Ek stood in the entryway to one of the buildings with two more of Pugh’s operatives. He beckoned for us to move with him into the shadows. He said, “That one,” and indicated the structure forty or fifty feet across the driveway. We moved forward a few steps and peered up, and I could sense that, like me, everybody was counting to fourteen.
When the men with the ropes and bamboo poles arrived, Ek signaled for them to follow one of his team into our building.
Miss Aroon joined this group now and was handed a bulging Central World shopping bag by Ek. I watched as all of them entered a stairwell and disappeared.
We were far enough off Rangnum Road that passersby would not be aware of anything out of the ordinary going on in the complex. We had the privacy we needed to do what we needed to do. Just as the kidnappers had the privacy they had needed to hold Timmy and Kawee captive for the previous forty hours, and the privacy they would need to hurl them off a fourteenth-floor balcony after sunset.
I said to Pugh, “Where’s the seer? He’s up where Ek is heading?”
“Khun Surapol was snatched as he approached Wat Mahathat, his neighborhood temple, for morning prayers. He was told that he was needed to bless a construction project and would soon be released and even amply rewarded. Then Ek and his lads hauled him over here and marched the eminent seer up to the fourteenth floor of this building. Its balcony looks directly across to the balcony of the condo where the captives are being held.”
I stepped into the sunlight and looked up again, and wondered if we shouldn’t be rigging circus trapeze nets around the building across the way. I guessed, though, that no net would support an adult plummeting from fourteen floors up. I said, “Wouldn’t the kidnappers have spotted us by now?”
“It doesn’t matter. They may phone General Yodying, but he will be neutralized within a matter of minutes.”
“Rufus, I’ll have to trust you that you can get away with this.”
Pugh said, “Ih.”
176 Richard Stevenson
After a few minutes, Pugh’s cell phone chirped. He spoke briefly in Thai, then said to me, “That was Ek. It’s time to make our move.”
At Pugh’s signal, Sek and Egg accompanied Griswold out from the shadows. Both men wore shoulder holsters containing long-handled Chinese revolvers. We walked across the unfinished driveway and entered the second unfinished apartment building.
Pugh said, “Let’s you and I, Khun Don, lead the way and make a memorable first impression on these boorish fellows.”
In what would have been the lobby of the apartment building, we passed the two openings to the empty elevator shafts. All around us was raw concrete with its limestone smell.
It was damp in the Bangkok pre-monsoon humidity and smelled like the inside of a wet cave. It took me back to my spelunking days in college, and I wondered what in the world I had in mind back then crawling around in those claustrophobic spaces, cold and muddy, and in danger in the rainy spring months of being crushed or, more likely, trapped and drowned.
Which was the most awful way of dying? Drowning? Being compressed and suffocated? Falling? As we climbed upward and passed the exposed elevator shafts on each floor, I thought to myself, Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall.
We were all getting winded in the heat, except for Griswold, the manic cyclist. He was more fit than any of us and probably had never smoked. Pugh, Sek, Egg and I were soon panting, and I finally got to see a Thai perspire. I thought of Timmy and Kawee, who two days earlier had been force-marched up these same stairs, probably unsure whether once they got to where they were going, they might be hurled down an elevator shaft or off a balcony.
Pugh was quietly counting off the floors. When he got to the twelfth, he said, “Fourteen is next.”
Sek and Egg had drawn their revolvers by now and were following Pugh, me and Griswold closely. As we turned onto the stairs leading to the fourteenth floor, four men appeared above us and we stopped. Two of them held guns, and the other two held good-sized bamboo canes.
There was a rapid back-and-forth in Thai between Pugh and one of the men holding a revolver. He was large and sullen, and I thought, yes, finally, the knocker-over of Austrian tourists.
As we climbed the final flight of stairs, I said to Pugh,
“That’s Khun Yai?”
“The one and only.”
We were led into what would have been — and I assumed what might one day still become — a large fourteenth-floor apartment. The place was set up like a campsite. Camp stoves were on a table in one corner next to a portable refrigerator. I could smell the soup in a pot. Straw mats were spread around on the floor. There were gas lanterns atop a pile of crates next to a card table with stools around it. Apparently we had interrupted a poker game, for four hands lay facedown around the table with a pile of bahts in the middle..
With two of their men pointing guns and two of ours doing likewise, any shoot-out would have been short and ugly.
Everyone in the room must have been acutely aware of this, though nobody lowered his revolver.
I saw no sign of Timmy and Kawee and figured they were in another section of the apartment.
Pugh said something in Thai, and Yai apparently indicated that one of his goons should go and fetch the captives. One of them kept looking at Griswold and then down at a photo he had, apparently to make sure we had not delivered a fake Griswold. It was plain that Pugh had done what he had told me earlier he was going to do. In Thai, he had informed these men that we were turning Griswold over to them in return for Timmy and Kawee. He said Griswold was not resisting because he now realized it was his fate to pay for his sins. He had caused important men to lose both money and face, each an unforgivable violation in the Thai moral universe. And he knew he would have to pay, and he was prepared to do so.
178 Richard Stevenson
Griswold said nothing. Apparently he was fluent in Thai, for he followed the conversation with a look that was fascinated though faintly bug-eyed.
Big Yai got on his cell phone to somebody — General Yodying? — and seconds after he rang off, one of the gang came back leading Timmy and Kawee. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were bound at the ankles too, so they had to take little dainty steps. They weren’t in the clothes I had last seen them in but were in cargo shorts and T-shirts.
They were both sweating. Timmy’s hair was a rat’s nest and Kawee’s lip gloss looked chewed off. On the front of Timmy’s yellow T-shirt were the words Thailand — Land of Smiles.
When Timmy and Kawee saw us, their faces fast-forwarded through shock, relief, joy, apprehension and fright. Then they just stared at us, hyperalert.
I said, “We’re getting you guys out of here. It won’t be long now.”
“And with hours to spare,” Timmy said. “Thank you for that.”
Yai indicated that his gang should free Timmy and Kawee from their bonds. They quickly did so, using sharp knives from the food preparation area to slice through the ropes. Timmy and Kawee began rubbing their wrists and moving their legs about, as if they were warming up for a ping-pong tournament.
Next, Yai directed two of his men to tie Griswold up.
That’s when Pugh said something in Thai that made Yai look out the door to the balcony with a start.
We had a clear view across the way to the second building in the condo complex. From the balcony opposite us, two people were dangling. Each was upside down. Ropes were tied around their ankles, and the ropes were attached to bamboo poles held in place by four of Pugh’s men, Nitrate, Ek and two others.
One of the dangling people was Khun Surapol Sutharat, the seer who had been providing ace astrological advice to the kidnappers. The other dangling person was a middle-aged woman in a fashionable Siamese gold-colored blouse and long THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 179 green skirt, the skirt now semicomically bunched up above her waist, exposing the woman’s black panties. Someone had lowered a cell phone on a wire to Khun Surapol and we could see him frantically trying to hold it up — down, really — to his ear.