The man behind the desk is a dim shape framed in blinding light, a god emerging from the brilliance of infinity. The god says, “Why not the bars? You’re pretty enough.”
The girl has worked a finger into the ragged hole in the left knee of her jeans. The knee got scraped when the two men grabbed her, and she avoids the raw flesh. She raises a hand to shade her eyes so she can look at him, but the light is too bright. “I can’t. I tried for two nights. I can’t do it.”
“You’ll get used to it.” The god puts a foot on the desk. The foot is shielded from the light by the bulk of his body, and she can see that it is shod in a very thin, very pale loafer. The sole is so shiny that the shoe might never have been worn before. The shoe probably cost more than the girl’s house.
The girl says, “I don’t want to get used to it.” She shifts a few inches right on the couch, trying to avoid the light.
“It’s a lot more money. Money you could send home.”
“Home is gone,” the girl says.
That’s a trifle, and he waves it away. “Even better. You could buy clothes, jewelry, a nice phone. I could put you into a bar tonight.”
The girl just looks down and works her finger around inside the hole. The skin around the scraped knee is farm-dark, as dark as the skin on her hand.
“Okay,” the man says. “Up to you.” He lights a cigarette, the flame briefly revealing a hard face with small, thick-lidded eyes, broad nostrils, pitted skin, oiled hair. Not a god, then, unless very well disguised. He waves the smoke away, toward her. The smoke catches the glare to form a pale nimbus like the little clouds at which farmers aim prayers in the thin-dirt northeast, where the girl comes from. “But this isn’t easy either,” the man says.
She pulls her head back slightly from the smoke. “I don’t care.”
The man drags on the cigarette again and puts it out, only two puffs down. Then he leans back in his chair, perilously close to the floor-to-ceiling window behind him. “Don’t like the light, do you? Don’t like to be looked at. Must be a problem with a face like yours. You’re worth looking at.”
The girl says, “Why do you sit there? It’s not polite to make your visitors go blind.”
“I’m not a polite guy,” says the man behind the desk. “But it’s not my fault. I put my desk here before they silvered those windows.” The building across Sathorn Road, a sea-green spire, has reflective coating on all its windows, creating eighteen stories of mirrors that catch the falling sun early every evening. “It’s fine in the morning,” he says. “It’s just now that it gets a little bright.”
“It’s rude.”
The man behind the desk says, “So fucking what?” He pulls his foot off the desk and lets the back of the chair snap upright. “You don’t like it, go somewhere else.”
The girl lowers her head. After a moment she says, “If I try to beg, I’ll just get dragged back here.”
The man sits motionless. The light in the room dims slightly as the sun begins to drop behind the rooftops. Then he says, “That’s right.” He takes out a new cigarette and puts it in his mouth. “We get forty percent. Pratunam.”
She tries to meet his eyes, but the reflections are still too bright. “I’m sorry?”
“Pra…tu…nam,” he says slowly, enunciating each syllable as though she is stupid. “Don’t you even know where Pratunam is?”
She starts to shake her head and stops. “I can find it.”
“You won’t have to find it. You’ll be taken there. You can’t sit just anywhere. You’ll work the pavement we give you. Move around and you’ll probably get beat up, or even brought back here.” He takes the cigarette out of his mouth, looks at it, and breaks it in half. He drops the pieces irritably into the ashtray.
“Is it a good place?”
“ Lot of tourists,” he says. “I wouldn’t give it to you if you weren’t pretty.” He picks up the half of the cigarette with the filter on it, puts it in his mouth, and lights it. Then he reaches under the desk and does something, and the girl hears the lock on the door snap closed. “You want to do something nice for me?”
“No,” the girl says. “If I wanted to do that, I’d work in the bar.”
“I could make you.”
The girl says, “You could get a fingernail in your eye, too.”
The man regards her for a moment and then grunts. The hand goes back under the desk, and the lock clicks again. “Ahh, you’d probably be a dead fish anyway.” He takes a deep drag and scrubs the tip of the cigarette against the bottom of the ashtray, scribbles something on a pad, rips off the page, and holds it out. His eyes follow her as she gets up to take it. “It’s an address,” he says. “Go there tonight, you can sleep there. We’ll pick you up at six-thirty in the morning. You’ll work from seven to four, when the night girl takes over.” He glances at a gold watch, as thin as a dime, on his right wrist. In English he says, “How’s your English?”
“Can talk some.”
“Can you say ‘Please, sir’? ‘Please, ma’am’? ‘Hungry’?”
“Please, sir,” the girl says. “Please, ma’am.” A flush of color mounts her dark cheeks. “Hungry.”
“Good,” the man says. “Go away.”
She turns to go, and his phone buzzes. He picks up the receiver.
“What?” he says. Then he says to the girl, “Wait.” Into the receiver he says, “Good. Bring it in.” A moment later an immaculately groomed young woman in a silk business suit comes in, carrying a bundle of rags. She holds it away from her, her mouth pulled tight, as though there are insects crawling on it.
“Give it to her,” the man says. “And you,” he says, “don’t lose it and don’t drop it. These things don’t grow on trees.”
The young woman glances without interest at the girl with the torn jeans and hands the bundle to her. The bundle is surprisingly heavy, and wet.
The girl opens one end, and a tiny face peers up at her.
“But…” she says. “Wait. This…this isn’t-”
“Just be careful with it,” the man says. “Anything happens to it, you’ll be working on your back for years.”
“But I can’t-”
“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have brothers and sisters? Didn’t you spend half your life wiping noses? Just carry it around on your hip or something. Be a village girl again.” To the woman in the suit, he says, “Give her some money and put it on the books. What’s your name?” he asks the girl holding the baby.
“Da.”
“Buy some milk and some throwaway diapers. A towel. Wet wipes. Get a small bottle of whiskey and put a little in the milk at night to knock the baby out, or you won’t get any sleep. Dip the corner of the towel in the milk and let it suck. Get a blanket to sit on. Got it?”
“I can’t keep this.”
“Don’t be silly.” The man gets up, crosses the office, and opens the door, waving her out with his free hand. “No foreigner can walk past a girl with a baby,” the man says. “When there are foreign women around, pinch it behind the knee. The crying is good for an extra ten, twenty baht.”
Dazed, holding the wet bundle away from her T-shirt, Da goes to the door.
“We’ll be watching you,” the man says. “Sixty for you, forty for us. Try to pocket anything and we’ll know. And then you won’t be happy at all.”
“I don’t steal,” Da says.
“Of course not.” The man returns to his desk in the darkening office. “And remember,” he says. “Pinch it.”
FOUR MINUTES LATER Da is on the sidewalk, with 250 baht in her pocket and a wet baby in her arms. She walks through the lengthening shadows at the aimless pace of someone with nowhere to go, someone listening to private voices. Well-dressed men and women, just freed from the offices and cubicles of Sathorn Road, push impatiently past her.
Da has carried a baby as long as she can remember. The infant is a familiar weight in her arms. She protects it instinctively by crossing her wrists beneath it, bringing her elbows close to her sides, and keeping her eyes directly in front of her so she won’t bump into anything. In her village she would have been looking for a snake, a stone in the road, a hole opened up by the rain. Here she doesn’t know what she’s looking for.
But she’s so occupied in looking for it that she doesn’t see the dirty, ragged, long-haired boy who pushes past her with the sweating farang man in tow, doesn’t see the boy turn to follow her with his eyes fixed on the damp bundle pressed to her chest, watching her as though nothing in the world were more interesting.
The boy sees her go, assessing her without even thinking about it: Just got here. Still got mud between her toes. Doesn’t know anything. Looks stunned, like someone hit her in the face with a pole.
The baby’s not hers. Too pale.
He thinks, Another one.
The nervous man behind him slows again. The boy hesitates grudgingly, feeling like he’s trying to lead a cat. For a moment weariness washes over him like warm water. He longs to disappear into the crowd and leave the foreigner to fend for himself, but the others are waiting, and they’re hungry.
“Come on,” he says in English. “Nothing to worry.”
“I don’t know,” the man says.
The boy stops. He draws a deep breath before he speaks; it will not do to show his frustration. “What problem now?”
“It’s not dark enough.”
“When it dark,” the boy says, “they all gone.”
“Just ten minutes,” the man says. He is in his forties, with hair brushed forward over a plump baby’s face that seems to be mostly lower lip. Despite his eagerness not to be noticed, he wears a bright yellow shirt and green knee-length shorts across wide hips. A fanny pack dangling below his belly thoughtfully announces the location of his valuables. To the boy he looks as conspicuous as a neon sign.
“Ten minute too long.” The boy’s eyes, tight-cornered and furious, skitter across the man’s face as though committing the features to some permanent archive, and then he turns away with a shrug.
The man says, “Please. Wait.”
The boy stops. Plays the final card. “Come now. Come now or go away.”
“Okay, okay. But don’t walk so fast.”
The sun is gone now, leaving the sky between the buildings a pale violet through which the evening star has punched a silver hole. The boy sometimes thinks the sky is a hard dome lit inside by the sun and the moon, and peppered with tiny openings. From the outside the dome is bathed in unimaginable brilliance, and that light forces its way through the pinpricks in the sky to create the stars. If the sky dissolved, he thinks, the light from outside would turn the earth all white and pure, and then it would catch fire like paper. But in the dazzling moment before the flames, it would be clean.
“We go slow,” he says. There may not be another man tonight. The crowds on the sidewalk are thinning. The kids are hungry. He drags his feet to prevent the man from falling behind.
The man says, “You’re handsome.”
“No,” the boy says without even turning his head. “Have better than me.”
They turn a corner, into an east- west street. They are walking west, so the sky pales in the sun’s wake until it slams up against a jagged black line of buildings. Before he returned to Bangkok, this city he hates, the boy had grown used to the soft, leaf-dappled skyline of the countryside. The horizon here is as sharp as a razor cut.
“There,” the boy says, indicating with his chin. “The window.”
Across the street, nine impassive children loiter against the plate glass of a store window. They wear the filthy clothing of the street, mismatched and off-size. Three of the five boys are eye-catchingly dirty. The four girls, who look cleaner, range in age from roughly eleven to fourteen. The boys look a year or two younger, but it might just be that girls in their early teens grow faster than boys.
They pay no attention to the man and the boy across the street.
“Keep walking,” the boy says. “Don’t slow down too much, but look at the window, like you’re shopping. When we get around the corner, tell me the sex and the color of the shirt of the one you want. Or take two or three. They don’t cost much.”
The man looks toward the shop windows. “Then what?” he asks.
“Then they come to the hotel,” the boy says.
The Big Guy’s eyes keep landing on Rafferty.
He’s developed a visual circuit that he follows every time a card is dealt: look at the dealer’s hands, look at the new faceup card in the center of the table, look at Rafferty. Then he lifts the corners of the two facedown cards in front of him, as though he hopes they’ve improved while he wasn’t paying attention to them. He puffs the cigar clenched dead center in his mouth and looks at Rafferty through the smoke.
This has been going on for several hands.
Rafferty’s stomach was fluttering when he first sat down at the table. The flutter intensified when the Big Guy, whom no one had expected, came through the door. Like the others in the room, Rafferty had recognized the Big Guy the moment he came in. He is no one to screw with.
But Rafferty may have to.
He has grown more anxious with each hand, fearing the moment when he’ll have to test the system. And now he can feel the Big Guy’s gaze like a warm, damp breeze.
With a flourish, the dealer flips the next-to-last of the faceup cards onto the green felt. It’s a six, and it has no impact on Rafferty’s hand, although one of the other men at the table straightens a quarter inch, and everyone pretends not to have noticed. The Big Guy takes it in and looks at Rafferty. His shoulders beneath the dark suit coat are rounded and powerful, the left a couple of inches lower than the right. The man’s personal legend has it that it’s from twenty years of carrying a heavy sack of rice seed, and he is said to have punched a tailor who proposed extra padding in the left shoulder of his suit coat to even them out.
A massive gold ring sporting a star ruby the size of a quail’s egg bangs against the wooden rim of the table as he clasps fat, short-fingered hands in front of him. Rafferty finds it almost impossible not to look at the man’s hands. They are not so much scarred as melted, as though the skin were wax that had been stirred slowly as it cooled. The surface is ridged and swirled. The little finger on the left hand doesn’t bend at all. It looks like he had his hands forced into a brazier full of burning charcoal and held there. The mutilated left hand lifts the corners of the facedown cards with the careful precision of the inebriated, the immobile little finger pointing off into space. The Big Guy was drunk when he arrived, and he is well on his way to being legless.
“What are you doing here, farang?” the Big Guy asks very quietly in Thai. The soft tone does not diminish the rudeness of the question. His mouth is a wet, pursed, unsettling pink that suggests lipstick, and in fact he swipes his lips from time to time with a tube of something that briefly makes them even shinier.
“I’m only part farang,” Rafferty says, also in Thai. “My mother’s Filipina.” He smiles but gets nothing in return.
“You should be in Patpong,” the Big Guy says, his voice still low, his tone still neutral. “Looking for whores, like the others.” He picks up his glass, rigid pinkie extended like a parody of gentility.
“And you should watch your mouth,” Rafferty says. The glass stops. One of the bodyguards begins to step forward, but the Big Guy shakes his head, and the bodyguard freezes. The table turns into a still life, and then the Big Guy removes the cigar from the wet, pink mouth and sips his drink. Minus the cigar, the mouth looks like something that ought not to be seen, as unsettling as the underside of a starfish.
The others at the table-except for Rafferty’s friend Arthit, who is wearing his police uniform-are doing their best to ignore the exchange. In an effort to forget the cards he’s holding, which are terrifyingly good, Rafferty takes a look around the table.
Of the seven men in the game, three-the Big Guy and the two dark-suited businessmen-are rich. The Big Guy is by far the richest, and he would be the richest in almost any room in Bangkok. The three millionaires don’t look alike, but they share the glaze that money brings, a sheen as thin and golden as the melted sugar on a doughnut.
The other four men are ringers. Rafferty is playing under his own name but false pretenses. Arthit and one other are cops. Both cops are armed. The fourth ringer is a career criminal.
One of the businessmen and the Big Guy think they’re playing a regular high-stakes game of Texas Hold’em. The others know better.
It’s Rafferty’s bet, and he throws in a couple of chips to keep his hands busy.
“Pussy bet,” says the Big Guy.
“Just trying to make you feel at home,” Rafferty says. In spite of himself, he can feel his nervousness being muscled aside by anger.
The Big Guy glances away, blinking as though he’s been hit. He is an interesting mix of power and insecurity. On the one hand, everyone at the table is aware that he’s among the richest men in Thailand. On the other hand, he has an unexpectedly tentative voice, pitched surprisingly high, and he talks like the poorly educated farmer he was before he began to build his fortune and spend it with the manic disregard for taste that has brought him the media’s devoted attention. Every time he talks, his eyes make a lightning circuit of the room: Is anyone judging me? He doesn’t laugh at anyone’s jokes but his own. Despite his rudeness and the impression of physical power he conveys, there’s something of the whipped puppy about him. He seems at times almost to expect a slap.
The two architecturally large bodyguards behind him guarantee that the slap won’t be forthcoming. They wear identical black three-button suits and black silk shirts, open at the neck. Their shoulder holsters disrupt the expensive line of their suits.
The Big Guy’s eyes are on him again, even though the dealer’s hands are in motion, laying down the final card of the hand. And naturally it’s when Rafferty is being watched that it happens.
The final card lands faceup, and it’s an eight.
Rafferty would prefer that someone had come into the room and shot him.
Just ust an alley.
Bangkok has thousands of them. To a newcomer-like the girl with the baby, the boy thinks-they’re just places to get lost in: filthy concrete underfoot, the chipped and peeling rear walls of buildings that turn their painted faces to the streets, hot exhaust and dripping water from air-conditioning units, loops and webs of black-rubber-coated wiring. Piles of trash and the rats they attract. The barbed, high-throat reek of urine.
But to the boy this alley is as good as a compass. He knows precisely how many steps it is to the busy brightness of the boulevard. He can feel on the surface of his skin the open space of the smaller alleys that branch off to the left and right. He could tell you without looking how many stories make up the building at his back.
It’s just one of the thousands of alleys in the boy’s mental navigation system, as safe or as dangerous as the person he shares it with. The person he shares it with now is definitely dangerous, but probably not under these circumstances.
He wears a polo shirt and a pair of cheap slacks, robbed of their crease by Bangkok ’s damp heat. Barely taller than the boy, the man is as wide and unyielding as a closed door. The square face is so flat it seems to have been slammed repeatedly against a wall. The man’s eyes scan the boy’s face as though they’re trying to scour the skin away.
The boy says, “You’re lying. I saw his wallet when he paid me.”
Behind the door-shaped man is another man, taller and more slender, but equally hard-faced. The taller man has both hands wrapped firmly around the elbow of a third man, who studies the concrete beneath his feet as though he’s looking for the faint lines that will betray a secret door.
The third man is handcuffed, his arms behind him.
“It’s full, but it’s mostly ones,” the door-shaped man says. “Here. Look for yourself,”
The wallet he extends has been taken from the handcuffed man. It is sticky, damp with the sweat of heat and fear. The boy doesn’t touch it. “Ones now,” he says. “But tens and twenties before.”
The man in handcuffs hears the argument without understanding a word. He speaks German and English, but no Thai. His face is blank with the sheer effort of running mentally through all the things he might have done, all the choices he might have made, dozens of them, large and small-anything that would not have led him to this minute. This minute when his life, his life as he has come to know it, ends.
“Look at it, damn you,” says the door-shaped man.
The boy says, “One hundred dollars.”
“You little shit,” the door-shaped man says. A scuff of shoe on concrete draws his attention, and two children enter the alley from the even narrower passage that runs off to the left. He turns back to the boy and gives the wallet a shake. “Are you saying I’m lying?”
The boy looks past the wallet, at the man’s eyes. “One hundred,” he says.
The man stares at him, then nods abruptly, as though agreeing with himself about something. He shoves the wallet into his hip pocket. “In that case,” he says, “fuck off.” He starts to turn to go, but the boy’s hand lands on his arm, and the man yanks his arm away as though the boy carried disease.
He brings the arm back, as if to hit the boy, but then his eyes go past the boy’s face and settle on something behind him. Four children have come into the alley from the boulevard. Behind them are three more.
The taller man, the one holding the prisoner’s arm, feels a presence at his back. He glances over his shoulder. Three children stand there, although he could not have said where they came from. He’s almost certain the alley dead-ends behind him. He licks his lips and says, “Uhhh, Chit…”
“One hundred,” the boy says. “Now. In one minute, two hundred.”
Half a dozen children come out of the alley to the right.
The children are ragged and dirty, their hair matted, their upper lips caked with sweat and snot. Many of them are barefoot, their feet so filthy it looks like they are wearing boots. Some of them are only eight or nine, and some are in their early teens. They say nothing, just stand there looking wide-eyed at Chit, the door-shaped man.
There are fifteen or twenty in all. Over the hum of traffic from the boulevard, Chit can hear them breathe. Three more appear at the alley’s mouth.
The boy says, “Thirty seconds.”
Chit draws his lips back, baring his teeth as though he is about to take a bite out of the boy’s throat. His hand goes to his pocket and emerges with a wad of twenties. With his eyes fixed on the boy’s, he counts off five of them, holds them out, and drops them to the ground.
The boy bends down and picks them up. “Thank you,” he says, as politely as if they’d been neatly folded and handed to him in an envelope. He puts them into his pocket and turns to go.
“Wait,” Chit says. The boy pauses, but the other children are already melting away. “Tomorrow night.”
The boy says, “No. There are other police, not as greedy as you.”
“Try it,” Chit says. “See how long you live.”
The boy turns back to him. “I could say the same to you.” He looks up and down the alley, taking in the remaining children. “They could be anywhere,” he says. “Any time. Waiting for you.”
Chit surveys the upraised faces, smells the dirt and sweat. He raises both hands, palms out. “All right, all right. No more bargaining. Fifteen percent off the top.” The boy is impassive. “Twenty,” Chit says.
“Tomorrow,” the boy says. He saunters to the end of the alley and goes left, onto the sidewalk of the boulevard. The children drift away.
Chit’s eyes burn holes into the boy’s back. He turns to the handcuffed man and slaps him hard, then slaps him again. Then he catches the taller man’s eye and jerks his chin upward, a command. The taller man reaches behind the prisoner, and a moment later the man’s hands are free.
This is not what the prisoner had expected. The thought ricochets through his mind: Shot running away?
He flinches when Chit’s hand comes up, but it holds nothing except the prisoner’s wallet. Chit removes the cash, then pulls out a slender deck of credit cards. “Gerhardt,” he says, reading the name off the top card. “Gerhardt, around the corner is an ATM. You withdraw everything you can get on all your cards and give it to me. Tomorrow morning you leave Thailand. Understand?”
Gerhardt says, “I…I leave? You mean, no jail?”
Chit says, “And you never come back.”
Gerhardt starts to thank him and then bursts into tears.
It’s an eight.
The other six men at the table barely give it a glance, but Rafferty suddenly has a buzzing in his ears that sounds like a low-voltage power line. He squeezes his eyes closed and opens them again.
It’s still an eight.
The Big Guy leans forward, watching him. He passes the tube over his lips and says, in that high, buttery voice, “The farang is interested.”
Rafferty barely hears him. If he were forced at gunpoint to make an estimate-and it’s looking increasingly likely that someone will be at gunpoint soon-Rafferty would put the value of the chips in the pot somewhere in the neighborhood of 750,000 baht-about $24,000 U.S. Not exactly the national debt, but certainly the largest amount he’s ever risked on the turn of a card.
Of course, he’s only been playing for ten days.
Feeling the Big Guy’s eyes on him, he grabs eight chips off his stack and clicks them together four times. He does his best to make the gesture seem natural, but it feels like the staged business it is, transparently phony, bad blocking in an amateur play. He closes his hand around the chips and finds them wet with sweat.
The Big Guy leans back in his chair, his pink mouth puckering around his cigar. The bodyguards watch everyone else.
The man three seats to Rafferty’s right had dealt the hand. He’s a sallow-faced man in a shiny suit that’s either brown or green depending on the light, but not a good shade of either. He waits indifferently for the man to his left to make his move. The man, one of the businessmen, makes a tight little mouth like a reluctant kiss and throws in a couple thousand. The uniformed man on the businessman’s other side, Rafferty’s friend Arthit, has the bet in hand and tosses it into the pot with the air of someone making a donation at the temple of an unreliable god. The moment Rafferty has been dreading has arrived. He tries to look thoughtful as he waits to be told what to do.
The one whose job it is to tell him, seated directly opposite him at the round green felt table, is as lean as a matador and as dark as a used teabag, with a hatchet-narrow face, and hair that has been dyed so black it has blue highlights. With his eyes resting lazily on the pile of chips in the center of the table, he turns the signet ring on his right hand so the stone is beneath his finger and then brings it back up again.
The hum in Rafferty’s ears rises in pitch, as though the power line has been stretched tighter. The room seems to brighten.
