“Aspirin’s bad for you.” She gives him the almost-smile he had seen in the street.

“Aspirin is an anti-inflammatory,” Rafferty says. “Getting hit on the head is bad for you.”

“I’m no nurse. My job was to see whether you were still being followed and then to get you here. I’m essentially finished.”

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“Not me,” she says. “He wants to talk.”

“He.”

“Him.” She steps aside, and Poke sees an old man shuffle around the end of the van, his feet in cheap carpet slippers. The edge of the light hits his knees, and then, as he moves forward, his waist, and then his shoulders, and then his face, and Poke looks at the face twice before he launches himself from the chair, shaking off Leung’s hand, and does his level best to break his father’s nose.

PART II

!

FOLDING MONEY

_!15

The End of the World

iaow’s ice cream is melting. For the past minute or two, she’s been remorselessly stirring it into a soup, following the movement of the spoon with her eyes as though she

expects some spectacular chemical reaction. The silence between her and Rose stretches uncomfortably, measured by the circular movement of the spoon.

The brown of the chocolate and the chemical pink of the strawberry make a particularly unpleasant-looking swirl. Rose raises her eyes from the bowl, telling herself she’s not really rolling them, and waits.

“Why him not talk me?” Miaow says at last, in the defensive pidgin she has been using since the conversation began.

Privately Rose thinks this is an excellent question. As happy as she has been with Rafferty since his proposal the previous evening, if he were here right now, she’d haul off and kick him in the shins. “He should have talked to you,” she says in Thai. “He made a mistake. Maybe he was nervous or something.”

Tired of making circles, Miaow scrabbles the spoon back and forth through the thinning slop in a hard, straight zigzag. Rose finds herself counting silently to ten.

The Häagen-Dazs on Silom, where they went to dodge the rain, is empty. The downpour had stopped practically the moment the door closed behind them, but Rose knew there was no escape, so she bought both of them a post-happybirthday ice cream. They had settled at a table, and the moment Rose picked up her spoon, Miaow had seen the ring.

For the past twenty minutes, Rose has been trying to explain to a girl of eight—no, make that nine—that the upcoming marriage is nothing for her to worry about.

“Everything will be the same, but better,” she says for the third time.

Miaow continues to slash through the spirals, giving Rose a first-class view of the knife-straight part she imposes on her hair.

Rose fights an impulse to grab the spoon. “It’s like when Poke told you he wanted to adopt you. You didn’t want that at first either.”

“Did too,” Miaow says in English.

Rose briefly toys with saying, Did not, but rejects it. There are conversations Miaow literally cannot lose, and that’s the opening gambit to one of them. “Miaow,” she says. “Poke and I love each other. We’re grown-ups. We should be married.”

“Not married before,” Miaow says. She is sticking with English because she knows it gives her an edge.

Rose sticks with Thai for the same reason. “Poke adopted you because he wanted you to really be his daughter. He’s marrying me so I can really be your mama.”

Miaow’s spoon stops. She regards the mess in her bowl as though she hopes an answer will float to the top. When she speaks, directly to her ice cream, Rose has to lean forward to hear her. What she says is, “You already my mama.”

In the eighteen months Rose has known her, Miaow has never said this before. Even as a mist springs directly from Rose’s heart to her eyes, her mind recognizes a master manipulator at work. Rose honed serious manipulative skills working in the bar, and she automatically awards Miaow a B-plus, even as she blinks away a tear. “But not really,” she says. “Not one hundred percent.”

The words fail to make a dent. Rose reaches over and takes the spoon from Miaow’s hand. The child’s eyes follow the spoon, and Rose realizes she might just have committed a tactical error, so she licks the spoon and hands it back, trying not to make a face at the mixture of flavors. She dips her own spoon into her scoop of coconut sherbet and holds it out. Miaow examines it as though it might contain tiny frogs, then opens her mouth. Rose feeds her, and as she tilts the spoon up, the thought breaks over her: My baby. “Miaow,” she says without thinking. “Do you know how much I love you?”

Miaow looks up at her, her mouth a perfect O. She has chocolate on her upper lip. “You . . .” she says. Then she looks away, staring at the Silom sidewalk through the window. A very fat woman, weighed down further with half a dozen plastic shopping bags, hauls herself past the window, and Miaow’s eyes follow her as though someone has told her she is seeing her own future. Then, without turning back to Rose, she says, “I know.”

Having finally managed to insert the thin edge of the wedge, Rose leans down on it. “And Poke. You know that Poke loves you more than anyone in the world.”

“Love you number one,” Miaow says, still in English. “But that’s okay.”

“Look at this,” Rose says, holding up the hand with the ring on it. “This is Poke,” she says, touching the ruby. Her fingernail moves to the tiny sapphire. “This is me.” She taps the surface of the topaz. “This one, in the middle. Who do you think this is? Who do you think this is, right next to Poke?”

Miaow says, “Oh.” Her chin develops a sudden pattern of tiny dimples, but she masters it. She puts down the spoon. When she looks from the ring to Rose again, she is back in control. “Why am I yellow?”

“Tomorrow you’ll be a sapphire, same as me, because we have the same happybirthday. But you’ll still be in the middle.”

Miaow processes this for a long moment. Then she asks, “Why?”

“Because you’re the center of our lives.” Rose passes her finger along the three stones. “This is us, Miaow. Do you know how old jewels are? Jewels last forever. This is Poke’s way of saying he wants us to be together forever.”

Miaow stares at the ring. Rose sees her mouth silently form the words: One, two, three. Then Miaow says, “Okay.” She picks up the bowl, lifts it to her lips, and drains it. The moment she puts the bowl down, she says, “Can I have a cell phone?”

NINETY MINUTES ANDthree cell-phone shops later, Rose has heard approximately ten thousand words from Miaow on cell phones in general, how they can play music, how great the games are, how much safer she’ll be with one, and—above all—an encyclopedic disquisition on text messages: They’re cool, they’re cheap, and all her friends send them all the time. Rose’s comment that she thought Miaow’s friends spent at least some of their time at school didn’t create a pause long enough to slip a comma into. Now, as Miaow works her thumbs on the touch pad of her new phone, so fast that Rose can’t see them move, Rose fishes through her bag and realizes she left her own phone at home. She borrows Miaow’s, after waiting until the child finishes keying in the third act of Macbeth or whatever it is, and dials Rafferty’s number. His phone, Rose learns, is not in service, which means he has turned it off. She hands the phone back to Miaow, who immediately polishes it on her T-shirt.

“I’ll send this one to you,” Miaow says, doing the thumbs thing again. “It’ll be on your phone when we get home.”

“Which is where we should go,” Rose says. “Poke will be there soon. When he’s all alone, he breaks things.”

Miaow finishes punching at the keys and then checks the shine on the phone. She uses the front of her T-shirt to rub at a stubborn spot. “Let’s go to Foodland,” she says. “Let’s buy him a steak.” She flips the phone open again. “I can call Foodland and see if they have steak.”

“They have steak,” Rose says. “I was going to make noodles with duck and green onions.”

“Poke’s American,” Miaow says. “He eats anything, but he always wants steak.”

“Poor baby. He tries so hard. Do you remember the night I gave him a thousand-year egg?” Thousand-year eggs, which found their way to Thailand via China, are not really a thousand years old, but they might as well be. They’re black, hard, and as sulfurous as a high-school chemistry experiment. Rose starts to laugh. “Did you see his face?”

Miaow is laughing, too. “And how many times he swallowed?” She mimes someone trying desperately to get something down.

“Like it was trying to climb back up again,” Rose says, and the two of them stand in the middle of the sidewalk laughing, with Miaow hanging on to Rose’s hand as though without it she’d dissolve into a pool on the sidewalk.

“You’re right,” Rose says, wiping her eyes. “If I’m going to be his wife, I should feed him a steak once in a while.”

“He wants to be Thai,” Miaow says, and Rose, startled, meets her eyes. Then the two of them start laughing again.

IT IS ALMOST SEVEN by the time they step off the elevator, dragging the bags that contain at least one of practically everything Foodland had on discount: shampoo, bleach, detergent, toothpaste, toilet paper, four place mats, two stuffed penguins, five pairs of underpants for Poke (who doesn’t wear underpants), a baby blanket because it was pink, a flower vase, some flowers to put in it, and five porterhouse steaks. As the elevator doors open, Rose says, “We saved a fortune,” and then the two of them stop dead at what looks at first like a pile of wrinkled clothes someone has thrown against the door to the apartment.

But then the pile of clothes stirs, and Peachy looks up at them.

