At 12:42 A.M., Captain Teeth says, “They’ve got cops.”
“I’d imagine so,” says the man who had sat next to Rafferty in the car. “He fired that thing four or five times.” He gets up from the soft black leather couch, turning back to center his drink, straw-colored liquid over ice, on a thick coaster. In this house, rings on the tables are strongly discouraged. When he is satisfied with the placement of the glass, the man noiselessly pads across the carpet to the console, where he grabs the second set of headphones. The console, just a cheap black table with the receiver on it, has been shoved up against a wall, displacing an ornate teak-and-suede sofa that is now jammed haphazardly into a corner, where it disrupts the meticulous feng shui of the room.
The room is a home office, all dark wood-and-leather furniture and the half-hidden glint of gold on the spines of unread books. The walls are the color of strong coffee, a deeply grained mahogany that’s been varnished to a reflective luster. Three flat-screen televisions are hung on one wall in a perfect vertical, and two computer screens flicker on the console behind the desk. The desk is empty but for a small thicket of expensively framed photographs, each one showing a handsome, richly dressed man standing with other richly dressed men, mostly less handsome, who face the camera with the air of having been interrupted in the middle of something important. There is one photograph of a thickset woman in her forties, her wrinkles retouched but her disappointment intact. She is flanked by two younger women and a teenage girl, forcing the requisite smiles, who are clearly her daughters.
The room is completely silent. The entire house has been soundproofed because its mistress does not sleep well. The men at the console press their headphones to their ears, one standing and one sitting, for several moments. The man who had spoken to Rafferty in the car drops his phones onto the console for a moment and returns to the couch, moving in and out of bright areas beneath the recessed pin spots in the ceiling. He grabs the drink and totes it over to the console, sits in the wheeled black leather office chair beside Captain Teeth, and slaps the phones back on.
“Pretty dumb story, even if they’re telling it to cops,” he says, listening. “Wonder where they put the snake.”
“Probably the refrigerator,” says Captain Teeth. A new bandage, pristine white, is neatly wrapped around his left thumb.
“She’d never let him do that. Listen to her. She’s not going to have any cobras in her refrigerator.”
“She’s extremely fine,” Captain Teeth says. “You didn’t see her.”
“If you’re a good boy,” the other man says, “you can have her when this is over.”
Captain Teeth shakes a cigarette out of a pack, holds it beneath his nose, and inhales the fragrance. He knows better than to light it. Only one person is allowed to smoke in this house. “I’ll never be that lucky. But I’ll tell you, if she’d be nice to me, I’d spend my life keeping snakes out of her refrigerator.”
“I can fix it. Give you a few hours with her before we put her away.”
“Better-looking than Eve. You didn’t get to see Eve either.”
“I saw her on TV.”
“Yeah?” Captain Teeth squints against a burst of static, puts down the unlit cigarette, and fiddles with the volume knob. “You see me? I was right up front. Till I had to leave, anyway.”
“The wife’s better than Eve. And she’s yours if you want her.” The man from the car slips one of the earphones off and tucks it behind his ear. “Okay, you got the story? The kid was playing with the gun, no damage done except the holes in the cabinet and the floor. The cops went through the place, probably looking in closets and under beds to make sure nobody was dead, and everybody said good night, and they left. I leave anything important out?”
“No.”
“I mean, if himself decides to listen to the tape. Have I left anything out?”
“No. That’s all of it.”
“When they go to bed, you rewind the tape and go through it again. Just to make sure.”
The two of them listen for a few minutes. The man from the car drains his drink. Then he asks, “Why’d you have to leave the party early?”
“Just business,” Captain Teeth says. “Listen. They’re going to bed.” He reaches over to the other man’s glass and loops a finger through the hole in the center of one of the ice cubes. He pulls the cube out and drops it into his mouth. Around the cube he says, “You really think I can have her?”
A voice behind them says, “It’ll be a waste if you don’t.” They turn to see the man in the photographs on the desk, wearing a dark blue silk robe. “Because no one else ever will.”
The men at the console leap to their feet. The man in the robe goes to the desk, opens the top drawer, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes and shakes one loose. “Kai,” he says to Captain Teeth. He picks up a gold lighter and flicks it. “Have you told Ren here what you did earlier this evening, after you deserted the party?” He regards the two of them over the flame.
“No,” Kai says.
“Didn’t tell him how you hurt your thumb?” The man in the robe is in the darker half of the office, away from the desk lamps on the console, and the flame of the lighter brings his face out of the gloom and plants bright pinpricks in the center of his eyes. “Nothing?”
“No, sir.”
“How sensitive of you not to embarrass him,” the man in the robe says. “Then I’ll tell him. What Kai did tonight,” he says, his eyes on Ren, “was pick up the shit you dropped.”
Ren licks his lips and says, “Excuse me?”
“The elevator,” says the man in the robe. He lets the lighter go out, throwing his face back into darkness. His voice is soft, but the edges are rough enough to remove skin. “You made three mistakes, didn’t you?”
“Three?” Ren asks. He puts a steadying hand on the console.
“One of them was just stupid. Taking the farang up in that elevator. Stupid, but understandable. You could have used the service elevator, but that one was right there, wasn’t it? Right there in the garage.”
“Yes, sir,” Ren says, around a swallow.
“So you saved a few steps. You used it. And it told the farang what floor we were on. And then you made a more serious mistake.” He flicks the lighter again, puts the cigarette in his mouth, touches the flame to its tip, and takes a drag that brings the coal to life. Then he exhales a stream of smoke and flips the cigarette straight at Ren. It strikes Ren in the center of the chest, and he drops to his knees as though he’s been shot, although what he’s doing is trying frantically to retrieve the cigarette before it scorches the carpet. He scrambles after it and grasps it between thumb and forefinger. When he knows he won’t drop it, he starts to rise, but the man in the blue robe says, “Stay there.”
Ren freezes in a crouch. His legs are bent at acute angles, and he is balanced on the balls of his feet.
“Is that position comfortable?” the man in the blue robe asks.
“Uh, no, sir.”
“Well, let’s see how comfortable it is in, say, two hours.” He comes out from behind the desk and stands over Ren. Then he draws back his right hand and slaps the crouching man hard enough to snap his head around and make him put his free hand down to keep from toppling over.
“I didn’t say you could use your hands,” says the man in the blue robe.
“Sorry, sir,” Ren says. The left side of his face is flaming. His legs have begun to tremble from the strain.
“Put your hands on your knees.” Ren does as he’s told. The cigarette in his left sends up a lazy filigree of smoke. The man in the blue robe slaps him again and then again, and when Ren puts a hand down, the man in the robe plants a slippered foot on it and grinds it into the carpet with the edge of the heel. “What was your second mistake?”
“I told him…I told him not to tell you.”
“You didn’t want me to be angry at you,” says the man in the blue robe. “You didn’t want me to-what? Speak harshly to you? Raise my voice? Shake my finger at you? So, since you didn’t want to endure that, since you were afraid of being shouted at, I didn’t know the truth, that Rafferty had information that could bring him back to us. And then you made your third mistake. The one that’s almost impossible to forgive.”
“Sir?” Ren’s face is running with sweat, partially from the strain of maintaining the position, but mostly from fear.
“You lost him. And while you didn’t have him in your sights, he met with that reporter. And he told her what he knew. Do you know what that did to us?”
“No, sir.”
“It took this entire operation out of bounds. This was supposed to be quick and easy. Threaten the man, set him loose, see what happens, what he finds out, and then take whatever action turned out to be necessary. Maybe nothing, maybe just give him his money and forget about him. Instead, because of you, Kai had to take definitive action tonight. He had to kill that reporter.”
“I-” Ren says, and runs out of steam.
“And he hurt his thumb. Didn’t you, Kai?”
“It’s okay,” Kai says.
“No, it’s not okay. None of it’s okay. It’s not okay that Ms. Weecherat is dead. Quite apart from the fact that she had children, and no child should lose a parent like that, it means we might have to manage the police, and that means that more people will be on the edge of our little circle. Not to mention those who have already been added. The night editor at her paper, for example.”
“He can’t-” Ren says. “He can’t know who it was who-”
“No, he can’t. And it wouldn’t affect me personally if he did. I’m not the one who’s at risk here. You are. Kai is. A couple of people just above you in the company. Lifters and door openers. But I’m supposed to protect my people, aren’t I? So your tiny, contemptible act of cowardice puts me in the position of having to behave like a common gangster. It means that Rafferty will almost certainly have to die, since he knows perfectly well that we killed the reporter. This was not the way this was supposed to work out.” His eyes go to the cigarette in Ren’s hand. “Are you planning to smoke that?”
“No, sir. I wouldn’t. It’s, um…it’s yours.”
“Well, if you’re not going to smoke it, what should you do with it?”
Ren says, “Put it out?”
The man in the robe sighs in irritation. “Of course put it out.”
“Then…” Ren says, “then I can get up?”
“No.”
Ren’s eyes dart around the room, looking for anything close at hand. “Then where should I-”
“Put it out,” the man in the blue robe says, “on your tongue.”
MIAOW CLUTCHES THE pen vertically in her fist, even though she has been trained at school to hold it at a slant between her fingers. Looking at the pen, upright as a flag, looking at the dimples in the brown knuckles as her fist moves across the paper, Rafferty sees hours of practice, wiped away by fear. It makes him so angry his mouth tastes of metal.
Miaow’s eyes flick back and forth between the note Rafferty wrote and the translation she is making. In English it says, They can hear everything we say. She does a final check of her looping Thai script and passes it to Rose, who scans it and shuts her eyes in an expression that looks more like irritation than fear. She opens them and points at the corners of the bedroom, jabs her finger toward the door leading to the living room and Miaow’s room, then lifts her palms in a question.
Rafferty shrugs and shakes his head: Don’t know. He mimes zipping his mouth closed and then takes the pen from Miaow and writes, We can only say things we want them to hear.
Miaow says, “Well, duh,” and then blanches and covers her mouth.
Rafferty gives her the pen, and she translates, with Rose looking over her shoulder. Even before she has finished, Rose is nodding impatiently, a gesture that means, Yeah, yeah, yeah. She takes the pen and begins to write in Thai. Rafferty hates including Miaow in this conversation, but his written Thai is rudimentary at best, and Rose can’t read English beyond “Hello” and and “I love you,” the phrases every bar girl learns to write during her first week on the job, so Miaow is irreplaceably in the middle. Her shoulders brushing against both Rose’s and Rafferty’s, Miaow follows Rose’s moving hand much as Rafferty followed hers.
The three of them huddle on the new blue bedspread Rose just bought, in a semicircle of light thrown by the lamp that stands on the bedside table. All the other lights in the apartment have been turned off. Rafferty has draped a blanket over the air conditioner in the bedroom’s only window to prevent light leaks that might be visible from the street.
He is certain that someone is down in the street.
Miaow takes the pen and paper and translates quickly: How long?
Rafferty writes, I’ll call Arthit in the morning from the hallway. He’ll send someone to find the microphones. Miaow translates, and Rose nods and writes something. Miaow, reading over her moving hand, nods in agreement and takes the pad almost before Rose finishes. When she is done, Miaow turns it to Rafferty. It says, Can we get out of here?
Rafferty shrugs again and takes the pad. He writes, They’re watching. Miaow reads it and shortcuts the process by jerking a thumb toward the glass door to the balcony and the window with the air conditioner in it and miming binoculars.
Rose surprises Rafferty by scrawling, in very large letters, a word he didn’t know she could write. The word is SHIT.
Rafferty takes the pen and turns the page over. On the clean side, he writes, I’ll move us soon. Without even showing it to Rose, Miaow grabs the paper and scribbles How? hard enough to rip the paper.
Rafferty writes, I don’t know.
Snarls of dust, smeared windows, grit on the linoleum, the tiny brown cylinders of mouse droppings. In the middle of the floor, a three-inch cockroach, dead and belly-up, its legs folded as precisely as scissors. The smell of damp.
Rafferty says, “It’s fine.”
