Pugh took out his own phone and hit a speed-dial number.
After a moment, he handed the phone to Yai and gestured toward the dangling soothsayer. “Somebody wants to palaver with you,” he said.
Yai spoke some Thai into the phone and then listened. He looked confused, bordering on panicky. It didn’t help his frame of mind when the men holding the bamboo pole across the way began to bob it up and down, as the seer and the woman next to him gesticulated and clawed at the side of the building.
Yai took out his own phone now and frantically dialed.
Pugh said, “Tell the general that that is his wife Paveena Hanwilai over there, the birthday girl herself. If you and the general don’t do as we say, we’ll drop her skinny ass fourteen floors to the pavement below. And Khun Surapol will accompany her soul to paradise or to purgatory or to Newark Liberty International Airport — wherever. In any event, both of their corporeal worldly remains will leave an impression, for the general and for many others in the vicinity of Rangnam Road.”
Now Yai spoke into his phone in rapid Thai. He scowled furiously then said in English, looking at Griswold and me,
“Wait.”
The general was no doubt phoning his wife to see if she had actually been abducted. She had in fact been snatched, Pugh had told me, from Wat Mahathat, where she prayed each morning with her soothsayer. She was not, however, hanging from a pole across the way. She was locked in a janitor’s closet in a disused primary school next to the temple, minus her cell phone, her skirt and blouse and — just to play it safe — her black underwear. To preserve her modesty, Mrs. Paveena had been provided a large plastic garbage bag with a hole on top for her head to stick out and holes on the sides for her arms. The woman dangling next to Khun Surapol in Paveena Hanwilai’s garments was Miss Aroon — who had never been an acrobat exactly, but had for a time some years earlier fired ping-pong balls from her vagina to the cheers of drunken tourists at a club in Patpong.
Suddenly Yai was listening closely on his phone and nodding. He soon said something to Pugh in Thai. Pugh smiled amiably and said — I knew this much Thai — “ Capkun kap, Khun Yai.” Thank you so much, Mr. Yai.
Then Yai narrowed his eyes and hissed out two or three more brief sentences. Pugh shrugged and said something that from his look could have been “I’ll take note of that.”
Pugh said to me, “Mr. Yai has informed me that today the general is going to release all of us. But by the end of the month he will have killed every last one of us. What do you think of that?”
“I find that pronouncement unsettling, Rufus. What do you think of it?”
“Well, I think the general has another think coming.”
Griswold had followed all this with a look of bemused fascination. Kawee looked more or less relaxed by now, too.
Timmy just looked queasy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The first shots were fired at our minivan no more than fifteen minutes later as we drove south on Ratchaprasong Road.
Nitrate sensed what was about to happen when motorcyclists pulled up on either side of us simultaneously. As he gunned the engine, I caught just a millisecond’s glimpse of the raised long-barreled revolver pointed at my side of the van. Nitrate did an instant U-turn — southbound traffic was heavy, northbound lighter — and shot northward. The second van in our convoy followed, and I could hear shots fired behind us.
Ek, in the seat behind me, had shoved open his window and was ready to fire at anybody within sight who was firing at us, but Pugh said something in Thai and Ek held his fire. Pugh told me, “We’re not gonna kill anybody on the street. We’ll get on the expressway. No motos are allowed on the expressway.”
Pugh was on his cell phone now, consulting the second minivan, driven by Egg. Griswold was in the second van, Timmy and Kawee were in ours. Kawee was taking all this in with a look of intense curiosity. Timmy just looked numb.
Still on his phone, Pugh said to us, “Egg’s van took fire, but no one was hit.”
Timmy was next to me, clutching my thigh. Kawee, on the other side of Timmy, was hanging onto an armrest and looking this way and that.
One of the motos came at us again from the left. As the driver raised his arm, Ek veered into him hard, and the attacking moto went over on its side and slid at high speed into the oncoming southbound traffic. There was a lot of crashing and banging behind us, but Ek straightened out the minivan and sped ahead. The other minivan was close on our tail, with the expressway entrance just ahead.
At the last second, Nitrate swerved onto the freeway, where motorcycles were not permitted. The second van was keeping pace with us, and so was the second moto guy, not a law
182 Richard Stevenson abiding citizen. As we shot down the ramp and onto the expressway, the gun-wielding cyclist was making a pass at the van Egg was driving. I turned around and watched as Egg slowed briefly, and an object shot out the side window of the second minivan and hit the moto gunman hard on the side of the head. The object splattered and the motorcycle flipped end over end, its driver doing cartwheels parallel to the vehicle, a horrifying choreography of metal and flesh dancing in tandem along a long ribbon of concrete.
Kawee exclaimed, “Oi, oi, oi. He in hell now.”
Timmy had been looking more traumatized by the minute, though I knew he would survive all this when he peered over and said to me, “I feel as if I’ve gone to the movies for a picture I really wanted to see, and first I had to sit through an entire day and a half of noisy, stupid trailers for movies I would not dream of paying money to look at.”
“It’s the story of your life with me, Timothy. You moved in with Marcello Mastroianni and woke up with Bruce Willis.”
He laughed lightly.
I asked Pugh, “What was it that hit that guy on the bike?”
“Miss Aroon’s durian. Normally I discourage my employees from carrying this large, spiky, melonlike fruit along on operations. Some Thais find its pungent smell enchanting, and some Thais — like most farangs — consider its stench revolting. But Miss Aroon needs her durian and usually has one stowed under the seat of the vehicle she’s in. She had one along today, and of course, she has a strong right arm and impeccable aim.”
One of the Thais in the car said something in Thai that made the others guffaw. Pugh said, “He asked, ‘How do we know she used her arm?’”
We had slowed to a normal speed now and the other minivan was close behind as we moved steadily eastward and then, I noted on the overhead signs, southward. Pugh’s phone sounded and he spoke briefly and then instructed Ek to pull over to the shoulder of the highway. He did so, and the second minivan followed us. I looked back to see the guardrail-side door open on the other vehicle, and the soothsayer Surapol Sutharat step out and stand by the roadside. Then the door closed and both vans drove on.
I said, “Do you think Khun Surapol predicted this turn of events, Rufus?”
“He would have had an inkling. The man is not stupid. He’s corrupt, but not entirely incompetent with his charts.”
“So now what? Do we ride around on the freeways of Bangkok until April twenty-seventh? We’ll run out of gas.”
“Nope. Not necessary. What I think is, we all deserve a few days at the seashore.”
“Sounds good. Can we pick up our bathing suits at the hotel?”
“No, Khun Don. I am sorry. We must proceed directly to Hua Hin. It is a pleasant town a few hours’ drive south of Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand. Hua Hin is such a desirable getaway spot that Jack and Jackie themselves have quite an impressive palatial hideaway there.”
“Well, if it’s good enough for Jack.”