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