The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard (бесплатные книги полный формат .txt) 📗
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.
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
180 Richard Stevenson
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