“It needs cleaning,” says Rafferty’s landlady, Mrs. Song. She looks even more worried than usual.
“I’ll clean it.”
“No, no, no.” Mrs. Song pats the air in Rafferty’s direction to repel the remark. “I’ll have a crew come in.”
“Today?”
“Well,” Mrs. Song says, giving the word tragic weight. The morning light seeps through the dirty windows like sour milk. “Maybe not today,” she says.
“That’s what I thought. I’ll take care of it.”
“But you’re not moving,” Mrs. Song says. Change petrifies her. She’d probably be happiest if the building were empty and sealed. She clamps her purse firmly against her side with her upper arm as though she expects it to try to escape.
“No. I want this one and the one upstairs. Both of them.”
“But why?”
Rafferty says, “Because people can’t see through walls.”
AS THE ELEVATOR doors slide closed behind him, Arthit says, “Have you seen this?” A copy of the Sun is folded under his arm. He is in street clothes, since Rafferty didn’t want the people who are watching the place to see anyone in uniform. Mrs. Song, trailing anxiety like a perfume, has gone down to the utility closet in the underground garage for mops, pails, and cleaning supplies.
“I haven’t gone out yet today.” Rafferty is holding a roll of paper towels. “But there’s no story. The guy who called last night said that there would be no story.”
“Oh, there’s a story,” Arthit says. His mouth is pulled into an inverted U so pronounced that it makes him look like a grouper. He hands the Sun to Rafferty, who tucks the roll of towels under his arm to take the paper. It is folded tightly around a front-page piece beneath the headline SUN REPORTER KILLED.
Dark spots swarm in front of Rafferty’s eyes, and he is suddenly light-headed. He hands the paper back and says, “I can’t read it.”
“It’s who you think it is,” Arthit says. “Hit-and-run. Driver fled the scene.”
Rafferty pivots away from Arthit, crosses the hall, and kicks the elevator hard enough to dent the door and send a telegram of pain all the way up to his quadriceps. “She had a daughter,” he says. His voice feels like it has had knots tied in it. “Seven years old.”
“A son, too,” Arthit says. “It was a hit-and-run in the most literal sense. The guy who hit her couldn’t get the car going, so he climbed out and ran. Which is how we know the car that hit her was a taxi, and that it was stolen.”
“So it wasn’t an accident. What a surprise. I don’t suppose there was a witness.”
“It’s not in the story, but there was. The driver was short and very wide in the shoulders.”
Rafferty looks up quickly. “And?”
“And?” Arthit screws up his face a moment. “Oh, yeah, and. He closed the car door on his finger, and he apparently snarled or something, because the witness saw his teeth.”
“They were crooked,” Rafferty says.
“I’d ask how you know that,” Arthit says, “but I don’t want to hear the answer.”
“Give me the paper.”
Arthit hands it to him, and Rafferty drops the roll of towels to the floor and scans the story about Weecherat, then flips through the pages until he comes to the third section. Pan’s fund-raiser owns the front page, above the fold. Rafferty tilts toward Arthit the two-column color photo, which shows Adam and Eve from behind, stark naked from that angle, ambling toward a conspicuously horrified crowd of well-dressed millionaires. “Right here,” he says, putting his fingertip above Captain Teeth’s head. “And this is the fucker he works for. I don’t know his full name, but his nickname-”
“-is Ton,” Arthit interrupts. “How do you know this is the guy?”
“He’s got teeth like he ate a grenade. They go all over the place. And it makes sense, because Ton wouldn’t talk to me last night.”
Arthit takes the paper and refolds it carefully, as though the task were important, as though it were the national flag. He avoids Rafferty’s eyes. “That’s your evidence? Ton wouldn’t talk to you? He’d refuse to talk to the prime minister if he felt like it. And get away with it.”
“He didn’t talk to me because he knew I’d recognize his voice. He’s the guy who ordered me to write the book.”
Arthit is still looking at the newspaper. “And you can prove that, of course.”
“Check his office. He’s on the thirty-sixth floor of whatever building it is. I’ll bet you anything you want.”
“There’s nothing I want,” Arthit says. “Which is a good thing, because I’m not making that inquiry.”
“Here’s what happened: Weecherat files her story. It goes into a computer. The computer has been programmed to flag anything with Pan’s name in it. The flag kicks the story to someone at the paper, who calls someone higher up at the paper, who calls Ton. Ton sticks his little warning in my kitchen cabinet, and then he thinks it would be tidier if Elora wasn’t floating around with the number of the floor he’s on. So he sends Captain Teeth to take care of her.”
“Ton is untouchable,” Arthit says.
“Oh, fuck that.”
“Listen to me, Poke.” Arthit has crumpled the paper in his fist without even knowing it. “Ton could run over an entire nursery school, on purpose, right in front of me, and back up to get the ones he missed the first time, and I’d probably offer to pay for his car wash. I’m telling you, these people are not accountable. Remember that miserable kid of General Aparit’s? Shot two cops and killed one of them in a drug bust at a rave club? He’s assistant to a cabinet secretary now. Aparit is a panhandler compared to Ton. It would be worth my job to look cross-eyed at him. And right now, with Noi the way she is, I can’t even entertain the fantasy.”
Rafferty turns away and looks through the open door of the unoccupied apartment. He hears himself say, “Right.” He bends down and picks up the roll of paper towels and pitches it underhand at the floor. The towels unroll clear across the empty room, making the only clean path on the floor. “Here’s something else you won’t want to do anything about. Weecherat had a tape recorder. My interview was on it. What do you want to bet it’s missing?” He hears the elevator doors open and glances over his shoulder, expecting to see Mrs. Song struggling mournfully with an armful of cleaning stuff. Instead it’s Lieutenant Kosit, whom he hasn’t seen since he dealt the card game that got Rafferty into this mess.
“Pretty impressive stuff,” Kosit says, “and expensive, too. Cost maybe eight hundred, nine hundred U.S. apiece. Three of them.” He’s wearing olive drab shorts and a camouflage T-shirt in green and brown.
“Where?” Rafferty says.
“Center of the ceiling. They bored a little hole for each microphone. Theory is that nobody ever looks up. The holes are only about half an inch in diameter, and just to make sure they wouldn’t catch your eye, they glued some kind of white cloth over the openings. The mikes are omnidirectional, sensitive across three hundred sixty degrees.”
“Which rooms?”
“Living room, kitchen, bedroom. Nothing in the bathroom or Miaow’s room. They feed to a transmitter inside your couch. They unstitched the liner on the bottom, put the thing inside, and tacked the cloth back.”
“What’s the range?” This is Arthit, and it’s purely an instinctive reaction. The moment the question is out, he squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head.
Kosit throws Arthit an inquisitive glance and then squints down the hallway for the answer. He has a seamed, leathery smoker’s face, and the squint creates a fan of deep creases radiating out from the corner of each eye. “Mile? Maybe a little more. So forget finding the listening post. It’s somewhere in a two-mile circle of Bangkok. And even if the sun shone straight down through the clouds to show you exactly where it was, you’d probably just find another transmitter to boost the signal and pass it along.”
Rafferty has no intention of looking for it. “Nothing in the hallway outside?”
Kosit shakes his head. “No.”
“Cameras?”
“No, and it’s a good thing. I was quiet, but not invisible.” Kosit grins. “You should have heard your wife and daughter, arguing about school and her hair color as though there was nobody else in the place.”
Rafferty says, “Her hair color?”
“Poke,” Arthit says. “What are you going to do about this?”
Rafferty turns back to the filthy, empty apartment. “What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to take advantage of it.”
WHEN DA AND Peep are pushed into the van that morning, there is only one other woman inside. She balances a very dark-skinned, black-eyed child, perhaps two years old, in her lap. The woman with the skeletal child is not there. Da assumes they will wait for her, but the man in the awful blue shirt-what was his name? Kep?-slides the door closed behind her with a bang. It is too angry a sound for so early in the morning.
“Where are they?” Da asks quickly, before Kep can get around the van and climb behind the wheel.
“Who knows? One of the tough men from the business came and got them very early.” The child in the other woman’s lap tilts its head to one side and trains its enormous eyes on Peep. Peep has been whimpering, fretful at being jostled as he and Da were hurried downstairs, but when he feels the other child’s gaze, he goes quiet, and the two of them regard each other like members of some rare species unexpectedly come face-to-face.
“Will she be all right?” Da asks, but before the other woman can answer, Kep pops open the driver’s door and slides his bulk onto the seat. An unlit cigarette hangs from his lips. Before he starts the car, he twists back to speak to Da, although he doesn’t bother to turn his head far enough to meet her eyes.
“No giving money back today, got it?”
He seems to expect a reply. “I heard you the first time.”
“And get off your ass. Don’t just sit there.”
Anger flares in the center of Da’s chest. “I made money yesterday.”
Kep throws an arm back and swipes halfheartedly at her, but she easily ducks out of reach. “Listen to me, you snotty little bitch. You make as much as I tell people you make. If you don’t want to wind up in some dirt-road whorehouse, you’ll be nice to me.”
“I’ll never work in a whorehouse.”
“You remember that when I bring a bunch of my friends by to break you in.”
“You have friends?”
The other woman puts a cautioning hand on Da’s arm. This time Kep turns all the way around to glare at her. He closes his fist and slowly brings it up into the center of her field of vision. “Women with bruises on their face make money,” he says. “If you don’t shut your mouth, you’ll find out.” For a moment Da is too furious to care whether he hits her or not, but the woman squeezes her arm, and Peep chooses that instant to begin to cry. Da lowers her gaze, and after a brief eternity, stretched out by Peep’s squalling, Kep turns away and starts the van.
He guns the engine, throwing the two women back against the seats, and then the van hits a pothole. Kep lets go of the wheel with one hand long enough to light his cigarette and say, “There must be a better way to earn a living.”
A CARPET TO muffle the echoes, maybe tack a blanket to a wall, hang something over the windows to cover them when the lights are on at night. Some soft, absorbent surfaces. The place sounds like an empty swimming pool, and that won’t do. Grab a few chairs, a table. Something to sit on, and around, while they do what they have to do.
Bare minimum.
Once the floors are clean, just fold some more blankets on them. Haul the spare pillows downstairs. If they have to sleep there, which he doesn’t think they will, it’ll only be for one night. With what he has in mind, they won’t have much time for sleep anyway.
Mrs. Song had helped for a while, running water and sloshing around in the bathroom before making her retreat, scattering excuses and tracking water behind her. As soon as the elevator doors had closed, Rafferty had gone into the bathroom for a look, but he couldn’t see that she’d accomplished much, other than getting it amazingly wet. So he’d balled up a bunch of the paper towels and scrubbed at the floor, walls, and toilet until he was certain the room wouldn’t horrify Rose. He found that the tight coil of anxiety that was wrapped around his heart seemed to ease when he was cleaning.
At least he was doing something.
Now, back in the living room, he uses the widest of the brooms to push a quickly growing ridge of dirt across the floor. He can still feel the scrape of it beneath his shoes, but the floor looks better. The air is razor-sharp with ammonia, and the windows are cleaner. A couple of hours more and the place will be almost presentable. Ugly, empty, and not home, but presentable. There’s no balcony for some reason, just a window where the sliding glass door is in their own apartment. It could be worse, he thinks, and anyway it’s just for a couple of days.
He won’t be able to stretch it any longer than that.
He feels eyes on him and turns to see Rose standing in the doorway, her shoulders high and her hands pushed deep in the pockets of her jeans. He says, “No problems?”
“Someone followed us to the school. A dark blue Lexus. Two men in the front seat. They didn’t try to stay out of sight.”
“They want us to know they’re watching.”
Rose takes in the room and nods at the clean window. “You’ve got talent.”
“Don’t get any ideas.”
She steps back, into the hallway. “I’ve been in the building three or four minutes,” she says. “We’d better go upstairs and make some noise.”
IT’S SUCH A relief for Rafferty to be back in his apartment, away from that forlorn, filthy space, that he can almost forget about the microphones.
But only almost.