This is a Peachy whom Rose has never seen before. Her lacquered hair is snarled and tangled, her face blotchy where the powder has been wiped away. Two long tracks of mascara trail down her cheeks.

“That man,” she begins, and then starts to sob. “That—that American—”

Rose drops the bags and hurries to her, takes both of her hands, and brings her to her feet. As Peachy straightens, a crinkled brown paper shopping bag, crimped closed at the top, tumbles from her lap to the floor, and Peachy jumps back from it as though it were a cobra.

“It’s okay,” Rose says. “Poke says it’ll be okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Peachy says. “It’s the end of the world.” She points a trembling finger at the paper bag, and Rose squats down and opens it.

And stares down into it, still as stone.

Then she says, in English, “Oh, my God.”

_!16

I Don’t Know What “Usual” Means to You

he’s your sister,” Frank says. “Say hello, Ming Li.” From beside Frank, Ming Li says, deadpan, “Hello,

Ming Li.” She sounds as if she finds nothing out of the ordinary, as if meeting her half brother for the first time in an abandoned garage, after she’s had someone cave his head in and he’s tried to assault their father, is nothing to get ruffled about.

Rafferty is pinned to the chair again, his hands cuffed behind him. His launch toward his father had been aborted by Leung’s hand grabbing his shirt. He’d belly flopped on the cement floor, gasping for breath with the chair flat on its back behind him, as the Chinese man snapped the cuffs back on, set the chair upright, and plopped Rafferty into it as though he were no heavier than a puppy. Leung is a lot faster than Rafferty.

“I should have known,” Rafferty says. He’s so angry at himself he feels like spitting in his own lap. “She looks as much like you as it’s possible for a beautiful Asian woman to look.”

“Looks like you, too,” Frank says. “It’s the bone structure.” He is sitting in a chair about a yard away from Rafferty, his face haloed by a fringe of white hair. Ming Li stands beside him, a pale hand resting on his shoulder.

Rafferty regards Ming Li, who gives him a cool downward gaze. “You and I don’t look alike,” he says to Frank.

Frank shrugs. “You may not want my bone structure,” he says, “but you’ve got it.”

“I hope that’s all we’ve got in common.”

Frank pushes his chair back a couple of inches. “Why don’t we postpone all that for now? Recriminations and hurt feelings and so forth. It’s not very appealing under the best of circumstances, and these aren’t them. I’ve kept up with you, Poke—from a distance, obviously. I’ve read your books, checked into what you’re up to here in Bangkok. You’re making a nice life for yourself, aren’t you?”

“Checked how?”

Frank shrugs again. “Usual channels.” Except for a slight stoop, a lot of missing hair, and that shuffling walk, he looks surprisingly like the man Rafferty remembers from all those years ago. He has to be in his seventies, but time has barely laid a glove on him. It strikes Rafferty for the hundredth time that serenity and selfishness aren’t that dissimilar. They both keep people young. His mother, even with her Filipina blood, has aged much more than his father has.

Rafferty says, “I don’t know what ‘usual’ means to you. I don’t know anything about you at all. And I didn’t get much help from that woman in Shanghai—”

“Ming Li’s mother,” Frank says evenly.

“—from Ming Li’s mother. And of course you couldn’t be bothered, could you? You were busy or something.”

“I was impressed you’d found us.”

“Well, that makes me feel warm all over. Imagine what a home run it would have been if you’d said it in person.” He shifts in the chair. “You can take the cuffs off.”

“You’re sure?” Frank seems amused, and Rafferty realizes he has seen precisely the same expression on Ming Li’s face.

“It was an impulse. It’s passed. I’d still like to bust you one, but you’re safe in front of your daughter.”

Ming Li laughs, and after a long moment Frank joins her. “Go ahead,” she says. “Hit him. Frank gets hit a lot.”

“I’d imagine.”

“Get the cuffs off, Leung. He’s going to be nice.” Frank watches as Leung emerges from the shadows to move behind Rafferty and free his wrists.

“Another of yours?” Poke rubs his hands together to restore circulation.

“No. He has the misfortune to be a friend.”

“No problem,” Leung says. He twirls the cuffs around his index finger. He has high Tibetan cheekbones, narrow eyes of a startlingly pale brown, and a wide mouth that smiles easily, although the smile does not make him look any more cheerful. For all the effect it has on his eyes, it might as well be on someone else’s face.

Rafferty looks at Leung’s smiling, cheerless expression and recognizes one of the people who don’t like other humans because they’ve seen too much of them. This is the group from which professional killers are recruited. “Aside from all the obvious reasons,” Rafferty asks, “why is it a misfortune to be your friend?”

“Well,” Frank says, shifting on his seat. It is a hedge, and for a moment Rafferty feels satisfaction at his father’s discomfort. “That’s what we have to talk about.”

“YOU LIVE RATHERpublicly,” Frank says. There is a damped disapproval in his tone.

Even at six-thirty on this Saturday evening, the restaurant is crowded with Thais in large groups, wet and noisily merry as though the warm rain, which has begun again, is a personal joke. When they entered, Frank had said something into the ear of the woman who greeted them, and she’d shown them to a small booth against the back wall, where they can see the entire room and hear each other without shouting. They had made the trip in two tuk-tuks—Frank, Ming Li, and Rafferty riding silently in the first and Leung solo in the second. Covering their backs, Rafferty figures.

“I’ve got no reason to sneak around,” Rafferty says.

Frank turns over a reasonable palm. “Just an observation, Poke. In Bangkok—hell, in Asia—information is money. No need to make it so accessible.”

“For me, money is money. Information is just information.” The booth is a tight fit. Rafferty is jammed next to Leung, who had come in a few minutes after them and then scanned the room, as objective as a metal detector, before joining them. Rafferty can smell Leung’s wet clothes, cigarettes, and a hair oil that owes a distant debt to bay rum. Pressing up against Rafferty’s hip is a hard object in Leung’s pocket that Rafferty assumes is a gun, which means that at least two of the three in Frank’s party are packing. Ming Li sits beside Frank, surveying Poke with a curiosity she had not displayed in the garage. Even dripping water she is beautiful.

“You never know what the local currency is,” Frank is saying. “The first time I saw the little girl I thought, whoops, the boy’s a twist, where did I go wrong? But you were so public with her. The real twists don’t like daylight. And then, of course, I saw the woman. What’s her name again?”

Rafferty does not reply.

“Rose, right? Amazingly beautiful, isn’t she? Very reassuring, knowing you’ve got taste like that.”

“I assume there’s more to this miraculous reappearance than a sudden need to express approval of my life.”

Frank lifts a cup of coffee and puts it down untouched. Poke is startled to see the age spots on the back of his hand. “At your age, Poke, you shouldn’t still be harping on all that. I know it’s fashionable in America for adults to blame their parents for everything they did or didn’t do, but the general feeling here is, get over it. One more example of the wisdom of the East.”

“Gee, I don’t know.” Rafferty turns his eyes to Ming Li. “Give me some of the wisdom of the East. You’re half qualified. Let’s suppose one day—two days after Christmas, as it turns out—old Frank here just took a walk. Went out to buy a pound of rice and some dried shrimp and never came back. Left you and your mother flat, hopped a plane across the Pacific. Didn’t even bother to say, ‘Hey, good-bye, see you later, take care of your mom, kid.’ ”

“My mother can take care of herself,” Ming Li says. “If she couldn’t, she’d be dead.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot. He left her, too, didn’t he? Sort of a leitmotif, isn’t it? Like background music. ‘Frank’s Theme.’”

Something flickers in Ming Li’s eyes. “He came back.”

“And you’re . . . what? Nineteen, twenty?”

“Twenty-two,” she says. “Frank looks young for his age, and so do I. You, too, actually.” Her long fingers are curled around a cup of tea.

“You work fast,” Rafferty says to Frank.

“It would have been faster, but China’s a big place,” Frank says. “I had to find my wife first.”

The babble of conversation in the restaurant stumbles up against one of those mysterious group pauses, and Poke says, into the silence, “Your wife was in fucking Lancaster, California.”

“My first wife,” Frank says placidly.

The words seem to shrink the booth and squeeze them all closer to one another, and Rafferty pushes himself back against the padding to find some distance, keeping his face empty. “Ah. Gosh, I guess we’re finally having that father-son chat.”

“I met her when she was twelve years old.” Frank ignores Poke’s tone. “She was washing sheets in a brothel in Shanghai.”

“I don’t really want to know,” Rafferty says, thinking, Twelve?

