Pugh sat nearby on a stool at an espresso stand and sipped coffee from a tiny paper cup. Two young woman had set up their own miniature Starbucks-like operation, about four feet by four feet, the electric coffeemaker powered by a cable that ran up the side of a building and vanished into the fat spaghetti maze of black wires strung just above the sidewalk along Rama IV Road. I remembered Timmy’s story of one of the earliest Peace Corps deaths. A volunteer was killed not by a wild animal or an obscure tropical disease but by electrocution while playing poker with four Thais during a thunderstorm. I recalled this as a characteristically Thai way of dying prematurely, and now I could add defenestration to any such list.
As Pugh sat watching me extract currency from a humming and blinking machine on the side of a building, it occurred to me that he might be wondering if he would be left in the lurch, now that Ellen Griswold was about to sever my expense account bounty. I assured Pugh that he would be paid, no matter what. He said, “I only doubted that for a nanosecond.”
Detective Panu refused to participate in the delivery of the
“gift” to General Yodying — having made the initial setup calls, Panu then pointed out to me in a dignified tone that bribery 112 Richard Stevenson was illegal in Thailand, and he had no intention of physically handling the tainted bahts — so Pugh said he would make the delivery. We swung by a police station on Sala Daeng Soi 1 and Pugh pranced in with the shopping bag and out again in less than a minute.
I said, “Will this guy follow through?”
“I believe so.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“Is Yodying a crook? Without doubt. But for the moment he is our crook, Khun Don. He’s what we’ve got.”
“Rufus, you’re so reassuring.”
We had used the scanner at the Internet cafe/seamstress shop and e-mailed Timmy’s passport photo to the general.
Within a matter of hours, supposedly, a police sweep of all the fourteenth floors in greater Bangkok would be undertaken.
Each cop would be armed with a picture of Timmy and a description of Kawee down to the fuchsia toenails.
I said, “So, are there also six hundred judges issuing several thousand search warrants for all those fourteenth-floor apartments and offices?”
“No,” Pugh said. “You would have to pay extra for that. But don’t sweat it.”
Pugh took a call from Jampen Noo, his field supervisor. She told him the surveillance team was in place inside and outside the Internet cafe in On Nut from which Griswold placed his phone calls to Kawee. If Griswold showed up, they would snatch him and hold him as unostentatiously as possible in a van parked nearby until Pugh and I could get there.
Meanwhile, Pugh and I headed back over to Griswold’s condo to look for the laptop computer Timmy said he and Kawee had found in Griswold’s ground-floor storage bin. Mr.
Thomsatai greeted us with a deep and respectful wai and the phoniest Thai smile I had ever witnessed. Why was this guy not behind bars? That was going to have to wait, along with a number of this case’s other nagging deferred matters.
We looked through the storage bin and found nothing there of use. More art books. A couple of empty canvas travel bags with Miami-Bangkok airline baggage tags still affixed. There was also what looked like a bike-riding helmet.
I asked Thomsatai, “Does Griswold have a bicycle?”
“Mr. Gary have bike. Good bike. Italian. But it is not here. I think he took it to where he go.”
Pugh said, “I’ll tell my crew to watch for a possible arrival at the Internet cafe by bicycle.” He made a quick call and did so.
Up in the apartment, the rooms looked surprisingly undisturbed, given that a forced abduction had taken place there several hours earlier. Apparently Timmy and Kawee had not put up a struggle. If the goons had guns — which they did, according to both Thomsatai and the pistol-whipped security guard — resistance would have made no sense. I didn’t know about Kawee, but Timmy was nothing if not sensible.
To our amazement, a laptop computer lay on Griswold’s desk. Presumably, this was the one Timmy and Kawee had retrieved from the downstairs storage area. So, the kidnappers seemed to want Griswold himself and not necessarily the kind of information he stored in his computer. What did this mean?
Or, did the boneheads simply forget to bring the device along?
Pugh and I messed around with the MacBook Pro but couldn’t come up with a password that would get the thing up and running. We tried all the obvious stuff: Mango, and the earlier Thai boyfriends; plus Buddha; Dharma; Sangha; Griswold’s birth date; Toot Toot, Lou Horn’s art gallery; Algonquin; and a lot of other details from Griswold’s daily existence. We even tried bicycle and cruising speed and past lives. Nothing worked.
Pugh said, “I know a guy who can get into this. I’ll call him.”
“How soon can he do it?”
“Soon.”
Pugh had the computer whiz on his speed dial and spoke to him in rapid Thai.
114 Richard Stevenson
“How come the cops didn’t take the computer with them?”
I said. “This place isn’t even being treated as a crime scene.”
“Like I said, it’s a low-priority matter. A lady-boy and a tourist.”
“Timmy warned me about this aspect of Thailand.”
Pugh said nothing, just indicated that I should take a seat while he took care of something. I remained standing, though, while he went over to Griswold’s shrine. A box of matches lay nearby on a table, and Pugh used one to light several candles and a couple of joss sticks in front of the shrine. He had one of the photos of Timmy that we had e-mailed to the police, and Pugh leaned this picture against the shrine next to the candles and the incense. He sat himself down on the straw mat in front of the shrine, his legs crossed and back straight. He bowed his head. The serene Buddha figure looked out at Pugh, its left palm raised in the “do not be afraid” mudra.
I stood awkwardly for a few minutes, then walked over and slid open the door to the terrace. The night heat slammed into me, dulling my senses. I held on to the railing and looked down at the parking lot and gardens far below. When I turned away from this abyss, I noticed that a few leaves had fallen off the orchid and azalea plants on the terrace, and I picked up the leaves and dropped them into the crocks holding the flowers.
The watering can nearby was about half full, and I watered the flowers and the bamboo plants.
When I reentered the apartment, Pugh was still seated silently in front of the Buddha, the candles flickering and the incense smoking up the room. I went over and sat down next to Pugh, also in the lotus position. I felt a twinge of something in my back, so my position turned into something a little more nasturtium-like. I sat there with Pugh for some minutes trying to lose my fear, as Pugh apparently had done in the presence of the Buddha. I envied Pugh and loved the way his connection to a world far beyond the mundane gave him courage and clarity of mind. Sitting there with him, I myself was much calmer now than I had been earlier. But I was still scared to death.
We waited for word of the police sweep of fourteenth floors all over Bangkok in Pugh’s office on Surawong. At midnight, the Sunday night traffic down below was still bumper-tobumper, though not so noisy as it might have been. I remembered how in the ’70s Bangkok streets were always impossibly clogged and endlessly frustrating and how the Thais nonetheless rarely honked their horns. To blare one’s horn merely out of impatience was to demonstrate jai rawn, a hot temper — literally hot heart — and what every Thai aspired to and valued above all was jai yen, a self-possessed inner being and a cool demeanor.