“God, now I feel terrible about getting you mixed up in one of my family’s typical messes. Listen, just do whatever you can 124 Richard Stevenson to get Timothy safely back with you. That’s the important thing.
And that poor Thai man too. Have the kidnappers threatened them in any way?”
“Yes, they have. So I need your ex-husband’s help as soon as possible. There’s a deadline, which is later tomorrow. Gary will know who these people are, we can reasonably assume, and perhaps know where to find them. So I do need to talk to him, and fast.”
“Well, I have total confidence in you, Don. Bob Chicarelli said you were a bit of a pain in the rear end sometimes but totally committed to whatever you took on and totally professional. You’ll know what to do, if anybody will. Good luck, and do keep me posted. So, it sounds like you should have everything more or less under control by later tomorrow?”
“I certainly hope so, Ellen.”
“I’ll wait for your report.”
I rang off and told Pugh what Ellen had told me.
“She’s a doozy of a client,” Pugh said. “How much did you get up front?”
“Ten K. But the plane tickets were forty-four hundred. So with the bribes to your police department, I’m already in the hole over nineteen thousand dollars. Plus what I owe you.
Griswold’s thirty-eight mil had better be largely intact.
Southeast Asia is supposed to be such a bargain tourist destination. What am I doing wrong, Rufus?”
Grinning, Pugh said, “You’ve had a run of bad luck, Mr.
Don, and you are defenseless in the face of it. Like most farangs, you rely solely on your brainpower and your financial assets, both of which are finite. I’m doing everything I can to compensate for your limitations, however, and between the two of us we’re going to pull the rabbit out of the hat. So, do not despair, my friend, do not despair.”
I looked at Pugh and said, “Rufus, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He guffawed. “You must be amazed that Thailand functions at all.”
Miss Aroon came in leading another man into the office, and Pugh got up to greet him, smiling and bowing and wai-ing.
Thunska Rujawongsanti, the computer consultant, was small and round, and appeared to be somewhere between the ages of fourteen and fifty-eight. He looked more Chinese than Thai. I knew that there had been a certain amount of intermarriage since the nineteenth century, when the Chinese began arriving in Siam in great numbers to — as a Chinese-Thai journalist had once explained it to me — teach the Thais how to count.
Khun Thunska had Griswold’s laptop with him and opened it on Pugh’s desk.
“So, what was the password?” I asked.
Thunska shrugged. “I have no idea. We just dispensed with that type of foolishness and spoke to this little honey of a Mac on a higher plane. It never knew what hit it.”
I gave Pugh an Is-this-guy-putting-me-on? look, and he said,
“No Thai juju was involved. Just some trade secrets and perhaps some Johnny Walker for a Mac company representative in Singapore.”
Thunska acted as if he hadn’t heard this. He was busy juicing up the Mac. He quickly produced an image on the screen and said, “I wanted you to lay eyes on this. I would have phoned it in, but you have to see this to believe it.”
“Who is it?” I asked. “The foreigner appears to be Gary Griswold. But who are the Thais? One does look familiar.”
Pugh said, “Oh, baby.”
The photo was of three men standing with drinks in their hands on the balcony of an apartment. They were casually but elegantly dressed, and they were relaxed and smiling. The digital image seemed to be of an unremarkable social occasion until Pugh identified the two men standing with Griswold.
“The man on Griswold’s left is former Minister of Finance Anant na Ayudhaya. He was removed from office in the coup last year but is generally understood to control the ministry under the current restored nominally democratic government.
The man on Griswold’s right is the one whose photo you have 126 Richard Stevenson perhaps seen, Mr. Don. It is Khun Khunathip, the esteemed fortune-teller who fatally went over a high railing just two days ago. Perhaps it was the very railing he is leaning against in this photo.”
“I believe, yes, that that is the unlucky railing,” Thunska said. “You can make out the Westin Grande in the background, suggesting that this photo was indeed taken in Khun Khunathip’s apartment in Sukhumvit.”
I said, “This is big stuff, no? Shouldn’t the police be told about this?”
Pugh and Thunska exchanged quick glances, and Pugh said to me, “Mr. Don, you are half right.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I walked down to an ATM on Surawong and withdrew another twenty-five thousand baht. I had nearly maxed out my MasterCard, so I started in on my American Express account.
Pugh bundled the cash into a shopping bag and sent Ek over to the police station on Sala Daeng Soi 1 with it.
Pugh phoned his own police sources to check on the investigation into the death of the renowned seer, Khun Khunathip. Miss Aroon had brought up the morning newspapers, both Thai and English language, and while all the papers had the soothsayer’s passing emblazoned across their front pages, none speculated on the details or meaning of his death. The great man had simply “died in a fall.”
Pugh’s police contacts told him that an actual investigation was under way, as opposed to a fake investigation. Pugh said this could mean that either important persons had nothing to do with the apparent homicide and wanted justice done, or that important persons had everything to do with the apparent homicide and they wished to gauge how much was going to leak out before they either declared the seer’s fall accidental or found a hapless scapegoat from the Thai lower social orders to take the rap.
Ek drove Pugh and me inch by inch through the morning traffic miasma over to the Topmost so that I could change clothes and Pugh could fortify himself with the bacon at the breakfast buffet. On the way, we tried to work up a story I could tell the kidnappers so that we could buy time if we needed it. Nothing we came up with sounded any more convincing than the truth. Pugh said the kidnappers undoubtedly had their own police sources — some of them possibly the same as Pugh’s — and the kidnappers would know that we had been unable to track down Griswold. They were simply using us to accomplish what they had been unable to do, 128 Richard Stevenson thinking that we had better information than theirs and more resources. But we didn’t.
I repeated to Pugh what I had told him earlier during an attempt to deconstruct Ellen Griswold’s phone call. “It had to have been Thomsatai that tipped off Griswold that we were looking for him. If so, Thomsatai has to have a phone number or some other way of contacting Griswold. If we can get him to talk, Thomsatai has to be our most reliable route to Griswold.”
“Possibly,” Pugh said. “Though Griswold may have a friendly police contact who alerted him. As soon as I began asking the cops about Griswold, word would have spread.
There’s a network of gay police officers, to cite one possible mechanism for alarms being sent Griswold’s way.”
“There’s no stigma attached to being gay in the police department?”
“There’s some, but not a lot. Once in a while you hear about some prick senior officer who’s hard on gays. Some of them picked up these bad attitudes from Christians or the Chinese or the US military. But most cops couldn’t care less. When I was in the police, a bunch of us were at a drunken beach party where all the guys ended up naked in a heap on the sand screwing and getting screwed. It was like a kind of larky extension of that day’s volleyball game, and everybody thought of it as just having a nice social occasion. Naughty but harmless. And nearly all those guys were straight, I think. The tops outnumbered the bottoms, as I recall, and I’m guessing that that’s significant.”