The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 9
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in some serious way. So, who saw Gary in Cambodia? At least
that’s promising news.”
“Elise Flanagan,” I said. “She’s here in Key West. Do you
know her?”
Now Tessig really lit up. “Elise! She’s a client of mine! But
she didn’t speak to Gary?”
“He seemed not to want to interact with her or even to be
recognized. So, does Elise Flanagan also have past-life
connections with Southeast Asia? Or was she just a tourist?”
“I don’t know, but I sure plan on finding out. Elise will be
here Friday morning. I know she was Mongolian. Sometimes
it’s hard to tell with Elise, though. She sometimes gets
confused, since her diagnosis.”
“Diagnosis for what?” I asked, wary.
“Early Alzheimer’s. She does sometimes confuse people she
knows with other people she knows. So it’s probably best not to
make too much of her spotting Gary, supposedly. Oh, that’s
really too bad it was Elise and not somebody more reliable. Her
long-term memory is still sharp, though. She’s especially
clearheaded on the great migration across the Bering Straits
from East Asia to the Americas.”
I glanced out Tessig’s living room window to see if perhaps
Lou Horn had parked outside and was waiting to drive me back
into Key West. I recognized his old red Camry, and as soon as I
politely could, made a beeline.
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
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