It takes all of Rafferty’s willpower to keep his hands steady as he pushes his entire pile of chips toward the center of the green felt. He says, “I’m all in.”
There is a general shifting around the table as people adjust themselves in their chairs and survey the new landscape of risk. Rafferty has about 290,000 baht in chips-he’s been having a selectively good night, just barely not good enough to be suspicious. This is a bet that could remove at least two of the players from the game.
One of them is the Big Guy.
Four days ago, when this game was being planned, there had been only three people in the room: Rafferty, Arthit, and the hatchet-faced man. They had been sitting in a dingy meeting room in a police station, a room to which the hatchet-faced man had been brought directly from his jail cell. He’d been promised six months off his sentence if he succeeded in fooling the pigeons-the businessmen-at the table, thereby guaranteeing that he’d do his best with the four dodges he was to perform during the game. Arthit and the other policeman, whose name is Kosit, had been promised a “consideration” of 50,000 baht apiece by the casino owners who were looking for ways to spot the dodges, and for whose enlightenment the game is secretly being videotaped.
But no one had expected the Big Guy.
And now, seated to Rafferty’s left, he blows out a quart of cigar smoke and leans back in his chair. His eyes flick to Rafferty again and then away. Late forties, strong as a horse beneath fifteen pounds of soft, wet fat, he holds the cigar dead center in a tightly pursed mouth.
He says in English, “Bluff.”
“Easy to find out,” Rafferty says. His heart is beating so hard he can actually feel the cloth of his shirt brush his chest.
A cloud of smoke, waved away so the Big Guy can peer down at Rafferty’s chips. “How much is that, farang?”
“Two hundred ninety-two thousand,” Rafferty says.
“I’ve only got two-eighty-five.”
“In or out?” asks the dealer.
“In,” says the Big Guy. He pushes his chips into the center of the felt and then drops the last few thousand-baht chips on top of the pile, one at a time. Then he switches to Thai. “Look at your money,” he says, “because you’re never going to see it again.”
The hatchet-faced man throws in his cards. The dealer and the man next to him also fold. Arthit takes a last look at the faceup cards and then mucks his own, making it unanimous. The man to Rafferty’s right, who has already folded, shifts in his chair to watch the showdown.
“After you,” Rafferty says to the Big Guy. The Big Guy moves the cigar to the corner of that pink mouth and flips his cards. He’s got a straight: four, five, six, seven, eight.
“Gee,” Rafferty says. He looks at the Big Guy’s hand and shakes his head in admiration. Then he turns over one of his hole cards: an eight. “Let’s see,” he says, squinting at the table. “I haven’t played for very long, but this is an eight, and there are two more of them over there, so that makes three, right?” He flips the other card. “And here’s another one. So that means I’ve got four eights.” He looks around the table. “Who wins?”
The Big Guy’s chair hits the floor with a bang, and the bodyguards step forward to flank him. “Who wins?” He takes three steps back, one of the bodyguards whisking the fallen chair out of his way. “You’re a cheat, you and that blue-haired freak over there. And you picked the wrong game.” He pushes back his suit coat, and suddenly Arthit is standing with his police automatic in his hand.
“Don’t move,” Arthit says, and Kosit, the man who dealt the hand, also pulls a gun and waves it around as though to say, Look what I have, although he doesn’t point it at anyone. “Khun Pan,” Arthit says to the Big Guy, “if you’re thinking about getting that little gun out of your shoulder holster, I have to advise against it.” The dealer’s gun comes to rest pointed at the nearest bodyguard.
“This…this game is fixed.” Pan is so furious he’s spluttering.
“Of course it is,” Arthit says. His eyes flick to the bodyguard at Pan’s right, who’s looking jumpy. “By the way, just to put all the information on the table, there’s no reason not to shoot you, so don’t get silly.”
“You should be ashamed,” Pan says. “Siding with this farang against a table full of honest Thais. He’s a cheat.”
“Yes, he is,” Arthit says. “But as you pointed out, he’s not the only one.” Neither the dealer nor the hatchet-faced man reacts, but two of the businessmen draw sharp breaths. “Tip here,” Arthit says, indicating the hatchet-faced man, “joined us this evening straight from the monkey house, where he’ll be staying for-how long is it, Tip?”
“Four years,” Tip says.
“With a little time off for tonight,” Arthit says. “Because Tip is way, way too lucky.”
“I saw the signal,” Pan says. “But if he’s so fucking good, how come he hasn’t won anything tonight?”
“He’s not supposed to. He’s been feeding Mr. Rafferty.”
“Feeding?”
“He’s been watching you,” Rafferty says in English, with Arthit providing more or less simultaneous translation and, to all appearances, enjoying it. “You’re watching him to see whether he’s cheating, but what he’s doing is lighthousing me, based on what he sees you do and what I have in my hand. Before I bet this last hand, I picked up eight chips and rattled them four times to tell I was holding four eights. He gave me a sign that said bet the house, and I did.”
“You shit farang,” Pan says. Rafferty starts to get up, but Arthit waves him back to his seat.
“You should be grateful,” Arthit says. “Tip pulled this trick in a game a few months ago that cost a friend of yours almost four million baht. So you got a free lesson. And before you get any more disagreeable, this is a sanctioned police operation, and you’re all going to get your money back.”
“And you’re going to lose your job,” Pan says. “I don’t want my fucking money back. I came here to play cards.”
“Tough,” Arthit says. To the dealer he says, “Give him the two hundred seventy-five thousand he came in with. Mr. Vinai,” he says to the man on Rafferty’s right, “you came in with a hundred and eighty-seven thousand. Officer Kosit here will count it out for you. You had two-ten,” he says to the other businessman.
“He’s a cop also?” Pan says, glaring at the dealer. He grabs the glass of brandy in front of him but doesn’t drink. “Is he? A cop?”
“Why?” Arthit says. “Are you going to get him fired, too?”
“I might,” Pan says. “What was the point of all this?”
“We, by which I mean the Bangkok police, arranged this game at the request of some people you know, actually-two of the guys who run the casinos on the Cambodian border. They face this stuff all the time.” He pauses, glances at Rafferty, and adds, “Also, in the interest of full disclosure, there’s Mr. Rafferty’s book.”
“A book?” This is one of the businessmen. “He’s writing a book?”
“He is,” Arthit answers. He is answering the businessman, but he’s watching with thinly veiled pleasure as Pan’s face turns an even deeper red. “What’s it called, Poke?”
“Living Wrong,” Rafferty says. “I apprenticed myself to seven different kinds of crooks and then went along on an operation. Tip here is the last of my mentors.”
Pan seems to be having trouble breathing. “I’ll have you sweeping streets for this,” he says to Arthit. Kosit, the other cop, has been counting out chips and has slid several stacks toward Pan. Pan backhands them, scattering them across the table, then turns to Rafferty. “And you,” he says, “I’ll have you run out of the country.” He takes the cigar from his mouth, drops it on the carpet, and steps on it.
“That’s going to cost you,” Rafferty says in Thai. “Somebody’s got to pay for the rug.”
“One more word out of you,” Pan says, “and I’ll put my foot on your head.” This is a violent insult for a Thai.
“Sorry,” Rafferty says. He is so angry he feels like his throat has been sewn half shut. “I forgot that you’re used to dirt floors.”
Arthit says, “Poke!” and Pan brings back his hand and slings the cognac, glass and all, at Rafferty. The glass strikes Rafferty in the center of his chest. Cognac splashes down his jacket and onto his trousers, and before he knows it, he’s up and leaping at Pan even as the bodyguards push in front of him, and then there’s an earsplitting bang and all eyes turn to Arthit, who’s just put a hole in the ceiling.
“That’s enough of everything,” he says. “The evening is over. Each of you just take your money and go somewhere else to play. Is that clear?”
Rafferty is chest to chest with the nearer bodyguard. Everyone is now standing.
“I said, ‘Is that clear?’” Arthit demands.
The two businessmen are already backing away from the table, but Pan takes a step forward. “Colonel,” he says to Arthit, “do you doubt I can have you fired? Do you doubt I can have this cheat’s visa canceled?”
“I think money usually gets its way,” Arthit says, his eyes as hard as marbles. “But not without consequences.”
Pan’s flush deepens. “You’re threatening me?”
“Oh,” Arthit says, “I think we’re past threats.” To Kosit he says, “Shoot the bodyguards if they so much as move.”
Even the businessmen who were backing away from the table stop. Someone’s cell phone begins to ring, but no one makes a move to answer.
Most Thais have an exquisitely accurate ability to read the emotional temperature of a confrontation and to veer away, even if it’s at the absolute last moment, from the point at which no one can back down without a serious loss of face. In the part of Rafferty’s mind that is functioning clearly, he knows that the line has just been crossed. And he knows that-since he’s not a Thai-he’s the only one with no significant face at stake, the only one who can step back, the only one who can retreat to the safe side of the line.
Slowly he eases himself away from the bodyguard and toward the table. He raises his hands, palms out, and sits. Then he looks down at his sport coat and brushes beads of cognac off it. The movement draws the attention of everyone in the room. “Since I offended you,” Rafferty says to Pan, “what could I do to calm you down?”
Pan licks the pink lips. The look of uncertainty is back. “What…what could you…”
“What would it take?” Rafferty says. “To wrap this up, to send you home happy.”
Two heavy blinks. “There’s…there’s nothing…”
“Sure there is,” Rafferty says. “You’re too busy and too important to waste time making trouble for us, and Arthit doesn’t want to have to deal in consequences. And neither do I. So what would it take? An apology? A promise to leave your name out of the book? What?”
“Ah,” Pan says. His eyes dart around the room, and then he says again, “Ah.” He moves to the table and picks up some chips, then lets them trickle through his fingers, apparently giving them all his attention. “An apology,” he says, as though the concept is new to him. He brings his eyes to Arthit’s and says, “You. Would you apologize?”
“Sure,” Arthit says, although the word seems to hurt.
“And you, farang? Would you apologize?”
“I’ll apologize for playing unfairly,” Rafferty says. “And for being rude. Would that do it?”
For a moment he thinks it will work, but then Pan shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “I want a fair game.”
“I’m out,” says one of the businessmen, and the other nods agreement.
“No problem,” Pan says. He lifts his chin to Rafferty. “He’s the one I want to play against.”
“He doesn’t have any money,” Arthit says.
“I didn’t say anything about money,” Pan says.
Rafferty says, “Then what?”
“You like it here, don’t you?” Pan asks, and Rafferty feels a sudden dip in the center of his stomach.
Studying Pan’s face, Arthit says, “I don’t know about this.”
Pan looks at Arthit and then at Rafferty. “Aren’t we looking for a way to walk out of this room?”
Rafferty says, “We are.”
“Then these are the stakes,” Pan says. “If you lose, you will voluntarily leave Thailand.”
“Poke,” Arthit says.
“I can’t do that,” Rafferty says. “I have a wife and daughter to take care of.”
Pan shrugs the higher shoulder. “That should make the game more interesting.”
“Forget it.”
The flush on Pan’s face deepens. “Consider the alternative,” he says. “I destroy your friend here, and then I have you thrown out of the country, and then your friend undertakes some act of vengeance that probably gets him killed.”
A vista of emptiness opens up in front of Rafferty. It feels like part of the walls and floor have fallen away and there is nothing above or below but gray, empty space with drizzle falling through it. Life without Thailand: life somewhere else, uprooting Miaow, explaining it all to Rose.
Possibly losing both Rose and Miaow.
Rafferty says, “And if I win?”
Pan shrugs. “Name your bet.”
Suddenly Rafferty thinks of something he might actually like to have. More important, it’s something Pan will never give him. If Pan won’t bet, they might all be able to walk away from the table. “I’m a writer,” he says. “I want your permission to write your life story, without interference.”
“You’re joking,” Pan says. His biography is a kind of holy grail among Thai publishers, as unattainable as it is desirable. Several well-known writers have announced plans to write the man’s life, only to abandon the project later for unspecified reasons. The only book that actually made it to press was lost when the printing plant burned down.
“That’s what I want,” Rafferty says. “Gives you something worth playing for.”
Without taking his eyes from Rafferty’s, Pan raises his right hand and massages the lower left shoulder as though it is still sore from the seed sack’s strap. He seems completely unconscious that he is doing it. Then he laughs, but without much conviction. “Write my life story? And I don’t try to stop you?”
Rafferty says, “You not only don’t try to stop me. You cooperate.”
“I’m leaving,” says one of the businessmen. “Send the money to my office.” The other joins him to leave, but Pan says, “You’re staying here. Keep an eye on the farang. I’m not going to get cheated again.”
His eyes drop to the green surface of the table and then come up to Rafferty’s. The room is silent and as motionless as a window display. He purses his lips and drums his fingertips on the table for a second. His eyes make their quick circuit of the room. Then he says, “I can beat you.”
“Poke,” Arthit says. “Don’t do it.”
“Got an alternative?” Rafferty still can’t believe that Pan will accept the stakes. He reaches over and grabs the deck of cards, squares it, cuts and shuffles it once, puts it in front of the spot where Pan had been sitting, and waits to see what the man will do. With an abrupt jerk, almost a muscle spasm, Pan lifts the low shoulder and lets it fall again. Then he adjusts his jacket and points to his fallen chair. One of the bodyguards picks it up and puts it back in position, and Pan sits. He puts out a hand, and a bodyguard gives him a cigar, which he centers in the pink mouth. He waits a moment, until the lighter has come and gone, and then shuffles the deck twice and passes it to Rafferty to cut again.
“So tell me,” he says, picking up the deck. “Why are you so interested in writing about my life?”
“Something Balzac said,” Rafferty answers. “I just want to know whether it’s true.”
The first two facedown cards hit the table, one for Rafferty, one for Pan. “Who is Balzac?”
“A French writer who died a long time ago.”
Rafferty’s second facedown card lands.
“And what did he say?”
“Something to the effect that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
Pan’s second card lands eighteen inches from his first.
♥ Uploaded by Coral ♥
The owner has taken advantage of the cool air towed in by a late-night drizzle to kill the expensive air-con and prop open the door to the street. It’s one of Arthit’s regular haunts; he had stopped at the bar to grab a full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black before heading for a corner booth. Rafferty followed along.
The place is funereally quiet, the drinkers solitary islands of silence, except for Arthit and Rafferty, who whisper, heads together, in the corner. Now and then the gloom lifts as a car passes in the soi, the small street outside, with a sizzle of tires on wet pavement, its headlights throwing the drinkers near the door into sharp silhouette.
“Call him in the morning,” Arthit says, putting down the bottle for the fourth time. He’s knocked back about a third of the contents, and the ice over which he poured the first few drinks is now a memory. “Tell him you’ve changed your mind.” He hoists his glass.
“He gets his way too often,” Rafferty says. “He needs his goddamn face slapped.”
Arthit takes two long swallows, the way Rafferty drinks water. “Far be it from me,” he says over the rim of the glass, “to remind you of one of the foremost precepts of your adopted culture: Keep a cool heart.”
“Like you did,” Rafferty says, and immediately regrets it.
Arthit lifts his drink and sights the bar through it, turning his head slowly with the glass in front of one eye. He doesn’t speak.
Rafferty says, “Sorry.”
“You’re right,” Arthit says. He takes yet another numbingly large slug of Black. “I behaved like a child. And Pan should never have been in that game. I put Vinai in charge of choosing our pigeons, and I am-most-” He shakes his head. “Almost called the whole thing off when he brought Pan in. But Vinai said Pan would enjoy it, said he’d think it was a terrific joke.”
“He might have, if he hadn’t been so drunk.”
“Well,” Arthit says, and drinks, a sip this time. “He was.” He looks idly around the bar, just a cop survey, obviously not expecting anything interesting. “You don’t want to write the book.” His eyes wander to the glass in his hand, and he sets it on the table again and picks up the bottle.
Rafferty has seen his friend knock it back before, but never quite like this. “What’s that thing with his lips?”
“He got burned, don’t know how. You saw his hands. The file on him said the lip balm is psylochogical-psychological. He thinks they’re hot, his lips, so he cools them down with menthol.”
“If I’m going to quit, tell me what I’m missing. What’s the story I’m not going to write?”
Arthit closes his eyes, and for a moment Rafferty thinks he might be going to slump sideways, but then he opens them again, looking at a spot in the center of the table with an intensity that suggests that he’s trying to get the room to hold still. “Father was a farmer. Had some land, Isaan dirt, all rocks and scrub. Every year they’d work themselves to death, and every year they’d borrow money. They were going to lose everything. So Pan came to Bangkok.” He sits there, regarding the invisible spot on the table.
“And?” Rafferty prompts.
Arthit tilts his head back as though it is too heavy for his shoulders. “And he’s a tough boy. You can see that when you look at him, even now.”
“He’s gotten soft,” Rafferty says.
“He’s hard underneath it.” Arthit’s eyes go to the wall, and he squints slightly. “He came to Bangkok, I said that, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. Good to know I didn’t imagine it. So.” He blinks heavily. “He chose three blocks in Pratunam, not far from where Rose and Peachy have their office now. Sidewalk market, lots of stalls. Remember, he’s about seventeen years old. He goes to the stallholders and tells them they need protection.” Arthit turns the glass in his fingers. “They say they’ve already got protection, and he says no they don’t. The next day the guy who’s collecting the protection money gets thrown out of a car in the middle of one of the blocks.”
“Dead?”
“Deeply dead. Pulverized. So everybody takes a good look, and the body gets hauled away, and next day there’s Pan again, telling them they need protection.” Arthit picks up the bottle and squints at the label. “It’s really whiskey,” he says, sounding surprised. “My head should be on the table by now.”
“Keep trying.”
Arthit presses the bottle to his cheek, as though his face is hot. “Of course, the guy who got tossed out of the car had a boss, and Pan gets grabbed and taken to him. They’re going to chop him up and prolly-probably-use him for bait, but the boss wants to take a look at him first. They’re all there, Pan and the three guys who grabbed him, in the boss’s office. And the boss, a management-level crook named Chai, asks Pan why he shouldn’t just be killed right there. Pan says, ‘Choose one of these guys.’”
As long as he has the bottle in his hand, Arthit pours and drinks. “You understand that this is hearsay, right? It’s not like it’s in his file or anything. Anyway, Pan says that thing about choosing a guy, and Chai figures what the hell and points at the biggest one, and in about five seconds the big guy is dead on the floor with an ice pick through his temple, and Pan has the dead man’s gun and it’s pressed against the back of Chai’s skull. But he doesn’t pull the trigger. What he does is say, ‘Choose another one.’” Arthit looks toward the door as a car hisses by, narrowing his eyes against the glare through the door.
“There’s buckets of this kind of stuff at the beginning, but of course if it’s not in a file somewhere, it never happened. Anyway, Pan becomes one of Chai’s enforcers and works his way up, and the next thing we know-say he’s twenty-three, twenty-four-he’s taken over a massage place, just a dump off Sukhumvit. Real junk pile. Cops called it ‘the armpit,’ because it was hot and dirty and wet and it smelled. A total bottom-level, ten-dollar pounding parlor. Women, the kindest way to describe them would be ‘motherly.’ Title to the place changes hands, and trucks pull up, and a bunch of heavyweights go in with sledgehammers, and a couple tons of dirt get dumped in front, and there are a few weeks of banging and hammering and painting and flower planting, and the dirt gets turned into a big hill leading up to the front door, which is now black glass-etched, okay?-and a huge purple sign goes up that says ‘The Mound of Venus,’ and Pan owns the fanciest public whorehouse in Bangkok. And then he owns two, and then three. And they’ve all got that little hill outside, and they’re called, I don’t know, Mound Two and Mound Three.”
“The Mound of Venus?” Rafferty asks. “In English?”
“That touch of class,” Arthit says.
“And from that he got into everything.”
“You name it,” Arthit says, “and he’s in it. The first Mound was maybe nineteen years ago, and now he’s in everything. Hotels, apartment buildings, office blocks, toy manufacturing.” He wipes a palm over his forehead although the bar is cool. “In fact, manufacturing of all kinds-shoes, clothes, dishes, anything with a label on it. Factories everywhere. He’s a baht billionaire. For all I know, he’s a dollar billionaire, too.”
Rafferty drains his beer and watches the remaining bits of foam form little bubble continents as they slide down the inside of the glass. Finally he says, “Something’s missing. Where’s the connective tissue? I mean, there’s a gulf between baby thug-slash-sex mogul, as opposed to getting manufacturing rights to half the logos in the world. You don’t just buy into the kind of businesses he runs. For that you have to get to the really big boys. That’s a closed club.”
“You’re right,” Arthit says. “There’s something hidden there. And that’s probably the reason he doesn’t want his life story written.”
“You’ve mentioned his file a couple of times-”
“Have I?” Arthit’s eyebrows rise. “I shouldn’t have.” He picks up the glass and regards it with severity. “Muss-must be the drink talking.”
“Why?”
Arthit says, “Why’ is an extremely broad question.”
“Why shouldn’t you have mentioned his file?”
“If you ever looked at it, you’d know.”
“I don’t think I’m likely to get a look at it.”
“You’re certainly not. It’s sensitive information. Privileged.”
“Privileged how?”
“Strictly cops only. You’d have to get a cop very drunk for him to tell you that Pan’s file is about three pages long, with wide margins and big type, and it reads like the stuff the Catholic Church gives the pope when they want somebody sainted, except shorter. Zero real information. And this is a guy everybody knows is dirty.”
“But he’s a Boy Scout on paper.”
Arthit leans forward, pushing his face toward Rafferty’s. “You’re only hearing part of what I’m saying. The file’s interesting, but what’s more interesting is the amount of power it took. ’Nough power to get somebody who’s way, way up there to pull a big, fat, dirty file, hundreds of pages thick, and replace it with a box of candy. And I mean it’s been pulled everywhere. It’s not on paper at the stations, it’s not online, it’s not in the backup systems. Least not the ones I can access.”
“How unusual is that?”
The glass comes up again and gets tilted back. Rafferty watches the level drop. “Very,” Arthit says when he can talk again. “Extremely. Almost unprecedented.” He fans his face, which, thanks to the alcohol, is as red as the liquid that indicates the temperature in an old-time thermometer. “Poke. You don’t want to get anywhere near whoever deleted those files. Which means you don’t want to get near Pan.”
AN HOUR LATER Rafferty steers Arthit’s car along the shining street, still wet from the drizzle, to the curb in front of the house that Arthit and his wife, Noi, share. Arthit has his head thrown back and his eyes closed, but when the car stops, he sits forward and looks around at the neighborhood as though he’s never seen it before.
He turns to face Rafferty. His eyebrows contract. “My car, right?”
“Right,” Rafferty says, pulling the key from the ignition.
Arthit blinks lids as heavy as a lizard’s. “How’d I get over here?”
“Seemed like a good idea, since you’d drunk most of the Johnnie Walker Black in Bangkok.”
“Did I?” Arthit seems pleased to hear it.
Rafferty gives his friend a second to find his way into the present. “I have a question for you.”
“And I,” Arthit says with careful precision, “am hip-deep in answers.”