“And I don’t really give a good goddamn whether you want to know. I’m telling you because I have to.” He has leaned forward sharply, his hands curved stiffly around the perimeter of his saucer, and the coffee slops onto his left hand as the cup slides forward. If it burns, he ignores it. “You need to understand what’s going on, because it involves you now.”

“And you need to understand something, too. If you’ve done anything that’s going to fuck with my life here, especially at this point, I’m going to grind you to paste.” He wills his spine to relax and adds, “Dad.”

Frank wipes the liquid from the back of his hand and lifts the coffee to sip at it, raising one finger—wait—as though Rafferty has politely expressed interest. “She’d been there—in the brothel, I mean—since she was ten. Just tidying up and stuff, not working yet. Sold by her family, of course, but I suppose you know all about that, considering what you write about. I had business with the guys who ran the place—I had given myself a crash course in accounting, and I did their books—and she took care of me when I was there, brought me tea. A couple of times, she massaged my feet. A really sweet, exquisitely beautiful kid.”

Rafferty tries, and fails, to match this description to the woman he had met in Shanghai.

“She learned my name,” Frank says, “although she couldn’t pronounce it for shit. But it meant something to me to hear her say it.” He catches his upper lip between his teeth and then blows out, so hard it ripples the surface of his coffee. “Anyway, the time came for her to make her debut. So to speak. At the age of twelve.” Leung is turned away from Rafferty, watching the room. Ming Li listens impassively, as though they are talking about someone she does not know. She runs the tip of her right index finger over the blunt-cut nails of her left hand as though thinking about pulling out an emery board.

“So I bought her,” Frank says. “I bought her for her first week, before some asshole could jerk off into her and then forget her. She’d never forget it, of course. It would have been the beginning of her life as a whore.” He dips his head as though in apology. “One of those moments when someone else’s life changes forever, and I was just standing there with my hands in my pockets. So I bought her for a week. I gave her a place to sleep. I fed her. I got her some nice clothes. I left her alone at night, obviously. She was a child. It was a typically stupid Westerner’s gesture, Don Quixote to the rescue, putting a Band-Aid on an amputation. Great, she had a week before the machine took its first bite out of her, and she’d be different forever.”

“It was a good thing to do,” Ming Li says.

He lifts a hand and rests it briefly on her shoulder. Ming Li leans against it and produces her fractional smile. “But it was pointless. I thought about it every night she was in my house. Kept me awake all night long. You know, I’d seen hundreds of whores in Asia—everybody from the top-level courtesans to the saltwater sisters who accommodated sailors against the walls of the alleys around the harbor. And of course lots of kids—twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. Shanghai was the commercial sex capital of the world then. I was surrounded by prostitutes, and not just in my professional capacity. But I hadn’t seen one at that moment, the moment when her real life ended, when she became something else. So I made a commitment. When it was time to take her back, I didn’t. I stole her.”

Rafferty has no idea what to say, so he doesn’t.

“Well, that created a fuss.” Frank is watching Leung watch the room. “As I said, I’d been doing the books for the brothel, one in a chain. All short-time stuff, just in and out, so to speak. Today they’d probably call it McSex. The firm I was working for, very proper and British in public, was really Chinese-owned, and it was on retainer for every triad in Shanghai. So I had some insight into how the system worked. I bought her for a second week, just to get a head start, and then we took off.”

“You should write a book,” Rafferty says, but he is interested in spite of himself.

“I’m in enough trouble already.” His eyes flick away. “Anything happening, Leung?”

“Only cops,” Leung says.

“Where?” Rafferty doesn’t see any uniforms.

“Table near the door. Three of them. Plainclothes. You can tell by the phones.”

Sure enough, black boxy things with short antennae. “I’m impressed.”

“Leung earns his keep,” Frank says.

“I work cheap,” Leung says, and laughs. Then he says to Frank, “Back door?”

“Through the kitchen,” Frank says, lifting his chin half an inch in the direction of a swinging door behind Leung. It is a very Chinese gesture.

Leung nods and lets his back touch the upholstery behind him. His version of relaxed.

“We got out of Shanghai and headed south, with Wang—that’s Ming Li’s mother’s name, by the way, Wang—dressed as a boy, a servant. Sorry not to be more original, but there you are. She was my valet.”

“She’s still your valet,” Ming Li says with a smile.

“I need a lot of looking after,” Frank says.

Poke is watching the way Ming Li looks at her father. “You didn’t used to.”

“Well, it wasn’t like your mother lived to take care of me.” He raises his hand before Poke can speak. “I’m not saying anything against her. Angela is a wonderful person.”

“She’d be thrilled to hear you say that.”

“Angela is well taken care of,” Frank says. “I left her a rich woman.”

“Yeah, but you left her.”

“For twenty years I was a good husband.” Frank finally allows his irritation to show, a sudden bunching of the muscles at the corners of his eyes. “I stayed home, I raised a family. I built a house for her.”

“She burned it down,” Poke says with some pleasure.

Frank’s cup stops halfway back to the saucer. “She what?”

“The day you left. She read the letter you wrote her—real personal, by the way, a bunch of bank-account numbers and some safe-deposit keys—and then she toted all the stuff she cared about outside and set fire to the Christmas tree. Oh, I forgot, she called a cab first. Then she sat there, and we watched it burn until the cab came.”

“That was a nice house,” Frank says. “I put a lot of work into that house.”

“It made a lovely light.” He leans forward, driven by an impulse to cause pain. “Oh, and you’ll like this. Seven years later she had you declared dead.”

“I’m dead?” Frank says. He seems more interested than surprised.

“She ran an obituary and everything.”

Frank and Leung exchange a glance Rafferty can’t read. Frank says, “That could be useful.” Leung raises his eyebrows and draws down the corners of his mouth.

Frank blinks and leaves his eyes closed a little too long. When he opens them, he is looking at a spot above Poke’s head. “I lived with Wang down south, out of sight in Yunnan, for a year, until I had to leave China. We lived like brother and sister. You have to remember, Poke, I was really only a kid myself then. We were happy. If things had gone on, eventually, we’d have found our way to bed. But come 1950 it was obvious that I was going to have to leave. I put it off for as long as I could—too long, actually. So we went out to a stone where we sat every day—have you ever been to Yunnan?”

“No.”

“It’s exquisite, at least where the rice is grown. Whole mountains carved into terraces that are flooded with water that reflects the sky. We sat each evening on a stone that looked down on a giant stairway of rice paddies, and waited for the stars to come out. The night before I had to leave, after I’d spent days packing and trying to prepare her, we went up to the stone and married each other. We took each other’s hands when the sun went down and waited until the stars appeared in the paddies below us, and then we said we were married. She needed that. She needed to know I was coming back.”

“Why didn’t she go with you?”

“She wouldn’t. She was afraid to leave China. And you forget, she was one of the oppressed masses. Remember them? She was one of the ones who were supposed to benefit. People’s paradise and all that shit. Who was more downtrodden than a peasant girl who’d been sold into prostitution? What she didn’t know was that Mao was a puritan. Officially, I mean. He had his fifteen-year-old Girl Guides—whole squadrons of them, if his doctor’s memoir is to be believed—but everybody else was supposed to sleep one to a bed. Prostitutes were contrary to the common good. It’s been said that the thing about Communists is that they have nothing and they want to share it with you. The problem with prostitutes was that they still had what they’d been sharing. So they were all shipped off to be ‘reeducated.’ They got Wang’s attention by breaking her arm.”

“You know,” Poke says, “it’s an interesting story, and it probably would have held my attention about twenty years ago, but now? It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Just shut up,” Ming Li says. “He’s obviously got a point.”

Rafferty continues over her. “I’ve got a family now—I won’t bother telling you who they are, since you’ve spent all that time paddling around in the usual channels—but they’re going to get worried if I don’t get back to them. So cut to it, okay? What’s happening that’s so important you had to kidnap me? You want to tell me about the past, write a letter.”

“We’re going to get to it,” Frank says. “In a second.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cell phone, then holds out his other hand to Leung, who reaches into his own pocket and brings out Rafferty’s. Frank turns on Rafferty’s phone, dials a number on his own, and waits until Rafferty’s rings. Then he turns off Rafferty’s phone again and hands it back to Leung. “In case you need my number,” he says.

Rafferty says, “I’ll give you a call on Father’s Day.”

“Fine. Until then Ming Li’s right. Shut up. There’s a point here. We grabbed you the way we grabbed you because you were being followed all the time, and we didn’t know by whom. Did you know you were

being followed?”

“Yes,” Poke says.

“Who is it?”

“Nothing to do with you.”

“I’d like to be the judge of that.”

“We’d all like something,” Rafferty says. “But what we get is each other.”