“I’m worried about Miaow,” Rose says. She doesn’t look particularly worried. She looks like someone deeply focused on filing her nails, which is what she is doing.
His fingers halt above the keyboard, but just for a moment. “You mean the thing with the snake?”
“No. I think that’s past. But she’s not as happy as she usually is.”
“I’ve noticed. But whatever it is, she’ll get over it,” Rafferty says for the microphones, without taking his eyes off his laptop. He is making a list, and he pauses to come up with something fatherly. “She’s just at an awkward age.” This is his third pass at the list, and it gets longer every time. Only Item One remains the same from draft to draft: Get Rose and Miaow out of the way.
“She doesn’t want to be called Miaow anymore,” Rose says, and something in her voice makes Rafferty look up. “She wants to be Mia.”
Rafferty frowns a question at her, and Rose lifts her eyebrows and nods. No bullshit, in other words. Then she says, “And she’s ashamed of being so dark.”
Rafferty gives up on his list. “Oh, boy.”
“She asked me about whitening creams. She’d like to dye her hair reddish brown, too.”
“Yeah, well, I’d like to be Johnny Depp,” Rafferty says, “but that’s not going to happen either.”
Rose says, “Johnny Depp’s got a girl. A French girl.”
“Not that part,” Rafferty says. “I’d like to be Johnny Depp selectively.”
“It’s easy to make fun of it,” Rose says, “but it’s important to Miaow. You probably remember, maybe not very clearly, what it was like to be young.”
“I’m not that much older than you are.”
“Actually,” Rose says, “compared to me, you’re a big, sheltered baby.” She extends her arms and gives her nails a critical survey. “But we’re going to have to figure out what to say to Miaow. She’s already worried about being short, and she doesn’t think she’s pretty. And now she feels like a dark little peasant girl with the wrong name.”
“I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “This seems like mother territory to me.”
“No problem. I’m just being polite, sharing the situation with you. I’ve already decided how to deal with it.”
“Yeah? How?”
“I’m going to dye her hair and buy her some whitening cream.”
“The hell you are.”
“As you said, it’s mother territory.”
“Well,” he says. Nothing authoritative comes to him. Then he says, “What are you going to call her?”
“Whatever she wants.”
“Not Harold,” Rafferty says. “I draw the line at Harold.”
Rose says, “Children need a strong father.”
He reviews his list, which now has two items on it, and he’s not sure about the second one. “So I’ve done my part?”
“You’re everyone’s dream father.”
“Okay.” He looks at his watch. “It’s late enough to start to bother people about this book.” He picks up the phone, glances involuntarily at the patch of cloth covering the microphone in the ceiling, and dials a number high up on the yellow list. “Mr. Porthip, please,” he says. He covers the mouthpiece with one hand and says to Rose, “The way this guy looks, I think I should talk to him first, or he won’t be around.”
Porthip seems even more frail than he had at Pan’s fund-raiser. The enormous office, jammed with Chinese antiques, has an unpleasantly sour smell, like damp, dirty cloth that has been allowed to mildew. The black lacquered desk is bare except for a glass and a matching pitcher of water with slices of lemon floating in it. Ringing the pitcher in a semicircle are seven vials of prescription drugs. Porthip follows Rafferty’s gaze and points a knotted, quivering finger at each vial in turn. The skin on his hand is hairless and yellow, the veins like blue highways.
“Pain, pain, nausea, pain, diuretic, antidepressant-if you can imagine that, an antidepressant for death-and these big ones that don’t do anything.” His voice is taut, making Rafferty think of wire being drawn through a hole too small for it. He is speaking English.
“But you take them,” Rafferty says.
“Because I’m supposed to. That’s what they’re for. They’re nothing, but they make me feel better because I take them. They give me the illusion I’m doing something, not just lying down to die.”
“You never know.”
“If that comforts you, go ahead and believe it,” Porthip says. “But I’ll tell you: Every cell in your body knows. You know with every breath you take. You know every time the second hand on your watch goes all the way around, and you think, ‘There’s another one gone.’”
Rafferty takes a longer look at the man. The face is taut and shrunken, but the tightly cut Chinese eyes are bright with fury, the eyes of an animal in a trap. “What does it make you want to do?”
“Be twenty,” Porthip says. “Twenty with a hard dick.”
Rafferty says, “I wouldn’t mind that myself.”
What happens to Porthip’s face could be a smile or it could be pain. When it passes, he says, “This isn’t what we were going to talk about.”
“No. Pan.”
Porthip puts both hands flat on the desk. They still tremble. “Are you going to ask me questions, or am I supposed to make a speech?”
“He’s a complicated character,” Rafferty says, feeling sententious. “I want both the good and the bad in the book. Let’s start with-”
“He’s as complicated as a cow patty,” Porthip says, waving off Rafferty’s assertion. “You’ve got the basics, right? I mean, someone gave you the background: Isaan, poor kid, farmer’s son, couldn’t read, probably never saw a roll of toilet paper until he was sixteen or seventeen. Came to Bangkok and made his fortune, a little shady at first, maybe, what with the poking parlors, but that was the only route open, since we evil rich control all the access to capital. But he ran circles around us with his native Isaan wit. That’s the hero version, how he used all that peasant cunning to make half the baht in Thailand and now he sprinkles them around like lustral water, anointing whole areas of the country, and he’s become the Bodhi tree people sit under to find enlightenment.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard all that.”
Porthip shakes his head in what could be disgust. “And you’ve met him.”
“Three times.”
“What did you think?”
“I don’t know. Good and bad, I guess.”
“Good and bad,’” Porthip repeats scornfully. He pours himself a glass of water, the edge of the pitcher rattling against the glass in his unsteady hand. A slice of lemon falls into the glass, and water splashes on the desk. Rafferty wants to help but knows the effort won’t be appreciated. “First thing I’m going to tell you…” Porthip says, and he raises the glass to his lips and drinks. He holds up a finger. Rafferty waits until the man has swallowed, and Porthip picks up the sentence. “…is, don’t believe anything he tells you. Not anything. If he says it’s sunny, buy an umbrella. If he tells you he’s giving you something, put your hand over your wallet. He lies every time he exhales.”
“Poor people have a different impression. He funds hospitals, he-”
“Bullshit. He never gives away a nickel. He’d steal from a corpse if he could find anybody dumb enough to lend him a shovel.”
“So where do these stories come from?”
Porthip allows his eyes to roam over Rafferty’s face, long enough for the scrutiny to be rude. He does not look impressed by what he sees. “He’s not complicated, but he’s smart. Do you understand the difference?”
“I like to think I’m capable of making basic distinctions, yes.”
“The whole thing-the outrageous spending, the gold Rolls-Royce, the rough edges, the awful clothes, the beautiful women, the fuck-you attitude-it’s all for effect. It’s all lies. The philanthropy, which isn’t even his money. He never uses a dime of his own. He’s got half a dozen backers, guys who are tired of being on the edges, and they bankroll all this crap. He wants to build some little health clinic and pay some quack doctors who couldn’t get work at a real hospital if the plague hit, and these guys pony up. If he wants to create a Potemkin village, some feminist paradise where all the women are empowered at their looms while the men sit around and drink all day, those guys not only pay for the looms, they buy the goddamn fabric. He’s got warehouses full of the fucking stuff. Mice chew on it. It never seems to occur to anyone that the world isn’t clamoring for an infinite supply of amateur weaving. It’s good for potholders, junk to sell the tourists, but come on, they’re making miles of the stuff. You could cover the road from here to Chiang Mai with it. And it would be uglier than the asphalt.”
“Why would these people give him money? What’s the payback?”
Porthip puts the glass on the desk, hard enough to crack it, and glares at Rafferty. “You know the answer to that, and if you don’t, get out of here. You’re not worth talking to.”
“Power,” Rafferty says. “Money.”
A wide expanse of yellow teeth, either a smile or a grimace. “Of course. Pan’s aiming high. These guys, the ones who are backing him, want to be in the middle of everything. They want access to the well. Because, of course, it’s not just money. It’s a torrent of money, a tsunami of money. They’re rich now, but nothing compared to how rich they could be if Pan makes it.”
“Makes it to what?”
“Some high national office,” Porthip says. “I’m not saying prime minister, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t the ultimate target. Cabinet level anyway.”
“He hasn’t said anything about that. Not to me, and not publicly.”
“He will,” Porthip says. “He’ll lie about it first, but he will.” Porthip dips his index finger into the glass of water and touches it to his tongue, as though to cool it. “Look at the political landscape. Look at what that idiot Thaksin did, paying all those farmers for their votes. The people who raise pigs want to rule the country.”
Rafferty says, “Maybe they should have a say in things.”
The lower lid of Porthip’s left eye begins to twitch rhythmically. “Maybe they should,” he says, “but if they ever get it, they’d probably deserve a chance to vote for someone who’s really what Pan claims to be.”
“Which is?”
“Someone who gives a shit.”
“So,” Rafferty says, “at one point he’s a pimp with some massage parlors, and now he owns the rights to trademarks, he’s got factories, he’s a possible political force. He’s somebody that people like you have to put up with. How did he make the jump? What’s missing?”
Porthip passes a hand over his brow and closes his eyes. He keeps them closed so long that Rafferty is on the verge of asking whether the man is all right. When the eyes open, they are pointed at the ceiling and the muscles surrounding them are tightly bunched, the left eye still twitching. The man breathes raggedly, catches the breath in his throat, and then lets it out in a rush. He breathes deeply two or three times, and only then does he look back down at Rafferty.
“He owned…somebody’s soul,” Porthip says. The four words require two breaths. He blots perspiration from his upper lip. “He knew something about somebody big. Maybe he did something to put that person hopelessly in debt. Whoever it was, he paid it back by putting up millions and millions. He opened doors. And he kept quiet about it. Makes you think there were only two possible options: give Pan everything he wanted or kill him, and for some reason Pan couldn’t be killed. So the little whorehouse owner disappears, and six months later we’ve got the tycoon on our hands.”
“And even someone like you doesn’t know who it is.”
Porthip swivels his chair ninety degrees so he is looking out the window at the brightness of the new day, and at the sight the muscles of his face soften. Something about the reaction strikes Rafferty as almost infinitely sad. For a moment he thinks Porthip will drop the shield that’s been in place throughout the conversation, but what Porthip says is, “Nobody knows. Nobody’s talked.” He turns back to face Rafferty, the mask of pain tightly in place. “And don’t forget, we’re talking about years ago. Whoever it was, he could be dead by now.”
RAFFERTY DOESN’T EVEN have to look at the yellow sheet to punch in the number. It rings once, and then it is picked up, but the person at the other end doesn’t say anything.
“This is stupid,” Rafferty says. “If you don’t talk, how am I supposed to know I’ve got the right number? You want me to blab about all this when I don’t even know who’s on the line?”
“Jutht a minute,” says the man on the other end, a voice Rafferty recognizes from the car that sped him away from Miaow’s school. But the man sounds like he has a mouthful of potatoes.
A moment later a new voice says, “What is it?”
“What’s wrong with the other guy?”
“He ate something hot. Why are you bothering us?”
“I want to tell you that I just wasted an hour talking to Porthip. I’m supposed to be filing some sort of report in a couple of days, and if they’re all as uninformative as he is, it’s going to be pretty thin.”
“That’s not our problem.”
Rafferty is almost certain the voice belongs to Captain Teeth, Ton’s enforcer, next to him in the photo from the Garden of Eden. “I’m supposed to be writing a book here. These are my sources, remember? The ones you gave me. The information value of the conversation I just had was zero. Porthip doesn’t like Pan. That sound like a chapter to you?”
“Like I said, not our problem. Make something out of it.”
“I’m beginning to wonder about your competence.”
“You’re beginning-” The other man starts to laugh. “Our competence. I’ll tell you what. We’re competent to make a hole where you and your family used to be. Just do your fucking job. Himself doesn’t like excuses.” The man hangs up.
Rafferty stands there, weak with anger. What he wants to do is phone Arthit and ask his friend to find out whatever he can about Porthip and Ton, but he knows that’s not possible. For the first time since he met Arthit, they might as well be strangers.