“You knew all about Pan, about the amount of power behind him, earlier this evening.”
Arthit says, “Oh,” and turns to look out the window at his house, at the place where he had once thought he and Noi would raise their children. He breathes on the window to fog it. “That.”
“Well, knowing all of it, why did you let things get so out of hand at the card table? Why didn’t you defuse it earlier?”
“The right question,” Arthit says thickly, “is, why didn’t I give a fuck?”
Rafferty waits.
Arthit slumps sideways, his cheek pressed against the passenger window. “Between us,” he says.
“Fine.”
“I mean it. Not even Rose.”
This stops Rafferty for a moment. There’s nothing he keeps from Rose. He looks at his friend’s drained, crumpled face and says, “Not even Rose.”
“Noi needs…pills to sleep,” Arthit says. The words seem to require physical effort. “The pain’s worse and worse. It keeps her up. I can hear her breathing. So the doctor, the new one, he gives her sleeping pills. Strong ones. She’s been getting them for more than three months.”
Noi has been Arthit’s wife for seventeen years. Her nervous system is being ravaged by multiple sclerosis. In the last few months, her decline has been brutally swift. She is a burning match. Arthit has been reduced to the role of helpless bystander.
“Do they work?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Arthit says.
“Why not?”
Arthit opens the glove compartment and snaps it shut again. “Every night she goes into the bathroom and she brushes her teeth, and then I listen as she fills a glass with water and shakes a pill out of the bottle, and then she comes to bed. Just like the doctor told her to. And I lie there and listen to her breathe, hear the catch in her breath, and I know she’s awake.” He opens the little compartment door again and leaves it hanging, the dim splash of light from inside it bringing his thighs and belly out of the darkness. “And this morning I went into the kitchen to make her some pancakes, as a surprise. She loves pancakes.”
Rafferty feels a tremor of dread but says, “Okay.”
“And in the tin of flour, a couple of inches down, I found one of those plastic bags that’s got the little zipper along the top, and it was full of pills. There were eighty-one of them, Poke.”
Rafferty says, “Oh?” Then he says, “Ohhhh.”
Arthit puts both hands on his friend’s arm. “Eighty-one of them,” he says. “Hidden from me.”
The phone in the Silk Room rings at 11:17 P.M.
The man in the big bed is awake immediately. Late-night phone calls are so common that his wife sleeps in the Teak Room, more than thirty meters down the hallway. It is a very big house.
“Yes.” He switches on the bedside lamp, and the pale silk walls of the room appear. He listens for a moment, until something he hears brings him up to a full sitting position. His forehead wrinkles and then smooths immediately, automatically erasing the display of concern even though there’s no one to see it. “Seriously? A farang?”
He peels back the blankets and gets up, a lithe, slender, balding man in his early fifties, whose face retains the fine bone structure that had made so many well-bred hearts flutter when he was younger, the bone structure that landed him the problem daughter of one of Thailand ’s oldest families, now sleeping down the hall. He wears silk pajamas. “Was he drunk? He must have been drunk.”
A desk, the work of some English craftsman who’s been dead for three centuries, gleams between the heavily curtained front windows. On one corner is a silver tray holding a decanter of water and a heavy, deeply cut crystal glass. The man cradles the phone between ear and shoulder and uses both hands to pour, being careful not to splash any water onto the wood. He picks up the water and sips. “No,” he says, “not at all. You were right to call.” He puts the glass back on the tray and picks up a pen. “Spell it?” He listens and then writes, Rafferty. The man on the other end asks him a question.
“Let me think about that for a second.” His underlings call him “Four-Step” behind his back, because of his insistence on thinking things through four and sometimes even five steps in advance. He closes his eyes briefly, his finger making tiny circles on the wooden surface of the desk.
His eyes open. “Good idea,” he says. “Two in English and two in Thai. All morning papers, and one of them should be the Sun. You’ll need to make the calls right now and use my name to make the morning editions. And I need information about Rafferty. By the time the papers come out.” He listens again for a moment, and impatience twists his face. “Everything,” he says. “I need everything.”
The children who joined the boy in the alley have eaten their fill at a roadside soup stand, and the boy has given each of them a small amount of money for the needs of the following day. The little ones are already curled up on old blankets spread over the dirt floor close to the damp wooden walls, since they go to sleep earliest. The older kids take the middle of the room, with the biggest ones in front, near the door, next to lengths of two-by-four with nails driven through them at one end.
Just in case.
The boy steps outside into the misting rain, pushing the shack’s wooden door closed behind him. The mud, thick beneath his flip-flops, slopes down toward the edge of the river, which is low at this season. A cloud of mosquitoes orbit him, but he waves them off and makes his way up to the boulevard, where he flags down a motorcycle taxi.
There’s a one-in-three chance that he’s guessed right about where the village girl with the baby will end up. She came out of Wichat’s building, and Wichat maintains three holding pens, or at least three the boy knows about. There could be more.
But his luck is good. He is sheltered in a doorway when another moto-taxi bounces over the ruts and stops in front of the empty-looking building across the street. She is on the backseat, the baby at her chest and a white plastic bag dangling from her free hand. He retreats into the darkness as she climbs off and takes her first real look at her destination.
PARTWAY ACROSS THE stretch of mud, Da stops.
Six or seven steps distant, seen through the gaping doorway, the hall is ghost-dark. To Da’s heightened senses, the building teems with spirits. It is roofed but unfinished, surrounded by an expanse of mud behind a rusted chain-link fence. Pitting its surface are dark, empty windows that look to Da like missing teeth. Patches of plaster have peeled from the walls, exposing sagging layers of crude, handmade mud bricks. The place smells of piss and abandonment.
Da takes two more steps, peering into the hall that yawns in front of her. There is enough city light reflecting off the low clouds to dilute the blackness of the hall into a kind of darkness in suspension, like a glass of water into which a writing brush has been dipped repeatedly. A long pool of black rainwater has collected against the left wall. Dimly visible at the hall’s far end is a staircase.
The baby sleeps, heavy and loose-limbed, in her left arm, curled against her chest. The baby’s blanket stinks of ammonia. A heavy plastic shopping bag cuts into the fingers of her right hand. Behind her she can hear the mechanical heartbeat of the motorcycle taxi that brought her, as the driver waits to make sure she’s in the right place before he abandons her.
A thin wash of light dances on the ceiling of one of the rooms on the second floor. A candle. So someone is here. Da turns and lifts the bag, swinging it back and forth as a good-bye to the driver. She tries to smile. He pops the moto into gear, and Da stands there, watching the red dots of his taillights disappear in the falling mist.
Then she hoists the baby higher, takes a deep breath, climbs three steps, and passes through the doorway.
Instantly something scuttles away from her along the opposite wall, the one to her left, creating a V-shaped wake in the water: a rat. Da doesn’t like rats, but she’s lived with them all her life. There are worse things than rats.
The only doors in the hall are on the left, but they are closed, and nothing could make Da step into the water. That leaves the stairs.
Da has climbed stairs more frightening than this one.
On the edge of her village in the northeast was the house where the woman died. It was the largest house in the village, with two stories above the ground, this in a town where most families shared a single wooden room.
The woman had lived alone. She was not born in the village, and she was not friendly. She moved through the streets without talking to the other women. She didn’t use the town shops. The shutters over her windows were kept closed.
So no one knocked on her door. And when she died, when Da was eleven, it was more than a week before the smell announced it, and two of the village men forced their way in and came out running, their hands over their noses and mouths.
In the year that followed, people gave the house a wide berth. One of the village grannies, a woman who had dreamed several winning lottery numbers, said she heard the sound of weeping coming from the house. No one else heard it, but no one else had dreamed winning lottery numbers either.
Naturally, the boys talked about going in. And talked about it and talked about it, until finally Da said she was going in. And quickly, before she could lose her nerve, she pried open the front shutters, hoisted herself over the sill, and let herself drop to the floor. Stood there, holding her breath, listening to the house creak in the heat. Felt the dust on the floor beneath her bare feet. Heard the rustling of mice in the walls.
Heard the weeping.
It came from upstairs. It flowed like water, without pauses for breath, a river of grief. Whoever or whatever was making that sound, it did not need to breathe. But it needed comforting. With every hair on her arms standing upright, Da went to the stairs.
There was no increase in volume as she climbed. The weeping filled the air evenly, like dust in a storm, the same everywhere.
The stairs took Da up to a short hallway. The weeping came through the open door at the end of the hall, a room that was tightly shuttered, because it was even darker than the hallway. Da slid one foot forward, then the other, moving as silently as she could. It seemed to her that it took a very long time to reach the door, and when she did, she put a hand against the jamb for balance and looked in.
The bed was terribly stained. Da’s mind reeled back from considering what had caused the stains, and she forced her eyes past the stain, to the edge of the bed, to the corner of the room. And stopped.
Slowly she looked back at the bed. Nothing, nothing but the stains. She looked away again, and felt her knees weaken.
The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed, slumped forward over her lap. Long gray hair hung loosely all the way to the blanket, covering her face. But when Da looked at her, she was gone.
Da grasped the doorframe with both hands and let her eyes scan the room. While her eyes were moving, the woman was clearly visible. When she looked directly at the bed, it was empty. But the weeping continued whether the woman was visible or not.
Da forced herself to study the empty bed. This time she could see something: The pillows beyond the spot where the woman had been sitting were wavering, as though Da were looking at them over a steaming kettle.
“Please,” Da said, and then stopped to clear her throat. “Please don’t cry.”
The weeping continued.
“Don’t cry,” Da said. “It’s all over. Whatever broke your heart, it’s over. You need to go.”
A moment of silence, and into it Da said, “And if you can’t go yet, I can come back. If you don’t want to be alone, I mean. I can come see you again. I can be your friend.”
Nothing.
“You don’t have to be alone,” Da said.
Then the bed creaked and the crack between the shutters seemed to widen, letting in more light, and Da took a lightning step back.
She could see the pillows clearly.
Da heard the house again, heard the wood groan and shift, heard the mice in the walls. Heard, as though from very far away, the boys outside calling her name. She felt the weight of her own body return to her, and she shifted from foot to foot, wondering what would be the most polite way to take her leave, just in case something remained to say good-bye to.
After a moment she backed away from the door. Halfway down the hall, she stopped and said, “Bye,” and gave a wai of respect. Then she turned and walked, without hurrying, to the head of the stairs, and down them, then across the living room and through the window into the bright sunlight and the circle of waiting boys, all demanding to know what it was like, what she’d seen, and all unsatisfied when she said, “Nothing,” and walked home alone.
And now, with the weight of the strange baby against her chest, with her left arm aching from the burden and the handle of the plastic bag cutting into the fingers of her right hand, Da looks at the stairs in the unfinished apartment house and begins to climb.
On the second story, there are no doors in the doorways and the openings are pale with light. Da peers into the first one and finds herself in one of the waiting rooms for hell.
A kerosene lantern. Its glow falls on hunched shoulders, bent backs, sharply angled necks, open wounds. Four of the people are fragments: their limbs are twisted or missing, their torsos folded over stunted appendages. The effect is of a roomful of people assembled, in the dark, from the litter of a battlefield. The fifth one, the whole one, is a child of ten or twelve. Da has to look twice to see the harelip that pulls her face up into a permanent grimace, like a painting smeared by a malicious hand before the oils were dry.
“Excuse me,” Da says, backing away. One of the adults sees the baby and waves them off. “No,” he says sharply, “not here.” He rises, his knee dangling, crimped at the end like a sausage, and Da backs out, into the hall.
Huddled in the next room are old-looking children, all teeth and joints and fingers; one of them hisses at her. The room after that reeks with whiskey and is crowded with men, dangerously full of unhealthy heat. Da looks into six rooms, six separate hells, before a heavyset woman in her thirties smiles at her and waves her in. This woman, ten or twelve years older than Da, also has a baby.
The older woman has somehow made the unfinished room feel warmer, although all she has done is lay a faded, threadbare blanket over the cement floor and made a soft mound of clothing to put her infant on. A candle burns in a bottle in the corner. Da offers a grateful wai, her palms pressed together as if in prayer, and then sets down the bag containing her new T-shirt, the blanket, the cake of soap, the milk, the small bottle of whiskey. Giving the other woman as much space as possible, Da sinks to a sitting position with the baby in her lap and says, “Thank you.”
The woman makes a fluid movement, precise and economical, from mouth to ears. She can neither hear nor speak. She puts her hands side by side and extends them toward the baby in Da’s lap as though she wants to pour water on it. She brings her hands back to her chest and repeats the gesture, and Da realizes what it means and hands the child to the woman.
In the woman’s arms, the heavy, stinking bundle becomes a baby. She gently unwraps the cloth, and a tiny hand emerges and opens and describes an arc through the air. The woman extends an index finger, and the baby’s fist closes on it.
Da feels herself smile.
The woman looks up and catches Da’s smile and returns it. At the sight of the smile, of the tiny fist around the finger, something breaks in the center of Da’s chest, something that has been hardening there for days. Her eyes fill with tears. The woman shakes her head slowly and extends her free arm, and Da creeps beneath it. With a stranger’s arm around her shoulders, Da wipes her eyes and looks down for the first time to study the face of her new child.
The Day of the Telephone begins at 6:20 A.M.
He rolls over blindly at the first ring, his hand slapping the surface of the bedside table and knocking the alarm clock to the floor, and Rose stirs and mutters beside him, although it takes more than a ringing phone and a falling clock to awaken her.
The side of his hand hits the phone, sending it skittering to the edge of the table, but he manages to grab it before it follows the clock down. “What?” he says, his voice a frog’s croak in his ear.
“Mr. Rafferty?” A woman’s voice.
“Time is it?” Rafferty says.
“Mr. Rafferty, this is Elora Weecherat with the Bangkok -”
“Elora what?” He is rubbing scratchy eyes with his free hand.
“Weecherat. With the Bangkok Sun.”
“I don’t want a subscription.”
“I’m wondering whether you have a comment about the story on page three.”
Rafferty says, “Ummmm.”
“Is the story accurate?”
He hauls himself to a sitting position. “Give me a number,” he says.
She recites a phone number, and he hangs up in the middle of it. He sits there, feeling the edge of sleep recede like the shoreline of a country he’s been forced to leave. The phone begins to ring again, and he pulls the jack out. This silences it in the bedroom, but he can hear it chirping away in the living room. He wraps himself in his robe as though it were a grievance and goes through the bedroom door, into the stuffy heat of the living room.
The air conditioners in the bedrooms make sleep possible in the hot season, which this year seems to be twelve months long, but it makes little sense to cool the living room when no one is in it. The door to the balcony is closed, and the air is heavy with the stink of Rose’s cigarettes. For the thousandth time in his life with her, Rafferty wonders why cigarette smoke smells so much worse in the morning than it does at night. At night it has a sort of sinful razzle to it, but in the daytime it smells as toxic as asbestos. He goes to the sliding glass door and opens it. The clouds responsible for the previous evening’s drizzle have thinned to a high, pale ghosting, semitransparent as a film across the sky, a brilliant chromium heat-yellow in the east, but still a sleepy, pillow-feather gray to the west. As he checks his watch-6:25?-the phone rings again. Or, more accurately, it chirps like the world’s biggest, most aggressive cricket, the ring tone Miaow programmed into it.
He glares at it, but it doesn’t explode, so he goes into the kitchen.
He has taken lately to grinding the coffee beans before he goes to bed, not so much because of the noise the grinder makes in the morning, since nothing short of a collision with an asteroid would wake Rose, but as a way of shortening the amount of time it takes him to get the first gulp of coffee into his system. All he has to do now is turn on the pot, pour bottled water into the reservoir, and then stand there in suspended animation while the coffee drips. And drips. And drips.
The phone rings four more times as he waits, his forehead pressed against the cool of the refrigerator door. As he pours his first cup, it begins again. He ignores it, sipping the hot liquid and waiting for the daily miracle, the renewal of consciousness and judgment and volition, that coffee always brings. At the twenty-fourth ring, the phone stops.
And, with the chirping silenced, he hears his cell phone ringing. The surge from the coffee gives him the energy to go into the living room and check the display, which says ARTHIT.
His throat tightens as the previous night comes back to him. Noi’s stash of pills. What it might mean.
“Arthit,” he says.
“One of our friends has been busy,” Arthit says. He sounds thick as sludge, as befits a man who drank his weight the previous evening.
The fact that this is not about Noi sends a porous buoyancy through Rafferty and makes the day visible through the open door look less stifling. “We have friends in common?” He sucks down most of the coffee that remains in the cup.
“One of our friends in the card game. You’re famous.”
Rafferty says, “Well, don’t worry, I’ll still say hello to you. If we should happen to meet, I mean. However unlikely that may be.”
After a moment Arthit says, “How much coffee have you had?”
Rafferty looks down into the mug, which is empty. “One cup.”
“You have a very responsive system.”
“Some people are Ferraris,” Rafferty says, “and some are Land Rovers.”
“And some are in the Bangkok Sun and the World,” Arthit says. “And a couple of the Thai-language papers, too.”
“Wait. What’s in the paper?”
“You and Pan,” Arthit says. “You’re big news.”
Rafferty puts down the cup. “Let me go get the papers,” he says. “I’ll call you back.”
THERE HE IS: page three in the Sun and page seven in the World. The Sun even has a dark, fuzzy picture, cribbed from the color shot on the back of Rafferty’s book Looking for Trouble in Thailand but oddly mutated by being cheaply converted into a black-and-white halftone.
“I look like an ax murderer,” Rafferty says.
“With all due respect,” Arthit says on the other end of the phone, “how you look is the least of your problems.”
“No,” Rafferty says. “How you look is the least of my problems. How I look is a matter of some concern. Who talked to the press?”
“None of them. They don’t have this kind of clout. One of them, probably Vinai, talked to someone who does have this kind of clout.”
“Why Vinai?”
“He’s the one who brought Pan.”
“And why don’t you think he made the call himself?”
“As I said, clout. By the time the game ended, the papers were coming up on deadline. It took somebody with weight to get the stories into the morning editions. And then look at what’s not in the story. The card game, any hint of resistance on Pan’s part-practically everything is missing except the fact that a farang has been selected to write Pan’s biography, with Pan’s blessing.”
“So what does that mean?”
Arthit says, “I don’t know yet.”
Rafferty’s adopted daughter, Miaow, comes into the living room, her hair wet and pasted to her head from her morning shower, on her way to another challenging day of fourth grade. She has been detached and even sullen lately, but she’s sufficiently surprised to see Rafferty-who’s not often up at this hour-to give him a startled little wave. Then she damps down her enthusiasm and heads for the kitchen.
“My phone’s been ringing all morning,” Rafferty says to Arthit.
“Oh, sure. This is news. Bangkok ’s most profligate billionaire, the guy who gold-plated his Rolls-Royce and is known not to care for farang, has suddenly given one of them the right to tell his story.”
As if on cue, the other phone begins to ring.
“There’s my public,” Rafferty says. “Do you know somebody on the Sun, a reporter called Eloise or Eleanor or something?”
“Elora?” Arthit asks. Miaow comes into the room with a can of Coke in one hand and an orange in the other and starts toward the ringing phone. Rafferty holds up a hand to stop her.
“That’s it,” he says to Arthit. “Elora.”
“Elora Weecherat,” Arthit says. “Business section. Looks like a fashion model, but she’s as tough as nails.”
Miaow tucks the orange under her chin and picks up the phone, ignoring Rafferty’s attempt to wave her off. “Yeah?” she says.
“Is she pro or con on Pan?” Rafferty asks.
“She’s got a kind of horrified fascination,” Arthit says. “Mainly because of all the girls.”
Miaow says, “He’s on the other phone. This is his daughter.”
Hearing Miaow refer to herself as his daughter makes Rafferty smile, although he knows she won’t like his smile any more than she seems to like anything else these days. “What’s she going to think when I quit?”
“Are you going to quit?”
“No,” Miaow says, in the put-upon tone Rafferty’s been hearing a lot of. “I won’t write down a number. I’m eating breakfast. Call him back.” She hangs up and takes the orange out from under her chin, and her eyes drift to the newspapers on the table.
“I thought we’d decided that last night,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to call him today and tell him I changed my mind.”
“Just checking,” Arthit says. “I didn’t know we’d come to a firm decision.”
“All this nonsense this morning has, as the British say, stiffened my resolve. I am stiffly resolved not to do it.”
Miaow nudges Rafferty’s arm. He glances up to see her finger pointed at his photo in the Sun. He nods, and Miaow tugs down the corners of her mouth and lifts her eyebrows, looking grudgingly impressed. At least, Rafferty thinks, it’s a reaction.
“Well, when you tell her you’re not going to write it,” Arthit says, “give her a reason, or she’s going to think you’ve been scared off.”
“But if Pan has given me permission to write it, why would he scare me off?”
“There are other people,” Arthit says, “lots of other people, who would much prefer that a book, especially a sympathetic book, not be written.”
“Who?”
“People who are worried about his personal power base. He’s extremely popular among the poor, especially in the northeast.”
“Why?”
“Ask someone who’s poor,” Arthit says. “Or used to be.”
Miaow is reading the story that accompanies the photograph. She gives a low whistle, which comes as a surprise. Rafferty hadn’t known she could whistle.
Watching Miaow run her finger along the lines of type, Rafferty says, “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
“I’d take a careful look around, assess the total situation, add up the pros and cons, and then scream.”
“Thanks. How’s Noi?”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Arthit says, and hangs up.
“What is this?” Miaow asks. She is rubbing the surface of the photo with her index finger as though she expects it to come off the page.
“It’s a picture of me.”
“You look really ugly,” Miaow says, and the door to the bedroom opens and Rose comes out, wrapped in a towel and a frown, just as the phone begins to ring.
“Why is it so noisy?” she asks.
“Poke’s in the paper,” Miaow says, rotating the Sun to face Rose. Then, without another word, she turns her back on both of them and heads for the kitchen.
“What?” Rafferty says into the phone.
“Listen to me,” says a man’s voice.
“I have the phone at my ear and everything,” Rafferty says. “Just poised to listen.”
Rose says, “This is a terrible picture.”
“You will not write this book,” the man says. “If you write it, you, your wife, and your daughter will die.”
“Who is this?” Rafferty says, and the tone of his voice brings Rose’s eyes up.
“Did you hear me?” the man asks.
“I asked who you were.”
“All three of you will die,” the man says. He hangs up.
Both Rose and Miaow, who stopped at the kitchen counter, are staring at Rafferty now. He brings up the corners of his mouth, hoping it looks like a smile, and says, “I don’t think the picture’s that bad.”
He’s a great man,” Rose says. She blows on her cup of Nescafé.
“Are we talking about the same guy?” Rafferty’s on his third cup of coffee, waiting for Miaow to finish getting ready for school, since he’s decided not to let her go alone today. She has grudgingly agreed to allow him to accompany her.
He eyes Rose’s cup of instant with resignation. He’s abandoned his two-year campaign to get her to give up Nescafé, the coffee she grew up on. He’s spent a fortune on exotic beans, coffeemakers, gold filter cones, and bottled water to convert her, and her dream cup of coffee still involves hot water run from the tap onto a heaping clot of brown powder.