“Poke.” Frank leans back, and the light catches the puffiness beneath his eyes and a new heaviness under the chin. Suddenly, Rafferty sees that time and gravity have gotten to his father after all. “I can’t apologize to you. I can only explain. Okay, so I’m not Father of the Year. But I owed something to Wang. I made her a promise. You can’t just walk away from something like that. Still, I waited. I waited until you were almost grown and away from home, and I waited until there was enough money for Angela. Then I took what I needed, and no more than I needed, and I went back.”

“And when I came after you—”

Frank’s head is still resting against the wall behind him, his chin raised, but his eyes drop to Poke’s. “Did it ever occur to you,” he says, “that I was ashamed to face you? That I left it to Wang because I was a coward?” He reaches over and takes Ming Li’s hand, and she turns to face him. “Also, I have to tell you, I saw no reason to bring my families together.”

“Until now,” Rafferty says.

Frank rubs the top of his head as though it aches, and he closes his eyes. “Well, yes,” he says. “Until now.”

“But you forgot something, didn’t you?”

“What?” Frank asks, his eyes still closed.

“You forgot to ask us.” He pushes Leung aside and keeps pushing until the man is all the way out of the booth. Then he stands. “Go back,” he says. “Wherever you came from, go back.”

Frank’s eyes open. “They’re after me, Poke. The ones I stole Wang from. They’re after me.”

“All these years later? Boy, some people really hold a grudge.”

“It’s a triad. It’s not about Wang anymore. I have something they want.”

“Then you’d better give it to them, hadn’t you? Or keep running. I hear Malaysia’s nice.”

“This is why we needed to talk, why I had to tell you that story.” He puts both hands on the table, one on top of the other. Takes a deep breath. “Trying to find me,” Frank says, “they could come for you.”

Rafferty steps forward so fast he hits the edge of the table. Ming Li’s tea slops out of the cup. Leung steps toward him but stops at a glance from Frank.

“You listen to me, old man,” Rafferty says. “If anything happens to my family because of you, I will personally beat you to death.” He reaches down with both hands and lifts the edge of the table, sending Frank’s coffee cup into his lap. “Are we clear on that?”

Despite the coffee spreading across his lap, Frank does not take his eyes off Poke. Rafferty can feel them on him all the way out of the restaurant.

_!17

The Leading Sphincter on the Planet

afferty?” Prettyman says, knitting his brow in a way that would make most people look thoughtful. “The same last name as you?”

“He’s my father, Arnold,” Rafferty says, trying not to grind his teeth. “As I told you a minute ago. Maybe you should speak English more often.”

Prettyman tears his eyes away from the front door of the bar. He’s been watching it the same way Leung watched the door of the restaurant, and probably for the same reason. Eighteen years’ worth of CIA training dies hard.

Ignored by both of them, three lightly clad girls dance listlessly on the stage. Except for their shoes, which are high-heeled, calf-hugging boots, they are saving a fortune on clothes. They shuffle their feet and hang on to the vertical chrome poles as they endure “Walk of Life” for the three-thousandth time. Their exposed skin, and there is quite a lot of it, is goose-bumped; the bar is aggressively air-conditioned. Rose once told Rafferty the bar owners kept the places cold so the girls’ nipples would stand out.

One of the girls wears a large triangular plastic watch, and the others glance at it from time to time. Two of the bar’s other main attractions sit in the laps of overweight customers, and another has been sufficiently lucky, or unlucky, to be taken behind the curtain in one of the booths.

“So you’re asking me to check up on your father?” Prettyman asks, having apparently reviewed the conversation in his mind. His eyes flick to Rafferty’s for confirmation. “Not a very close family, is it?”

“I barely remember the man,” Rafferty says, wishing it were true. “He disappeared into China more than twenty years ago. Not a lot of cards and letters. But here’s the thing, Arnold. He’s got—how should I put this?—he’s got skills.”

“Living in China for those particular years would take some skills,” Prettyman says listlessly. A Steely Dan riff punches its way through the speakers, and he turns to eye the girls onstage as though he is wondering about their Blue Book value. “Where in China?”

“Shanghai and Shenzhen. Yunnan, Fujian. Also, apparently, a little time in Pailin. In Cambodia.” Frank had mentioned Pailin in the tuktuk on the way to the restaurant.

Prettyman looks remotely interested for the first time. “Pailin is old Khmer Rouge and rubies. Fujian is people smuggling. Shanghai and Shenzhen are everything we can both think of, and lots we can’t. You think it’s any of that?”

“For all I know he makes Garfield the Cat in a plush-toy factory. That’s what I’m asking you to find out, Arnold.” He decides, on the fly, that the word “triad” might dampen Prettyman’s enthusiasm. Such as it is.

Prettyman’s lifeless eyes go back to the door. Then he says, “Money, of course.”

“Of course. Twenty thousand now and twenty more when you come through.”

“Thirty. When I come through, thirty.”

“I’m a little squeezed at the moment, Arnold.” Nothing like understatement.

Prettyman nods. “Then you’ll owe me.”

One of the girls onstage stumbles, grabs the arm of the one next to her, and they both go down, laughing, in a tangle of elbows, thighs, and buttocks. Rafferty turns at the sound.

“You want one?” Prettyman is following Poke’s gaze. “Add it to your tab.”

“Thanks anyway, Arnold. I’m sort of booked up.”

“Suit yourself.” Prettyman regards the girls another moment, looking like a man counting his change, then seems to come to a decision. “China,” Prettyman says. “I’m still connected in China. I don’t know about that money, though. Seems pretty short.”

Rafferty touches Prettyman’s arm, and Prettyman yanks it back, all the way off the table. “Arnold. I’m not in a mood to be fucked around with. It’ll cost exactly what I said it would cost.”

Prettyman says, “Or?”

“Or,” Rafferty says. “This is a nice bar. Mirrors, sound system, lots of liquor, those fancy booths, everything. Lot of cash sunk into this room. Cops would line up to bend you over a barrel for a higher cut. I know a lot of cops, Arnold.” It’s not exactly true, but it’s enough to make Prettyman purse his lips. Then he shakes his head slowly, a man who has grown used to disappointment.

“No bargaining, no give-and-take,” Prettyman says, and sighs. “None of the old back-and-forth. It’s not the same world, is it, Poke?”

“I doubt it ever was.”

“Maybe not.” Prettyman looks depressed.

“One more thing, Arnold.” Rafferty taps the table for emphasis. “What you find out, whatever it is. It belongs to me. It is not capital. It’s not for sale, loan, or affectionate sharing. The man may be one of the world’s premium assholes, he may be the leading sphincter on the planet, but he’s still my father. This is bought and paid for by me, not merchandise for additional profit.”

Prettyman turns to him, gives him the full blue-eyed treatment. “Poke,” he says, “don’t you trust me?”

Rafferty looks at him.

Prettyman shrugs and turns back to the door. “Just asking,” he says.

_!18

Green and White and Brown and White

afferty’s first indication that something else is wrong is the sight of a police uniform in his living room. His spirits rise briefly when he realizes that the person wearing the

uniform is Arthit, then plummet again at the sight of his friend’s face, which is several stops beyond grim. They plunge further when he spots the bundle of misery on his couch, which turns out to be Peachy, reclining in a position as close to fetal as a tight skirt with large buttons will allow. Rose is nowhere in sight.

“You have a problem,” Arthit says.

Rafferty pulls the door closed. “You’re telling me.”

Something happens to Arthit’s face. Rafferty couldn’t describe it precisely, but if Arthit were a dog, his ears would have gone up.

“Are you saying you know about this already?”

A surge of irritation begins at Rafferty’s toes and rises all the way to the roots of his hair. “I’m not saying anything.”

The knobs at the corners of Arthit’s jaw pulse. “That’s not wise.”

“For Christ’s sake, Arthit, it’s not a declaration of policy. It’s a statement of fact. I wasn’t saying anything, and I told you so. Let’s review,

okay? You told me I had a problem—”

“You do.”

“And I said, as I recall, ‘You’re telling me.’” Arthit’s hard gaze doesn’t waver. “Maybe someone should be recording this conversation. That way we’ll only have to have it once.”

“In an hour or two, somebody probably will be recording it.”

Rafferty grabs a breath and lifts both hands. “Okay, okay. Let’s admit I came in here with a bad attitude. So let’s pretend I didn’t, and that I’ve just this second come through that door with a big smile on my face and offered you a beer. ‘Hi, Arthit,’ I said. ‘What a nice surprise to see you again so soon.’ Something like that. Would that make anything better?”

“No,” Arthit says.