Noi, he thinks, with a jolt of despair. He can’t even ask about Noi without feeling like he’s imposing. And he still hasn’t told Rose that Arthit’s afraid Noi is planning to kill herself. It’s almost enough to make Rafferty’s own troubles seem trivial.
Except for Rose and Miaow.
He considers calling Kosit, but the people Arthit fears could obviously erase Kosit from the equation even more easily than they could Arthit, since Kosit is a much more obscure cop than Arthit. The second obvious source of information, newspapers, is also closed to him. He figures it’s not just the Sun where the computers are programmed to let out a squawk every time someone enters Pan’s name. It’s easy to see himself sitting in the empty morgue of some paper, suddenly being joined by Captain Teeth and a couple of lifters who specialize in joint dislocation and eardrum ruptures.
He could say it’s research, of course. He resolves to hold that option for later.
So.
So, he guesses, that makes it time to eat.
He turns idly in the direction that most of the foot traffic is moving in, looking for someplace where he can get a salad or something light. In this heat he’d rather eat a bowling ball than a chunk of meat. He figures he’ll grab a table big enough to write on, clear a space, and go back to work on his list. Maybe start playing with scenarios. He’s long known that he thinks more clearly when he writes, that the act of waiting for his hand to finish forming the words slows his thought processes in a way that opens them up, allows him to see three or four possible alternative paths rather than just the most obvious one.
One problem is that there’s been no time to reflect. This is Thursday, just minutes into P.M. The card game had been Tuesday night, the phone calls and the abduction in front of Miaow’s school had happened on Wednesday morning. Looking back, Wednesday seems a week long: the threats, the abduction, the office suite, leveling with Pan-which he still thinks might have been a mistake, especially in light of what Porthip had to say about him-the meeting with Weecherat and then with Arthit, the encounter at the party with Captain Teeth, the event in Pan’s sparkling garden.
Ton. The snake in the cabinet. Miaow’s terror. The microphones in the apartment.
And today: Learning about Weecherat’s murder. Arthit’s remoteness. The fourth-floor apartment, and then Porthip, the dying man, smelling of mold and bitterness behind his desk.
And almost willfully uncommunicative. Why had he been on the list?
The thought stops Rafferty midstep, and someone passes him, brushing him lightly, as though he or she had sidestepped at the last moment in order to avoid bumping into his back. Rafferty glances up as the person passes, but the question about Porthip claims his attention and leads to another question: What if they’re all like that? And then to a third: Does anyone actually want this book written?
And, if not, what the hell is going on?
But before he can begin to consider that, his consciousness is flooded by a detailed, high-definition visual memory of the person who had brushed past him. The shape of the shoulders, the way he carried himself, the color of his clothes.
The hair.
Rafferty breaks into a run, dodging between people, pushing his way through the crowd and the heat, not seeing anything ahead of him, no one that could be who he thinks it was. An alleyway opens to his right, and he stops.
Alleyways.
If it’s who he thinks it was, if he went into an alley, if he doesn’t want to be found, well…
He won’t be found.
Still, it could have been someone else. It probably was. In Bangkok there must be a thousand people who look like that.
And it doesn’t do Rafferty any good to wonder about it. He needs to get to a table, he needs to start writing. He needs to stop reacting and begin to plan. He needs to solve the problem of Rose and Miaow.
TODAY IT’S FLIES.
They land on Da’s wrists and hands and ears. They swarm Peep’s face and crawl toward the moisture in the corners of his eyes. He swings his fat little fists back and forth, but seconds after the flies take off, they land again. She hears their buzz even over the noise of the crowd, and that thought straightens her spine.
She’s grown accustomed to the sound of the crowd.
Was it yesterday that it was so deafening?
Was it yesterday that she met that woman across the street, with her skeletal, shining-eyed child? Remembering that the woman and the boy hadn’t been in the van that morning, Da scans the sidewalk across the street and sees her. But the boy’s not with her.
There’s no question that it’s the same woman who’s sitting there: same color blanket, same long, loose hair, same faded denim blouse. But she’s not upright, not up on her knees with her bowl out. She sits hunched over, like someone who’s been kicked in the stomach. And in place of the skeletal child, she holds a bundle, tightly wrapped in a blanket.
A passing schoolchild tosses a sidelong glance at Peep. Da has almost stopped noticing how people avoid her eyes; they look at the baby, they look at the bowl, but they don’t look at her. She is becoming used to this.
Da shakes her head, and Peep stares up at her. She will not become used to this.
A schoolchild, she thinks. Kep may be eating. This is the time he disappears to eat; the woman said so.
After three or four minutes of searching the sidewalk for the awful blue shirt, she gets up. The traffic hurtles by, all gleam and glass and chrome and steel. She has not actually crossed a Bangkok street yet, except when many others were crossing, too, but now she is alone. A big something goes by, and there is enough open air behind it that she grasps Peep so hard he squeals, and then she steps out onto the pavement. Two motorcycles beep at her and split up, one going behind her and the other in front of her, and when the one that went in front of her is gone, there is room enough between cars for her to run into the second lane. She stops as a truck barrels past and a boy sitting on top of it shouts something down, and then she’s in the middle of the street, dripping sweat, watching the traffic come from the other direction. But this time she gets a break, because a bus makes a turn at the corner, stopping all the cars, and she has enough time to crawl across on her hands and knees if she wanted to.
The woman does not look up, not even when Da says, “Hello.”
This close, she can see that the bundle in the woman’s lap is a baby, not much older than Peep. The woman holds it carelessly, as though it were a newspaper or something else that can’t be damaged by letting it roll onto the pavement. The child’s eyes are wide and startled, like the eyes of someone who has just learned that people sometimes hurt each other on purpose.
“Are you all right?” Da asks. She sits back on her heels, village style.
The woman says, “Go away.”
“Kep’s probably eating.”
“Who cares? Go away.” She has not turned her head, not given Da so much as a glance.
“Where’s…um, where’s…” She doesn’t know the name of the missing child.
“Gone. I don’t want to talk about it.” She reaches up and scrubs the palm of her hand fiercely across her cheeks. “Little idiot. He never even learned to button his shirt right.”
“Gone where?” People are pushing past them now as the afternoon rush intensifies, but neither of them pays any attention. Their bowls are on the pavement, forgotten.
“I had to button it every morning. Can you believe that? Seven years old and he couldn’t-” She stops talking abruptly.
“He’s seven? He looks so much younger.”
“They let him starve,” the woman says. “When he was three, his mother knew he was wrong. He didn’t look at things. He didn’t learn. So she fed her other kids, and after a while she pushed him out of the house. He didn’t get enough to eat, so he stayed small.”
“But then how…why did you have him?”
“I took him. Nobody wanted him. He just sat and cried because he was hungry. His mother had three healthy kids and no money; she couldn’t take care of an idiot. I didn’t…I didn’t have any. Children, I mean. When I ran to Bangkok, I brought him with me.”
“I thought they gave him to you.”
“No. I was different.” She passes her sleeve over her face and sniffles. “I told them that people would give more because he was an idiot. I mean, he wasn’t really an idiot, he was…he was just a little…a little, aaahhh, slow. And he was-” She loses her voice for a second and clears her throat. “He was sweet.”
“I don’t understand,” Da says. “He was yours. You mothered him, so he was yours. Where is he? And why do you have this baby?”
“I told you,” the woman says in a tone of pure rage. “I told you not to name yours. They’ll take him. They take all of them. I thought I was safe, because nobody would want him, but I was wrong. I wasn’t making enough money. They said he was too stupid, he was a freak, people didn’t want to see him on the sidewalk. So they took him away from me.”
“Where is he? Why do they take the babies? Where do the babies come from? Can’t you get him back?” The questions are tumbling out, and Da has to pause, get a breath. “Where have they taken him?”
The other woman says, “I don’t know. I’ll never know. Because he’s not…not normal. When they take yours, and they will, they’ll sell him.”
Da feels like she has been punched. “Sell him.”
“Of course, you idiot. What do you think they do with them? Send them to school? Buy them toys on their birthdays? They sell them. They sell them to anyone who wants them, anyone who can afford them. But Tatti-I mean…I mean, the boy-I don’t know what they’ll do with him. No one will see how sweet he is. No one will see that he needs to be loved. They’ll just see an idiot who can’t button his shirt. He’s not worth anything.” She bends forward and begins to weep in earnest, the child on her lap wide-eyed and frightened.
“What can I do to help you?” Da asks, and a heavy hand lands on her shoulder. She looks up to see Kep glowering down at her. His red face proclaims several beers, or possibly whiskey, with his lunch.
“What are you doing here?”
“I…ah, she seemed upset, so-”
“It’s none of your fucking business. You get your ass across that street before I count to ten, or I’ll kick you all the way across it.” He reaches down and grabs Peep, snatching him from her lap and hauling him up by one arm, and Peep starts to scream. Da is up immediately, reaching for Peep, and when Kep is slow to release the boy’s arm, she sinks her nails into the man’s wrist.
He yanks his hand back as she struggles against Peep’s sudden weight. Kep looks in disbelief at the red welts on his skin. “That’s it, you bitch,” he says. “You have no idea what you’re in for. Now get over there.”
With Peep in her arms, she negotiates the traffic, her heart pounding in her throat. She is so shaken she can’t follow what’s happening around her: It’s a series of quick, still, semitransparent pictures as though the world were reflected in a bubble that pops after a moment, and then there’s another bubble inside that, and then that pops, and inside that one…
Then, somehow, she is on the other side of the road. She spreads her blanket and sinks trembling onto it, absently bouncing Peep against her breast to quiet him. To quiet herself. Across the way, the woman holds her bowl up, her arm raised at the awkward angle of someone imploring mercy, her head sharply down. Kep is nowhere in sight.
When she can keep her hands steady, Da takes her bowl and puts it in front of her on the pavement. Upside down.
First, get Rose and Miaow out of the line of fire. Somehow. Second, separate Ton temporarily from his muscle, even if it’s only for personal satisfaction. The muscle is vulnerable, even if Ton isn’t. The muscle can be made to bleed. Third, disappear.
Fourth, work out what they really want.
It can’t actually be a book. The timing doesn’t make sense. If they’re worried about Pan suddenly announcing that he’s running for office, what good is a book going to do? It’ll take months to print and distribute, assuming that Rafferty lives long enough to write it.
Whatever it is, they’ll need it faster than that.
He studies the list of names on the yellow sheets, looking for what they have in common beyond their animus toward Pan. All but two, one of whom was Weecherat, are male. All but three are in business, according to the addresses, which are either in care of a company or are suite numbers in business buildings. He tries to pair the names with the faces he saw at Pan’s party and realizes they are all approximately the same age, in their late fifties or early sixties. Once again Weecherat was an exception. They probably chose her because she’d written unflatteringly about Pan, and, of course, when they’d put her name on the list, Rafferty hadn’t yet heard the number of the floor Ton’s office was on. They had no way of knowing he’d try to use that information for insurance.
The yellow scarf comes into his mind’s eye, her preoccupation with the drape of the scarf. The way her face had softened when she mentioned her daughter.
He fights down the anger and the guilt and makes notes, just to process the information with both his mind and his hand, to see what links might open up. Doesn’t see a meaning behind the patterns, although there’s an elusive little flicker there somewhere.
His mind keeps wandering into scenarios, based on assumptions about what it is that Ton and his accomplices might really want. He follows one line of plausibility to its end-a bad end-and backs up and starts over. This time, with slightly different variables, the process takes him to a different end, different but still bad. Start again, factor in a new initiative on his part, and this time the ending is, to view it charitably, ambiguous. Maybe ambiguous is the best he can hope for. Maybe ambiguous should sound good to him.
The tuna salad in front of him has warmed to room temperature as the restaurant has filled and then emptied around him. Now the waitresses straighten the room, squaring the chairs and dusting the seats, laying down new linen, folding napkins and wiping their fingerprints off clean glasses, joking and talking quietly, and glancing over at him from time to time. They notice that he seems to be completely unaware of them, just staring through the window and sometimes making a note in the little notebook in front of him.