“We’re talking about Pan,” she says. “The gold car and the girls.”
“He’s a thug. And a drunk.”
“So what? The way he acts, he knows what he’s doing. He’s like a bone in their throats.”
“Whose throats?”
“The good people,” she says, and he is taken aback at the bitterness in her voice. “The big people, the people who have everything and want more. The people who take, take, take, own, own, own. The people who go to fancy parties with blood on their hands. With their expensive cars and their big houses and their beautiful clothes and their terrible, spoiled children. The people who own the streets underneath the bars the girls work in and the rooms they sleep in when they’re finished screwing tourists. And then sell them the drugs for AIDS.” She slaps the cup down, loudly enough to straighten his spine. “You know. The people who have run everything forever.”
They are seated opposite each other at the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room. The brilliance of the new day spills into the room behind Rose, catching flyaway locks of her hair and exploding what seems like a hundred colors out of the long fall of black that stretches to the dimples at the base of her spine. He leans across and touches her wrist.
“He drives them crazy.” She turns her hand palm up and wraps her fingers around his. “He’s dirt, up from some pigshit village, and he rubs their noses in it every day of the year. He shoved his way in here, with his awful skin and his burned hands and his one low shoulder, and grabbed a place at the dinner table without being invited, and then he pushed all their plates and glasses onto the floor, and spit on them. And then he bought everything they owned, two or three of everything, and covered them with gold just to make them uglier. And he takes the most beautiful women in the country, the ones they all want, and drags them behind him like a parade.”
“What’s the point?”
Rose shakes her head. “To prove that someone like him can have everything they have, everything that makes them special, and then shit on it. That someone can get rich without pretending to be one of them or trying to hide where he came from. The richer he gets, the cruder he gets. It scares them. They think he does it on purpose, just to build his personal power base.”
Power: the word Arthit had used. “Does what? Act like a pig?”
She turns the cup in the saucer, just doing something while she thinks. “That’s one side of it. But then he also gives money away like old newspaper. He sets up what he calls ‘banks’ up north. But they’re not really banks. Real banks lend money at interest and take away houses and things. His banks make small loans, maybe three or four hundred dollars, to poor people who have an idea for a business. If the business works, they pay back a little more than they borrowed. If the business fails, they don’t owe him anything. There are weaving villages now, woodcarving villages, silver-jewelry villages. There are men who own three or four trucks that they rent to farmers whenever they’re needed.”
“Why does that upset anyone?”
She dips her index finger into her cup and flicks coffee at him. “You’re supposed to understand this country. You wrote a book about it, remember?”
“I’ve never claimed to understand it. That’s why I married you.”
She pushes the coffee aside. “It upsets people because poor people are supposed to stay poor. They’re not supposed to have papers that say they own their land. They’re not supposed to have money in the bank so they can stockpile their harvests until the prices go up. They’re not supposed to do anything except live and die, and get fucked over in between. Grow the rice and sell it for nothing. Clear the land so some godfather can kick them off it and build ugly, expensive houses. Go where they’re told and stay where they’re put. Present themselves for sacrifice on a regular basis so the rich can stay fat.”
“And Pan is rocking the boat?”
“Sure. Rich people steal from the poor and pretend they’re giving. And here he is: He was poor, he still behaves like a peasant, and he’s really giving. He’s built two hospitals in Isaan, not big hospitals but good ones, and he pays doctors to work there, to take care of people who have never seen a doctor in their lives.” She stands and goes to the sink. He looks at the day heating up through the window, hearing the clink of her spoon against the jar of instant coffee and then the flow of water as the tap goes on. “Do you remember a girl from the bar, short and a little fat, always laughing, named Jah?”
Rafferty searches his memory. “Sort of. Maybe.”
“You have to remember her. There was that girl, the ugly, awful one, who was dancing when you first came into the bar. She wore glasses, and you can’t tell me you’ve forgotten that.”
Rafferty feels his face go hot.
“So you thought she was a college student or something, and you gave her-”
Rafferty tries to wave the rest of the story away. “I remember.”
“-you gave her five hundred baht. Because you were a sap. And the next night when you came in, everybody was wearing glasses.”
“Oh,” Rafferty says, the light dawning in the east. “Jah.”
“Right. She was the one whose glasses were so strong she walked off the edge of the stage and landed on that foreign woman. Anyway, Jah tested positive.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Rose is right, Jah had always been laughing.
“She’s okay.” She comes back and takes her seat again. “She got into a place here in Bangkok with about a hundred and fifty women in it. I know five or six of them. They get the drugs without having to pay for them, they have a place to sleep, they get three meals. They’re not out on the street, dying, or curled up in some shack up north, with the whole village pointing at them. Pan pays for it all.”
Rafferty says, “Last night he was calling the women on Patpong whores.”
“They are,” Rose says.
“Well, yeah, I mean, sure, literally.” This is not his most comfortable subject. “But he used the word-I don’t know-contemptuously.”
“That’s who he is. He uses the worst words he can think of. And then he goes and sets up a place like the one Jah is in.”
“I’m ready,” Miaow says, coming into the room in her school uniform. Her hair has been meticulously reparted and slicked down, and the skin on her cheeks literally shines. She is, Rafferty thinks, the cleanest child on the face of the earth.
“Let’s go, then,” he says, standing up.
“Why are you taking me?” Miaow demands. “I get there by myself every day.”
“Why not?” Rafferty says. “I’m awake, it’s time, and you’re my daughter. You said so yourself.”
Miaow slips into the straps of her backpack. “He’s weird today,” she says to Rose.
Rose says, “He’s weird every day.”
FOR THE FIRST five minutes of the taxi ride, Miaow gives him the brooding silence that seems to be her new default mode.
When she finally talks, he gets the topic he wants least. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“Why would something be wrong?”
“I saw you when you were talking on the phone. You got all tight and squinched.”
“Squinched?”
“That’s English,” she says. “I think.”
“I suppose it’s closer to English than it is to anything else.”
“Anyway, you looked like that.”
Rafferty gazes longingly out the window, which is too small for him to escape through. In retrospect, being alone with Miaow right now is not a tremendous idea. For some obscure reason, possibly because she knows he loves her with all his heart, she thinks she can ask him about anything. And, of course, she’s right.
He opts for selective honesty. “You know that book they mentioned in the newspaper?”
She blows out, her upper teeth against her lower lip to create a very long and slightly irritated “Ffffffffffff” sound. “I remember. It was only half an hour ago.”
“Well, that was someone who told me not to write it.”
Miaow says, “Or what?”
He should have known better. “What do you mean, ‘or what’?”
She crosses her arms high on her chest. “People don’t tell you not to do something without saying ‘or what.’ You know that.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies.”
“No. He said ‘or something,’ and then you got all squinched.”
The cab, at long last, makes the right into the street that leads to the street that leads to the street that Miaow’s school is on. Rafferty exhales heavily and says, “Jesus, this is a long ride.”
Miaow’s not giving him an inch. “That’s because you can’t think of anything to say.”
“Why have you been so grumpy lately?” Rafferty asks.
“Don’t change the subject. They said ‘or something.’”
“All right, you’re absolutely correct. They said if I wrote the book, they’d attack me with garden tools, chop me up, and make me into sandwiches.”
“I’m not five,” Miaow says. “Why would anyone make a sandwich with garden tools?”
“They’re farmers,” Rafferty improvises. “That’s all they have.”
“Why don’t they just back the buffalo over you?”
“Then they wouldn’t have the sandwiches.”
The remark gets the silence it deserves, and Miaow allows it to stretch out. Then she puts a small brown hand on top of his, the first time she’s touched him in days. “Are you going to get us into trouble?”
“Absolutely not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Very simple,” he says. “I’m not going to write the book.”
IT TAKES ONLY a second for his life to change.
The thrust of something hard into his back. The solid grip on his upper arm.
“It’s a gun,” a man says in English. “Stop walking. Don’t look around.”
“Or what?” Rafferty says, Miaow’s voice in his ears. The door to her school is a few yards behind him. She disappeared through it ten seconds ago.
“Or I’ll blow your spine to bits.” The English is almost completely unaccented.
“Just asking.”
“Hold still,” the man says, and something dark brown is pulled over Rafferty’s head and he’s shoved forward. “Bend down, pull the hood away from your chest, and look at your feet. There’s an open car door in front of you. Get in. Leave the door open behind you and sit in the middle. Clear?”
“Crystalline.”
“Then go.”
The car is black, and the bit of it he can see is clean and highly polished. He climbs in. It is cool and smells of leather. He slides to the center of the seat, his feet straddling the bump for the drive shaft, and waits. The front door opens, and the car dips as someone very heavy climbs in. A second later the back door to his left opens. A man gets in, and then there is another man sitting on his right. A gun probes his ribs on each side.
“With all friendly intent,” Rafferty says, “if those bullets go through me, you’re going to be shooting each other.”
“They won’t go through you,” says the man who had spoken before, who is now to Rafferty’s right. “They’re.22 hollow-points. They’ll just turn you to hamburger inside and stay there.”
Rafferty says, “Good. I’d hate to worry about you.” He hears a ticking that he identifies as the turn signal, the driver preparing to enter the stream of traffic.
“On the other hand,” the man says, “no exit wounds. You can have an open-casket funeral.”
The baby’s name is Peep.
The night whispered the name in Da’s ear just before she dropped off to sleep. She had spent hours, extravagantly letting her candle burn down, studying the child’s face. He is a beautiful baby with features of bewildering delicacy, especially the impossible miniature perfection of the nose and ears, the long, dark fringe of eyelashes, the soft curls of black hair. All of it so defenseless, all of it so new.
“Peep” is the first sound a chick makes, when its wings are silly, useless elbows and its feathers are yellow baby fluff. It’s a small sound, breath-edged, perfect for a baby.
So: Peep.
Don’t drop it, the man in the office had said.
How could she drop him?
Early the next morning, they were jostled down the stairs and across the drying mud into the back of a pair of vans. The men and the cripples were herded into one van, the women with children into the other.
The windows were covered with ragged pieces of sacking that had been glued to the glass. The covered windows frightened Da: Why shouldn’t they see where they were going? She pointed to the cloth and made a palms-up, questioning gesture to the deaf and dumb woman, who smiled and shook her head: Don’t worry. One of the other women, older than the others, with a skeletal, stunned-looking four- or five-year-old child clinging to her, said, “It’s so nobody can see in. People aren’t supposed to know that we get driven back and forth.”
Da said, “Oh.” Feeling stupid, feeling naive. Feeling lost. Wishing she were back in the drowsy cluster of wooden shacks at the bend of the river that is now dry, its water stolen. The shacks empty now, knocked off balance by the big machines until they sagged drunkenly sideways. Even the dogs are gone.
The sidewalk that has been given to her is hard and hot and dusty, another kind of dry riverbed, a river of people. The booths from which the vendors sell their wares begin half a block away, while this stretch is given to store windows, small office buildings, foot traffic, and beggars. Da sits exactly where she was put by the man who had driven the van, a thickset tree trunk of a man in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with brown girls all over it. He had looked at her incredulously when he realized she didn’t have a bowl, and then he’d tightened his mouth and stalked away, down to the booths. When he returned, he tossed a red plastic rice bowl into her lap. It had just missed Peep.
“You owe me eighty baht,” he’d said.
Now she sits there, the bowl upraised, hopelessly fishing the river of people. Most of them push past her, the same way they would sidestep a hole in the pavement. Once in a while, someone-usually a woman-will slow slightly and drop a coin into the bowl, often with a glance at Peep. Every time a coin strikes the bowl, Da feels a wave of shame wash over her.
The noise of the street is deafening.
Everything is in motion, but nothing seems to change: The people flow past, the cars glint cruelly, the sun slams down, the noise hammers her ears. How can the world be this noisy? How can the air smell like this? How can the people who live here endure it? Sweat gathers under Da’s arms and between her breasts and runs down her body. She feels repulsively filthy.
How will she survive this day?
One of the problems is that everything-the noise, the people, the dust, her shame-distracts her. It breaks to pieces her sense of who she is and scatters them unrecognizably at her feet. Where she grew up, silence was always available. There was always someplace she could go to reassemble herself when her grasp on who she was became frayed by distraction or anger, or even love. And now, sitting here, she feels as soulless, as valueless, as a piece of furniture abandoned on the sidewalk.
And she has been this way, she realizes, for days. Since her mother and father slung their packs over their shoulders and took her younger sisters by the hand and said good-bye to her and to their lives together. Since the bulldozer knocked the shacks crooked and made them unlivable. Since the moment she began the long, slow flight to Bangkok.
She has lost herself.
But now that she has recognized it, this is something she knows how to deal with.
She gathers her attention, reeling in the bits of her she left here and there over the days and nights that she was moving, no, running, as blindly and absently as the people who push past her now. She focuses all her attention on the sweat coursing down her skin. Feels the separate drops, feels their faintly cooling progress toward her belly. Feels the reassuring pressure of buttock on sidewalk: There is someone here after all. Slowly she broadens her focus to include her breath. In and out, in and out. An endless cycle with something at the center of it. Something doing the breathing, or perhaps something being breathed through, that she has come to know as Da.
The noise gradually fades.
After an undefinable period of time, she becomes aware that Peep has stopped shifting restlessly in her lap. She looks down to find him gazing at her. His tiny eyebrows are very faintly contracted, as though he is seeing something different when he looks at her. The look that passes between them is a pulse of some sort. A fine thread of connection.
Peep brings up one arm, fingers spread wide, and swings it up and down. It looks to Da as if he is waving at her. The thought breaks her concentration and makes her laugh.
And she feels eyes upon her. Someone is looking fixedly at her. She can feel this kind of thing. It is the dim, warm pressure of a gaze, fainter than the most tentative breeze, as faint as the weight of light falling through an open door. From behind her.
She turns to look, and someone stumbles into her, hard enough to knock her to an elbow and send the bowl into the air, the coins spiraling loose and ringing against the pavement. Hard enough to make her grab Peep so tightly he squeals and then begins to cry.
Someone is gabbling at her in some language-Sorry sorry sorry-it’s English, Da realizes, and she looks up, Peep squalling against her chest, to see a thin farang woman with hair the color of copper, a color that doesn’t even pretend to be real. The woman is waving her hands around, almost in tears, loudly saying the same thing, Sorry sorry sorry. She drops to her knees and begins to pick up the coins that hit the sidewalk.
“Okay,” Da says, embarrassed for the woman, with the sweat dripping off the tip of her long, bony nose. “Me okay. Baby, him okay.”
“I just wasn’t looking,” the woman says. She snatches a coin just inches in advance of a man’s shoe, barely getting her raw-looking knuckles out of the way. “Are you sure he’s all right?” She looks at Peep more closely and says, “Oh, my God, he’s adorable.”
“Him…pretty,” Da says.
“Pretty?” the woman says. She is dropping into the bowl the coins she picked up. “He’s precious, just a real little heartbreaker. How the girls will love him-he is a boy, isn’t he?”
Da says, “Boy.”
“And look at those lashes. Why is it always boys who get those beautiful eyelashes? Although you didn’t exactly get shortchanged in that department either. I feel like Bigfoot,” the woman says, looking around for more coins. “Just hoofed over you like a heffalump. Honey,” she says, putting a red-nailed hand on Da’s arm, “I am so sorry.”
“No problem,” Da says. Peep has stopped crying and is regarding the woman’s hair with wide-eyed uncertainty.
“Look at that little angel,” the woman says. “Just look at him. Couldn’t you just eat him up?”
Da says, “Eat?”
“Oh, you poor thing,” the woman says. “Here I am, gabbing on and on like this. Of course you need to eat. A lot more than you need a bunch of sloppy sympathy. Here.” She unsnaps a big straw purse and pulls out a wad of red five-hundred-baht bills. “You just buy as much food as you can choke down, and get that little angel a new blanket. The one you’ve got needs a couple of hours in a good strong bleach solution.” She puts two of the notes, and then a third, into Da’s bowl.
“Too much,” Da says.
“Nonsense. Plenty more where that comes from.” The eyes on either side of the sunburned nose are a pale, faded blue that Thai people associate with ghosts, but they seem kind. “Look at you,” she says. “Probably never done anything wrong in your sweet little life, and here you are. I have to tell you, honey, with all due respect to your beautiful country and everything, it stinks.”
Da takes the third note out of the bowl and extends it. She says, “Please?”
“Honey, you knock that off. Put that back, or I’ll give you a bunch more.” The woman gets to her feet. “I’m Helen,” she says. She jabs her chest with an index finger. “Helen. Me Helen.” Then she points at Da. “You?”
“My name me, Da.”
“Da,” Helen says. “What a pretty name. And Junior there?”
“Sorry?”
Helen points at Peep. “Name?”
“Name him, Peep.”
“Name him…” Helen says, her voice trailing off. “Oh, oh. His name, his name is Peep. Peep, right?”
Da says, “Peep.”
“Da and Peep,” Helen says. “Peep and Da.”
“Happy,” Da says, and then runs the sentence through her mind once and says, “Happy meet you.”
“Oh, well, honey,” Helen says, blinking fast, “I’m happy to meet you, too. And I’ll be back here tomorrow. I’ll be back here every day this week, and I’ll be looking for you.” She tugs her blouse straight, puts the strap of the big straw purse over her shoulder. She waves at Peep. “You take care of that little treasure,” she says. “Bye, now.”
Da says, “Bye-bye,” and Helen is gone.
And immediately the space is filled by the tree-trunk man in the blue shirt, who snatches the five-hundred-baht bills out of the bowl, bends down, and says furiously, “Never do that. Never. Never give money back. Do you understand me?”
Da lowers her head. Peep begins to cry again. “I understand,” Da says.
“You’re here to get it, not give it away.” And then the man is gone.
Da sits there, bouncing Peep to quiet his crying, trying to reassemble the feeling she had before Helen bumped into her. But what she feels instead is the warmth of that fixed gaze.
When she turns this time, she sees him: a spectrally slender boy of thirteen or fourteen, with a sharp-featured face and long, knotted hair. A moment later, like an animal disappearing into the brush around her village, he is gone.
You guys do this often?” Rafferty asks.
“Often enough,” says the man on his right, the one who spoke before.
“The driver must be built like a sumo wrestler. When he got in, it felt like the car was going to tip over.”
“You hear that?” the man asks in Thai. “A sumo wrestler.”
The man in front makes a sound that Rafferty identifies as a chuckle. Despite having read countless novels in which characters chuckle more or less continuously, this is the first time Rafferty has actually heard someone do it.
Rafferty says, “He chuckled.”
“He’s a merry soul,” says the man to his right.
“It’s important to be happy in one’s work,” Rafferty says.
“Do you always chatter like this when you’re frightened?”
Rafferty says, “I’d be frightened if you hadn’t put the hood on.”
“That just means we’re not going to kill you. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to beat the shit out of you.”
“When I’m frightened, I shut up,” Rafferty says.
After a moment of silence, the man to his right chuckles.
“You chuckled, too,” Rafferty says. “Did somebody teach all you guys to chuckle?”
“The chuckle,” the man to his right says, “is a perfectly acceptable form of laughter.”
“You speak very good English.”
They ride in silence for a few moments. Then the man says, “Here’s the problem: It doesn’t matter whether I like you. I’ll do anything to you that I’m told to do. Kill you without a thought. So go ahead and entertain us, but it won’t make any difference.”
Rafferty says, “Why waste good material?”
DOWN A RAMP and over some speed bumps. The car stops, and a hand grasps Rafferty’s arm.
“Let’s go. And don’t suddenly get stupid.”
“I don’t suddenly get stupid,” Rafferty says, sliding across the leather. “I have to work up to it.”
A few short steps, a wait, and then a bell rings. Rafferty hears the doors slide open, and he’s guided in. The man says, “Use the key for express. No stops.” Rafferty counts his pulse as the elevator rises, not because he thinks it’ll be useful but because it seems to be the only information available. At the count of seventy-three, the elevator does a stomach-churning deceleration, and at seventy-seven it comes to a full stop. An amplified woman’s voice with a fruity, phony-upper-class British intonation, says, “Thirty-six.” Then she repeats it in Thai.
“Shit,” says the man who has been doing all the talking. “I forgot about that.”
Rafferty says, “I didn’t hear it in either language.”
“No, you didn’t. And you don’t mention it while you’re talking to the man, understand? If you want to get through the day alive, you’ll forget all about it.”
“It’s gone.”
“Good.” Hands take his elbows as the doors slide open and a wave of cold air rolls at them. “You’re going straight now. I’ll tell you when we’ve got to turn.”
Four turns later he is stopped. He hears a very faint tapping sound that could be fingers on a keyboard. Several keyboards. A secretarial pool? It’s easy to envision one of those big open rooms with chest-high walls. A secretarial pool, in the kind of office where a hooded man doesn’t invite speculation.
So an office suite. On the thirty-sixth floor of some building, almost certainly in the Sathorn district.
A door squeaks open to his right, and hands grasp his shoulders and turn him ninety degrees to point him toward it.
“Walk four or five steps directly forward and then stop. When you hear the door close, take the hood off.”
Rafferty counts off five steps, feeling thick carpet underfoot. The door closes with the same squeak. He removes the hood.
He is in a conference room. A single glance makes it clear that what is conferred about here is money, gobs and gobs of money. The table, at least sixteen feet long, is teak. It doesn’t look like a veneer. It looks like twelve hundred pounds of extremely valuable, endangered hardwood. Surrounding it are eight high-backed teak chairs with sky blue woven-silk cushions, the precise color of the carpet. Dead center in front of one chair is a bright yellow legal pad and a single ballpoint pen.
Other than the pad and pen, the surface of the table gleams empty except for a squat black high-tech object at one end, an obviously expensive Whole Geek Catalog item that looks to Rafferty like it might spring a set of pincers and decide to crawl across the table toward him. The walls, covered in a cream-colored fabric, host large rectangular pale patches, announcing where pictures or posters were probably removed for his visit. Near the top of the wall to his right are two small square windows: a projection booth.
Rafferty takes a couple of steps, and a tinny voice says, “Sit.” The voice comes from the techno-thing on the table, which Rafferty belatedly recognizes as a conference-call terminal. He glances up at the windows of the projection booth, but the glass is dark. Whoever is watching him is sitting well back in the gloom.
“Here, I assume.” Rafferty pulls out the chair in front of the legal pad and sits. “Listen,” he says. “I appreciate you sending the car and everything, but if this is about the book, you should know that I’m not going to-”
“Of course it’s about the book,” the man says. “I want it written immediately.”
Rafferty parrots, “You want it written.” He feels like a man who’s just been shown proof that two plus two is a subtraction problem.
“Beginning today. You’ll be paid a substantial advance, which will be transferred into your account at Thai Fisherman’s Bank, the Silom branch, in ninety minutes. It’s account 044-35-11966, is it not?”
“I’ll take your word.”
“Look under the legal pad.”
Rafferty says, “No.”