Rose comes in from the bedroom and stops at the sight of him. “Poke,” she says. “We have a problem.”

Rafferty is struck by a bolt of pure panic. “Miaow? Is it Miaow?”

“No,” Arthit says, his face softening slightly. “It’s not Miaow.”

“Okay,” Rafferty says. His spine loosens a bit. “Rose is here, Miaow is all right. How bad could it be?”

“Bad,” Arthit says. Peachy contributes a stifled sob. Arthit looks at her as though he’s just realized she’s in the room and says, “I shouldn’t be here.”

“He came because I called him,” Rose says. She is speaking Thai. “I didn’t know who else I could—”

“He’s a great guy,” Rafferty says. “We don’t even need to vote on it. What the hell is wrong?”

“I really should leave,” Arthit says. “This is completely inappropriate.”

“Poke taught me that word last night,” Rose says. “It means you slept with a poodle, isn’t that right, Poke?”

“Yes, although I wasn’t applying it to Arthit. What do you mean, you should leave? And why the hell isn’t there anywhere for me to sit? I have no intention of taking bad news standing up.” He moves toward the couch, and Peachy shrivels in a manner so abject that Rafferty is instantly ashamed of himself. “Did we sell the hassock?” he asks Rose.

“It’s in the bedroom. I was standing on it. To hide something.”

“I really shouldn’t be here,” Arthit says, making no move to leave.

“I’ll get it,” Rose says, leaving the room.

“While you’re at it,” Rafferty calls after her, “bring whatever you were hiding.”

“For the record,” Arthit says, “I did not suggest that she hide it.” He sounds like he’s on television.

“Well, gee, I hope that gets you off the hook, whatever the hook is. Do you want a beer?”

“I guess,” Arthit says. “This is as good a time to be drunk as any.”

When Rafferty comes out of the kitchen, a bottle of Singha in each hand, Rose is standing by the white leather hassock, clutching a wrinkled brown paper supermarket bag. Peachy is staring at the bag as though it has a red digital countdown on its side, signaling the number of seconds before the world ends.

Rafferty hands Arthit one of the beers and takes a long pull off the other one. Then, as insurance, he takes another long pull and sits down on the hassock. Rose gives him the bag, and he opens it.

He sees rectangles, green and white and brown and white, a loose, disordered pile of them. Closes his eyes, squeezes them tight, opens them wide, and looks again. Nothing has changed.

“Thirty-two thousand dollars,” Arthit says. “Six hundred thousand baht, all in thousand-baht notes, and one hundred fifty American hundred-dollar bills. All brand new. And, since it’s almost certainly counterfeit, it’s exactly what Agent Elson is looking for.”

“IN THE DESK,”Peachy is saying. She claws her fingers through her hair again, snags them on the same clot of hairspray, and lets her hand drop. “The middle drawer. Rose knows. It’s the drawer I keep the account books in.”

“That’s right,” Rose says. “We advance money to the girls when they’re short, and that’s where Peachy puts the book we track it in.”

“Is the desk kept locked?” Rafferty asks. He is on the floor now, leaning against the wall. Rose shares the couch with Peachy, who is finally sitting upright.

“No.” Peachy starts toward the hair again and stops herself. “There’s no reason to lock it. Nobody would go into it.”

“Someone obviously did.”

“Why were you in the office?” Arthit asks. He has replaced Rafferty on the hassock, which he sees as a position of greater authority, and is working on his second beer. His face is beginning to turn red. Two more and he’ll look like a stop sign.

“Why? It’s my office.” Peachy sounds bewildered by the question.

“On Saturday,” Rafferty says. “He means, why were you in the office on Saturday?”

Peachy starts to answer, then shakes her head as though this is leading somewhere she doesn’t want to go. “I’m always in the office. I go in every day.”

“Why?” Arthit says.

“Because . . . because . . .” She blinks heavily, and then her face seems to crumple, and Rafferty knows she is moments away from tears. “Where else would I go? What else would I do?”

“Family?” Arthit asks.

“Oh,” Peachy says. “That.” Her lower lip does a watery little ripple. “We, I mean, I— Well, not really, you know, I mean . . .” She undoes a button with shaky fingers and does it up again. “I spend a lot of time in the office.”

“Okay,” Arthit says uncomfortably. “Sorry. So when you left on Friday—”

“Last night,” Peachy says, and Rafferty suddenly sits up. All this started only last night? The proposal to Rose, Agent Elson, his father, the money? All since last night?

“When you left the office last night,” Arthit says. “Was everything normal? I mean, was the place the way you usually leave it?”

“Sure,” Peachy says.

“And did you lock the door?”

“I always lock the door.” The questions seem to be calming her.

“This morning, when you went in— Wait, what time did you arrive?”

“About eleven.” The hand goes up again, but this time it pats the hair instead of ravaging it.

“At eleven, then. Was the door still locked?”

“Yes. I had to use both keys to get in.”

“And you double-locked it when you left.”

Rafferty sits there, admiring Arthit at work.

Peachy’s eyes go unfocused, as though she is doing addition in her head. “I think so. I usually do. But sometimes I forget.”

Arthit has been sneaking a hit of beer while Peachy thinks, and now he lowers the bottle. “Who else has a key?”

“Um . . .” Peachy says. A blush mounts her cheeks. Her eyes rove the room like someone looking for an exit. She passes her index finger over her front teeth and inspects it, scanning for lipstick. Then she says, “Who else has . . .”

“I do,” Rose says.

“Yes,” Peachy says, looking relieved. “Rose. Rose does.”

“Nobody else.”

“The landlord,” Rose says.

“Who’s the landlord?” Arthit asks.

“Somkid Paramet,” Peachy says, naming one of the richest men in Bangkok. “He owns the whole block.”

“Scratch the landlord,” Rafferty says.

Arthit tugs at the crease in his trousers and stares longingly at the bottle of beer in his hand. “When does the cleaning crew come in?”

“Never,” Rose says. “Peachy and I clean the place on Mondays. We go in early.”

“Rose does most of the cleaning,” Peachy says apologetically. “When I was growing up, I never learned how to clean properly. And my husband, my former husband’s family, they . . .”

Arthit’s eyes flick to Rafferty, who finds something interesting to study on the carpet. Rose admires the ceiling. Peachy’s genteel upbringing has been a frequent topic of conversation among them. “And when you went in this morning, everything was still in place?”

“Except for that.” Peachy indicates the paper bag without looking at it.

“Right, right. Except for that.” Arthit sits back and stares out through the sliding glass door at the lights of Bangkok. The bottle of beer dangles from his hand, forgotten for the moment. “Well,” he says to Rafferty, without turning, “isn’t this interesting?”

“It’s fucking riveting.” Even in her distraught state, Peachy stiffens at the word. “Here’s the thing, Arthit,” Rafferty says. “It’s Saturday.”

“Thank you,” Arthit says, inclining his head. “I always like to be reminded what day it is.”

“They didn’t know she’d go in.”

“Ah,” Arthit says. He shifts himself around and stares at the wall above Rafferty’s head. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“What’s right?” Rose asks.

“Whoever put that money there,” Arthit says, “doesn’t know it’s been found.”

“Monday,” Rafferty says. “They think it’ll be found on Monday.”

“It’s not much, is it?” Arthit says.

“What’s not much?” Rose asks with an edge in her voice.

“One day,” Rafferty says. “Before whatever is supposed to happen actually happens. We have one day to try to screw it up.”

“It’s a little better than that,” Arthit says. He hoists the beer and swallows. “We also have tonight.”

_!19

Simoleons

he bar is fashionably dim. The same authority that decrees that casinos should be bright apparently mandates that bars should be dim. This one is dim enough that the street out

side, visible through the open door, is a source of light even at a few minutes before midnight.

“Walk back the cat,” Arthit says. He seems to be talking to his reflection, partially visible behind the row of bottles, most of which, in defiance of their fancy labels, contain cheap generic whiskey.

Rafferty has switched to club soda, much to the amusement of the female bartender. “That’s a striking image,” he says. “What the hell does it mean?”

Arthit puts down his second glass of so-called Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. Like many Asians, he lacks an enzyme that metabolizes alcohol, and his face is a shade of crimson that would fascinate a cardiologist. “You obviously don’t read much espionage fiction.”

“I don’t read much of anything that was written after 1900. If you want to be dazzled, ask me about Anthony Trollope.”

“I always loved that name.” Arthit raps his wedding ring on the edge of his glass. Rafferty wonders if he is checking to make sure he can still hear. “ ‘Walking back the cat’ is a technique for unraveling an operation.” He lifts the glass and drinks. “First, of course, you have to assume it’s an operation.”