And he’s cute, one of them says. Is he part Thai? Hasip-hasip, fifty-fifty? After a whispered conversation at the far end of the room, the boldest of them takes the matter in hand.
“Have problem?” she says.
Rafferty almost jumps out of his seat. He had no idea anyone was near, much less standing at his elbow. He looks up to see a girl of seventeen or eighteen, cute in a baby-puffy way, wearing the kind of accessories that girls her age in the United States would either scorn as cluelessly uncool or embrace as post-retro irony: Hello Kitty earrings, little butterfly hair clips, a long curved comb at the back of her head, decorated with a row of hearts, to pull the long black hair out of the way.
“Just thinking,” Rafferty says, ripping himself, with a certain amount of relief, out of the latest lethal scenario. “Sometimes thinking is the only thing I know how to do.”
“Food not okay?”
He’s forgotten about the food. He has to look down at it. “It’s fine.”
“How you know?”
“Excuse me?”
“You no eat.” Just a ghost of a smile to acknowledge that she won the exchange, and then it evaporates.
“I thought I was hungry, but I wasn’t.”
She opens a graceful hand, palm up, slightly curled fingertips a few inches from the plate. “You want I take?”
“Sure. Thanks. Sorry to waste it.”
“Not waste,” she says. “Can give to kid. You know? Some kid not have eat.” She raises the fingertips to her mouth, looking uncertain. “Boss not know.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell him.” This girl, and others like her, had helped Miaow survive, sometimes with their boss’s knowledge and sometimes without, when she was on the street.
When she was being protected by-
The vision of the boy who pushed past him on the sidewalk is suddenly in his mind again. And it brings with it a jumbled confusion of impressions and emotions: kindness and violence, hope and disappointment, failure. Mostly, and most deeply, failure. A failure he has hoped a thousand times to be able to rectify. He has prayed for a chance to rectify it.
But he looks at everything he’s facing at the moment, at the danger and the isolation, and his only thought is, Please, not now.
THE BOY DOESN’T come.
Da sits there, the inverted red bowl as conspicuous to her as a fire on the sidewalk, terrified that Kep will suddenly materialize, swearing at her, threatening her. Maybe snatching Peep away from her.
She constantly scans the crowd for the blue shirt. Twice she glimpses blue and grabs the bowl and holds it upright, but it’s someone else both times. Someone who doesn’t look anything like Kep.
She thinks, I could get up and walk away myself.
And go where? says a voice in her head. And do what? You couldn’t take care of yourself before, when you were alone. And now look at you, you’re stuck with a baby. And you’re waiting for this boy? You don’t even know anything about him.
“I do too,” Da says aloud, without realizing it. “I saw him disappear.” One minute he had been there, and an instant later he wasn’t. She had recognized it then. This place was his forest, just as the land around her village had been her forest. She’d grown up there, gotten into danger there, escaped it there. She’d known where to go, how to live there, what was safe and what wasn’t. If someone had been lost there, Da would have been the person to trust.
Trust, the voice says. Why do you think you can trust him?
Da thinks, Because his face was clean. Because his clothes were dirty but his face was scrubbed. There was something about him that said he was more than he seemed to be. And because she believes that she can sometimes see things in people that are invisible to others.
Blue down the sidewalk. She grabs her bowl and turns it upright. As she watches Kep stride down the sidewalk, she pulls the coins from her pocket and drops them inside. Looking away, as though she doesn’t know he’s coming to get her, she raises the bowl.
RAFFERTY CLAPS HIS hands twice. With the floor covered by the cheap, worn rug, taken from a dusty room full of stuff that tenants have abandoned over the years, and with blankets tacked to two walls to create a soft corner, the sound of the clap dies immediately. The sheets hung over the windows soak up the echoes, too. When he’d started putting the pieces together, two hours ago, the sound had reverberated with a spang like a gunshot in a tunnel. The acoustic revisions were made between trips to the eighth floor every seven or eight minutes to make some noise for the microphones until Rose and Miaow came home, but for the past ninety minutes he’s been able to stay on the fourth floor. He’s finished making the place functional with a chipped and splintered coffee table flanked by two rattan chairs adopted from the leave-behind room, one of which sags drunkenly to the right, and a wooden stool, painted apple green, with a crack running down the center of the seat that widens when it’s sat on and snaps back closed again quickly enough to pinch the sitter’s bottom.
Pinch or not, this is better. This will work.
His watch says 4:50. Miaow had been sulky when she peeked into the fourth-floor apartment on her way up, practically rolling her eyes at Rafferty’s efforts. For all Rafferty knows, she and Rose are planning her new life, her life as Mia, right now. Father of the year, he thinks, not even realizing that his newly introverted daughter is going through a crisis. When he finds his way out of this mess, he’s going to rethink this whole fatherhood thing. He’s obviously not doing it right. He knows nothing about little girls. And his own father, who abandoned the family when Rafferty was seventeen, didn’t provide much in the way of a paternal role model. But he’ll do better.
It’s comforting to look forward to a time when he can focus on being a better father. When Miaow’s problems will be as important to him as they are to her.
“Looks great,” someone says. “You’ve got a real eye for decoration.”
Rafferty turns to see Lieutenant Kosit leaning against the edge of the doorway. He is in street clothes, and looped over his thick fingers is the handle of a fancy plastic shopping bag from an electronics shop on Silom.
“I think the blankets provide a kind of unexpected élan,” Rafferty says. “Who would ever have believed those colors would go together?”
Kosit says, “No one.” He holds out the bag. “You owe me seven thousand baht.”
“Jesus. I’m not using it for opera.”
“You needed some way to jack it into your speakers, right? Well, that’s where they get you. Connectors. That’s where they got you, anyway.” He fishes out a receipt and flaps it in Rafferty’s direction. “See? Connectors, twenty-three hundred baht.”
“How about we forget the money and I come over and redecorate your apartment?”
Kosit looks around the room with great interest. “Sure. I have a cute little French maid’s outfit, all black and white with ruffles. I haven’t been able to talk anyone into wearing it.”
Rafferty says, “Will you take a check?”
IN THE ELEVATOR Rafferty says, “Seen much of Arthit?”
“Nobody has. He’s like the Ghost of the Station. You see him around corners once in a while, but by the time you get there, he’s disappeared.”
Rafferty sags against the wall. “Hell.”
“What’s wrong?” Kosit asks. “You two are close. I tried to ask him what was going on, and he practically bit my nose off.”
“Problems of some kind. He won’t talk to me either.”
“Must be bad, then. You guys are like a pair of gloves.”
“It’s bad. Listen, do whatever you can, okay? Even if he acts like you’re imposing and he’d be happy if you fell off the edge of the earth, just sort of take his temperature every so often. He may need help any time, and you know him. He’d rather die than ask for it.”
“I know. I mean, I’m a guy, but he takes it to ridiculous lengths.”
The elevator stops. Before the doors open, Rafferty says, “Remember, don’t say anything inside.”
Kosit nods and claps a hand to his mouth, and Rafferty crosses the hall and opens the door.
Rose and Miaow are in the living room. A heavy, unmistakably toxic chemical odor punches him in the nose. Miaow is sitting on the hassock with a towel over her shoulders and something slick and gleaming-vegetable oil or petroleum jelly, maybe-spread over her forehead and cheeks. She’s as shiny as a potato bug. Rose, who has a mouth full of Q-tips, is wearing rubber gloves and combing something viscous through Miaow’s thick hair, which has been parted even more ruler-straight than usual. His daughter doesn’t meet his eyes, but she registers Kosit behind him and slams her lids shut as though that could make both men disappear.
Rose says around the Q-tips, “Don’t distract me. Whatever you want in the kitchen, you know how to find it.”
“Yes, I love you, too. I think it’s time for a beer.” He gives Kosit raised eyebrows and gets a nod, so Rafferty goes into the kitchen, the bullet holes in the linoleum and the cabinet looking as big as lunar craters, and pops the refrigerator door. “Which do I want?” he asks aloud. “Singha,” he says, holding up one finger, “or Tiger?” He holds up another.
Kosit gives him two fingers back, so Rafferty pulls a Singha for himself and a Tiger for Kosit. “And does my brusque little honey want anything?”
“Half an hour without being asked what I want.”
“This is wonderful,” Rafferty says, uncapping the beers. “We’ve reached the point in our relationship where we no longer have to be careful of each other’s feelings. We’re finally finished with all that tiptoeing around the real issues, all those secret resentments.” He hands Kosit his bottle and takes a haul off his own. “Our long national nightmare is over at last.”
Rose pulls a couple of Q-tips from her mouth and uses them to wipe carefully at Miaow’s hairline and then, with the other end, the curl of her ear. “Go away. Go in the other room. This is girl business.”
“If you want me-”
“I won’t,” Rose says.
“-you know where to find me. Just hovering aimlessly at the end of an invisible thread, putting my entire life on hold while I wait to see how I can be of service.”
Miaow says, “Poke,” in a tone that practically takes the paint off the walls.
“I guess it’s unanimous. Okay,” he says to Kosit, “the bedroom it is.”
The two of them sit on the bed and drink. Rafferty slides open the headboard and grabs a wad of baht. He counts out seven one-thousand-baht notes and hands them to Kosit. Kosit pulls out the receipt again and puts it on the bed, smoothing it with the side of his hand, to show that it’s actually for sixty-eight hundred. Then he fishes around in his pockets until he comes out with a sweat-damp clump of smaller bills, which he pries apart with blunt, tobacco-yellow fingers. He hands Rafferty a salad of twenties and fifties and a couple of coins. While Rafferty drops the money uncounted into the compartment in the headboard, Kosit probes his shirt pocket and pulls out a crumpled pack of Marlboros, undoubtedly Korean street fakes, and wiggles his eyebrows in interrogative mode. Rafferty reaches down to the floor on Rose’s side of the bed and comes up with the swimming-pool-size ashtray she uses at night. Kosit looks at it so gratefully that Rafferty thinks he might take a bite out of it, but instead he shakes a bent cigarette free and lights up. His face assumes an expression of such relief that Rafferty toys with the idea of lighting one himself, but he muscles it aside. The two men sit in companionable silence in the middle of a miasma of smoke, sipping their beers, while feminine mysteries unfold unwitnessed in the living room.
Finally Kosit stubs out the filter and puts the ashtray back on the floor. He dips a hand into the bag and begins to pull out the items he has bought: two four-packs of long-life AA batteries, a handful of microcassettes, the overpriced connectors, and a glossy box decorated with a photo of a small recorder that Rafferty recognizes, with a pang, as identical to the one Elora Weecherat had used. He takes the box from Kosit, opens it, and shakes the contents free onto the bed. Yes, it’s exactly the same. He picks it up, expecting it somehow to be much heavier than it is, and slides open the compartment at the back, where the batteries go. Kosit picks up a thin black cord with a little square power brick at the outlet end and shows Rafferty where the male end of the jack slips into the recorder. He uses his index finger to flick a package of batteries and leans to whisper in Rafferty’s ear. “Insurance,” he says. It’s not much louder than a breath. “In case there’s a power outage.”
Rafferty nods, but he can’t take his eyes off the tape recorder. Weecherat’s daughter was seven, she had said. It’s a magical age.
Whatever it takes, whatever he has to do, he’s going to make Captain Teeth pay.
ON THE TRIP to the abandoned apartment house, Da and Peep share the van with the woman and baby they had ridden with in the morning. There is no sign of the third woman. Before Kep gets into the front seat, the woman with the dark baby says, “They’re taking her somewhere else. They always move a woman when they change her baby.”
“Why?”
“They don’t want people talking too much.”
Kep climbs in, slams the door, and starts the van without so much as a glance at Da. But three or four times during the long ride, she feels his eyes on her in the rearview mirror. When she looks up to meet his gaze, he holds hers until it becomes necessary for him to pay attention to some kind of static on the road. And then, a few minutes later, his eyes are on her again, weighing her, appraising her. He has never looked at her like this before, and it brings a warm, faintly dirty-feeling prickle to her neck and cheeks, as though she has not washed in several days.