A pause, just long enough for Rafferty to swallow.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not going to write the book.”
“You’re mistaken. You’re not only going to write it, you’re going to file regular reports on your progress. You’re going to share the chapters with us as you finish them. We’ll have suggestions. You will accept them.”
“It’s not going to get that far. I’m not going to write it. So, with that out of the way, you can go back to standing behind the screen and working the levers or whatever it is you do with your time.” He starts to get up.
“If you go through that door before I excuse you, you’ll have a very brief time to regret it.”
Rafferty analyzes the sentence for a moment and lowers himself back into the chair.
“Mr. Rafferty. Has someone told you not to write this book?”
“No. Actually, I’ve decided to write a children’s book. Mr. Bunny’s Bow Tie. It’s about a little rabbit who’s frustrated because her husband wants to wear bow ties and she can’t tie bows. You see, her paws-”
“And were there threats involved?”
“The problem is that rabbits don’t have fingers-”
“Against your wife and daughter, perhaps?”
Rafferty says nothing.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Two things you need to know. First, we can protect you and your family better than anyone else in Bangkok. Second, whatever you may have been threatened with, I promise you that it would be a feather bed compared to what we will do if you don’t cooperate with us.”
Rafferty realizes that he has crumpled the top sheet on the yellow pad.
“So let’s not waste time. Lift the legal tablet. Look beneath it.”
He does as he’s told, forcing his hands to be steady. He finds two sheets of paper, stapled together.
“Those are names,” the man says. “Most of those people will talk to you willingly. The book will also require some investigative work, nothing you can’t handle, judging from what you’ve already written. The last number, at the bottom of the second page, is the one you call to communicate with me. Is all that clear?”
What’s clear to Rafferty is that he needs to get out of the room. He can’t do anything until he’s out of the room. “What else?”
“Now and then we’ll have people watching you, just to make sure you’re giving us the time and energy we expect. Occasionally an addition to that list will probably occur to us, and we might call to tell you about it. Your cell phone number is 012-610-2230, isn’t it?”
Cell phones aren’t listed. Rafferty says, “Don’t showboat.”
“This is Wednesday. You’ll get the advance in your account today. You’ll leave most of that in the bank. We’ll know how much you withdraw, down to the last baht. We don’t want you running around with so much cash it gives you stupid ideas. I’ll expect the initial report on Monday, and it will be substantial if you don’t want things to get uncomfortable. Your family will be under continuous surveillance, which you should find reassuring.”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, you’re right. It’s a two-edged sword. But as long as you’re doing what you should, they’ll be better protected than the prime minister.”
“And when this is over,” Rafferty says, “how do I find you?”
“You won’t have to worry about that. If you’re foolish enough to try, we’ll find you.”
Rafferty says, “I’ll look forward to it.”
“Don’t waste energy being angry. You have work to do.”
“So,” Rafferty says, holding up the two pages, “I take these with me?”
“Of course not,” the man says. “You copy the information onto the legal pad and take it away in your own handwriting. And you leave the pen on the table.”
“I like the pen.”
“Fine. One of my men will buy a box of them and then, when no one is in your apartment, he’ll pick your locks and put them on your daughter’s pillow. That’s the bedroom to the left of the front door, I believe. Before you get to the bathroom.”
Rafferty sits for a long moment, feeling the blood pound in his ears. Then he picks up the pen and begins to write.
Standing on the sidewalk, counting to fifteen as he’s been told to do before removing the hood, Rafferty smells something tantalizingly familiar. He hears the surge of the car’s engine. At the count of twelve, he pulls off the hood and finds himself in a small soi. At the end, a black Lincoln Town Car makes a left onto a broad and busy boulevard. Mud has been smeared over the license plate.
Two passing women look at him, standing there, dangling a brown pillowcase from one hand. One of them says something, and they giggle. They step into the street to avoid him.
He needs to know where he is, but before that he needs to know he still has a family. He yanks his cell phone from his pocket with so much force that he pulls the pocket inside out. Baht notes flutter to the pavement. He leaves them there, just putting a foot on one, as he dials.
Rose answers on the second ring.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
“I’m making noodles. Does that sound okay?”
“Sounds like heaven.” He stoops to pick up the money.
“I’m such a housewife,” Rose says. “If anyone had told me three years ago I’d be awake at this hour, making noodles with an apron on, I’d have laughed at them.”
“I knew it, though,” Rafferty says. “I knew the first moment I saw you, up on that stage wearing ten sequins and that crooked tinfoil halo, that there was a vacuum cleaner in your future.”
“Good thing you didn’t say it. I’d have had them throw you out of the bar.”
“Listen,” he says. “Be careful today. Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know. And I think one of us ought to go get Miaow when school’s out.”
Rose sighs and says, “Why does life with you have to be so interesting?”
He says good-bye and works his inverted pocket back inside his pants, then takes a survey. Down at the end of the soi, several stands cluster, nothing more than dusty awnings tacked to the backs of buildings and propped up in front with wooden doweling. As he moves toward them, he sees that they’re selling luggage, mostly knockoffs of Tumi and Louis Vuitton. And then the fragrance in the air resolves itself into curry and basmati rice, and he knows where he is: He’s in the Indian district.
And the ass end of Bangkok, as far as Rafferty is concerned. He knows that it can be difficult to get either a taxi or a tuk-tuk here. He’s sworn off motorcycle taxis since he went down on one a couple of months back. He has forbidden Miaow to ride them, too, giving her extra money every school day for taxis.
Six dollars a day, he thinks, trudging toward the boulevard. Twenty-four, twenty-five every week. When he first came to Bangkok, those taxis would have cost a buck, a buck twenty-five. In a week that would have been-
He stops, halted by the realization that he’s taking refuge in details. The part of his mind that earns its keep by imposing order on the world is offering up bright little beads of factual material for him to string into a reality that doesn’t include anything that’s happened since he sat down at the card game last night: Pan’s drunkenness, the threats, his abduction.
Noi’s pills. The sound of Arthit’s voice when he told Rafferty about them. Noi’s pain.
And today’s displays of naked power.
The floor plan to his apartment. His bank-account and cell-phone numbers. The kind of power most farang never experience.
Rafferty knows Thailand well enough to be aware that people above a certain social and political level are virtually unaccountable, shielded from the consequences of their actions by layers of subordinates and networks of reciprocal favors and graft that corrupt both the police and the courts. These are the people, the “big people,” whom Rose despises, the people who attend dress balls with blood on their hands. There are not many of them, relatively speaking, but they have immense mass and they exert a kind of gravity that bends tens of thousands of lives into the orbit of their will.
Most farang pass through the gravitational Gordian knot of Bangkok unscathed, like long-haul comets for whom our solar system is just something else to shoulder their way past. Farang have no formal status here. They come and go. They dimple the surface of the city’s space-time like water-striding insects, staying a few months at a stretch and then flitting elsewhere. They don’t have enough mass to draw the gaze of the individuals around whom the orbits wheel.
But Rafferty is being gazed at. And he knows all the way to the pit of his stomach that it’s the worst thing that can happen to him. If they decide it is in their best interest, they can blow through him and his cobbled-together family like a cannonball through a handkerchief.
If he goes in one direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. If he goes in the other direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. And “in danger” is a euphemism.
He is leaning against a building. His skin is slick and cold with evaporating sweat. Panic is barking useless orders at him: Get the family to the airport. (Rose and Miaow don’t have passports.) Hurry them out of Bangkok. (We’re being watched.) Disappear into the city. (Not possible.) Kill everybody. (Who?)
He pushes himself free of the building on legs that feel as numb as prosthetics and makes his way down the soi to the boulevard.
Where he stops, looking left, then right. Which way to go?
Both directions are wrong, but one must be less wrong than the other.
What he needs to do is buy time. He needs to do things that both sides will see as compliance while he figures out which chunk of Bangkok masonry he can pry loose to make a hiding place for his family. Once they’re out of the line of fire, he can think about next steps. About removing himself from the equation. Finding some way to step aside at the last possible moment and let the opposing forces annihilate each other.
Just as he figures out where he needs to go next, his cell phone rings, and it’s someone summoning him to the one place in Bangkok he wants to be.
You wait,” the guard says, shutting the little glass door in the booth. The glass is at least an inch thick, certainly bulletproof.
The booth occupies the base of a semicircular clay-brick turret beside an enormous pair of weathered bronze gates that stretch twenty feet toward the paper-white sky. Mesopotamian lions rear up on them, claws extended and teeth bared. The Mesopotamian theme continues on the clay-brick walls, covered with bas-relief figures of standing kings, slender and stiff-kneed and tightly robed. Sprouting here and there among the kings are outcrops, planted with vegetation that spills over the edges. Green streamers dangle downward.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Rafferty realizes. Not even remotely what he’d expected.
The wall is perhaps a fifth of a mile long. It occupies the entire block. Rafferty tries to remember what used to be here, but nothing comes to mind. Bangkok is like that, he thinks: One day you look up and there’s a building, and the field, the house, the slum-whatever it was before, it is gone forever.
The sun’s glare makes him uncomfortably aware that it is almost noon. He is glancing at his watch when the guard opens the little window again and says, “Through here.” A narrow door, barely wide enough for one person to pass through, opens in the left gate. On the other side of the door stands a short, slender, dark-complected man in a pale yellow shirt and triple-pleated, salmon-colored golf slacks.
“Please,” he says in English, “come in, come in.”
The door in the gate clangs closed, and the slender man in the bright clothes climbs into a little white electric golf cart that has been remodeled to look like a very large and steroidal swan. One wing is improbably upraised to shade the passengers. All that Rafferty can see as the cart whirs into motion is greenery, thickly tangled and thorny, a second wall. At the wheel of the cart, the slender man says, without turning to Rafferty, “I am Dr. Ravi.”
“I recognized your voice from the phone,” Rafferty says. Dr. Ravi’s receding hair makes his noteworthy nose seem even larger. His entire face points forward, like a 1950s hood ornament.
“I’m often told I have a distinctive voice,” Dr. Ravi says. “I think it’s the influence of Cambridge.”
Arthit also went to school in England, but his linguistic suitcase isn’t packed with such plummy vowels and half-chewed consonants.
“Sounds like you were there for years.”
He gets a quick glance, but the wall of foliage is upon them. Dr. Ravi slows the cart, slides a hand into his pocket, and brings out a slim remote, which he points at the green barrier. A portion of it detaches itself and begins to swing inward.
Rafferty says, “ Lot of protection.”
“Human nature,” Dr. Ravi announces gravely, “is to want.”
“I’ve noticed.”
The paved track they’re following describes a slow turn through the tangle of scrub, and the view widens suddenly. Rafferty stifles the urge to gasp.
They are entering the Garden of Eden.
The cart passes through a flaming gate, from the top of which a gigantic hand points a single finger outward. The flames are made of gold, beaten thin and curled into phantasmagorical shapes. Large red stones glow at the base of the flames, simulating coals. On the far side of the gate are green, gentle hills, pools complete with swans, ferns, and willows, and, in the center of the garden, an artificial apple tree hung with glistening red and green fruit. A gleaming silver snake curls around the trunk of the tree. It has a red apple in its jaws.
Rafferty says, “Um.”
“The first paradise,” Dr. Ravi says.
From several hundred possible questions, Rafferty randomly chooses one. “How did he get the apples to glow like that?”
“That’s what everyone asks,” says Dr. Ravi smugly. “The red ones are covered in tiny rubies, thirteen or fourteen hundred on each. The green ones are made with emeralds.”
“It’s like a fundamentalist theme park,” Rafferty says maliciously. “Faith World.”
Dr. Ravi says, “Hardly,” in a voice like a pair of tin snips.
A brace of peacocks wander by, the males wasting their time trying to dazzle each other. Men, Rafferty thinks. White ponies dawdle and trot here and there. A couple of them have spiral horns protruding from their foreheads.
“I didn’t know there were unicorns in the Garden of Eden.”
“Obviously there weren’t,” Dr. Ravi says. He’s still offended. “Or they’d exist today, wouldn’t they? One assumes that God works in first drafts and doesn’t revise, or there wouldn’t have been such a flap about evolution. But this is Khun Pan’s Eden, and he wanted unicorns.”
Rafferty watches the apple tree recede. The bed of deep green moss that surrounds it looks like it was created to be reclined upon. “Is Eve home?”
Pursed lips and a pause. “On occasion.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“I rather doubt that you will.”
The narrow road they are navigating is so smooth and the cart so silent that Rafferty has the illusion of being towed over ice. “Why Mesopotamia? Why Eden? Why not something Thai?”
The pursed lips again. “If you had done any research this morning, you would know that Khun Pan enjoys annoying certain people. Spending this kind of money to re-create the Judeo-Christian paradise in a Buddhist society…well, it…it-”
“It pisses people off.”
“And occasionally he opens the grounds for a charity event. Tonight, for example. It’ll draw movie stars, television crews, newspapers, and pour more salt into the wounds of the wellborn. All of this did not come cheap,” Dr. Ravi says. He allows the corners of his mouth to lift, revealing unexpected dimples. “If it doesn’t upset people repeatedly, it’s not cost-effective.”
For the second time, Rafferty catches a whiff of something that is quite distinctly not the perfume of paradise. “What am I smelling?”
The smile, such as it is, reappears. “That’s the other creation myth. You’ll see it in a moment.” The golf cart labors up a hill. “I must warn you, your reception will probably not be a warm one.”
“I’m not expecting a corsage.”
“He seems to regret the entire evening. And especially you.”
“Oh, fuck him,” Rafferty says, and Dr. Ravi’s startled sideways glance makes the cart swerve. “I’ll give him whatever he gives me. And something really stinks. It smells like-”
The furrows in Dr. Ravi’s brow are so pronounced that he looks like a basset hound. “I’m quite serious. He’s not at his best this morning. I would avoid offending him.”
“Or what?” Rafferty says. “That’s the question of the day. Or what?”
Dr. Ravi says, “Oh, dear.”
“What do you care? I suppose you have to put up with him, but that’s not my problem. And you know what? You don’t actually have to put up with him. There are lots of jobs for a broad-voweled Oxford graduate like you.”
“ Cambridge.”
“Just checking.”
“You really are a disastrous choice. I don’t know what he was thinking.” The cart crests the hill, and Dr. Ravi says, “There it is. Your other creation myth.”
At the foot of the gradual downslope before them gleams a white marble mansion, a Parthenon of twenty or twenty-five rooms, marble columns and all. In front of it is a small, rickety, blow-the-house-down northeastern farm village: four raggedy stilt houses and a rice paddy half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. A bamboo fence surrounds a churned-up sea of filth in which five mammoth pigs wallow. From the sheer volume of the stink, rich enough to thicken the air to an unwholesome syrup, it’s clear that the pen has not been mucked out in some time. During Rafferty’s weeks in Rose’s village, he has become familiar with pigsties.
“It’s not usually this bad,” Dr. Ravi says, averting his face from the smell without taking his eyes off the road. The paved track, Rafferty sees, will take them past the pigsty before delivering them to the classical pretension of the front porch. “As I said, he’s got an event tonight, an antimalaria fund-raiser, and lots of the big folks will come. He likes to let it all ripen when they’re here.”
“My wife says he rubs their noses in it, but I didn’t know she meant literally.”
“Your wife is Thai?”
“As Thai as tom yum kung.” Tom yum kung is the national soup, eaten everywhere.
“Was she poor?”
Rafferty glances over at Dr. Ravi, but he seems to be giving all his attention to the task of steering the cart. “Very.”
“Then she’ll appreciate this,” he says as the stench envelops them. “The pigs are named after our last five prime ministers.”
AFTER THE SCRAMBLED symbolism of the grounds, the house is just another ordinary Greek Revival mansion roughly the size of the Taj Mahal. Rafferty follows Dr. Ravi across gleaming marble floors until they reach the big, closed double doors at the back of the house.
Dr. Ravi’s knock, so feathery it wouldn’t wrinkle linen, is answered by something that sounds like a sea lion nailed to a rock. With a final glance that combines haughtiness and supplication, Dr. Ravi opens the door and gestures Rafferty through. Rafferty has the feeling that Dr. Ravi wants to hide behind him.
The room they enter is square, with walls approximately twenty-five feet long. The focal point is a teak desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The far wall is glass, opening onto a sun-soaked vista of plants and flowers. Seated behind the desk, his back hunched defensively against the glare, is Pan. Without looking up, he says, “You.”
“Always a good guess.” Rafferty bends down to look at Pan’s face. The man cradles his head in both hands as though afraid it will roll off his neck and crack open on the desk. His eyes are deep-sunk and red-rimmed, and a silvery little aura of gray bristle glints on his chin. He has not shaved this morning. The silver dusting his chin looks odd beneath the bootblack sheen of his hair.
“You didn’t waste any time, did you?” Pan snaps in Thai. Dr. Ravi starts to translate, but Rafferty raises a hand.
“If you mean the newspapers,” he replies, also in Thai, “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Of course you did.”
Rafferty says, “Good-bye, and good luck with your hangover.”
“Wait,” Dr. Ravi says, putting a placating hand on Rafferty’s arm.
“Like I said in the cart, fuck him. I took all the shit last night I’m willing to take.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t mean to offend you,” Dr. Ravi says with an imploring glance at Pan.
“Who else?” Pan squeaks. “Who else had anything to gain?”
Rafferty has a hand on the doorknob. “Any of them. Anybody who wanted a journalist in his pocket.”
After an evaluative moment, Pan mops his face, lowers his head even farther, and says, “Owwwwww. I hurt.”
“Tell somebody who cares.”
“Okay, okay,” Pan says. He closes his eyes in a long wince. “How much not to write it?”
Rafferty hasn’t expected this, although he realizes he should have. He thinks for a moment and says, “I’m not sure I can have this conversation.”
“Five hundred thousand baht. Cash, right now.” Pan slowly opens a drawer, like someone pushing his way through a thick liquid, and pulls out a wad of thousand-baht notes.
“Even disregarding everything else,” Rafferty says, “and there’s a lot to disregard, that’s peanuts.”
Pan’s face is suddenly a deep, choleric red, and he slams the drawer closed with a sound like a pistol shot. He starts to sputter something, then removes one hand from his temple and actually covers his mouth with his fingers and lets his eyes droop shut. He sits there for a moment, breathing heavily, then lowers his hand, opens his eyes, and says, “All right. You’re angry. Pim told me it was my fault.”
“Pim?”
“One of my bodyguards. He said I was terrible.”
“You were.”
“I’m not-I’m not a good drinker,” Pan says.
“You were-” Rafferty turns to Dr. Ravi and says, in English, “I don’t know the Thai. Tell him he was appalling.”
“I think…” Dr. Ravi swallows. “I think he’s already gotten that message.”
“A bodyguard can level with him and you can’t? What kind of amanuensis are you?”
“I’m not an amanuensis. I’m his media director.”
“Goddamn it,” Pan says in heavily accented English. “Speak Thai. Or translate.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Dr. Ravi switches to Thai. “The farang said he also sometimes behaves unwisely when he drinks.”
“I did?” Rafferty asks.
“He is certain he contributed to the problem.” There is a sheen of perspiration at Dr. Ravi’s hairline.
Pan’s eyes look like they were pounded into his head solely to hold up the bags of fluid hanging beneath them. They creak around to Rafferty’s. Pan waits, the pink mouth half open, like someone watching to see whether the water will ever boil.
“I did,” Rafferty says. “We all did.”
A sigh escapes Dr. Ravi.
“All of us,” Pan says. He burps and pats the center of his chest. “We all behaved badly.”
“Fine.”
Pan nods. “One million baht.”
Rafferty says to Dr. Ravi, “Am I allowed to sit down or what?”
“Please, please,” Dr. Ravi says. “Sit.”
“Thanks.” Rafferty pulls a chair to the edge of the desk. “I need to think for a second.”
“Fine.” Pan puts his forehead back into his hands. “If I start to snore, wake me up.”
“How are you going to get in shape for your party tonight?”
Pan says to the desk, “Steam, sauna, herbal tea, massage, boom-boom with triplets from Laos, a few drinks.”
“Triplets?”
Pan grunts. “I really only like one of them, but I’m never sure which one it is.”
“I want to ask you a question.”
“So?”
“Why do you care about sex workers with HIV?”
Pan separates his fingers and peers at Rafferty between them. “Who says I do?”
“The hundred and fifty of them you’re taking care of.”
Pan brings the scarred hands back together. All Rafferty can see is the Elvis-black hair and the silver grizzle on the chin. “Who else will?” Pan says.
“I didn’t think you liked prostitutes.”
“You were wrong. It’s farang I don’t like. Those women and me, we’re mushrooms, sprung from the same shit. They’re my sisters for life. ‘Whore’ is just a word for something they have to do for a while.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Look at me,” Pan says. He opens his desk drawer, pulls out a tube of lip balm, and applies it. “Look how handsome I am. Am I any better than they are?”
Rafferty thinks, No, and he’s heard enough. “We need to talk.” He moves his head a quarter of an inch in Dr. Ravi’s direction. “Alone.”
Pan’s glistening mouth contracts as though he’s about to whistle. Dr. Ravi sputters.
Pan says, in English, “Go.”
“Khun Pan,” Dr. Ravi says, “I don’t advise-”
“If I have to get up and push you out the door,” Pan says, “I’ll probably break your back.”
“Very well.” Rafferty can hear Dr. Ravi’s lips tighten around the words. Then the door closes.
Rafferty says, “I’m going to put my life in your hands.”
Pan is watching the door as though he’s trying to see through it. He seems to be listening, but not to Rafferty. After ten or fifteen seconds, he nods and says, “Why would you do that?”
“Because my wife thinks you’re a great man.”
“Women are bad judges of character.”
“Oh, turn it off. You’ve already outraged me. Give it a rest.”
Pan puts his fingertips to his temples and rubs circles, about the size of a quarter. “This is about why you don’t want the million baht.”
“Actually, the million baht confuses me.”
“Why? A million is a thousand thousands, right? What’s confusing?”
“I had a threatening call this morning, telling me not to write the book.”
The circles stop. “You did? Who-Oh, oh, I see. No, not me. I don’t do things that way.”
“You used to. Back in the old days.”
“Think about it,” Pan says. “I have someone threaten you this morning-what? Four, five hours ago?”
“Something like that.”
“And then I ask you to come here so I can offer you money. Without even waiting to see if you’ve been scared off. Does that make sense?”
“Then you have no idea who-”
“None. But I’ll think about it. So,” Pan says, leaning back in a relaxed position for the first time, “are you going to write the book or not? The million’s still on the table.”
“It’ll have to stay there. I had two conversations this morning, not one. In the second chat, my life and the lives of my wife and daughter were threatened if I don’t write the book.”
He jerks forward as though Rafferty had yanked a rope tied around his chest. “If you don’t-”
“And the book they want me to write is probably not the monument of your dreams.”
Pan settles back in the chair. The wet-looking eyes go from side to side for a second, as though Rafferty were moving, and then something ignites in them. He leans forward again, almost eagerly, and says, “Who?”