Rafferty glances around. As far as he can determine through the gloom, the other six customers seem to be absorbed in their own conversations. “It’s certainly something,” he says. “Even in counterfeit money, thirty thousand bucks is a lot of simoleons.”

“ ‘Simoleons’? Anthony Trollope used the term ‘simoleons’?”

“Not often,” Rafferty concedes.

“Here’s how many simoleons it actually is,” Arthit says. “Let’s say you’re a customer of whoever is making these things—”

“The North Koreans, Arnold Prettyman says.”

“Arnold? You’re talking to Arnold again? It’s a good thing you’re not on parole.”

“One takes information where one can get it.”

“Well, Arnold’s right. So. Let’s say you want to get your hands on some of these things. You can buy a North Korean hundred-dollar bill—in bulk, of course—for anywhere from sixty to seventy-five dollars, depending on market forces.”

“For example.”

Arthit tilts his head to the left. “How badly the North Koreans need cash. How much trouble they’re having getting the things into circulation. Fluctuations in the price of plutonium. How low Kim Jong Il’s cognac reserves are.” He raps the glass again, and this time the bartender looks over at him. Arthit raises a finger and points it, pistol style, at Rafferty’s soda glass, which contains nothing but a straw and a slice of lime. “So figure it out. Take a middle value, say seventy dollars to the hundred. Seven hundred to the thousand.”

“Jiminy,” Rafferty says. “Twenty-two thousand dollars.”

“Very impressive. Somebody spent twenty-two thousand dollars, or passed up on the opportunity to make twenty-two thousand dollars, to put that bag in Peachy’s drawer.”

“I see the distinction.”

“That’s a substantial investment. So to walk back the cat, you ask yourself a few questions. Who would be willing to make that investment?

Why? Why now? Why Peachy? Why an obscure domestic-service agency in a crappy corner of Pratunam?”

“Not so crappy.” Rafferty’s new glass of soda arrives, floating in on a big smile from the bartender, and he sips it and feels his tongue try to roll itself up. It’s tonic water. He starts to send it back and thinks, What the hell. Try something new. He returns the smile and takes another swallow. It tastes like malaria medicine.

“You know what I mean,” Arthit says. “If you’re going to set off a bomb, why do it there?”

“You’re smart when you’re drunk.”

“This isn’t drunk. This is mellow. Drunk is when I fall sideways off the stool.”

“Let’s arrange a signal, so I can get out of the way.”

“Who and why,” Arthit says. “Work from what we know and focus on who and why.”

“If we’re going to walk back the cat,” Rafferty says, “we have to start with yesterday, when those maids took the bad bills to the bank. Actually, we have to go back further, to when Peachy got the stuff in the first place.”

Arthit says, “Bingo.”

“Right,” Rafferty says. His mind is working so fast he doesn’t even taste the tonic as he swallows it. “We’ve said from the beginning that this would be all over as soon as Elson goes to the bank where Peachy got the money.”

“And that would be?” Arthit asks.

“On Monday.”

“Coincidence?” Arthit asks, and then lowers his voice and says dramatically, “I don’t think so.”

“So the why,” Rafferty says, “is to keep Elson from backtracking to the bank.”

“Sure. All this fake money, right there in the desk. Even if she did go to the bank, so what? The bills she gave to the maids came out of the bag.”

“That leaves the who,” Rafferty says. “Or, maybe more important, it leaves the how.”

“What how? Some master keys or a good set of picks, a paper bag full of money, an open desk drawer.”

“How the who knew to put it there.”

Arthit swivels his stool back and forth for a moment. “That how,” he says. He picks up his glass and puts it down again. “This line of speculation leads to some very uncomfortable territory.”

“The wood of the wolves,” Rafferty says. Then he says, “But still. Wherever the cat goes.”

Arthit has discovered that his stool squeaks when he turns more than six or seven inches to the left, and he plays with it for a moment, to Rafferty’s annoyance. Satisfied with the amount of noise he has made, he comes back to face the bar. “There were four people in your apartment. Elson, my two colleagues, and the girl— What’s her name?”

“Fon.”

“Right, Fon. And Fon’s been in jail ever since, so I suppose we can cross her off the list.” He takes an ambitious pull off the amber whatever-it-is in his glass and says, “And it doesn’t matter whether the someone put the money there himself or had someone else do it.”

“Not in the least.”

“Of course,” Arthit says carefully, “there’s always the possibility that Peachy put it there herself.”

“No,” Rafferty says. “There isn’t.”

“Let’s just follow it for a second. She hands out the bad bills, right?”

“Right. So?”

“And the girls get caught. She’s stuck with the story about the bank, and she knows it won’t hold up, so she grabs her bag of pretty paper from home or wherever she keeps it and shows up at your place, all distraught. ‘Look what I found,’ she says. And here we are, thinking about other people.”

“Never in a million years.”

Arthit wipes condensation from his glass with his index finger and dries it on his pants. “She’s had some problems, did you know that?”

“They’re hard to miss. She’s got pretensions to gentility, a bad marriage, a business that was going on the rocks.”

“She’s a gambler, Poke. She lost a small fortune playing the horses. It almost cost her—and her husband—everything. She was into the loan sharks for more than I make in a year.” He looks down at the wet smear on his trousers. “In fact, it cost her Prem, her husband.”

“He left her,” Rafferty says. “She told Rose about it.”

“Whatever she told Rose,” Arthit says, “it wasn’t true. Prem killed himself.”

Rafferty buries his face in his hands. “Oh, Jesus. Poor Peachy.”

“I could have kicked myself when I asked about her family. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“And you know about her husband how?”

“I checked,” Arthit says. “When Rose went into business with her, I did a little background research.”

“I see.” Rafferty looks down at his tonic water, focusing on the lonely little slice of lime, and Peachy’s face, hidden beneath its mask of makeup, floats into view. He flags the bartender. “This is tonic,” he says. “Could you please dump some gin into it?”

“IF YOU REALLYthought it was Peachy,” Rafferty says, “you wouldn’t be here.”

They have moved to a booth, mostly because Rafferty couldn’t stand hearing Arthit’s stool squeak one more time.

“I wouldn’t?” Arthit is drunk enough to be leaning forward on both elbows. Rafferty has forcibly switched him to soda, then tasted it to make sure nothing has been slipped into it while he wasn’t looking.

“What you kept saying at the apartment. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’ You must have said it half a dozen times.”

Arthit tastes his soda and gives it an Easter Island grimace. “I never claimed to be interesting.”

“You’re here because you don’t trust those cops.” He watches his friend’s face. “Or Elson.”

Arthit looks around the bar as if he hopes there will be somebody else there to talk to. Then he says, “Peachy’s too hapless. Too distracted by her life. She wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to get that paper. Also, the business is finally beginning to pay off. This would not be a good time for her to embark on a life of crime.”

“Then what was all that stuff—”

“It’s a case,” Arthit says, baring his upper teeth. “It’s a pretty convincing case, if you don’t know Peachy. It’s the case I think they’re going to try to make on Monday.”

“Ah,” Rafferty says.

“And there’s no way it’s not going to splash onto Rose.”

A little chill of pure dread runs through Rafferty’s chest and is immediately replaced by fury. “I’m going to see that it doesn’t.”

“So,” Arthit says, rubbing his eyes. “It’s Elson or the two cops, or someone they talked to.”

“Too many. We’ve only got until Monday.” Rafferty looks over at Arthit, red-faced and sweating opposite him. “Thanks for not leaving.”

“There, there,” Arthit says. “Let’s not get emotional.”

“But if this backfires, it could be serious for you.”

“No. If this backfires, it’ll be fatal.” He slides the glass of soda toward the center of the table. “Could I replace this with something that contains an active ingredient?”

“It’s your hangover.” Rafferty flags the bartender. “Black Label?”

“Black seems appropriate,” Arthit says.

“One more Black for my unwise friend,” Rafferty says. Then, to Arthit, he says, “Go away. Finish your drink and distance yourself. You weren’t at my apartment, we didn’t go to any bars. I haven’t seen you since this afternoon.”

Arthit is watching the bartender make his drink. Spotting him in the mirror, she adds an extra slug. “And walk away from all this fun?”

“You have to decide,” Rafferty says, “whether you want to hear what I’m about to say.”

“If I wanted to go deaf, I would have done it earlier.”

“Okay. We can’t figure out the who by Monday, but whoever they are, I think I can fuck up their plan pretty thoroughly.”

“Do tell.” The drink arrives, and Arthit looks like he wants to kiss it.

Rafferty tells him.

