Richard Stevenson - The 38 Million Dollar Smile

Pugh said, “This is interesting.”

Griswold said, “Oh fuck.”

Pugh said, “That too.”

Just after four, nine police vehicles pulled up in front of the safe house. Black-uniformed commandos quickly scaled the walls on four sides to prevent any of us from making a run for it.

A captain in a uniform that appeared freshly washed and pressed despite the heat had all of us gathered together in one place. He said calmly, “Please come with me. General Yodying wishes to speak with you.”

At the police station, we were all placed inside the same holding cell. Four unwashed men with multiple tattoos were already in there, lying on the concrete floor, and they looked unhappy to see us. This was perhaps because now they would have to share the single pail being used for urination and defecation with the fifteen of us. The cell was unfurnished except for the reeking bucket, and somebody had forgotten to equip the room with air-conditioning.

“Surely they won’t keep us here for long,” Griswold said, and all the English-speaking Thais in the cell turned away from him and fixed their gazes instead on the cockroaches crawling up the walls.

Timmy said, “I was once in a cell like this in rural India. It takes me back.”

“You deal drugs?” Mango asked.

“No, I had transported a village boy trampled by a bull to a hospital, and as a bureaucratic precaution, two policeman took me to jail, just in case it had been I who had crushed the boy’s pelvis.”

“How long you stay?” Kawee asked.

“Just overnight. The district poultry officer came and bribed somebody to release me.”

Now everyone looked at Griswold again, Mister Moneybags.

Pugh said, “The general may let us marinate a bit. To clear our minds.”

“I really don’t see why he is doing this,” Griswold said.

“Obviously Yodying is in this with Anant. They have swindled me out of just about everything I own, including my family’s company. What more can they possibly extract from me?”

“I am sure they are at this very moment compiling a list, Khun Gary. What else have you got?”

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“My condo. What’s left of the cash in the vault under my spirit house. Minus, of course, the two hundred fifty thousand I handed over to Seer Pongsak last night. Oh. I suppose he was also a party to the scam. And he knew where my cash reserves were kept. So I suppose he informed Anant and Yodying, who went over to the condo and helped themselves.”

“You’ll be lucky if they didn’t lick the paint off the walls,”

Pugh said. “They are greedy.”

“Maybe,” Kawee said, “they water plants, make offerings.”

“Let’s hope so,” Pugh said. “The general and the former finance minister are, after all, good Buddhists.”

Griswold suddenly looked nauseated and hunkered down with his back against the filthy wall and lowered his head between his knees. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he croaked.

Timmy, Mr. Peace Corps, was the one who picked up the bucket, carried it over, and set it down in front of Griswold.

Pugh said, “Let ’er rip, Khun Gary.”

Griswold did.

The Thais all averted their eyes from the violently retching farang.

I said, “Timothy, at home you’re so careful to turn up only in the most fastidiously kept surroundings. Maybe in one of your past lives you learned to adapt to conditions like these.

Say, in the Crimean war.”

Would he laugh? Nope. He glanced over at me noncommittally, but that was all.

After an hour or so, two guards returned. Were they going to release us? We had been on the cement floor, shifting about and trying to find comfortable positions without kicking one another in the face. The four men who were occupying the cell when we arrived, we had learned, were in on drug charges and facing long sentences or even death and had been inert in this cell for eight days. They hoped for a pretrial hearing within two or three months, they said. They knew better than to expect anything good from the guards when they came back, but the rest of us looked up expectantly.

The guards, however, were only delivering supper. One held an automatic weapon while the other unlocked the cell door, and two kitchen workers came with a cart and passed out to each of us plastic plates of rice and bowls of dun-colored soup.

“This food makes me ashamed to be Thai,” Pugh said. “It must be Burmese.”

The rest of us weren’t crazy about it either. Most of us ate the rice but skipped the soup. The four tattooed drug dealers ate the rancid soup eagerly. They considered the extra food a treat.

Timmy said, “Is it really possible we’ll be here overnight?”

Pugh shrugged.

I said, “But Rufus, nothing is permanent. All we have to do is wait for the transitory nature of all things to notice us here.

Am I right?”

Pugh chuckled, and he translated my joke to the non English-speaking Thais in the cell. Everyone laughed except the drug dealers.

At ten o’clock, the guards came back and handed in a bucket of water with a single plastic cup floating in it. All the Thais looked grateful, but I guessed that the three farangs — Timmy, Griswold, me — were all thinking the same thing: Bangkok tap water. No San Pellegrino was going to be provided.

Just after eleven, two new guards turned up. They opened the cell door, and one of them asked in English for Pugh, me, Timmy and Griswold to follow them.

The second-floor captain’s office was more sanitary than our cell, but it also lacked the charm we had come to associate with Siamese furnishings and decor.

The captain himself, the man who had arrested us at the safe house, was present but he had little to offer us beyond a few pleasantries. He said General Yodying would be along shortly.

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The captain apologized for Bangkok’s steamy weather.

Griswold asked if we would be permitted to phone the United States embassy. The captain said no, that we should just sit tight.

General Yodying ambled in around eleven thirty carrying a sheaf of papers. The captain and Pugh wai-ed the general.

Griswold, Timmy and I followed their lead. The general wai-ed us back and there were friendly exchanges of sa-wa-dee-cap.

He was big for a Thai, light skinned, with a broad forehead and an immobile face. He was wearing a full dress uniform and looked as if he might have come from a formal occasion, possibly official. I doubted the general had dolled himself up for us. He seated himself at his raised desk, and we took seats across from and half a foot below him.

The general looked at Timmy and me and said, “It is a pity your visit to Thailand has been disrupted by the taint of your association with this bad man.” He indicated Griswold with a curt nod. “And I certainly hope that neither of you shares Mr.

Griswold’s unfortunate tendencies. If so, I would advise you to leave Thailand and take up residence instead in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.”

I could see just enough of Griswold with my peripheral vision to catch the flinch. He knew what was coming, and he knew what had happened to him, and he knew he was finished.

“And you, Khun Rufus. I am surprised and disappointed that you would allow yourself to be employed by such a depraved pervert. I know you well enough to know that your sexual appetites are entirely healthy. I suppose you are in it for the money — protecting a man like this — and I can appreciate that. We all have families to support and temples to which we must make appropriate offerings.”

Pugh looked at the general evenly but said nothing.

Flipping open his packet, the general pulled out a wad of eight-by-ten color photos. He said, “Mr. Griswold, investigators under my command have compiled incontrovertible proof that you have been molesting helpless little boys in and around Bangkok. People like you have been coming to Southeast Asia for years to prey on poor and vulnerable urchins like the ones in these photographs. But I have to tell you that those days are over. Finished. Monsters such as yourself now serve long prison terms for these despicable acts, and I want you to know that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Would you like to make a statement?”