She stops checking the mirror.
When he pulls to a stop in the dirt yard, the first day’s routine is repeated. As the women get out of the van, Kep holds out a heavy envelope to each of them. Each of the women empties into the envelope with her name on it all the money she has taken in, and Kep adds the bills he has seized during the day.
He adds no bills to Da’s envelope.
“Wait,” she says as he licks the flap.
Kep says, “Shut up.”
“You took eighteen hundred-”
Kep gives her a flat gaze. He looks sleepy. “I don’t remember that. Anybody see you give it to me?” He runs his thumbs over the moistened flap, sealing the envelope. Then he pulls the envelope back and brings his hand around, slapping her across the face with it.
It’s not a particularly forceful slap, but all the coins in the envelope have slid to the end that is moving fastest, and the hard weight of the jumble of coins strikes her cheekbone with enough force to jar her and bring tears to her eyes. Blinking to clear her vision, she takes an inadvertent step back, almost a stumble, and comes up against the hot, unyielding surface of the van. Kep follows her, his nose practically pressed to hers, and the sleepy look has been replaced by something dark and tightly focused, and Da recognizes it, with a sharp, sinking feeling, as joy.
“I told you,” he says. “You make as much as I say you make.” She can smell the alcohol on his breath, and out of the corner of her eye she sees the other woman backing away with a hand placed protectively over the eyes of the child at her chest. Da curves her spine, pulling her waist and pelvis away from him as far as she can, not because she fears him sexually but to make space for Peep, who is beginning to squall in alarm. “You’ve made almost nothing in your first two days,” Kep says. “Barely enough to feed yourself. And you haven’t been nice to me.”
“I don’t-” Da begins.
“We could get along much better,” Kep says, and he brings up a hand and brushes the backs of his fingers over her cheek. “Up to you. You can be nice to me, or maybe we should take the kid and give him to somebody else.”
She knows he sees her eyes widen in alarm, but she tries immediately to wipe it out. The only way to handle a bully, she has learned, is with a quick kick. She spits into her free hand and scrubs the cheek where he touched her. Then she snaps, “Fine,” and holds the baby up. “Take him now. He’s wet and he stinks, and I’m sick of him. Here.”
Kep has backed up as she thrusts Peep at him, and he takes another step back with her pursuing him, holding Peep at about the level of his face. “Take him,” she says. “Do me a favor and take him. I’m sick of him, I’m sick of the whole thing. Take him. You can eat him for all I care.” She keeps pushing Peep at him, hearing the child squeal and seeing the spark of panic in Kep’s blunt, dark face, and she knows that he’s frightened. He can get into trouble over this, she realizes, losing a new beggar, having to take back the child. It’s a problem, and the man in the office won’t appreciate a problem. Kep has put two feet between them now, and she uses it. “Here,” she says, holding Peep out and turning halfway away, as though to walk to the road. “I’m leaving. Is that what you want? You want me to leave?”
There is no response, and she turns to Kep and sees him looking not at her but up at the windows on the second story of the building. There are faces there, looking down, watching everything that’s happened. Some are laughing. Others stare openmouthed, waiting for the resolution.
And Da knows, sure as a fist in the stomach, that she has failed.
Kep can’t lose this kind of face in front of the others. She no sooner realizes this than she feels his fingers dig into the muscles at the sides of her neck. “Don’t be in such a hurry,” he says. He squeezes hard enough for her knees to go weak. “We’ve just begun our talk. And you’re not going anywhere, you little bitch. I’ve got someplace special for you tonight.”
He knots her blouse in his hand and half drags her around the van and toward the front door. Da struggles, but she can only do so much without dropping Peep. Finally she grasps the child with one arm and reaches out and twists her fingers through Kep’s thick hair. She yanks hard enough to pull some of it out.
And he rounds on her, his face flaming, and hits her in the face with his closed fist. The blow snaps her head to the left, and her ankles tangle as she tries to step back to keep her balance, and she goes down, falling sideways to the left. It takes everything she has to land on her back, with Peep on top of her. The child is screaming. There is blood in Da’s mouth, salty and warm.
“You like to pull hair, huh?” Kep says. He is so furious that his eyes have practically disappeared. He knots his fingers into Da’s hair and hauls her to her feet. Then he drags her through the door and into the corridor and pushes her up against the wall on the left while he fishes in his pants pocket for something. When his hand comes out, it holds a jingling ring of keys. He chooses one and slips it into the lock on one of the doors that were closed the night Da first came into the building. He pulls the door wide, puts a hard, heavy hand on the back of Da’s neck, and shoves her through the door into the dim room. Then the door slams closed, and she stands there, swallowing blood and aching, the baby crying with all its being, in total darkness.
She hears the click of the lock.
This is silly,” Miaow says. She has been even crankier since Kosit saw her getting her hair dyed. The newly reddish hair, still slightly damp from the post-coloring shampoo, looks to Rafferty like a wig. He has to make a continuous effort not to stare at it.
He fights a surge of irritation. “I don’t care. Just do it. And don’t try to win an Oscar, okay? All you’re doing is talking to your mother.”
Miaow says what she’s supposed to say: “I’ve got a lot of homework.” Her tone is so flat she sounds like she’s reading.
Rafferty gets up from the green stool, which pinches him good-bye. He has to move around for a second or he’ll explode. When he has his breathing under control and all the little black spots have stopped swarming in front of his eyes, he says, “But not winning an Oscar doesn’t mean we’re going to act like we’re dead either. It just means we sound normal. We’re going to do this until I’m happy with it, if it takes until the sun comes up.” He looks at his watch. “It’s twenty past eleven, and even if we get all of it right the first time, it’s going to take us until one or two. It’s up to you, Miaow. Either you can help with this and get it over with, or you can sit here all night long.”
“Poke,” Rose says.
Rafferty holds up both hands. “We’re doing it, Rose. And that means Miaow’s doing it. As far as I’m concerned, we can all sleep on the floor down here, but we’re getting this done.”
“You don’t have to be a jerk about it,” Miaow says.
Miaow is on the wobbly chair in front of the pink blanket, and Rose is on the solid one. The tape recorder is on the battered coffee table. More than an hour ago, they all said good night to one another upstairs, and then Rafferty led them to the elevator and down to the fourth floor. Until the anger picked him up and towed him around the room, Rafferty was balanced on the stool. Now he goes to the table and sits on the threadbare carpet, in the least confrontational stance he can adopt.
“We’re in some trouble,” he says to her. “I don’t want to go into detail, but it’s about that book, okay? Just take my word that what we’re doing is important, that I wouldn’t be asking you to do it unless it was important. Do I often ask you to do things that aren’t important?”
“All the time,” Miaow says. “And I do them.”
“Then put yourself out there one more time and do this one for me, too. And then, someday, you can ask me to do something stupid, and when I don’t want to do it, you can remind me that I owe you one.”
Miaow says, “Promise?” This is her kind of currency.
“Absolutely. Here, in front of Rose and everything.” Without taking his eyes from hers, he pushes the “record” button, counts silently to three, and says, “I like the hair.”
“Really?” She puts both hands against it, palms down, and smooths it. “You’re not just trying to make me feel better? You don’t think it looks dumb? And fake?”
Rose says in Thai, “It’s not supposed to look real, Miaow, not any more than lipstick is. It’s stylish. And it catches the light well. Lots of highlights.”
“Honest? I mean, you really think so? Do you think the kids at school will, um…?”
“If they don’t like it,” Rafferty says, “it’ll just be because they’re envious.”
“Oh, come on,” Miaow says, but she looks happier than she has all night long.
Rose says, “It makes you look older.”
Miaow grabs the thought with both hands. “How much older?”
“Ten,” Rose says, and Miaow’s face falls. “Maybe eleven.”
“Eleven.” Miaow’s expression is deadly serious, and Rafferty suddenly realizes there are several conversations going on at the same time.
“Why is that important, Miaow?” he asks. “What’s so magical about eleven?”
“I, um…” She looks down at her lap. “I didn’t want to tell you this until I was pretty sure, you know? I didn’t want to be the kid who yelled…who yelled, uhhh…”
“Wolf?”
“Yeah. Wolf.” She still hasn’t looked up. “What’s a wolf?”
“It’s like a tiger, but not. Go ahead with the story.”
“Well, Mrs. Paris, that’s my teacher?” Her head comes up halfway, and her eyes go back and forth between Rafferty and Rose.
“We know Mrs. Paris,” Rose says.
Miaow finds a thread loose on the elastic waistband of her pajamas and picks at it, giving it all her attention. With her head down, she says, “Well, I’ve…um, I’ve been having some trouble in class.”
“Really.” Rose’s voice is cool. “What kind of trouble?”
“Just, you know.” Miaow wraps the thread around her index finger and tugs at it. “Uh, talking, writing notes to other kids, drawing a lot, making jokes when I shouldn’t. Going…um, going to sleep.”
Rafferty says, “Going to sleep?”
“Only twice.” Miaow lets go of the thread and holds up two fingers.
“But your grades,” Rose says. “Your grades are better than ever. They’re practically perfect.”
“That’s what Mrs. Paris says. She says-” Miaow grabs a breath. “She says I’m not paying attention in class because I’m ahead of the level. Because it’s too easy for me. Even though it’s fourth grade and I’ve only been in school three years.” She is wearing her bunny pajamas, looking all of five to Rafferty, although apparently this is not the time to point that out. “Anyway, about a week ago, she-Mrs. Paris-said she thought maybe I should skip up to fifth grade.”
Without thinking, Rafferty says, “You’re shitting me.” Rose’s glance hits the side of his face like a slap, and he amends it to, “I mean, that’s amazing.”
“But she wanted to talk about it first with the Dragon-sorry, Mrs. Satharap, the principal. And she did, and the Dragon said it was okay and that she was going to talk to you about it. That was yesterday? So she’ll probably call tomorrow. And, I mean, I’m really happy about it, but…but…”
“But what?” Rafferty says. “You should be happy about it. I never got asked to skip a grade.”
“But I’m so short,” Miaow says. “I’m a baby. And everybody’s practically eleven, and I barely look nine. I’m a pygmy. And I can’t get any taller, and I’m going to be in the class with all those really big kids. So I thought…”
“Oh, my gosh,” Rafferty says, having rejected half a dozen less acceptable expressions of delight. “I’m so proud of you. Fifth grade. My God, you’ll be in junior high before I have to shave again.”
Rose says, “Do the girls in fifth grade wear makeup?”
“Rose,” Rafferty says.
Miaow looks at Rose as though she’s just turned into a Christmas tree. Her eyes are shining. “A little.”
Rafferty says, “How little?”
“Like, you know”-Miaow passes the tip of her index finger over her upper lips-“a little lipstick, kind of pale, and maybe some-what do you call it?-some stuff on their eyelashes.”
“It better be very pale,” Rafferty says.
“Poke,” Rose says, “it’s not going to surprise anybody that Miaow has lips.”
“That’s not the point.”
Rose says, “What is the point?”
“The point,” Rafferty says, knowing he has no chance whatsoever of prevailing in this discussion, “is that I’m proud of Miaow, but I’m not having her going to school looking like the Queen of Patpong.”
Rose bursts out laughing. “The Queen of-” And she’s laughing again, and then Miaow starts to laugh.
“Okay, okay,” Rafferty says. “Not the Queen of Patpong. But, you know, too much makeup on a young girl looks…um, tarty.” And at the word “tarty,” Miaow laughs even harder, her arms crossed low over her stomach.
“Trust me, Poke,” Rose says. “Mia will be beautiful.” The name “Mia” ends Miaow’s laughter as though a door has been shut on it. “Your own mother would like the way she’s going to look.”
“That’s not actually much of a recommendation,” Rafferty says. Then he says, “Mia?”
“You mean,” Miaow says to Rose, with a quick detour glance at Rafferty, “you mean I can buy some makeup?”