“My, my,” Arthit says. “That’s genuinely devious. And you think you can do it by Sunday night?”

Rafferty shrugs with an indifference he doesn’t feel. “I have to.”

“Is all this running around tomorrow going to give you time to go on an errand with me?”

“Oh, sure. My time is your time. What did you have in mind?”

“I thought we might crack open Agent Elson’s shell. Just a little. Sort of give us an idea of what’s inside it.”

“How?” Rafferty’s cell phone rings, and he says, “Hold that thought,” and answers it.

“Poke?” It is Prettyman’s voice, and it sounds strained to the point of strangulation. “Get your ass over here. Right now.”

_!20

Moby-Dick

hat the fuck have you gotten me into?” Prettyman demands, leaning so close that Rafferty can see the gray in his Ming the Merciless goatee. Prettyman’s well-estab

lished distaste for personal proximity is no match for the urgency he feels. Rafferty has seen the man under pressure before—in fact, Prettyman’s approach to life seems to be to create pressure and then cave in to it—but this is something new. The intensity even reaches his eyes.

And that makes Rafferty very uncomfortable. During their acquaintance Prettyman has revealed few admirable qualities, but he doesn’t frighten easily. At the moment he is scared half to death. They are in the back room of the Nana Plaza bar, and the bass from the sound system thumps in two-four time through the wall, synchronized approximately with Rafferty’s heartbeat. The room is empty except for the table at which they sit, the four chairs that have gathered around it for company, a wall full of framed photographs, and a Plexiglas box padlocked on a black stand. Beneath the box, displayed like an Academy Award, is a SIG-Sauer nine-millimeter automatic.

“I gather you had a nibble,” Rafferty says.

“A nibble? It was like sinking a hook in fucking Moby-Dick.” Prettyman shows a lot of teeth. It is not a smile. “First person I called, wham. All I did was mention the name, and I thought the guy was going to come through the line and grab my tongue. So I think, Whoa, slow down, and I get off the line. And three other guys call me within fifteen minutes.” Prettyman hears the pitch of his own voice and sits back, eyeing the room as though he wishes it were much larger and, perhaps, made of steel. “A number I didn’t think anybody had,” he says, more quietly if not more calmly. Despite the coolness of the room, his shirt is patchy with sweat, and not just in the obvious places.

Rafferty gives him a minute in the name of tact and then says, “What kind of guys?”

“Not your problem.” Prettyman seems to be regretting his volatility. He makes a show of straightening his cuffs. A cup of coffee toted in from the bar is cooling in front of him untouched, and a paint-thinner smell announces the brandy it’s been laced with.

“It certainly is my problem, Arnold. Look, I’m not asking for names and addresses. Americans, Chinese, Thais, military, diplomats, spooks, cops, gangsters—what?”

“All of the above,” Prettyman says in the satisfied tone of someone who predicted disaster and turned out to be right. “And with a lot of weight—very high-density guys.” He drums the table with his fingernails. “What are those little stars called? The ones that are so dense?”

“Little dense stars?” Rafferty guesses. His heart isn’t in it.

“Dwarf stars,” Prettyman says. “A cubic inch of a dwarf star weighs as much as the earth. Think dwarf star. That kind of density.”

“And what did these very heavy guys tell you?” Rafferty lifts his own coffee, pretends to sip. His hand is not completely steady, so he puts it on the table again.

Prettyman is still buying time by adjusting his clothes. “From one perspective they didn’t tell me shit. No answers, not even rude ones. What they wanted was to know what I knew. From another perspective, of course, they told me quite a bit.”

“For example.”

“The whole world wants to get its teeth into Frank Rafferty. Way it sounded, they’d chew your father up and fight over the scraps.”

Rafferty’s initial doubts about involving Prettyman suddenly intensify. He pushes his chair back and gets up, feeling the other man’s eyes follow him. Three or four steps carry him to the wall with the photos on it. A younger Prettyman stares out from each of them: in a jungle, wearing fatigues; centered and fuzzy in an obvious telephoto shot, talking to a woman on some Middle European street; posed dramatically in front of the Kremlin in a trench coat that might as well have spy stenciled on the back. The others are all variations on the theme: spook at work.

“I didn’t know you guys liked to have your picture taken so much,” Rafferty says. “This looks like the wall at a local chamber of commerce.”

“Fuck the pictures,” Prettyman says.

“So they’re eager,” Rafferty says, still studying the photos. “So they’ve got a lot of weight. Puts you in an interesting position.”

“Puts me right up the fecal creek,” Prettyman says. Then he hears the implication. “You don’t actually think I’d shop you, Poke?” Rafferty turns to see him widen his eyes, which succeeds only in making them bigger. They’re still the eyes of someone who could spot an opportunity through a sheet of lead.

“Please, Arnold,” Poke says.

“And even if I would,” Prettyman says immediately, “I don’t actually know anything, do I? I’m the guy in the middle, the one all these wide-track trucks think has the marbles, and I don’t even know if the guy is really your father.”

“Of course you do. There’s no way you haven’t learned that much.”

“This does not make me happy, Poke,” Prettyman says. He turns his coffee cup ninety degrees and then back again, and wipes sweat from the side of his neck. “It’s not the kind of attention I want to attract. I’m a settled man here, retired from the Company, whatever you may think. The world has passed me by, and that’s fine. A man at my time of life doesn’t need the adrenaline jolts I liked twenty years ago. A little money, the occasional girl, regular habits. The same pillow every evening. A house I can leave in the morning knowing I’ll be coming back to it at the end of the day. No more night crawls, no more tracking boring people across boring cities and then discovering that they’re not so boring after all, that in fact they’d like to kill you.”

Infected by Prettyman’s anxiety, Rafferty does his own scan of the room, wondering whether there’s a microphone somewhere. He lifts the pictures, crosses the room and looks under the table, comes up, catches Prettyman studying him, and says, “Have you left the bar tonight, Arnold?”

Prettyman hesitates, just his normal disinclination to part with information. “I went home for dinner.”

“After you made the calls?”

“Some of them. I made more from home.”

“And when you left here, or when you came back, were you followed?”

The question makes Prettyman shift in his chair, sliding from side to side as though smoothing down a lump in the cushion. He licks his lips. “That book you were going to write,” he says. “How good did you get at spotting a tail?”

“Obviously not too good.” He sits again. “I still smell like an issue of Vanity Fair.”

“Then you know,” Prettyman says. “It’s not easy. Give me half a dozen good people and I could follow Santa all the way around the world without tipping him off.” He blinks a couple of times and blots his upper lip with the side of his index finger. “But I don’t think so. For one thing, no one knows where I live.”

“They didn’t know the phone number either.”

“No,” Prettyman says grimly. “And don’t think I’m not keeping that in mind.”

“Because of course you do know something, don’t you? You know that Frank’s in Bangkok and that I’m in contact with him. You know where I live. Not exactly a Chinese wall. You’ve probably operated on less.”

Prettyman lays both hands flat on the table, as though to rise. “Are you back to that? Suggesting that I’d sell you?”

Rafferty shoves the table a few inches toward him, trapping Prettyman’s knees beneath it. “You’re on the wet spot, aren’t you? If they tried the stick, which it sounds like they did, there’s also the carrot. Probably a whole bunch of carrots if, as you say, they want him so much. Especially if there’s some sort of contest to take the first bite.”

“The discussion didn’t get that far.” Prettyman settles, and finally drinks some of the coffee, his eyes on the room again. “Anyway, I don’t

sell people.”

It would be silly to argue. “What time did you make the first call?”

A moment of elaborate consideration that Rafferty automatically discounts as a dodge. Prettyman has a chronograph implanted in his cerebellum, running several time zones simultaneously. Finally he says, “What time did you and I talk?”

“I don’t know. Nine, nine-thirty. And why are you stalling, Arnold?”

“Right after that.” Prettyman lowers his voice, imparting a confidence even though they are alone in the room. “You wanted answers, Poke. I got right on it.”

“Answers from China,” Rafferty says.

Prettyman starts to answer, hesitates, and says, “I didn’t start in China.”

Rafferty waits for more and then asks, “Bangkok?”

Prettyman nods so slightly that Rafferty can barely see it.

“So let’s say ten. Sound about right?”

He gets an equivocal shake of the hand, side to side. “Más o menos.”

“And then the phone started to ring.”

“The people in China didn’t seem to care what time it was. They were too interested.”

“And did you mention me? They must have put some pressure on you.”

An upraised palm. “Poke. I wouldn’t—”

“So you say, Arnold, and naturally I believe you. I’m just giving you a chance to convince me.”