“I don’t know. But they’re serious.” He tells Pan about the snatch in front of Miaow’s school and what followed.
“Do you have the list?”
“Sure.” He hands it across the desk.
Pan scans it, and the color mounts in his face. “No,” he says. “Not the book I’d want.” His eyes come up from the page. “Do you know any of these people?”
“I recognize some of the names. Anyone would.”
“Spiders, the bunch of them.” Pan passes the side of a scarred hand across the page as though he could erase the names. “Bloated, greedy, venomous. They suck people dry and spit out the husks. Strip the land, poison the rivers, turn men into drunks and women into whores. Buy rice at low prices and sell it at high ones. Let people starve and count the money.” He fills his cheeks with air and releases it. Rafferty can smell the sourness of the previous evening’s cognac all the way across the desk.
Rafferty says, “You’re saying they’re pigs.”
“Not on their best days,” Pan says. “Give me a good pig any time.”
“When these people threaten my family, how seriously should I take it?”
“How seriously do you take breathing?” Pan squirms himself a bit lower in his chair. Then one foot, clad only in a sock, hits the top of the desk. He laces his fingers across his belly and regards his foot critically. “What you said last night,” he says, “about there being a great crime somewhere. That didn’t sound like you were planning to write a fan letter.”
“I was pissed off. I was surprised you took the bet.”
Pan drops his eyes to the center of Rafferty’s chest, and then, suddenly, he grins. “I’m really not a good drinker.”
“No, you’re not.”
“So, just to be clear, you want to get out of writing the book.”
“With a qualifier,” Rafferty says. “I have to get out of it alive.”
Pan waves a hand in the air, as though to clear smoke. “Be specific. Let’s say I’m disposed to help you. How would I do that?”
“To start, I want a list of everybody who will tell me the story you’d want the book to tell. That way, I can let them know you’re cooperating.”
Pan nods. “And you’ll look busy, if someone is watching.”
“Someone will be watching.”
“Yes, they will.” He looks over Rafferty’s shoulder and then raises his eyes to the ceiling. Then he closes them. After a moment he says, “I’m having an event here tonight. Malaria relief.”
“I heard. How many of the people on that list will be here?”
“A lot of them.”
Rafferty says, “Got an extra ticket?”
Pan opens his eyes, still looking at the ceiling, and says, “Your wife, the one who thinks I’m a great man. Is she from Isaan?”
“Yes.”
“Is she pretty?”
“I think it’s absolutely safe,” Rafferty replies, “to say she’s pretty.”
“Good.” Pan leans back and puts his other foot on the desk. His eyes close again. “You get two tickets.”
He leans against the carved Mesopotamian wall, his shoulders midway between a king’s sandaled feet. After the mausoleum chill of the house, the heat actually feels good. He settles his shoulders against the warm brick, reaches into the rear pocket of his jeans, and pulls out the yellow sheets containing the list he copied on the thirty-sixth floor.
The list Dr. Ravi gave him at Pan’s command is in his shirt pocket. He opens it, too, and spends three or four minutes going back and forth between them.
Not a single name appears on both lists.
He is pushing that around in his mind when the low growl of an engine brings his head up.
Idling at the curb six or seven feet from him is a carbon-black, dark-windowed SUV, expensively pimped out in customized chrome. The word LEXUS is inscribed on the door in silvery italics eighteen inches high. Deep blue lights blink beneath the chassis and bounce off the asphalt, in time to a throbbing bass line that makes the entire vehicle pulsate. The windows are heavily tinted. The behemoth just sits there, a sort of right-hand drive Death Star energized by techno music. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
A movement at the edge of his vision draws his gaze. In the turret beside the gate, the guard has picked up the phone. His eyes, like Rafferty’s, are on the SUV.
There is no one on the sidewalk. Except for the guard behind his bulletproof glass and whoever is in the SUV, there are, Rafferty realizes, no witnesses.
Not a comfortable way to look at it.
He could move, but there’s nowhere to go, just the wall with its frozen kings and hanging gardens, which he can neither climb nor melt into. A look at the guard’s anxious face makes it clear he’s not going to open any doors. Even if Rafferty turns and runs the long block to the corner, the SUV can keep up with him easily, and there’s no place to run to.
The SUV’s horn is tapped twice, like it’s clearing its throat for attention. A back window goes down five or six inches, and something long and shiny comes through the opening and points at Rafferty. It is the barrel of a rifle.
Rafferty can feel the precise spot in the center of his chest on which the rifle is trained, as though a stream of cold air were pouring through the muzzle of the gun. He can feel his knees loosen. He rests more of his weight against the wall just to stay upright. He feels his pulse bump against the band of his wristwatch.
After what feels like an eternity, someone in the vehicle laughs, and it pulls slowly away from the curb.
The license plate is not Thai. It has only five digits. Rafferty doesn’t even need to write them down.
“THIS IS ELORA.” The voice is brisk and cool. Rafferty has an image of a slender vamp from the 1940s, wearing seamed stockings and a dress with shoulder pads, her hair loosely rolled up around her head. A sort of executive big-band singer.
“Ms. Weecherat. This is Poke Rafferty.” This is his third cab in twenty minutes, and no one seems to be following it. His body still feels loose and nerveless, emptied by the draining of all that adrenaline.
“You were going to call me back.”
“And here I am.”
“This morning. While you were news.” The words are in precise English, with a faint accent that could be French.
“I’m still news.”
“That’s what everybody thinks.” Definitely French. “But it’s not true unless you have something new.”
“Do I ever.”
A moment’s evaluative pause. “If you want to talk to me, I’ll need to meet you,” she says.
“That could be difficult.”
“Call me again when it’s not.”
“Wait. You want what I have.”
“Because.”
“Because it’s sensational.”
“Then I definitely need to meet you.”
Rafferty says, “Someplace we won’t be seen.”
“Where are you?”
“New Petchburi Road.” It’s not true, but it’s not far off.
“How’s traffic?”
“I’m in Bangkok,” Rafferty says. “How would it be?”
“Where are you headed?”
“Toward Silom. Okay, I know where. Write this down.” He gives her an address on Silom and then a suite number. “That’s my dentist. I know her well enough for this.”
“A dentist? This had better be worth it.”
“Can you make the deadline for tomorrow’s paper?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’ll be worth it.”
HE HAS BEEN in the fourth cab only a minute when his phone rings.
“What the hell are you doing?” It is the man who sat next to him in the Lincoln.
“I’ve been thinking about buying a cab. Thought I’d try a few out.”
“Where are you?”
“ Rama IV Road,” Rafferty lies. “You mean your guys lost me?”
“Yes,” the man says. “But we know exactly where everyone else is.”
“When this is over,” Rafferty says, “I’m going to pull your teeth one by one and shove them up your nose.”
“No point getting mad at me. Just don’t disappear again, or there will be consequences.”
“What was that cute thing with the SUV?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you want this book or not?”
“He wants it.”
Rafferty says, “And he’ll be unhappy if things go wrong.”
“Things won’t go wrong.”
“They will if you ever pull anything like that again,” Rafferty says, and disconnects. Then he sags back against the seat and works on his breathing.
The day is endless.
The river of people continues to flow past her, sometimes in full flood, sometimes at a trickle. Occasionally the people arrive in knots and tangles, as though they were snarled in the branches of a floating tree. People are most likely to give when the river is trickling. They can see her from farther away then; they have time to make up their minds, to fish out the money so they can drop it into the bowl without slowing. No one wants to slow. Most look no further than the upraised bowl, as though it were floating unaided above the sidewalk. A few glance at her very quickly and then look away, embarrassed.
The tree-trunk man in the blue shirt is always somewhere nearby. Every time someone drops paper money into her bowl, he is there, snatching it.
Da has begun to keep a count in her head, just as something to do. When she was small, she discovered she was good with numbers. She did the math, mostly subtraction, that spelled out her family’s finances. She is surprised by the amount of money that has fallen into the bowl. Counting Helen’s 1,500 baht, it comes to 3,200, plus the coins that she hasn’t counted yet. So say 3,500 baht.
The man in the office said they took 40 percent. That means she keeps 60 percent. To do the math, she divides by ten-let’s say that’s 350 baht-and then multiplies by six.
More than 2,000 baht.
There were twenty or twenty-five beggars in that building. If all of them take in as much as she, the man in the office is making something like 28,000 baht a day. There are probably other beggars in other buildings. He is probably making…she works out the answers, but she has to stop and double-check the zeros in her head. He is probably making more than a million baht a month.
Da’s father earned less than 13,000 baht a year.
Still, she thinks, they have people to pay. Money to the police not to chase the beggars away. There are businesses behind her, their front doors opening onto the sidewalk. The business owners probably get paid something, too.
Someone drops a coin into her bowl, and she looks up to see a little boy of nine or ten, scurrying away as though he’s done something he’s ashamed of. He is the first child she has seen since morning. That means school is out. It’s after two-thirty, perhaps three. At four o’clock it will be over.
They have to pay the drivers, she thinks, the man in the blue shirt. Maybe rent for the half-finished building they sleep in. The vans, the gasoline. Expenses.
Still, it’s a lot of money. It’s the most money she’s even thought about in her life. She sees again the shoes the man in the office had worn, shoes that looked as if their soles had never left a carpet.
Maybe he has a hundred beggars. Maybe two hundred.
Peep makes the rising sound that means he wants her to look at him. She drops her eyes to her lap, and sure enough he is gazing at her, the gaze that makes her feel he can see right through her. She feels the smile spread over her face, and then a thought chases it away.
Did they have to pay for him?
How much do you pay for a baby? Do they all cost the same? Are they priced by the pound, like meat? Do beautiful ones cost more than ugly ones? Is there an extra charge for light skin, like Peep’s, or a discount for dark babies? Do children of different ages cost different amounts?
Different ages.
The oldest undamaged child she has seen is the skeletal boy of four or five. Where are the older children?
“How are you doing?”
It’s a woman’s voice, and there he is, the skeletal boy, and behind him is the woman from the van. The child looks at nothing, clutching the woman’s sleeve in a hand that’s all knuckles.
“Can we go now?” Da asks.
“Another hour. Kep has gone to eat something. He does this every day. We’ve got half an hour before he gets back.” The woman shakes her sleeve free, but the child immediately reclaims it, without even glancing at it. His dusky skin is stretched tightly over his bones and his eyes have the unblinking luster Da associates with the simple-minded.
“Kep?”
“The one in the blue shirt.” The woman puts her folded blanket on the pavement and sits on it. The boy immediately sits beside her. He puts an open hand, dark and elongated as a monkey’s paw, on her leg, palm up. “How much money has Kep taken from you today?”
“More than three thousand baht.”
The other woman raises her eyebrows. “Good day.”
“One woman gave me fifteen hundred.”
“The farang with the metal hair?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky you. She comes every day. She works somewhere down there. One of the buildings.”
“Does Kep tell the truth about how much money he takes?”
“No. He’ll put a thousand in his pocket and pass the rest on to Wichat.”
“Wichat? The man in the office?”
“That’s Wichat.”
“He doesn’t make enough money without stealing from me?”
“For these people there’s never enough money. They’d eat the world if they could get their jaws wide enough.”
“It isn’t fair.”
The other woman laughs. The sound draws the skeletal child’s empty gaze, but then his eyes drift downward again. “Fair,” the woman says. She laughs again.
“Well, it’s not.”
“No,” the other woman says. She fans herself halfheartedly. “You’ve had a good day,” she says, “but it was luck. I’ve been watching you.”
Da is looking at the boy’s eyes. He seems to be gazing at a point four or five feet in front of him, about as high as the center of his chest. Da says, “Am I doing something wrong?”
“You don’t move around enough. You need to get their attention. Push the bowl in their direction, get up on your knees so they can’t pretend they don’t see you.”
“But if I get up, it wakes Peep.”
“Who?” the woman asks.
“Peep,” Da says. “The baby. If I get up, it-”
“You named it,” the other woman says. She looks at Peep and then averts her eyes and shakes her head as though in distaste. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“Why? He needs a name.”
“You shouldn’t,” the woman says. “But you already did, didn’t you? So why talk about it? Anyway, move around more. If you don’t make good money, they treat you badly. Kep especially.” With a grunt she gets to one knee. “Not much longer,” she says. The boy rises to his feet and extends a hand to her, but she pushes it away, not ungently, and gets up unaided.
“Wait a minute,” Da says. “Why shouldn’t I name him?”
The other woman says, “You’ll find out soon enough.” The boy grabs the back of her blouse and knots it in his hand, and she rests her hand on the nape of his neck as the two of them wade into traffic, zigzagging through it as though the cars and motos and tuk-tuks are an elaborate mirage. Only when they are safely across does Da take her eyes off them, and when she does, she realizes that someone is standing beside her.
She looks up. It is the boy with the tangled hair.
He leans down, and she is startled by how clean he is. His clothes are filthy, but his skin shines.
“When you want to run away,” he says, “turn your bowl upside down and put it in front of you.”
“Run away? Why would I want to run away?”
“Just turn the bowl upside down,” the boy says, backing away from her, his eyes scanning the sidewalk. “Don’t look for me. Just turn your bowl upside down.”
Elora Weecherat is fearsomely stylish, nothing like the retro siren of Rafferty’s imagination. The instant he sees her in the sparse, creatively wrapped flesh, the faint French accent becomes a heady, even cloying, whiff of Paris, the Paris of haute couture and hold the sauce, the Paris that Rafferty glimpses on the pages of Rose’s fashion magazines, where “beautiful” means undernourished and overdressed. Beneath the drape of expensive clothes, Weecherat is as thin as a piece of paper and probably, he thinks, as easy to cut yourself on.
By the time he comes through the door, her tape recorder is already on, its little red eye glowing on the table. She is seated in regal state on one of the two pumpkin-colored chairs in the corner of the dentist’s waiting room, and she starts talking before the door has closed behind him.
“You don’t look like your photo.” She redrapes her skirt and crosses her legs in a single choreographed motion. Her cheekbones are so prominent that her face is almost diamond-shaped, and her eyes have sunk deeply into her face. The eyes may be deep-set, but they are very bright eyes, and they don’t look like they miss much.
“Ah, but I’ve brought my personality,” Rafferty says.
“Charm doesn’t make the cut.”
“Is that English?”
“The cut,” she says, the word itself sharp. “The twenty-five percent of my story that my editor will remove just to remind himself that he can.” She turns the tape recorder a fraction of an inch toward him. “Let’s get to it.”
“First,” Rafferty says, and he reaches over and turns the tape recorder off.
Weecherat gathers her draperies around her. “No tape, no talk.”
“This is background,” Rafferty says. “If the discussion goes well, I’ll let you turn that thing on again and I’ll give you the stuff for attribution.”
She settles back and realigns her shawl, which is the color of a buttercup, until it is at a precise vertical.
“You’re interested in Pan,” he says.
She shrugs, and her lower lip pops out. It is a very French shrug, and suddenly Rafferty has a plausible biography: rich family, French education, interested in fashion, but not enough talent to make a living at it and too hardheaded to specialize in writing about it. Therefore, the business beat. “In the way one is interested in faulty plumbing or a grotesque tattoo,” she says. “Good plumbing is a blessing. A really marvelous tattoo is an enhancement. Pan has the opportunity to be both and has chosen to be neither. He eats money and vomits it in public. Pan is a swine.”
Rafferty reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out the two lists, the one Dr. Ravi gave him and the one he copied onto the legal pad. He puts the second yellow sheet in front of her and points at a line halfway down the page.
She looks at the name that is written there, which is her own. “Yes?”
“You’re one of about seventy people whose names I was given this morning. Would you say that most of these people share your opinion of Pan?”
She holds out a hand, its nails painted black. He passes her the remaining yellow pages. Her eyes go down them quickly, and then she flips through the sheets as though looking for a contradiction. The lower lip makes a reappearance. “These people would not be invited to his wedding, if that’s what you mean. Or, if they were, you’d be a fool to eat the cake.”
“Do you think a good book can be written from these sources?”
“Of course not. Whatever he is, Pan has done some good. He has a kind of prehensile charm that some people find attractive. A biography, if it’s going to be worth anything, needs to get as much of the story as possible. Otherwise it’ll be Mao’s Little Red Book. Of interest to no one but the people who already believe it. Who gave this to you?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Maybe.”
She shakes her head impatiently. “I don’t see how you could even be considering this approach, since he’s authorized you to write the book. I’d think he’d want something that would position him for the Nobel Prize.”
“Like the perspective you’d get from these folks?” He hands her the list Dr. Ravi gave him.
She looks at it, and then she does what Rafferty had done; she puts them side by side, her eyes going from one to the other. When she turns her gaze to him, there is a glint of amusement in her eyes. “Exactly.”
“Okay,” Rafferty says. “You can turn on the tape recorder.” He waits until the red light glows again and she nods at him to proceed, and then he says, “This morning my life and the lives of my family were threatened. I was snatched off the street, hooded, shoved into a car, and taken someplace where I was given the names on the yellow sheets and told that we’ll all be killed if I don’t write this book-and I mean this book, the one I would get from these sources. I can’t tell you who threatened me, because I don’t know, but I can give you some information, off the record for now, that might help the police to identify them if my family and I are killed. Does that sound like news to you?”
“I can’t print the information that would lead the police to them?”
“No. You can say you have it but that it might violate the libel laws.”
“In Thailand it probably would.” She glances down at the tape recorder, making sure it’s running, then flicks the yellow list with an extremely long index finger tipped in black polish. “Before we go any further, you realize there’s no way I can verify this story.”
“No,” he says, “but you can report truthfully that the farang who was authorized to write Pan’s biography says that his family’s lives have been threatened by unknown persons unless he writes a violently anti-Pan book. And just so you know that it isn’t a publicity stunt, you can also report that he’s going public with this in the hope that the reduced risk will allow him to quit the project.”
She studies him for a moment. “You’re not going to write it?”
“I’m going to try like hell not to.”
“And you think this story will reduce the threat?”
“I hope so. At least we won’t be killed in a vacuum. Whoever’s behind this will know that the American embassy will demand an investigation, a real one, not just going through the motions. It might scare these people off. They’ll know that the investigation will focus on the information you didn’t print.”
“Why don’t you go to your embassy directly?”
“What could they do? Get me out of Thailand? My wife and daughter are Thai. They don’t have travel documents.”
The buttercup scarf seems to require her attention again. She is still fiddling with it when she asks, “How old is your daughter?”
“Nine.”
“My daughter is seven,” Elora Weecherat says. “It’s a magical age.” She aligns the strands that make up the shawl’s fringe until they are precisely parallel. “Let’s start from the beginning,” she says. “You’re a travel writer. How in the world did you get into this?”
Arthit says, “The thirty-sixth floor.” His face is rigid, the mask of muscle he wears when he’s just been with Noi. His eyes are still poached from the previous night’s alcohol.
“In both English and Thai.” Rafferty is trying to conceal his dismay at the way his friend looks. Arthit’s composure seems thin as a coat of paint. The hands clasped on the table betray a faint tremor. A cup of coffee cools untouched in front of him, the cumulus burst of cream in the center not even stirred smooth.
“Even in the New Bangkok we keep hearing about, there aren’t that many buildings with talking elevators,” Arthit says. “But as much as I hate to say this, it won’t mean anything even if you figure out who it is. You’re not going to get anywhere near him. If I’m right about what’s happening, this is a level where I can’t help you. I don’t even know who could help you.”
“Then what do you suggest, Arthit? Should I just roll over and die?”
“It would save you a lot of effort.” Arthit rubs his face with both hands, as though he were trying to erase his expression.
“Well, in the absence of that kind of wisdom, here’s what I’ve done.” Poke tells Arthit about the meeting with Elora Weecherat.
“Not bad,” Arthit says, in a tone that suggests it’s not very good either. “Still, you should get Rose and Miaow off the map somehow, just in case the reaction to the newspaper story isn’t what you want it to be.”
“Moving them will be hard. I think the other side is four deep on them all the time. The followers got a little chesty today when I shook them.”
“And why did you shake them?”
“That thing with the gun and the SUV. I got pissed off.”
Arthit takes a fistful of his own hair and tugs at it in sheer frustration. “You can’t afford to do that,” he says. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here.”
“Has that just occurred to you?”
“Let me give you an image,” Arthit says. He picks up the coffee and drinks half of it at a gulp. “If it would clarify your situation to think about it visually, then imagine this: You’re at the bottom of the Chao Phraya, wandering around on the riverbed without a map, and breathing water. You just haven’t realized it yet.” He erases the image with his palms. “No, actually, it’s more like this: You’re in the crevice of a deep canyon with very steep walls, and there are some enormous boulders directly above you. Let’s say the size of an apartment house. You’ve built a cute little straw roof to keep you dry, something a songbird could dent. These boulders can decide, any time they want, to roll down on top of you. For any reason. You go to the wrong place. You talk to the wrong person. You ask the wrong question. You go out too much. You stay home too much. You eat meat on Friday. They don’t like your socks. So they roll down on you and squash you to paste.”
“Okay,” Rafferty says. “What’s the downside?”
“The downside is that even if you do everything they want, they still might kill you.”
Rafferty nods. “That qualifies.”
“You’re not taking this seriously.”
Suddenly Rafferty is furious. “What do you want me to do, Arthit? Run in circles, scream in soprano, wring my hands? Give me an option. You’ve pretty much said there’s nowhere I can go for help and that it barely matters what I do. For all the difference it makes, I might as well yell at the weather. If I write it, we’re dead. If I don’t write it, we’re dead. If I write it wrong, we’re dead. According to you, if I somehow defuse the people who don’t want it written and then write it exactly the way the other side wants, we’re dead anyway. Would you like to tell me how taking it seriously is going to help?”
Arthit drains the cup and curls his lip at the dregs in the bottom. It makes a jittery little clatter against the saucer when he puts it down. “You have a point.”
“One thing that might help would be for you to do what I thought you were going to do just a minute ago, which is to tell me what the hell is going on. Why is this book such an issue?”
Arthit picks the cup up again and turns it upside down on the saucer. “I thought you understood this country.”
“That’s what Rose said, too. And I’ll tell you what I told her. I don’t.”
“Actually,” Arthit says, “you know all of it. You just haven’t put it together.” He pushes his chair back slightly and eases a leg out from under the table. “Let’s start with the coup.”
Rafferty says, “You’re kidding.”
“No. It’s a good starting point. And it’ll suggest the kind of weight you’re up against.”
“Why? What does this little whirlwind of stupidity have to do with who governs the country?”
“Everything,” Arthit says. “Okay. Here’s the dummy’s guide to the coup. Point One: Thaksin Shinawatra, a rich guy but not really a member of the traditional power elite, gets himself elected prime minister by purchasing the votes of a group of people who have never really turned out for an election before. The poor of the northeast.”
“Rose’s people,” Rafferty says. “The ones she says are supposed to go where they’re told and stay where they’re put.”
