Richard Stevenson: The 38 Million Dollar Smile

This was my fault. I should only have told him about the golden reclining Buddhas. I said, “You’re getting a distorted picture. New York City looks sinister and forbidding on a police blotter, too. I sometimes do work there. So do you. We like New York.”

“It’s true,” he said, “that there’s very little street crime in Bangkok. It’s peaceful in that respect. But if you’re doing business there — as Griswold may have been doing — look out. A favorite way of settling money disputes is for one party to hire a guy on a motorcycle to drive by and shoot the other party in the head. Extrajudicial killings by the police are routine.

Get this: in July two thousand one, a Bangkok newspaper ran a front-page story with the headline, ‘Police Death Squads Run Riot.’ In one region, the police general dealt with drug dealers by sending cops out to shoot them. ‘Our target,’ this police official said, ‘is to send one thousand traffickers to hell this year, to join some three hundred fifty before them.’ Could Griswold have gotten enmeshed in some gigantic drug deal? That could explain the so-called quick return on investment. If so, he could be six feet under in the backyard of a police station. Land of Smiles, my ass, Donald. The Thailand I am seeing in front of me here is bloody treacherous.”

22 Richard Stevenson

I leaned over his shoulder. “Timothy, this is great stuff.

Really helpful. Would you mind printing this for me? I’ll read it on the plane to Key West tomorrow. I’m going down to talk to Griswold’s friends there. It turns out they’re quite worried about him, too.”

“And then” — Timmy went right on — “I came across a book I think you should read. I’m ordering it tomorrow from Stuyvesant Books. It’s My Eight Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison.

It’s by some American bozo who got on the wrong side of somebody over there, and he landed in some nightmare Midnight Express situation he didn’t have enough ready cash to buy his way out of, the way the rich Thais do.”

“Well,” I said. “All this stuff is frightening, sure. It makes me apprehensive too. But it’s also all the more reason to worry about Gary Griswold. He sounds like a basically good guy — adventurous in a harmless way, a spiritual searcher. Maybe too naive and susceptible, but that’s hardly a moral crime. And he may have been victimized by the Thai subculture displayed so garishly on your screen there. Griswold may be in trouble, and he needs help. I’ve been hired to help him, but of course, you don’t need to be involved.”

“I intend not to be.”

“That’s up to you.”

He said, “It’s not that I don’t get it. I agree that Griswold could well be up to his ears in some hideous mire — a swamp of his own making or not — and he needs somebody to come along and drag him out. All I’m saying is, Bangkok sounds as if it can be a very dangerous place, and I’m frightened for myself and for you.”

“I know.”

“And the other thing is, how objective are you being about this? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Griswolds to hire somebody on the scene there instead of somebody who hasn’t set foot in Bangkok for years? Maybe,” he said, “your judgment is a bit off because you mainly want to get back to this part of the world you once found so compelling and do it at somebody THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 23 else’s expense. And maybe reconnect with Bank or Book or Mango or Dragonfruit or like that. Is what I have just described a distinct possibility, or isn’t it?”

A relentlessly keen-minded piece of work was my beloved. I said, “Yes, all that is a distinct possibility. And I want you to know that I am resolving at this moment — thanks to you — to turn into a perfectly rational human being and to behave accordingly.”

“Uh-huh.”

I added, “In my next life.”

He seemed unamused by me, gave up and tried Jon Stewart.

The photograph of her ex-husband that Ellen Griswold had given me was about a year old, she said. In it, a lithe, well-tanned, curly-haired man in his midforties stood in front of a frangipani tree in splendid full bloom. Griswold wore khaki shorts and a lime green polo shirt. While not striking in appearance, he seemed a leaner, looser version of his older brother Bill, a tense and weary business traveler with a five o’clock shadow whom I met briefly at the Albany airport when his flight from Washington unexpectedly arrived only twenty minutes late.

In the picture, Griswold’s dark eyes shone brightly as he peered confidently into the camera lens. His full-lipped smile, while not beatific, looked natural and relaxed. Buddhists say we inhabit our bodies only temporarily, but in this picture, at least, Griswold’s soul appeared comfortable in its then-abode.

I looked at the picture and the other material on Griswold on the first leg of my Key West flight, a two-hour ride down to Atlanta. Ellen Griswold had provided regular-mail notes from Gary and hard copies of e-mails sent from Thailand. Nearly all were addressed to Ellen, not to Ellen and Bill. In his messages, Griswold spoke glowingly of his new home — he wrote, “the Thais are a truly free people” — and of the contentment he had found in Buddhist ethical systems and through daily meditation.

He also mentioned being pleased with a condo he had purchased in Bangkok. This was about eighteen months earlier, and Ellen had included the street address in her packet.

There were several references to what Griswold termed “the romance department.” All the romances seemed to be with Thai men. Early in his life in Bangkok, there was Keng, “a sweetheart of a man,” and later “delightful” Sambul, and then

“quiet” Poom. No mention was made of any of these relationships ending. It seemed as if when one halted or dwindled out, Griswold just moved on to another. This left me 26 Richard Stevenson wondering what the exact nature of these liaisons might have been.

The last boyfriend mentioned, in an e-mail dated the previous July 17, was Mango. Griswold called him “a beautiful man and a fantastic human being.” He also said, “This one’s a keeper, I hope.” This was a month before Griswold sold all his holdings in the US for thirty-eight million dollars and two months before he disappeared.

The other material Ellen provided me, at Bob Chicarelli’s direction, was biographical and statistical data. I noted that Griswold had been a business major at Cornell with an art history minor. His resume consisted mainly of marketing positions with Algonquin Steel, the family company. He started low at Albany headquarters then climbed steadily, with his company career culminating in his becoming head of marketing in the US Southern region when he was in his early thirties.

Then Griswold left the company and ran his Key West art gallery before departing for Thailand.

On the smaller plane from Atlanta to Key West, I looked through the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand I had picked up that morning at Stuyvesant Books. In the “Dangers and Annoyances” section that Lonely Planet quaintly and helpfully includes in all its guidebooks, unscrupulous tuk-tuk drivers were listed, as well as fake-gem scams. No mention was made of drive-by shootings or police-run massacres. The emphasis in Lonely Planet’s Thailand was on the green landscape, the golden temples, and the smiles.

“I have to admit,” Lou Horn said, “that in retrospect we should have seen it coming — Gary mentally and physically sailing off into the blue. There were signs.”

Marcie Weems added, “Thailand, swell — nice people, nice place. And Buddhism, that’s fine, too — the ethics of tolerance and acceptance and nonviolence. And, of course, all those cute monks with their shaved heads and gorgeous orange robes. But astrology? Numerology? I don’t think so.”