CHAPTER FIVE
I phoned Timmy from Atlanta and told him my connecting flight to Albany would be over an hour late, getting in close to midnight, and I would not leave for Thailand until Friday. I said I had some things I needed to check with the Griswolds — and about the Griswolds.
I gave Timmy a quick summary of my Key West visit with Horn, Weems and Romeo, my informative session with Sandy Tessig, and my brief visit early that afternoon with Elise Flanagan. Lou Horn had driven me over to her house so that we might get a firsthand account of her sighting of Griswold on the Thai-Cambodian border. Wan and sinewy in a gauzy dun-colored sack of some kind, Mrs. Flanagan at first insisted that the man she saw had to have been Gary Griswold. He had been her dear friend for years. But then, she said, the man she saw did look a lot like Raul Castro, and that was confusing. As she went on, I could see Horn’s now-faint hopes fade even further.
I told Timmy I had booked just one seat on the JFK Bangkok flight a day and a half later, but that it probably wasn’t too late for him to join me.
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Timothy,” I said, “when did you become such a travel wuss? You’re Mister Peace Corps. This isn’t India, I know, but you loved India way back when. And, like me with Southeast Asia, you’ve talked about going back someday. We could wrap up this strange Griswold business in Bangkok and then stop over in your old village in Andhra Pradesh on the way home.
Most of it would be on Ellen Griswold’s dime. It’s the travel opportunity of a lifetime.”
He laughed. “Mo Driscoll, one of the guys in my India group, went back to his village in Maharashtra last year. Some people actually remembered him. He said word spread all around that the guy who wiped his ass with paper was back.”
“Sargent Shriver would be touched.”
44 Richard Stevenson
“It’s actually a telling Peace Corps story. Yes, we made some nice connections while we were there, and may even have done some useful work in India. But we were always convinced that basically the villagers thought of us as Martians.”
“Were any of Driscoll’s chickens still flapping around when he went back?”
“He wasn’t in poultry development,” Timmy said. “Mo was in the family-planning program.”
“Apparently it didn’t work.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure.”
“Yeah, if it hadn’t been for the Peace Corps, India’s population today might be one-point-three billion people instead of one-point-two.”
He laughed, but not heartily. Timmy and his Peace Corps pals could themselves be cavalier when discussing their youthful development work. But when others cast doubt, they often became stern. I deeply envied him his Asia experience, though.
Peace beats war any day.
“Of course, I want to go back to India,” he said. “I just don’t want to be a nervous wreck when I get there. Or show up with a bloody hole in my head. Or a boyfriend with a hole in his.”
“I don’t know why you’re fixating on the Bangkok drive-by shooting statistics. We don’t know that anything remotely like that has happened to Griswold, or is likely to. Sure, there’s reason to worry about the guy. But let’s not leap to any conclusions. My own plan is to take it one cautious step at a time.”
“Is it possible,” he said, “that one reason you want so badly for me to come with you is that you don’t quite trust yourself over there alone? That you’re a little afraid that you’ll fall in love with the place the way Gary Griswold did? The place, and of course all those happy-go-lucky, silky-skinned, sanuk-loving Mangos? And if I go along, then you’re much more likely to retain some grip on reality and come back to where you belong in a timely manner? Since I don’t know Bangkok at all, I THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 45 wouldn’t be all that useful over there. Surely you know that. So I’m just trying to figure out what it is that’s actually going on here.”
After a long moment, I said, “Well. So you think maybe I want you to come along so that you can be my mother?”
“No, not your mother. Just your boyfriend of many years gone by, as well as many years to come. Anyway, that’s certainly what it sounds like to me.”
“Okay,” I said, “what if I do maybe want to re-fall in love with Thailand — Thailand in peacetime — and maybe I want you to come along so that you can fall in love with Thailand too? We can re-fall in love with the Land of Smiles — yes, drive-by shootings too, but mainly the Land of Smiles — together. Doesn’t that sound just as plausible as what you just said? Whatever the hell it was you just said.”
Now Timmy was quiet. Then he said, “That I would have to think about.”
When I got home just after one in the morning, Timmy was snoring exuberantly — “calling the hogs,” as his Aunt Moira called it — and I went online to see if I could get Google to cough up some answers.
The deaths of Max and Bertha Griswold got considerable play in the Albany Times Union in early June of 1993. He had been a business leader, and both were benefactors of the arts and numerous Jewish and other charities. So it was shocking to many when the couple, who were in their early sixties, died in the crash of a Piper Comanche piloted by the aircraft’s owner, Dave Kane, who was also killed. The plane had gone down in a pasture as it flew from the Albany County Airport to Rochester, where the Griswolds were to have received an award in recognition of Algonquin Steel’s in-kind contributions to a concert hall restoration project.
Follow-up stories said FAA investigators had found no mechanical problems with the aircraft, but that an autopsy showed the pilot, sixty-eight years old, had died of a heart 46 Richard Stevenson attack, probably before the plane went down, causing it to crash.
Somewhat less prominently reported was the disappearance just under a year later, in May 1994, of Sheila Griswold of Clifton Park, former wife of Algonquin Steel president and CEO
William Griswold. The initial story made page one below the fold, but follow-ups soon fell into the B section before vanishing altogether.
Mrs. Griswold, who had no children and had not remarried, apparently fell overboard from the Norwegian cruise liner Oslo Comfort on the night of May 21, somewhere off St. Kitts.
Shipmates had seen Mrs. Griswold in the dining room earlier.
She was reported missing the next morning when she failed to meet dining room companions for a book signing with mystery author Deidre McCubbertson and crew members discovered that her bed had not been slept in. Family members speculated, the paper said, that “alcohol could have been a factor in the tragedy,” though the speculating family members were not identified.
There were three daily English-language newspapers in Bangkok, the Post, the Nation, and the Daily Express, and I scanned their archives for mention of a Gary Griswold. None turned up.
Ellen Griswold had given me the name of the Bangkok bank Griswold had had his thirty-eight million wired to. It was just after noon Thursday in Thailand, and I got the Commercial Bank of Siam on the phone. I said I was Gary Griswold and needed an account balance. Mrs. Griswold had told me the account number, and I recited it. After some minutes, a man came on the line and told me in English that was a little hard for me to follow that the account had been closed. I said, oh, that’s right, I had the money moved to an interest-bearing account but I had forgotten the number, and may I please have it along with the balance? No, the man said, sounding a bit wary now, there was no other account in the name of Griswold at the Commercial Bank of Siam.
It didn’t seem as if it would help if I screamed, “Then, where the bloody hell is my thirty-eight million?” So I said,
“Oh, God, where did I transfer that cash to? Was it Bangkok Bank?”
This was taking a chance — was there such a thing? — but the man said, yes, I had done exactly that.