“The least powerful people in Thailand. And so what if Thaksin paid for some of their votes? What mattered was that we had the first prime minister in the history of the country who was voted in by the poor.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Well, that development didn’t sit well with the people who have been in charge forever. They wanted to get rid of Shinawatra, and luckily for them he got caught apparently cheating the country, ducking millions in income tax, and they saw their chance. Bang, a military coup; the army overthrew him and set up a new government.”
“And it was the Marx Brothers.”
“Yes. But it represented the old guard, so the folks who are traditionally in charge were comfortable with it.” Arthit clanks the inverted cup against the saucer a couple of times to get the attention of the ethereal, almost transparent youth behind the counter, who is devoting his entire being to getting his bangs to fall across his forehead at a forty-five-degree angle. The boy locates the noise, registers the police uniform, and gets up. “So you’ve got a government of generals, and they can barely figure out which shoe to put on first.”
The boy with the bangs says, “Yes, sir?”
“Some sort of pastry with chocolate in it. And fill this.” The boy takes the cup and fades. “And the generals hold an election, and guess what-the peasants vote Thaksin’s friends back in.”
Rafferty says, “What a surprise.”
“It was to the power elite. The second prime minister in a row, voted in by poor people. The old guard is flabbergasted. They feel like they went to a party and while they were out, the furniture took a vote to change the locks. Suddenly they see themselves standing on the doorstep, trying to get their keys to work.”
A chocolate eclair appears in front of Arthit, followed by a napkin, a fork and a knife, a full cup, and a discreet retreat.
“And okay, the new prime minister, the one the poor elected, breaks some obscure rule and appears on a cooking show because he likes to cook, and the powers behind the scenes are shocked, do you hear, shocked that he’d accept a couple thousand dollars U.S. to make an omelet on TV. So they kick him out. Only in Thailand could a prime minister be overthrown for the way he handles a spatula. But of course that’s not what it’s about, is it?”
“No,” Rafferty says. “It’s about poor people having political power.”
“That’s it exactly. Something fundamental has changed. Poor people have learned that their votes count. This is new in Thai politics, and it terrifies some very powerful people, all of them pale-skinned, most of them Thai-Chinese. Some of the old-power families have been in charge for generations, since Bangkok was built more than two hundred years ago. And they’ve gotten amazingly rich. Billions of dollars, Poke. Year after year, billions of dollars. They dip their scoops everywhere: the national budget, the banks, the corporations, the army, the police-you name it. All of it based on the assumption that they’ll hold power forever, which always looked like a good bet. But now the foundation is suddenly shaky. The ground they built on could be turning to water.”
“And this has what to do with me?”
Arthit empties the cream container into his coffee. “To bring you up-to-date, since you don’t read the papers. The elected party put up yet another prime minister, and the elite went on a rampage. Formed a group with Democracy in the name, which is kind of amusing since they want a mostly appointed government. So they demonstrated, took over the airports, and finally got some people in the Assembly to change sides so they could put one of their own in.”
“I actually do remember that.”
“So nothing is resolved. Nobody thinks the current situation is stable. Here’s the point, Poke. Shinawatra mobilized the poor, but he was never one of them. He was never Isaan. He’s Thai-Chinese. But Pan was poor. Pan is Isaan. Look at the way he’s lived, Poke. He never stops reminding people where he came from. He gives constantly. He’s dark-skinned. The poor liked the former prime minister, but-what did Rose say about Pan?”
“She worships him.”
“Then let me ask you a question. Given everything that’s happened in the past few years, if Pan suddenly decided he wanted political power, how much do you think he could get?”
“If he lived through the election,” Rafferty says, “as much as he wants.”
“And how much power would be lined up against him?”
Rafferty turns to look out through the window at the darkening street. “Pretty much all of it.”
ON THE SIDEWALK outside the coffeehouse, Rafferty forces himself to bring it up. “Listen, I know you don’t want to discuss this-”
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Arthit says. His voice is remote, toneless. “But it won’t do any good. There’s nothing I can do.”
“What does that mean? You’re her husband. You can talk to her. Get it on the table.”
“It doesn’t belong on the table. She’ll lie to me. She’ll tell me she doesn’t like the pills, that they nauseate her or something. What am I going to do? Contradict her? I’d sit there nodding, hating myself for making her tell me a lie.” He passes the back of his hand over his forehead, erasing a sheen of sweat. “Because when you get right down to it, it’s actually none of my business, is it? What could be more personal than the decision to stop living? Is there any action that belongs more completely to the person who commits it? It’s Noi’s life. She shared it with me, but I’m not the one to tell her she has to continue to live it when it’s just one wave of pain after another.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rafferty says. “It feels like I should be able to do something.”
“And I’m grateful for the thought,” Arthit says. “But you’ve already got more than you can handle.”
Rose starts to laugh when she smells the pigpen.
Her reaction startles Rafferty, and he’s further surprised to see a grin put dimples in Dr. Ravi’s face. The swan cart has carried them in grim silence across the grounds thus far, even when they drove past a dramatically lit Garden of Eden. Rose is in agony over what she’s wearing, a white, flowing, two-piece outfit she bought to meet Rafferty’s father in. He thinks she looks beautiful, but she behaves as though she’s wrapped in a rice bag.
But the pigpen makes her laugh out loud.
“How long?” she asks, wiping her eyes. “How long since he had it cleaned out?”
“Weeks,” says Dr. Ravi. “Imagine their faces,” and the pair of them go off again. Dr. Ravi has a falsetto laugh that flutes along half an octave above Rose’s alto. Together they sound like a pair of mice on the keyboard of an organ.
“Oh,” she says, half gasping for breath, her fingers splayed over her heart. “This is enough, Poke. You can take me home and my evening will be complete.”
“No you can’t,” Dr. Ravi says. “There’s something you’ll want to see.”
“What?”
“A surprise. You’ll love it. I promise you, it’s going to be worth it.”
Rose says, “I doubt it.” She looks down at herself and tugs at the sleeve of her blouse with an intensity of loathing that Rafferty can hardly comprehend. They are obviously deep in female territory.
“Besides,” Dr. Ravi says with the secure air of someone who knows he’s got a first-class closer, “Khun Pan would kill me if I allowed someone as beautiful as you to leave without at least an introduction.”
Rafferty says, “What do you mean, ‘at least’?”
“He’s jealous?” Dr. Ravi asks.
Rose drops her sleeve like a rag that’s been dipped into something disgusting and says, “He can’t believe his good fortune.”
“I can’t either,” Dr. Ravi says.
“Hey,” Rafferty says.
“And here we are.” Dr. Ravi pulls the swan to the bottom of the broad marble steps leading up to the front porch. The double doors have been thrown wide, and even at this distance Rafferty can feel the cool air pouring out. A small orchestra is cricketing away inside, and he hears the usual party montage of conversation, laughter, and ice cubes hitting glass. Two women wearing, as even Rafferty can tell, several thousand dollars’ worth of clothing apiece float across the doorway on a cloud of privilege.
“Absolutely not,” Rose says. “I can’t go in there.”
“Oh, come on,” Rafferty says. “You look beautiful. And, Jesus, look at me.”
“He’s right,” Dr. Ravi says. “You’ll be the most beautiful woman in the house.”
“What I’ll be,” Rose says, “is a dark-skinned, big-footed peasant girl wearing a dust rag.” She puts a hand on Rafferty’s arm. “Poke. I want to go home.”
“Well, well,” someone says from the top step. Rose turns at the sound of the voice, and her jaw very discreetly drops.
“You are surprising,” Pan says to Rafferty. “You must have strengths you haven’t shown me. Goodness,” he says, turning to Rose. “What jeweled box does he keep you in?”
Rose says, “Oh, my.” Her nails dig into Rafferty’s arm.
“You said she was pretty,” Pan says, coming down the steps, “but you didn’t tell me she was stunning.” Halfway down, he tosses his partially smoked cigar to smolder on the marble. He wears bright yellow silk slacks with burgundy patent-leather shoes, lavender socks, and a shirt of a vibrating grass-snake green, the precise color to set off the pink lips. He looks, in all, like a newly successful pimp who hasn’t found the right haberdasher yet. Rafferty would bet everything he owns that the look is intentional, down to the last agonizing detail. “I have a show planned that will curl their hair,” Pan says to Rose, “but nothing compared to you. You’ll drive them completely crazy.” He puts a hand on Rose’s shoulder and studies her face as though he were memorizing her bone structure. “You’re Isaan, of course. Where?”
Rose’s face is flushed with embarrassment. “About a hundred kilometers from where you were born.”
“We were neighbors,” Pan says. “This farang is lucky that I never saw you when you were growing up. I’d have stayed in Isaan, and he’d never have laid eyes on you.”
“Of course,” Rose says. “You’d be loafing barefoot on some hammock while I nag you to feed the chickens.”
Rafferty says, “Go ahead. Talk as though I’m not here.”
“Get used to it,” Pan says. “No one’s even going to notice you.”
“Since someone has to have some manners,” Rafferty says, “this is my wife, Rose. Rose, this is-”
“I know who he is,” Rose says. “It’s an honor to meet you.”
Pan says, “And you’re the…” He pauses, screws up his eyes, and says in English, “…whipped cream on the evening. You’re so beautiful it’s almost wasteful.” He glowers at Dr. Ravi. “Why didn’t you think of this?”
“I hadn’t seen her.”
“No, of course not.” Pan looks at Rose again and actually rubs his hands together. “I’ve made a life out of excess,” he says. “Improving the lily-”
Dr. Ravi says, “Gilding the lily.”
“Actually,” Rafferty says, “it’s ‘painting.’ Painting the-”
“Oh, fuck the lily,” says Pan. He leans in toward Rose as though to whisper in her ear. “I have an idea for you, something that will ruin the evening for most of my guests. We know they think of Isaan as mud. Let’s remind them that mud is where the lotus grows.” He turns and says over his shoulder, “Please, please come with me.”
Rose and Rafferty follow Pan’s broad yellow bottom up the steps as Dr. Ravi climbs back into the swan and heads for the gates. Pan leads them at an angle, chatting with Rose all the way, partly in Lao, which Rafferty doesn’t understand. They top the steps to the left of the door and follow Pan around the side of the house. Halfway back they come to a marble wall with an iron gate in it. Beside the gate is a combination pad, which Pan prods with a sausagelike index finger for a second, and then Rafferty finds himself in the garden he’d seen that morning from Pan’s office.
“This will take me a minute,” Pan says, shoving a glass door aside and motioning them to file into the office. He comes in behind them and closes the door. “But, believe me, it’ll be worth it.” A few steps take him to a corner, where he opens a closet door, revealing a safe the size of a refrigerator.
“I don’t give up easily,” Pan says to Rose as he twirls the dial, “but I was beginning to think I’d have to return these. You’ll know what I mean at a glance. Not just anybody can wear them. They’d look ridiculous on someone who isn’t tall, for one thing. How tall are you?”
“Almost two meters,” Rose says.
“You should think about modeling, except you’d have to kill eight or nine society girls to get a job.” The door swings open without a murmur, although it must weigh three hundred pounds. “And even most tall women would disappear behind these. Just vanish, like the stars when the sun is out.” He pulls out a long, gray box covered in velvet and pops it open.
Rose emits something that sounds like a long hiss.
“They’re canaries,” Pan says, looking closely at her face. Draped over the swirl of burns on his fat little hand is a concentration of golden light: solid yellow drops of brilliance chained together somehow. “Average size is four carats,” Pan says, “but the one in the center is six. Canary diamonds this size are very rare, I’m told. I don’t know anything about it. I just thought they were pretty.”
“Why…why are you showing me these?” Rose asks.
“To wear, of course,” Pan says. “Oh, don’t worry,” he says to Rafferty. “I’m not trying to dazzle your wife with presents, although I would if you weren’t here. These are a loan for the evening, just to give those snobs out there something to stub their noses on. Let’s show them an exquisite Isaan girl, the most beautiful woman in the room, wearing three million dollars’ worth of yellow diamonds.” He holds up the necklace. “What do you say?”
Rose reaches out a hand and says, “Let’s make their teeth hurt.”
RAFFERTY’S FIRST IMPRESSION when Pan plunges into the thick of the gathering, dragging him and Rose in his wake, is that everyone is surface, brought to a high polish. Everyone shines, everyone glistens, everyone seems to reflect everyone else. Gold, jewels, hair, the shimmer of fabrics, the mysterious gleam of money. He practically squints in self-defense.
The men are a mixed lot, although all have the sheen of power he noticed in the poker game. Despite the occasional immaculate uniform, glittering with medals, most of the men wear suits, sober garments with the effortless drape achieved through highly paid effort. The men are mostly in their fifties and early sixties and look like they would put on a suit to pull a dandelion.
Seen from six or eight feet away, the women seem younger than the men, and some of them actually are-trophy wives or favored mia noi, “minor” wives who have been towed into public as a treat. Silk is everywhere, bordered at neck and wrists by the hard sparkle of precious stones. Young or old, most of the women are variations on a theme. They are grimly slim and brilliantly made up. Noses too broad in the bridge have been subtly shaded to appear narrower. Thin lips have been plumped up and thick lips minimized. White skin is the ideal, and those who do not have it wear pale, almost ghostlike powder to simulate it. Hair is architectural: sculpted, layered, lacquered against gravity. Perfume is everywhere. In the midst of the crowd, Rafferty feels like he is being attacked by flowers.
Rose, her face scrubbed and gleaming, the diamonds dazzling at her throat, towers above the women and most of the men as Pan hauls her and Rafferty along behind him, introducing them right and left as proudly as if he’d just whipped them up in the kitchen. He pretends not to see the stiffness with which they are met.
It usually takes a moment for the stiffness to set in. Rafferty can almost see the thoughts chase each other through people’s heads as they first look at Rose: She’s beautiful. Maybe she’s someone I should recognize. Hmmmm, very dark-skinned, low bridge of the nose-Isaan. Oh, of course, she’s one of Pan’s little popsies.
Pan not only ignores the stiffness, he intensifies it. He has a trick of taking between both of his hands one of the hands of the woman he is greeting and then, when he introduces Rose, putting Rose’s hand into the woman’s. Some of the women manage the situation; their breeding comes to the fore, and they hold on to Rose’s hand and make conversation as though they had grown up neighbors, rather than on the opposite sides of one of the world’s widest gulfs of power and possession. The others-mostly, Rafferty thinks-those who fought their way into rooms such as these, go rigid. They actually tilt slightly backward, as though Rose smelled bad, and they snatch their hands away the moment Pan lets go.
At first Rafferty is worried about how Rose will handle the rejection, but this is a woman who stepped onstage nightly in a crowded, testosterone-filled bar, wearing little more than an attitude. The women who try to escape her learn that she is eagerly friendly, that she will follow them, puppylike, as they back away across the marble floor. She asks them the kinds of questions they would be asked in a small village: How many children do they have, how old, were the births painful, how do they get their hair to do that?
The woman Rafferty likes least retrieves her hand and wipes it on her thigh. Her eyes go to Rafferty and then back to Rose, and he can almost see the word “whore” form in her mind. “I’ll bet there’s a fascinating story here,” she says in English, for Rafferty’s benefit. “Where in the world did you two meet?”
“The King’s Castle,” Rose says, the English name of the Patpong bar she danced in.
“The Royal Palace,” Pan translates into Thai.
“Really,” the woman says, her eyebrows elevated. “Were you on a tour?”
“Oh, no,” Rose says. “I worked there. For years.”
The woman hesitates for a second, weighing the probabilities, then says, “Doing what?”
“Guest relations,” Rose says with her sweetest smile.
The woman says, “Ah.”
Pan says to Rose, “You don’t need me,” and disappears.
Rafferty snags a passing waiter and grabs two flutes of pink champagne, and he and Rose wander the crowd. There is no question that Pan was right: Rose is easily the most beautiful woman present. The yellow diamonds throw hard little points of golden light on the flawless skin of her neck and the underside of her chin. Most of the men follow her with their eyes, and most of the women watch the men, although their gaze eventually floats to Rose. But Pan was wrong about one thing: Even when Rafferty is standing right beside Rose, there are people who pay attention to him. Men, three of them. He can feel their eyes on him and see them slide away when he turns.
They are scattered throughout the crowd as though some sort of territorial imperative were in operation, keeping them apart. Orbiting each of them is a muscular little knot of men, three or four of them, wearing dark suits of anonymous cut. These men keep their eyes in motion. Some of them wear discreet earplugs. When one of the men in the center wants a drink, one of the satellites peels off and goes to get it. When the drink bearer returns, he stands like a human tray with the drink extended until the top dog condescends to notice him.
The three men’s eyes keep flicking to Rafferty.
At eight-thirty the little orchestra, which is seated on a raised platform midway down one of the room’s walls, strikes up the triumphal march from Aida, and two long screens, painted with gold bamboo and blindingly iridescent hummingbirds, are folded back to reveal a room filled with food and white-jacketed waiters. There is a general movement toward the buffet, and Rafferty takes advantage of the shift in focus to navigate through the crowd to Pan’s side.
“Three men,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to describe them, but don’t look for them while we’re talking.”
“I won’t have to,” Pan says. “It’s good business to know your enemies.”
“High-ranking policeman,” Rafferty says. “Full uniform, fat, looks a little like a monkey-”
“Thanom,” Pan says. “Very bad. He runs a little squadron of killer cops. They scare people to death. He was one of the top cops who resisted the crackdown on drug dealers because he was taking so much money off them. Millions of baht a month.”
“Why is he here tonight?”
“His wife is ambitious. Got a set of claws and uses them to climb. Also, we were in business once, he and I. When we were both younger and poorer.” His eyes scan the room. “But most people are here to show me I can’t chase them away. They would rather this fund-raiser had been held anywhere else in the world. They’d prefer a rat-infested slum or a mountain of rubbish. But since I outbid all of them to host the event, they have to show up to prove they’ve got the balls.”
“Dark suit, short, mostly bald. Not skinny but gaunt, got a face like a skull. Not eating or drinking anything.”
“Porthip. He’s the guy who owns the cranes you see all over the city. Imports steel for skyscrapers. His steel partners are Tokyo yakuza. Once or twice they’ve sent him help when he needed to persuade builders that they were buying their steel in the wrong place.” Pan seems to be enjoying himself. “Three or four years back, one of the reluctant customers was found in Banglamphoo. And Pratunam. And Lumphini Park.”
“I get it.”
“Something very sharp,” Pan says. “Japanese sharp.”
“Does he live on air or something? He can’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds.”
“He’s lost maybe twenty kilos in the past year or so. Word is he’s got stomach cancer.” Pan looks around the room. “It’s a good thing we’re not raising money to cure that. Half the people here wouldn’t give a penny until Porthip is dead.”
“This last one’s harder,” Rafferty says. “Maybe the best-dressed man here, really beautiful suit. Late forties, early fifties, goes to the gym a lot-”
“In the middle of a gang of bodybuilders?”
“Right.”
“Mmmmm,” Pan says, the pink lips pushed out.
Rafferty says, “Mmmmmm?”
Pan pulls a cigar case from his jacket, opens it, and takes one out. He snaps the case closed without offering one to Rafferty. Then he stands there, looking down at his hands as though the cigar and the case come as a surprise to him. He opens the case, drops the cigar back in, and shoves the case back into his pocket. He smiles at Rafferty and takes his arm.
“Let’s eat,” he says.
It takes Rafferty less than a minute in the privacy of Pan’s office to confirm that Thanom and Porthip are both on the yellow list.
While everyone eats and Pan proudly leads Rose around the room, Rafferty grabs Dr. Ravi. Dr. Ravi has a plate in his hand and doesn’t seem overly happy at the interruption.
“Where’s the list of the people who showed up tonight?” Rafferty asks.
“Down at the guardhouse.”
“Do me a favor? Call and tell them to show it to me. And can I borrow your swan?”
The swan starts with a purr. As Rafferty guides it back toward the gates, he becomes vividly aware that the stink from the pigpens has increased incrementally. Passing the ramshackle village, he sees the enormous fans that have been placed behind the pen, wafting the scent of merde de cochon toward the Garden of Eden.
The smell chases him up the long hill. When he crests it, he sees that the lighting in the garden has been shifted to create an island of brilliance around the apple tree. The jeweled fruit gleams green and red through the leaves, and the verdant moss that surrounds the tree has been raked or fluffed up to make it seem deeper, lusher, more sensuous. As befits, Rafferty thinks, the spot where the world’s most pleasant sin had its world premiere. Half a dozen men are at work around the apple tree. Several of them are up on ladders and seem to be putting something into its branches. In the relative darkness on the far side of the garden, behind red velvet ropes policed by two uniformed guards, is a gaggle of people whom, from their cameras and casual dress, Rafferty identifies as members of the press. They have their own bar and are using it with some enthusiasm; its surface bristles with bottles, and the voices he hears have the tone-deaf loudness of the freshly drunk.
A guard gives Rafferty a few minutes with the RSVPs. About a third of the attendees are on the yellow list, the anti-Pan list, and about a fifth of them are on the list Pan gave him. He pulls out his copies of those lists and circles the names of the people who are present. He wants to get a look at as many of them as possible tonight. Pan’s line comes to mind: It’s good business to know your enemies.
He works as fast as he can. The booth is hot, even this late in the evening. His shirt is damp by the time he finishes. He refolds his lists and pockets them, thinking that by tomorrow morning it may all have proved to be a waste of time. Elora Weecherat’s article will be out by then, with its hidden threat: If anything happens to Rafferty and his family, the paper has information that could lead to the person responsible.
If he weren’t American, he thinks, it wouldn’t have a chance of working. The potency comes from the threat of the embassy pushing the Thai investigation along. And if Arthit is right and this has something to do with the national political scene, pressure from the United States is the last thing the people who are threatening him would want.
During his time in Bangkok, he’s learned not to take too much comfort from a string of hypotheticals, but it’s all he’s got.
HE APPROACHES THE policeman, Thanom, first. The picket fence of protectors parts as though he’s expected, and Thanom offers him a wet hand to grasp and a fat-faced smile of welcome that almost makes his flat little eyes disappear. “Certainly,” he says. “I’d be happy to talk to you. Anything to help a writer with such an interesting subject.”
“Isn’t it?” Rafferty says. “And of course I want to do it well.”
“I’m sure you do,” Thanom says, and one of his guys snickers. Thanom’s smile remains in place, but his eyes, when he turns them to the man who laughed, look as if smoke should be coming out of them.
When Rafferty reaches the other side of the room, the living skeleton, Porthip, is more difficult. “No time,” he says.
“I’m sure you’re busy-”
“I have no time. Didn’t you hear me? I’m working twenty hours a day as it is. And Pan no longer interests me.” There’s a tremor to his voice that could be lack of breath support. It could also be pain.
One of Porthip’s guardians puts a hand on Rafferty’s arm, and Rafferty shakes it off. “That’s going to disappoint some people,” he says. The guardian takes Rafferty’s arm again.
“Who?”
“Tell you what,” Rafferty says. “Rather than discuss a bunch of names in front of everyone, I’ll have one of them call you tomorrow.”
Porthip extends a shaky hand and touches the shoulder of the man whose hand is on Rafferty’s arm. The man lets go. “Do that,” Porthip says. “If they’re the right people, I’ll talk to you. But you arrive ready to work. No matter who calls me, I can only give you an hour. If that.”