“Tomorrow,” Rose says. “I’ll go with you tomorrow.” She slides her eyes to Rafferty, daring him to say anything. “Does that sound okay, Mia?”
An hour and a half later, Rafferty turns off the tape recorder, and they take the elevator upstairs and go to bed for the second time, more happily than they had the first time.
“SOMEONE’S UP,” CAPTAIN Teeth-Kai-says. He’s had the phones on so long that he’s stopped feeling them against his ears. “I hear moving around.”
“So someone’s going to the bathroom.” Ren is stretched out on the couch, facing the cushions on the back, with a throw blanket over him. The air-conditioning in the big house is more than he can take. “Give up for the night. You trying to earn points or what?”
“Fuck you,” Kai says, without much heat behind it.
“Anybody flushed yet?” Ren speaks carefully, but his tongue feels as if a nail’s been driven through it, and to Kai it sounds like he’s got rocks in his mouth.
“No mikes in the bathroom, remember?” Kai says. “She can be a little bitchy, huh?”
“Who? What do you mean?”
“This afternoon. When she told him to go in the other room and leave her alone. Kind of bitchy.”
“It’ll add spice.” Ren plumps up the throw pillow beneath his head. “When she’s tied to the bed. Beauty’s fine, but spice is better. You want it a little hot.”
Kai shakes his head. “Never happen.”
“Stop listening to that crap. Nothing’s going on. Just let it record. I’ll fast-forward through it tomorrow. Get some sleep.”
Kai takes off the phones. “You going to stay here?”
“I think so. They get up early. The little girl’s up before seven. And that way, when Four-Step comes down from upstairs, he sees me sitting here being vigilant.”
“Up to you,” Kai says, rising. He stretches.
Ren pulls the blanket higher so it covers his shoulders. Unfortunately, that exposes his feet. He says, “Do you really think we’re going to have to kill them?”
“After what happened to the reporter?” Kai says. “Sure.”
She has no idea what time it is when Kep comes for her. The room has no windows, and she has nothing to help her gauge the passage of time. It could be midnight, it could be three in the morning when she hears the singing.
The first sound to get her attention is an engine. It can’t be the van; it’s too loud. Probably a motorbike. She hears it approaching, out on the street, and she thinks of the moto driver who brought her here, only two nights ago, kindly waiting to make sure she was in the right place. But the bike doesn’t go past and fade in the distance. It gets louder, and then it drops to an idle, and over it she can hear him singing. He is obviously drunk.
An Isaan song. It surprises her. She would have figured him for Bangkok pop, some stupid jangly song about love and pretty girls. Instead it’s an Isaan song about losing a child to the city, a daughter who has gone away.
So he likes sad music. So…tough.
She’s spent her time in the room getting to know it by touch, and she is familiar with every square inch of it. It had been used for storage by the builders. Probably all three downstairs rooms were; probably that’s why they have doors with locks on them.
What was stored in this room was lumber, mostly scraps. Her heart had leapt when she found the wood, and she had passed her fingers over every surface in the room, hoping for a hammer, a screwdriver. A knife. But there was only wood. Not even any with nails in it.
The first thing she has to do when she hears the singing is to get Peep out of the way. He had fallen asleep in her lap, so she gets up slowly and edges four or five steps to the right, where there is a large wooden box, which she turned upside down to create a flat, raised surface. After turning it over, she had pushed it against the wall to make it more secure. She has already folded her blanket and put it there, and now she lays Peep in the center of the blanket and feels for the big pieces of wood.
Outside, Kep cuts the engine and sings louder. His voice is true, the notes solid. The child who went to the city does not send letters. Da’s mother sang this song sometimes.
The wood is right where she put it, leaning against one end of the box. Each piece is about a meter long and as thick as a man’s arm. She takes the four pieces she already selected and builds a square perimeter of wood around Peep. There’s no way to anchor them to the top of the box, but she thinks the wood will at least prevent him from rolling over the edge.
She hears boots on the steps that lead up to the building’s door.
The hinges of the door to the room are on her right and the door opens in, so it will swing to the right. There is no light in the hall, and the moon, as far as Da can remember, is just a sliver. It will be dark, unless he has brought a light with him.
No way to know about that. No advantage to worrying about it.
The piece of two-by-four, about a meter long, is propped against the wall to the left of the door. It’s heavier and rougher than she remembers, and her fingers are too short to wrap around it securely, but she’s invented a grip that works by interlocking her little fingers.
Scuffing in the hallway, like sand between teeth. In the last line of the song, the child comes home so changed that her own mother doesn’t recognize her. Kep slows it down and packs it with heartache. He sings very well.
Da steps to the left, stopping near the wall, her eyes on the bottom of the door, looking for a spill of light, anything to tell her whether he’s carrying a flashlight. If he is, he’ll see her. But he’ll also have only one hand free. She brings the two-by-four up over her right shoulder and waits.
Key in the lock.
Nothing.
Then the door opens fast, banging against the wall, and Da swings the piece of wood with an effort that begins at her ankles. But it sails through space, hitting nothing, until it cracks against the frame of the door, having passed straight through the place where Kep’s head should have been, and the force of the impact flips the piece of wood out of her hands, and then the flashlight comes on and blinds her.
“Awwwww,” Kep says. “You waited up for me.” He kicks the piece of wood aside. “Don’t pick it up,” he says, “or I’ll take it away and beat your teeth in with it.” He pans the room with the light, fast sweeps to right and left, and then brings it back to her face. “Where’s the little monster?” He leans to his right until his shoulder hits the doorframe, almost missing it. He’s drunker, Da thinks, than he knows.
“Asleep,” she says, backing away. There is a pile of wood behind her.
“Good. No interruptions.” He points the light at the concrete floor for a moment. “Not too comfy, huh? Where’s your blanket?”
“Under Peep.” The heel of her shoe has touched the edge of the woodpile.
“Well, up to you. He can have it or you can. You’re going to be on the bottom. You want to get your back dirty?”
“I’m not getting my back dirty.”
“Yeah? You wash the floor or something?”
“If you touch me,” she says, “I’ll mark you for life.”
“I don’t think so. Look here.” He shines the light down at himself. His left hand flashes silver, and the flash turns into a long, curved knife.
Da reaches behind her, her fingertips brushing pieces of wood, just odd pieces, nothing with any weight to it. She says, “Are you ready to kill me?”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I won’t have to kill you.” He brings the knife up and wiggles it from side to side. “You know that web between your thumb and your first finger? You got any idea how much it hurts when that gets cut? I mean cut deep? You’re going to be very surprised. And then you’ll do anything I say not to get the other one cut.”
There’s nothing behind her that she can use. She brings both hands forward, arched into claws. Then she registers surprise, looks past him, over his shoulder.
Kep laughs. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Right. And I turn around and look behind me, like I haven’t seen ten million stupid movies. Like I haven’t-”
Da sees a blur of dark motion and hears something that sounds like a coconut hitting the ground from a high tree, and Kep’s knees turn to water and he pitches forward flat on his face, the flashlight spinning on the floor, lighting the room, the boy from the street, the room, the boy from the street.
I have a stomachache,” Miaow says.
It is 6:45 A.M., and she is fully dressed: jeans with an acute crease, which she irons in herself because she’s never satisfied with the way the laundry does it, and a bright red T-shirt featuring the Japanese teenage girl samurai Azumi. Her bunny slippers are on her feet, but her shoes are lined up beside the front door like well-trained pets. Rafferty sits at the kitchen counter, grimly waiting for the coffee to drip, and if someone challenged him to describe his own clothes without looking down, he’d fail completely.
“Sorry to hear it.” His pre-coffee voice is, as always, a croak. “Do you feel well enough to go to school?”
“I don’t think so. I really hurt.” She goes to the counter and takes the can of Coke he’s pulled out for her and pops the tab.
Rafferty says, “Alka-Seltzer? Good idea,” and watches her down about half of it and then lower the can. She burps discreetly. Breakfast.
The door to the bedroom opens, and Rose, who is rarely at her best before noon, feels her way into the living room. She regards the two of them without conspicuous goodwill and squints defensively at the red of Miaow’s T-shirt. She is leaning against the wall, so loose-limbed she looks as though she plans to go back to sleep standing there, but she is dressed to leave the apartment, in a pair of white shorts and one of Rafferty’s freshly laundered shirts. Her hair has been slicked back with damp hands, but it’s still a gloriously anarchic tangle.
“Miaow’s not feeling good,” Rafferty says, getting up. At the sink he runs hot water into a cup that already holds two heaping tablespoons of Nescafé and stirs it quietly, trying not to make a clinking noise with the spoon.
“Me neither,” Rose says furrily. “My stomach hurts.” She watches Rafferty cross the living room with the cup in his hand. When he gives it to her, she does something with the corners of her mouth that she probably thinks is a smile.
“I’m feeling okay,” Rafferty says on his way back to the kitchen. He pours just-dripped coffee into his cup. “Did you two eat anything last night that I didn’t?”
“The spring rolls,” Miaow says.
The bottom half of Rose’s face is hidden by her cup, but she lowers it long enough to say, “Right.”
Rafferty swallows the day’s first coffee. An invisible film between him and the rest of the world begins to dissolve. “That’s probably it. You both look a little punk.” He knocks back half of the cup and picks up the pot with his other hand. Miaow goes to the door, kicking off the bunny slippers, drops to her knees, and pulls on her sneakers. Rafferty continues, “They probably sat too long, maybe under heat lamps. Maybe you guys should both go to bed for a while, see how you feel in a few hours.”
“All right,” Miaow says, opening the front door.
“Don’t make a lot of noise, okay?” Rose says. She sounds sleepy and irritable, and it’s not an act. “I want to sleep.”
“I’ll work on my notes for the book. That’ll be quiet.” He drinks again and heads for the front door, which Miaow is holding wide. “You two go to bed. Get some rest. You won’t even know I’m here. I promise.”
Rose precedes him through the door, cup in hand, and Miaow closes it quietly behind him as he punches the button for the elevator. Two minutes later, down on the fourth floor, Rafferty inserts a new cassette and pushes “record” again.
DA WAKES ON a village farmer’s schedule, maybe six in the morning, and finds herself on her back, looking up at a rough wooden ceiling. After a moment shaped like a vague question, she rolls over to see where she is.
The room is dim, with interruptions of brilliance. Sunlight shoulders its way through the cracks between the planks that make up the walls. When she withdraws her focus from the vertical strips of glare, the gloom resolves itself into backs, seven or eight of them, between her and the nearest wall. Peep is asleep beside her, nestled up against a child Da has never seen before.
She smells children, none too clean, but not filthy either. Just the slightly salty pungency of child’s sweat. She could be back in the village.
Suppressing a grunt of effort, she sits up and looks around. The room is full of sleeping children, literally wall to wall. The floor beneath Da’s hand is packed earth. It takes her a few seconds to assemble the pieces in her memory. The sad song, the light in Kep’s hand, the silvery fire of the knife, the blur of motion behind him, the sound of the stone hitting his head. The stone that turned out to be in the toe of a sock. And the boy standing in the doorway when Kep went down.
She had quickly picked up the flashlight and snapped it off. She was certain that the sound of the motorcycle and Kep’s singing had awakened the others in the building, and the light seemed dangerous. The boy had nodded acknowledgment and then made a cradling motion with his arms: the baby. By the time Da had Peep hugged to her chest and the blanket folded over one shoulder, the boy had pulled the ring of keys from Kep’s pocket. He rolled the man farther into the room so the door could swing shut without hitting him. Then he motioned Da into the hallway, closed the door, and locked it. She had followed him outside into the night. Without even looking back at her, he climbed onto a motorcycle that had to be Kep’s and started it with one of the keys on the ring. He waited until she climbed on. As he pulled the bike away from the building with her hanging on behind, she looked back to see the pale shapes of faces at the windows.
