At ten thirty Griswold still had not returned, and we were all wondering about that. What was he doing out riding his bike around Bangkok this late at night? But a call came in from one of Pugh’s operatives, reporting that the list of abandoned partially constructed buildings at least fourteen stories high was on its way to where we were stationed. The list was expected within fifteen minutes, so Ek was summoned and told to wait up the street with his SWAT teams.
When the list arrived in a shoulder bag carried by a tiny young woman on a motorbike, Pugh and I got out and carried the bag up the soi to meet Ek. He had a convoy of three large four-by-fours, the type of swaggering road hogs Timmy would have immediately labeled socially irresponsible. Timmy, however, was not there to complain.
Some of Ek’s small army of muscular guys in T-shirts and cargo pants got out of the SUVs and stood on the sidewalk looking formidable, even menacing, just as a male farang on a bicycle rounded the corner from Sukhumvit Road, approached our assemblage, seemed to take in the scene at a glance, and quickly swooped around and began peddling furiously back up the soi. Pugh saw this and yelled something in Thai to the girl on the motorbike who had brought the bag. She was off like a shot after the man on the bicycle, and we jumped into the van and took off after both of them.
Pugh’s driver was so reckless that a couple of the taxi drivers we cut off actually honked their horns at us hot-heartedly and glared as we lurched down Sukhumvit Road. Within a block, we spotted Pugh’s little moto woman, who had knocked Griswold off his bicycle and was wrestling with him on the sidewalk in front of a 7-Eleven. We pulled up, hopped out, elbowed aside a dozen or so alarmed bystanders, and hauled both Griswold and his bike into the back of the van. We required privacy for what was about to transpire, so we sent Nongnat back to her place with Supornthip, the moto driver who had chased down Griswold. They climbed on Supornthip’s bike and sped away, and we took off close behind.
Griswold, who I recognized from his photographs, was in spandex biking shorts and a tank top, and he carried a shoulder bag, which Pugh wrenched away from him as one of Pugh’s muscle guys, who had the word Egg stenciled on his T-shirt, wrapped plastic handcuffs around Griswold’s wrists. Sweaty and decidedly nonaromatic, Griswold said nothing but was breathing fast. His bike helmet had slipped down low over his forehead, and Pugh carefully removed it and set it aside. Under his gleaming mess of helmet hair Griswold’s eyes were wide open, and he kept glancing at me.
Pugh gave the driver some instructions in Thai, and that’s when Griswold, apparently understanding Pugh’s words, said evenly, “Not a good idea.”
“Why should we not take you to your condo in Sathorn? It is your real home.”
Griswold studied us and said, “Who are you? Before I say anything else, I need to know that.”
“We are not your enemies. We are your friends,” Pugh told him and then instructed the driver in English to take us to Pugh’s office in Surawong, and to use the garage entrance.
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Griswold took this in and then looked at me curiously.
“Yeah. Okay. I think I understand what’s going on here. You
— Mr. Buttinski-Farang. What’s your name? Is it what I think it is?”
“Donald Strachey. I’m a private investigator. I was hired by your former wife and current sister-in-law Ellen Griswold to find you and to protect you if necessary, and to persuade you to stop acting like a ninny.”
Griswold laughed mirthlessly. “Ah, yes. The Albany private eye. I’ve heard about you. I thought you went home. You were supposed to fold up your tent and carry it back to the Hudson Valley. And yet here you are. I really need to talk to my former wife about her lax hiring practices.” He shook his head and pushed some sweat off his forehead with the backs of his cuffed hands.
“You are in spectacularly big trouble, Griswold. You do grasp that, do you not?”
“Am I in spectacular trouble? Well, yeah, I guess I am. How thoughtful of you to fly all the way across the Pacific Ocean to point that out to me. Thanks loads.”
My impulse was to grab the sarcastic asshole and bash him one, but I wasn’t sure what all he knew. And of course, Timmy would have disapproved of my striking a pacifist — if Griswold really was that. I seemed to be surrounded by peace-loving Buddhists who found room in their hearts to smack people with phone books, and others who hurled soothsayers and farang retirees off balconies.
I said, “My partner — boyfriend — Timothy Callahan has been abducted by violent criminals. This is entirely your fault, Griswold. These criminals are people who are in fact looking for you and have not been able to locate you — because you are hiding out from them — and they want to swap Timothy and your young friend Kawee for you. If recent events are any guide, once they get hold of you these people intend to toss you off a tall building. So we have developed two plans. Plan A is to rescue Timmy and Kawee and then to protect you. You’ll be happy to know that handing you over to these goons is only
Plan B. But before any of us carries out any plan at all, we need badly to understand exactly who and what it is we’re dealing with here. Griswold, you have some extensive explaining to do.
You can begin when I say go. Go.”
He looked surprisingly at ease. Griswold’s breathing had evened out now, and he lay on a straw mat in the back of the van with his head propped on a sack of rice. As I spoke, he listened carefully, his mouth dropping open when I told him Timmy and Kawee had been kidnapped and the kidnappers were willing to release the two once they had taken possession of Griswold. Unless he was faking it more brilliantly than seemed likely, Griswold was hearing about the kidnappings for the first time.
“Oh no,” Griswold said. “Poor Kawee. This is awful. He’s such a sweet-natured soul.”
“Apparently that is the case. And I can tell you that Timothy Callahan is a nice guy, too. So let’s get them both back real, real fast.”
“I was so naive,” Griswold said and shook his head. Then he looked up at me and said, “Please tell me. What is Timothy Callahan’s birth date?”
I thought, Oh, good grief, here we go. “I’m not telling you that. We’re not going to screw around with any astrology bullshit. What we’re going to do is get to the point, and we are going to do so starting right now.”
Griswold gazed up at me serenely. I was pathetic in his eyes.
A rationalist, a literalist, a lost soul. He said, “I’m just trying to get some perspective on where you and your friend fit into all of this. Nothing more.”
Then Pugh said, “I too am interested, Mr. Don. If you revealed to us where and on what date Mr. Timothy was born, this could help clarify the larger picture. I appreciate and respect your Western rationalist outlook, but just indulge us. And then we can proceed using more universal means. Phone books or whatever.”
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Pugh had used the word us, meaning Griswold and himself.
What was going on here? Wasn’t Pugh in a very real sense my contract employee?
I could hear Timmy snickering over all this, but I could also hear him bellowing, “Just tell them what they want to hear!”
I recited the year of Timmy’s birth and told Griswold,
“Timothy was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on November eleventh, at ten fourteen a.m. So?”
The van was making its way through the Monday night traffic northward and westward toward Surawong. We were traveling at a normal rate of speed now, observing all the traffic laws, blending in, not attracting attention.