“That’ll be fine,” Rafferty says. He turns away.
“Wait,” Porthip says. “Who is she?”
“Who?”
The tip of his tongue touches his lower lip. “You know who.”
“Oh, her,” Rafferty says. “She’s a spirit of the forest. She only assumes human form when the moon is full.”
Porthip looks past him, to where Rose towers over Pan, yellow fire at her throat. “The moon isn’t full.”
Rafferty says, “I guess I was misinformed.”
The third man, the beautifully dressed man whose name Rafferty doesn’t know, won’t allow Rafferty anywhere near him. The bench-pressing phalanx that surrounds him simply stand, massive shoulder to massive shoulder, a human Stonehenge, several feet in front of their employer, and stare Rafferty down.
“At least let him tell me himself,” Rafferty says.
One of the musclemen says, in English, “Fuck off.”
“Is that message from you?” Rafferty calls over the muscleman’s shoulder.
The beautifully dressed man simply turns away. Rafferty has been snubbed before, but this is a whole new level. He starts to push between two of the men in front of him, but the one to his left, a short, wide, dark-skinned man whose teeth stagger drunkenly across his mouth, leaning in all directions, reaches around the side of Rafferty’s neck and digs an iron thumb into a spot behind Rafferty’s jaw, just below his ear. Pain radiates outward in all directions. Rafferty lets his knees go loose, trying to drop out of the hold, but the other man grabs his necktie and holds him up. It has taken almost no movement, nothing to draw attention, but Rafferty’s entire awareness is focused on pain. By the time the two men release him, the beautifully dressed man is gone.
“Next time,” says the one with the drunken teeth, “you’ll be limping for a week.”
Then he brings up his right hand and, with his index finger, flicks Rafferty across his open left eye.
The pain is dazzling, enough to take Rafferty to his knees, both hands cupped over the assaulted eye. Tears stream down his face. After what seems like ten minutes, he becomes aware of an open hand extended down to him.
He looks up with his good eye to see a man in his early fifties with long, wavy hair, worn brushed back without a part, in a senatorial style. His hand is framed by half an inch of immaculate white French cuff fastened by a link of lapis lazuli set in gold. “Please,” the man says. “Let me help you up.”
“Thank you.” Rafferty reaches up to give the man his hand and is more or less hauled to his feet.
“I saw that,” the man says. “Filthy trick.”
Rafferty mops his face with the sleeve of his jacket. The vision in his left eye is badly blurred. “And he’ll have an opportunity to regret it.”
The senator smiles gently. “Don’t say it too loudly. There are people in Bangkok who could wipe you up like a spill, and Ton is one of them.”
“Ton?”
“Oh,” the senator says, dropping his eyes to adjust an immaculate cuff. “I thought you knew.” When he looks back up, he is smiling. “Given the beauty of your companion, you have good reason to stay alive. If I were you, I would think of Ton as a wrecking ball and stay out of his path.” He nods slightly. “Please excuse me.”
The senator moves off, doing a little genteel glad-handing here and there, and Rafferty turns to find Rose standing behind him. “Nice-looking man,” she says.
“He returns the compliment. In fact, everyone returns the compliment. You’re all anybody here wants to talk to me about.”
“That’s not surprising, considering that one of your eyes is bright red. You look better when they match. What happened?”
“I ran into a finger.”
“Who was it attached to?”
“Captain Teeth.”
Rose says, “Is this something else I have to worry about?”
“Worry?” Rafferty says, blinking against the pain. “In a gathering like this one?”
The evening’s final act begins about nine-thirty as Pan steps up onto the orchestra’s platform. He raises both hands, gesturing for silence. The fiddlers desist.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Pan says. “On behalf of the Malaria Relief Fund, I want to thank you all for coming and invite you out into the garden for our closing presentation. I’m sure you’ll find it worthwhile.”
He steps down and weaves his way through the crowd, as conspicuous in his awful clothes as a peacock among pigeons. He winks at Rose as he passes. They wait a bit and then go out and down the steps, following the crowd along the narrow paved track, and the little village is to their left. “By the way,” Rafferty says, “the votes have been tallied, and it’s official. You obliterated every woman here.”
“I already married you, Poke,” Rose says. “But don’t stop just because of that.”
Someone jostles Rafferty’s shoulder roughly and pushes past him. It is Captain Teeth, the man who flicked Rafferty’s eye. He turns back to stare at Rose and makes a loud slurping noise with his tongue.
“If you learn how to swallow,” Rose calls to him, “you won’t have to do that.”
“He knows how to swallow,” Rafferty says, his eyes on the man’s. “He eats shit every time the boss loosens his belt.”
Captain Teeth flushes and starts to pivot, but the man next to him grabs his arm and gives it a yank. With his upper lip pulled back to bare his awful teeth, Captain Teeth makes a V with his index and middle fingers, jabs them in the direction of Rafferty’s eyes, and then allows himself to be dragged away. The beautifully dressed man is not with them.
Rose says, “Would that be-”
“It would,” Rafferty says.
“He doesn’t like you much.” She fans her hand beneath her nose. “Ohhh, those pigs.”
“Half an hour ago, Pan had wind machines, like in the movies, set up behind them, just to move the smell around.”
“He doesn’t trust much to chance, does he? The diamonds for me, the fans for the pigs. He really piles it on.”
They are cresting the hill that slopes down to the garden. “It’s probably a good thing it didn’t occur to him to put the diamonds on the pigs,” Rafferty says.
“We should suggest that for next time.” Rose passes her fingertips over the stones. “It was nice to wear them once, though.” Rafferty doesn’t say anything, and Rose hits him in the ribs with her elbow. “You dummy,” she says. “You say one word about how you wish you could buy me something like this and I’ll stick my finger in your other eye.”
“At least they’d be the same color.”
“Look at that,” Rose says, stopping. Rafferty stands there, feeling the crowd part around them and flow past, apparently unimpressed by the sight below.
The garden is an explosion of light. Six-story palm trees, gilded by light, dazzle against the black sky. Enormous ferns are transparent green, backlit by thousands of watts. Apples glisten in the foliage of the tree, and a pinspot picks out the snake as it winds its silver spiral down the trunk. The whole thing nestles like an emir’s jewels against the dark velvet wall of greenery. It is vulgar, ostentatious, biblically ridiculous, and absolutely beautiful.
Movement beyond the garden catches Rafferty’s eye. The members of the press have been released from their eighty-proof cage and are streaming toward the lights like moths. Nipping at the heels of the press, herding them like a border collie, is Dr. Ravi. He and two guards shepherd them to an area on the opposite side of the tree from the crowd.
“This could be interesting,” Rafferty says. “Look, he’s set it up so the guests are in the picture.”
Pan emerges from the greenery and steps up onto a wooden platform, about eighteen inches high, positioned beneath the tree. Flashbulbs explode, making Pan’s movements as jerky as stop-motion animation.
“Welcome to the garden,” Pan says. He is wearing a microphone on a headset, and his voice echoes. “And to Net Profits.” He says the words in English and then reverts to Thai. “You’ll see why we’re calling it that in a moment. When the Malaria Relief Fund proposed this event, I decided immediately that we should end the evening here, in the Garden of Eden.” He pauses as Dr. Ravi and the two guards finish jamming the press into their assigned area and then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a fan of three-by-five cards. “Most of us here tonight are Buddhists. But for Christians and Muslims, this garden was the setting of creation.” He is reading now; the words-which, Rafferty thinks, he obviously didn’t write-sound stiff and uncomfortable in his mouth. “It was here that the Deity shaped, from clay and divinity and a rib, the creatures who would sit on the throne of the world He made. They were perfect in form and perfect in health. And they were perfect in their innocence.”
A murmur starts to run through the crowd, and Rafferty sees heads turn, sees people step back and bump into those behind them. He hears Rose start to laugh, and say, “Oh, no.”
The thick ferns to Pan’s left part. Adam and Eve enter their garden, holding hands. Neither of them is a minute over nineteen, and they are as naked as the day they were born except for a couple of strategic and mysteriously adhesive leaves. As the beautiful couple walks to the base of the tree, seemingly unaware that the garden is full of overdressed millionaires, every flashbulb in Thailand goes off, and it suddenly occurs to the people in the front of the crowd that they have just been captured in a front-page photo. There are more attempts to back away, and Pan has to raise his voice to speak over the protests.
“But there was something else in the garden,” he reads from the cards, “a creature whose sting we continue to feel even today. And no, ladies and gentlemen, it wasn’t the snake with his shining apple of temptation. It was a much smaller creature, a tiny, seemingly harmless creature, that finds us at our most vulnerable.” Adam and Eve lie down together on the moss at the base of the tree. Their arms intertwine as the flashbulbs reach the intensity of antiaircraft artillery. The people at the front of the group are trying to back away while the people at the rear are pressing forward for a better look.
“The anopheles mosquito,” Pan says. He starts to grin but fights it down. “It took its first drink of human blood here in the garden, and it went forth and multiplied. It multiplied by the millions and became a swarm that fills the night with the world’s number-one killer. The humblest, bringing down the most mighty. But it could have been stopped right here, ladies and gentlemen-” Adam has wrapped both arms and one leg around Eve, and a fig leaf flies into the air from between them and dawdles its way down again. Now the crowd is seriously trying to get out of camera range, and Rose is laughing so hard she has to lean against Rafferty.
“It could have been stopped here, but it wasn’t, because one thing was missing from the garden.” Pan raises his hand and makes a magical pass at the tree, and a glittering gold net drops from it, covering Adam and Eve only seconds before the pictures would have become useless for news purposes. Movement continues beneath the net. Pan takes advantage of the diversion to light a cigar. “A net, ladies and gentlemen,” he says through a haze of smoke. “A simple net. A net that still stops malaria today, that can help us to eradicate it from the face of the earth. And I’m proud to announce that my own initial contribution to Net Profits will be ten million baht. That’ll buy one hundred and fifty thousand nets, but that’s just a beginning. I’m hoping we’ll buy a million nets with the money we raise tonight, and, fortunately, there are people here this evening-good friends of mine, each and every one of them-who will make me look like a tightwad.” He creases the cards up the middle and tosses them over his shoulder, then glances down at the golden net, which is still in motion. “So,” he says, “why don’t we give these kids a little privacy and go up to the house and write some checks?”
It’s almost eleven when Elora Weecherat steps onto the sidewalk. Late for her, but it’s been a frustrating evening.
She’d stopped for a quick dinner after her meeting with Rafferty, just a simple coq au vin and a fresh baguette at a French bistro on Silom where she knew the cooking was actually French, not Thai-French, which she supposes has its charms, but not for her. A glass and a half of Côtes du Rhône had washed everything down with the dusty red taste of the Left Bank, and she was feeling carefree and mentally limber by the time she plopped into the chair in her cubicle in the newsroom, logged onto the computers, and started to slap out Rafferty’s story.
It came easily, but it came wrong. The opening was too leisurely, the language didn’t achieve the muted tension she was aiming for. This man has been threatened with death, and the death of those he loves. The people behind that threat are almost certainly overwhelmingly powerful, and their motive is probably to create a book that would serve as a preemptive strike against Pan, should he decide to take advantage of his political potential.
Halfway through rewriting the opening paragraphs, she stops and asks herself how she feels about that. She loathes Pan for his vulgarity and the way he treats the women who are foolish or greedy enough to rise to his bait. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Thailand should be moving toward real democracy, untidy as that may be. Weecherat has little innate sympathy for the poor, primarily because she believes that beautiful things are always created by the privileged. One may wish for the proletariat to rise above poverty without also wanting them to design one’s clothes.
So she detects a little bias problem in the story’s point of view. And, perhaps more important, the piece isn’t sufficiently discreet. No matter how big the story is, she has no desire to feel on her own back the sights that are presumably trained on Rafferty’s. She needs to get her personal opinions out of the way and make the language more suggestive and less explicit. She needs to make the reader see something she doesn’t actually say. And amp up the tension at the same time.
She reaches out and straightens the small photograph of her daughter, the only personal item in the cubicle, then kisses the tip of her index finger and touches it to the child’s nose.
She has worked most of her way through the story, feeling more in control of the material, when an instant message pops up on her screen. The night editor would like to see her.
She gets up, irritably redrapes her scarf, and threads a path between the empty desks to the office at the far end of the room. The night editor, a fat, balding hack who has gained thirty pounds since smoking was banned in the building, swivels in his chair to face her. He holds up a printout.
“Where’s this going?”
“If you’ll let me finish it,” Weecherat says, “you’ll see.”
“Just tell me. My eyes are tired.”
Weecherat sighs and talks him through the story, painstakingly telling it exactly as she intends to write it, eliminating her personal bias and skirting the occasional misdirection that will allow her to imply more than she actually says. When she finishes, he regards her long enough for her to feel uncomfortable.
He drops the printout on the desk. “So you’re selling me a story that could bring the cops down on the paper if anything happens to this farang. We become the keepers of the keys if things go wrong.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“Give me another.”
“I just told it to you. The first person ever authorized to write Pan’s biography is being forced under threat of death to write a character assassination. That meets my definition of news.”
He nods slowly, as though considering her argument. “And what’s this mystery information? The stuff you’re leaving out?”
The nape of Weecherat’s neck suddenly feels cold. “You don’t need to know,” she says. “It won’t be in the story.”
His index finger snaps against the edge of his desk with a thwap. “Don’t tell me what’s material. You’re taking us in a direction that could put us in a courtroom.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. If the police do come to us, we’ll tell them everything. We can’t be sued for libel if the police demand the information, and you know it.” She hears the pitch of her voice and takes a step back in an attempt to lower the temperature. A question occurs to her. “What are you doing reading this? You don’t usually monitor stories in real time.”
His gaze drifts past her, and she has to fight the urge to turn and look over her shoulder. The tips of his fingers land in the middle of the printout and scrabble it back and forth over the surface of the desk. “You’re right,” he says at last. “Don’t tell me. It’s probably better that I don’t know.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
He stands, picks up her printout, wads it into a ball, and drops it in the trash. “Didn’t I? Sorry. Go finish your story.”
Back at her cubicle, she rereads what she’s done, types in a few minor changes, and then finishes. She spends twenty minutes fast-forwarding through her tape of the conversation to make sure she’s quoted Rafferty accurately, and then pushes “send.” After she gets up and hefts her purse to her shoulder, she turns to look across the dim room at the bright window in the night editor’s office and finds him looking at her.
She gives him a cool but proper fingertip wave. He nods and swivels his chair to turn his back to her.
The moment she is gone, he swivels around again and gets up. He goes to Weecherat’s cubicle and picks through the things in her drawers until he finds her tape recorder. He opens it and checks that the tape is inside. Then he returns to his office.
Traffic is thinning at this hour. Weecherat steps into the street and extends an arm, palm down, and pats the air to signal a cab. One pulls out from the curb a short distance away, swings into the traffic lane, and swerves toward her. She glances down to gather her shawl so it won’t catch in the taxi’s door, then the glare of headlights brings her eyes up and she sees the cab bearing down on her. The two steps she manages to scramble back, toward the safety of the curb, put her directly behind a parked truck, and that’s where the cab hits her, slamming her against the lower edge of the truck so hard she is almost cut in two.
The driver flicks on the wipers to clear blood from the windshield and shifts into reverse. The transmission lets out a squeal of protest. Something is caught beneath the truck. The driver throws his door open, climbs out, and slams the door on his thumb. He yelps in pain, opens the door, and lopes away into traffic, dodging between cars and holding his injured thumb close to his chest.
As traffic whisks past the scene, Weecherat’s buttercup scarf flutters in the windstream.
The moment the apartment door opens, Miaow pushes through, saying, “It was on television.”
“Then I guess it really happened,” Rafferty says, standing in the bluish fluorescent light of the hallway. He puts a hand on Miaow’s head. “Don’t you have something to say to Mrs. Pongsiri?”
“Thank you,” Miaow recites dutifully. “I had a very nice time.”
“It was a little holiday for me,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. She is wearing full evening makeup and a silk robe in all the hues of the rainbow, plus a few that were deleted for aesthetic reasons. Her apartment, the lamps mysteriously sheathed with colored scarves, gleams behind her like a Gypsy caravan. “This is the first night in months I haven’t gone to the bar.”
“Were they really naked?” Miaow says. Her eyes are so wide he can see white all around her irises, and the evening’s excitement seems to have driven away the clouds that have been hovering over her head. “I mean, really?”
“Close enough,” Rafferty says. “Thank you, Mrs. Pongsiri. I’ll baby-sit your bar girls some evening.”
He gets a flirtatious smile and a disapproving shake of the head. Rafferty doubts there’s a man in the world who could mix messages like that. “You wouldn’t say that if your wife could hear you.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he says. “And she’s not going to hear it from anybody here either. Is she, Miaow?”
“Why couldn’t I go with you?” The petulance returns.
“No kids allowed. Just a bunch of rich people standing around sneering at each other. Bye, Mrs. Pongsiri.” He leads Miaow down the hall. “Anyway, it was all boring except for the two minutes you saw on television.”
“The garden was pretty. I would have liked it.”
“It didn’t smell as good as it looked.” He opens the door to the apartment and steps aside to allow Miaow to precede him. As he closes the door, Rose comes out of the bedroom, already in shorts and a T-shirt.
“You should get out of that monkey outfit,” she says.
“Miaow was just telling me that Pan’s little show was on TV.”
“It was,” Miaow says, heading for her room.
“That was fast.” Rose stops at the kitchen counter. “I’m going to make some Nescafé,” she says. “Want some?”
“Have I ever wanted any?”
“Not that I remember.”
“But I might want it at this hour?”
“You’ll never truly become Thai until you learn to enjoy Nescafé.”
“Then I guess I’m locked out of paradise.”
“I don’t know about you,” Rose says, crossing the kitchen, “but I had enough of paradise tonight. The kids were pretty, though, weren’t they?”
“Enthusiastic, too.”
“I could never do that,” Rose says with one hand on the handle of the cabinet. “Work naked like that. I was offered more money to move to the upstairs bar and do shows-you know, shows-but the idea made my stomach-” She pulls the door open, and there is a white blur of motion, and Rose takes an enormous, instinctive leap backward as something explodes off the shelf toward her. Packages tumble to the counter, pushed aside by whatever it is. Rose’s scream is so high that Rafferty squints against the sound, and he stands as though he has been nailed in place, staring at the thing that has landed on the floor only a few inches short of Rose, who is backing away, both hands out to fend it off.
It raises itself to a vertical position, perhaps three feet off the floor, its hood spread wide, its tongue tasting the air.
Rafferty later has no memory of having grabbed Rose. All he can remember is the two of them in the living room, his fingers digging into her upper arms, as Miaow charges down the hall toward them. He stops her with a single barked syllable. The cobra remains upright, swaying from side to side.
“Miaow. Stay there. Rose, go over there, near the front door, with Miaow.” He grabs the white leather hassock from beside the coffee table with both hands and pushes it across the room to the edge of the kitchen counter. It blocks the entrance to the kitchen.
The cobra drops flat, out of sight beneath the edge of the hassock.
“It can get over that,” Rose says.
“Yell if it does,” Rafferty says, already on the run. “Then go into the hallway and close the door.”
He shoulders open the bedroom door and leaps onto the bed, belly-first. He pulls over his head the chain he wears around his neck and slides aside a panel in the headboard to reveal a locked metal door.
“I can’t see it,” Rose calls.
“Don’t try!” Rafferty shouts. “Don’t go near the kitchen.” He fumbles with the key dangling from the chain, trying to get it into the lock. It keeps skittering away from the slot. “Yell if it starts to come over the hassock.” He finally gets the key into the slot, cranks it to the right, and yanks the door open. His hand hits the heavy cloth bundle, and he pulls it out and unwraps it.
The Glock is cold and oily to the touch. It takes him three attempts to ram the magazine home, and when he tries to rack a shell into the chamber, his hands slide uselessly over the slick metal. He has to dry them on the bedspread before he can snap the barrel back.
Rose screams his name.
He rolls off the bed and charges into the living room to see the cobra slithering over the hassock as though it were a molehill. Rose and Miaow are backing toward the door to the hall. Its attention attracted by all the movement, the cobra rises up again, and Rafferty sights down the barrel.
“Don’t!” Miaow shouts. “Look. It hasn’t got any fangs. It’s been-”
Her voice disappears in the roar of the gun, three fast shots, and a bullet hurls the snake backward as though it’s been yanked by an invisible wire, over the hassock and back into the kitchen. Rafferty runs to the edge of the hassock and looks down to see it writhing on the floor. He fires two more times, the first bullet digging a useless hole in the linoleum. The second goes straight through the cobra’s flat head, and the writhing slows.
“It was defanged,” Miaow says from behind him. She sounds accusing.
“I don’t care if it subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal,” Rafferty says. His legs are shaking violently. He puts a hand on the counter to steady himself. “Any cobra that comes into this apartment is snake meat.”
“It obviously didn’t come in here,” Rose says.
Rafferty’s cell phone rings.
He and Rose hold each other’s eyes until Miaow says, her voice high and unsteady, “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“They already left their message,” Rafferty says, but he takes the phone out of his pocket, flips it open, and says, “Yes?”
“There won’t be any story in the newspaper,” says the man who sat next to him in the Lincoln. “You won’t try anything cute again. I assume you got our present by now. If not, you might want to skip tomorrow’s breakfast cereal. The next one will be in your daughter’s bed, and it’ll have fangs.”
“Got it,” Rafferty says, but his eyes are searching the apartment. He sidesteps Rose and Miaow and looks under the coffee table. Nothing.
“And we’re not happy that you’re spending time with Pan.”
“Oh, use your fucking head,” Rafferty says. “He can make a lot of trouble if he thinks I’m not writing the book he wants. This is going to be hard enough without that.” There is nothing under the counter either.
“Just a minute,” the man on the other end says. Rafferty can hear a palm cover the mouthpiece and a muffled conversation, both voices male. “Okay,” the man says. “You can stay in touch with Pan. But don’t get fancy again, because you’re all out of warnings.”
“One more thing,” Rafferty says, “and then you can hang up and high-five each other on scaring a little girl half to death. That skinny old guy, Porthip. The one who sells the steel. He won’t talk to me until someone calls to tell him he should. I thought you assholes were on top of details.”
“He’ll get a call tomorrow.”
“Now would be the time to hang up on me,” Rafferty says, “but I’m hanging up on you instead.”
He closes the phone and looks at Rose and Miaow. More bad news to deliver. He puts his finger to his lips, then uses the same finger to make a circle that indicates the room in general, and then he touches his ear. He says, “I’ll clean this up. Miaow, go to bed.” He gestures her not toward her bedroom but toward the room he shares with Rose.
She says, “I’m frightened.”
Rafferty is checking the underside of his desk, but he turns and goes to Miaow. Kneeling, he wraps his arms around her. She fidgets, but then she puts an arm around his neck and presses her forehead against his chest.
Rafferty says, “So am I.”