Then there had been miles of Bangkok unrolling on either side of her and sliding by, bright lights and tall buildings, all of it looking alike to Da. The noise of the bike, the wind filling her eyes with tears. The boy, whiplash-lean in front of her, Peep cradled to her chest. Now and then a last-minute zigzag between cars, making her gasp as the boy laughed. Then the streets had gotten narrower and darker, and they began to slope slightly downhill, and soon there was the river, broad and black and spangled with reflected light.
He had parked the bike and climbed off, then brought his arm way, way back to sling the keys in a long, high arc that ended with a splash in the water twenty or thirty yards distant. The two of them had walked from there, a kilometer or more, along the edge of a road that paralleled the river, both of them looking down the mud-slick bank, seeing the occasional rough wooden structure in the spaces between the buildings that are increasingly fencing in the River of Kings. Above one of the shacks, the boy had turned to her and taken Peep from her arms and tucked him into one elbow with a practiced gesture, then grabbed her hand with his own and led her down the path. A rusted latch, the creak of a wooden door, and then twenty, maybe twenty-five sleeping children. Here and there, half-open eyes shone at them, and she heard the soft sound of breathing.
He had not spoken a word to her the entire time. He led her, stepping over the sleeping forms, to a corner far from the door. He indicated the open space and whispered, “Sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
She had whispered, “They can’t find-”
“No,” he had said. “Nobody knows we’re here.”
She had dropped off almost before she was finished making certain that Peep was comfortable.
THE DOOR TO the shed opens, just a few inches, and the room brightens. He looks in, his eyes going straight to her. When he sees her sitting up, he puts a silencing finger to his lips and motions her to come out. Being careful not to jostle the children on either side of her and Peep, she gathers the baby to her and stands, stiff from a night on the ground, and threads her way between the sprawled children to the door. Here and there, kids roll over and mutter, but they quickly lapse back into sleep. Peep throws out an arm but doesn’t open his eyes.
“They stay up late,” the boy says after he closes the door. “They need to sleep when they can. If you have to go to the bathroom, there’s a hut around the side. I’ll wait for you.”
“Thank you,” she says. She has taken eight or nine steps when she turns back to him. “My name is Da,” she says. “What’s yours?”
The boy says, “I’m Boo.” He looks even slighter in the bright morning light. He can’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and once again she is struck by the concentration of life in the tight-cornered eyes. “When you come back, we’ll get something to eat.”
The hut is the most primitive kind of toilet, just a hole in the earth with four walls built around it and a length of cloth hanging in the open doorframe. There is no roof, but even without one the reek is overwhelming. Da looks down in the hole, as village children learn to do, not eager to squat over a snake or a poisonous spider, and is surprised to see water only a foot or so beneath the edge of the hole. Then she thinks, The river, and takes care of her needs. She unwraps Peep and takes off his soiled diaper, suddenly realizing that she’d left the shopping bag with the clean diapers, with the towel, with the milk and whiskey, at the beggars’ apartment house.
Well, there’s no way she can put the old one back on him. She folds it and drops it into the hole, then cleans him up with paper from the roll beside the hole and totes him back outside with his bottom bare to the breeze. When she comes around the corner, Boo sees Peep and grins. It is the first time she has seen him smile. She feels herself smile back at him, and her heart lifts. Just for a moment, she isn’t worried about anything.
“Cute butt,” Boo says.
“It works, too. I have to get some diapers and a couple of towels and some of those little packets of wet tissues, and-”
“Relax,” he says. “There’s a Foodland a few blocks that way.”
“Open this early?”
“Foodland is like Bangkok,” Boo says. “It never closes.” They are climbing the path, Boo first and Da following. The day opens around them as they get higher, the river flowing below and buildings rising ahead. The mud has a fetid smell, but as they approach the top of the bank, it gives way to the stench of exhaust. Da prefers the smell of the mud. Boo looks back over his shoulder at her. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen. What about you?”
“Fourteen. Or maybe fifteen. There was kind of a disagreement about when I was born.”
“Who disagreed?”
He glances across the road and raises his eyebrows to indicate a lane that runs off it, away from the river. “My sister and my brother.”
They cross the road and enter the lane, lined on both sides with old-style Bangkok buildings, shopfronts at street level with one or two stories rising above them. “Where are they now? Where are your parents?”
Boo says, “Gone,” in a tone that does not encourage further discussion. “Up here about half a block,” he says. “The woman makes good noodles.”
“How do the kids eat?”
He stops and waits until she is beside him, and the two walk on together. “We work with some cops,” he says. “I go to the places where the guys go who are looking for children, and I talk to them, I tell them I have what they want. Then I take them to look at the kids-the ones you saw asleep in there-and they pick out the ones they want. We get a room at a sex hotel and deliver the kids. Two minutes later the cops bang on the door.”
Da can hardly believe it. “And the men go to jail?”
“No. The cops are crooked. They take all the guy’s money and drag him to an ATM to get more, and then they tell him if he doesn’t leave Thailand the next day, they’ll lock him up forever. They pay me, maybe thirty, forty dollars, depending on how much the man had. Sometimes more. They keep most of it.”
“The man doesn’t get arrested?”
“No, but he’s out of Thailand. And the kids can eat.”
They walk as Da considers it. There’s not much traffic yet, and the lane is almost peaceful. “Who thought of it?”
“I did.”
“How did you find the cops?”
He gives her a quick glance. “You mean crooked ones?”
“Yes.”
He laughs. “What’s hard is to find straight ones.”
Small bright plastic chairs, red and blue, are drawn up on the sidewalk, flanking a sloping table covered in a burnt-orange oilcloth. A frilly, smooth-trunked tree provides shade. Over a charcoal fire burning in a black metal drum at the curb, a wok smokes and sputters, and four people are already slurping out of faded plastic bowls. The smell of the food makes Da realize she’s starving, and that Peep must be, too. “I’ve got to get something for Peep,” she says.
“After you eat. One thing you learn on the street is to take care of yourself first. You’re no good to anyone unless you’re strong.” He waves at the woman beside the fire, broad and brown and sturdy, who gives him a bright good-morning smile and starts throwing things into the wok without asking what he wants.
“Your girlfriend?” she shouts, stirring in some chopped garlic and a handful of cilantro.
Da is surprised to see Boo blush.
“Look how shy,” the woman says, laughing. She pours liquid down the sides of the wok, and fragrant steam billows up as the others at the table, three men and a woman, laugh, too. “Such a handsome boy, if he’d only get his hair cut. Honey,” she says to Da, “cut it while he’s asleep if you have to.”
“I just need to comb it,” Boo says. His face is scarlet.
“You couldn’t comb it with a tractor,” the woman says. This time Da laughs with everyone else, and after a moment Boo smiles, too.
“I have very fresh chicken this morning,” the woman says. “An hour ago it was a customer.”
“Two of everything,” Boo says. “Except jokes.”
“You should always start the day laughing.” The woman is throwing things into the wok with both hands. “If you don’t, you’ll end it crying, my mama used to say.” She looks at Da again and says, “Isn’t she pretty?”
There’s unanimous agreement among the customers, and it’s Da’s turn to blush.
Da sits there, in the shade, smelling the food, watching the woman’s sure, quick hands and listening to the flow of chatter and laughter, and suddenly the entire scene blurs and ripples, and she is surprised to realize that she has to wipe her eyes.
“Don’t cry, honey,” the woman calls out. “He’s not that ugly.”
“I’m sorry,” Da says, drying her cheeks on her T-shirt. “I just felt like I was back home.”
WITH ANOTHER NINETY minutes on tape in the apartment downstairs, and with Rose back in bed and Miaow reading in her room, Rafferty has time on his hands. When he came home the previous evening, he’d been able to spot two of the people watching the apartment. He’d guess that there’s one more, one assigned to each of them. The third one had undoubtedly been behind Rafferty, following him, and probably peeled off when he saw Rafferty was going home, probably called the others for confirmation that Rafferty had actually arrived and entered the building. There’s not that much traffic on Rafferty’s soi. No point in the follower drawing attention to himself.
Probably two shifts, possibly even three, since apparently money is no object. Not much use trying to memorize all the faces when they’ll change in a few hours. He figures that they’ve chosen their surveillance spots and that by and large they’ll stick to them, so he’ll keep an eye on those places. He needs to find spot number three.
And soon. His best guess is that he can continue for another day, two or three at most, to do a convincing imitation of someone who thinks he has a book to write. If they’re unconvinced, there’s nothing to say they won’t grab either Rose or Miaow as a way of holding his feet to the fire.
To get whatever it is they really want.
How would Ton be working the surveillance? The watchers are in the street. The microphones are in the ceiling. Presumably someone is listening in real time, and the two groups, the watchers and the listeners, are communicating. When the information from inside the apartment indicates that the family won’t be going anywhere, all but one of the watchers are probably encouraged to leave their positions. No sense drawing attention to themselves needlessly. They’d be somewhere nearby, most likely someplace crowded out on Silom, with cell phones. When the listeners hear that someone is going to leave the building, all of them would get a call and move into their spots.
Maybe the best thing to do is to separate them. The three of them go out and head in a different direction, put some distance between them, and then…
And then…what? If one member of the family disappears, Ton’s guys will probably kill the other two. Rafferty has to take Weecherat’s murder as a message. Rose and Miaow need to vanish at the same time, and then Rafferty needs to become invisible, too.
Information overload, he thinks. There’s a lot of information going to Ton’s men, between the sounds coming in over the microphones and what the watchers are seeing. They’ll be comfortable, maybe a little lax. All those eyes, all those ears. He needs to exploit that. Create a disconnect of some kind, a contradiction between what they hear and what they see, and use the confusion to make two people vanish in plain sight. Up until now he’s been focused on figuring out how to make them think that Rose and Miaow are still in the apartment for a day or so after they’ve left it. He’s been trusting himself to come up with the way to get them out, postponing dealing with the big illusion while he putters around preparing this beginner’s parlor trick, which will be useless until they’ve gone.
Putting second things first.
He looks at his watch: 9:25. Time to imitate a writer. He puts the yellow list on the table and starts to dial numbers. He starts with the cop and then moves to the gangster.
THEIR BELLIES ARE full. Peep is clean and freshly diapered, engrossed in a bottle of formula from Foodland. Da and Boo sit on the riverbank in the shade, watching the river slide by.
“I don’t know what I can do for you,” Da says. “I’m probably too old to help you with those cops. Peep’s too young. We’re just two more mouths for you to feed. And you did all that-I mean, Kep and all of it-for me.”
Boo watches a gleaming white cruiser speed upstream. The reddish brown water parts before it, sluicing up over the sides, all the way up to the big red letters that say RIVER QUEEN.
“Rich people,” he says. “That’s from the Queen Hotel. Rich farang being taken up to look at the ruins at Ayutthaya. Do you know how much it costs to sleep there for one night?”
Da says, “In Ayutthaya?”
“No, Da,” Boo says with exaggerated patience, “not in Ayutthaya. At the Queen Hotel.”
“How would I know? I’ve never even been in a hotel.”
“Three hundred, four hundred dollars,” he says. “Some of the rooms cost more than a thousand dollars.”
Da looks over at him. It sounds like a lot of money. “How many baht?”
“More than thirty thousand.”
“Thirty thousand? My whole village didn’t have thirty thousand baht.”
“The people on that boat could buy your village with what’s in their pockets. They wouldn’t even have to go to an ATM. But they wouldn’t want your village.” The boat is well upstream by now, and Da can make out some of the men and women gathered at the back of it. Most of them wear white clothes, and many of them look fat. “But you know what some of them would want?”
“What?”
“Peep.”
Da says, “Oh,” and she sees it all. Poor mothers, rich people, and the currency a baby. She holds Peep a little more snugly.
“I didn’t get you away from them because I need your help,” Boo says. “What I want you to do is talk to somebody. About you and Peep.”
“Who? Who would want to know about us?”
Boo shakes his head. “I have no idea whether he’ll want to know. I don’t even know if he’ll let me in. But if he’ll talk to us, he can do something about it.”
“What? What can he do?”
Boo takes her hand in his. Hers is cold, but his is warm and dry. It feels natural to her. He says, “If he wants to, he can tell the world.”