“Think about it, Poke. Even if I were willing to sell your father, which of course I’m not, would I lead them to you? Let’s suppose, just for discussion’s sake, that I’d entertain the idea. I mean, it’s preposterous—” He waits for Rafferty to agree and then plunges ahead. “But just to move the talk along, let’s say I would. If I give you to them, they don’t need me.”

“That has a certain logic. Then again, if that’s all you have—me, I mean—there might be a price for that. Was there?”

After a pause almost too short to measure, Prettyman says, “You think too much, Poke.” He sounds like Rose. “As long as you’ve lived here, I’m surprised. Everything isn’t logic, you know. Sooner or later you have to trust your feelings, your instincts.”

Rafferty does not explain that his instincts are what inspired the question.

Prettyman lets the silence stretch out before speaking. “I can understand why you’d be concerned. With your family and all.”

“I’m sure you can.”

“Maybe I can help,” Prettyman says, his eyes floating toward the ceiling. “I’ve got more experience than you do.”

“That’s swell of you Arnold, but I think I’ve got it covered.”

Prettyman nods. “Fine, fine,” he says. “Good to hear it.”

“When you call them back—”

“Hold it,” Prettyman says with some urgency. “Let’s not operate under a misunderstanding. I’m going right back into my little hole. This kind of weight I don’t need.”

“And you think they’re just going to forget you called? Say, ‘Oh, that Arnold, what a tease.’ You duck out of sight and they’re going to send a regiment after you.”

Prettyman does something with his mouth that, on a child, would be a pout. “I know what I’m doing, Poke.”

“They want Frank, and it’s obviously not just a whim. You make one call in Bangkok, middle of the night, and the long-distance lines start humming all the way to China. Heavyweights, as you say. Working late, just for you. Dialing a secret number, one they shouldn’t have. These are not people you can wave off, Arnold: ‘Sorry, it’s some other Frank Rafferty.’ Either they’re going to come after you now or they’re going to come after you later. They’ve probably already bought their tickets. Not to mention the ones you talked to in Bangkok. They’re already here.”

Across the table Prettyman blinks away perspiration that has run down his forehead and into his eyes. Rafferty finds that he feels sorry for the man. He should have mentioned the triads.

But he hadn’t. “We both need the same thing,” he continues. “Information. You pretend to play with them, keep them busy for a few days, and get whatever you can. That way you won’t be picking up that nice pillow you go home to every night to see whether somebody put a scorpion under it, and when we get back together, we’ll have a better idea what we’re up against.” He waits, and Prettyman’s eyes slide left, toward the door. Rafferty knocks sharply on the table. “And if you don’t play, Arnold, or if you sell me and my family out, I’ll get through it somehow, and when I do, I’ll come after you and kill you myself. Just, as you say, so we’re not operating under a misunderstanding.”

Prettyman’s eyes go very small, and he puts his hands in his lap. Rafferty knows he is wishing he had a gun there. The one in the plastic box is too far away.

“So, Arnold,” Rafferty says, shoving his chair back. “Looks like we’ve both got a problem.”

_!21

He’s More Like Arnold Than He Is Like Me

fter returning her nod, he silently shares the elevator with Mrs. Pongsiri, the apartment house’s central gossip conduit, whose opinion of Poke has improved with Arthit’s frequent visits. Uniforms, Rafferty supposes, inspire confidence. Given the hours Mrs. Pongsiri keeps—going to work at 6:00 p.m. and returning home around 3:00 in the morning—her occupation is a topic of continuing speculation among the residents. She looks tired tonight, her figure sheathed in a too-tight cocktail dress that is so saturated with stale cigarette smoke that the elevator smells like an ashtray by the time they reach the eighth floor. Once the doors open, they exchange minimal smiles and go in their separate directions. As she walks away, Rafferty sees she has already unzipped the top four inches of her gown.

The digital clock on his desk blinks a green hello when he finishes double-locking the door and turns to face the living room. The clock reads 2:17 a.m., so Mrs. Pongsiri has come home early. Rafferty has managed only a couple of hours’ sleep in the past two days, and he feels it all the way down to the cellular level.

He smells smoke, and it isn’t Mrs. Pongsiri. Then he sees the light beneath the bedroom door.

Rose is sitting up in bed, wrapped in the mandatory towel, a cigarette between her fingers. From the pile of butts in the ashtray, she’s been at it for quite a while.

“I was worried about you,” she says in Thai.

“Everything’s under control,” he replies, also in Thai. He kicks off his shoes and climbs up beside her. “I gather Peachy actually went home.”

“Not happily. I think she’s very lonely since her husband left her.”

“It’s worse than that. Arthit told me tonight that he killed himself over the debts she ran up.”

Rose’s fingertips fly to her mouth. “Ohhh, Peachy. How terrible for her.”

“Another reason for us to be grateful for what we’ve got.” He spreads his arms and stretches. He feels like he’s been shut up in a small box for days. “Every day we’re together is a blessing. You, Miaow, and me. And there’s no promise that it’ll go on forever, so we need to be thankful one day at a time. There was probably a time when things were fine between Peachy and her husband, and they took it for granted. And then things weren’t fine anymore.” He strokes her arm, the skin he loves. “I’m never going to take you for granted.” Then, at what he hoped would be the romantic high spot, he yawns.

“Poor baby, you’re tired.”

He shakes his head, half expecting to feel his brain slosh around inside. “This has been the longest day of my life.”

“I’m so sorry about all that.”

“It’s not you. Oh, I mean, sure, it’s partly the thing with the bag of money. But I think I can put that on hold for a little while.”

She runs a finger down the side of his face, and his right side erupts in goose bumps. “If you say so, I’m sure you can. What’s the rest of it?”

“Give me a minute. Let me figure out what order to tell it in.” He closes his eyes for a moment, lets some of the day’s images pass before his eyes, and the next thing he knows, there’s a tug on his arm.

“You were snoring,” Rose says.

“Not a chance.”

“Like a helicopter.” She leans over and kisses him on the cheek. “Go to sleep. You can tell me in the morning.”

“No. You need to know what’s going on.” He focuses on what he needs to say for a moment, making sure he has the Thai words at his command. “Okay, okay, let’s start with the relatively easy stuff.” And he tells her about his talk with Arthit, about how happy Arthit was to hear that Rose had accepted Rafferty’s proposal.

“I finally accepted it,” Rose says. “Before one of us died of old age.” She slides a hand over his shoulder and says, “You’re so tight you’re practically in a spasm. Turn around so I can work on your neck.”

“It’s carrying this head around,” he says. “Just too many ideas inside.”

“Not to mention all that bone.” Her fingers probe, stretch, and isolate his muscles.

“And then,” Rafferty says, and hesitates. “I had a little surprise today. My father is in Bangkok.”

Her hands stop moving. He feels their warmth against his skin, and he starts to drift off again. “Is this a joke?” she asks.

“I wish it were. He’s here, and he’s brought along my half-Chinese half sister and a Southern Chinese guy who seems to be a hired gun.”

“A sister, too? But this is wonderful for you,” she says. “It’s your chance.”

“For what?”

“To make it up with him.” She makes a tsk-tsk noise, a reaction that Rafferty has learned is a lot less mild than it sounds. “We’re talking about your father, Poke. He’s here, in Bangkok. With your sister. He came looking for you.”

“Yeah? That makes us even or something?”

She lifts a hand and slaps his back. “This is one of the things that’s wrong with you.”

“One of them? And, by the way, ow.”

“One of many. You’re in your head too much. You’re so busy making a judgment that you close yourself off to understanding anything. You talk about being ‘even’ with your father, like you’re making some sort of business deal, like you don’t have any feelings about it. For years it’s been like your father was dead, and now he’s here. You can make things right again. You have a second chance. Do you know what I’d give for a second chance with my own father? Do you know what I’d give to be able to talk to him for five minutes? Two minutes ago you were talking about how it’s a blessing for us to be together. Every day is a blessing, you said. Well, here’s your father, back from the dead. And you don’t think that’s a blessing?”

“Actually, no,” he says, still in Thai. “I was just fine. From one day to the next, I never gave him a thought. I haven’t seen him since I was sixteen, remember? It’s not like he’s earned a lifetime of love and loyalty.”

“Your parents don’t need to earn your love,” Rose says. “They gave you life. That’s enough. What did Miaow do to earn your love? You make love sound like money.”

“At least you get change from money if you give too much of it.”

She rolls over so her back is to him and lights a cigarette. “You don’t even mean what you’re saying. You’re just stubborn. You’ve gotten used to the idea that your father is no good, and it’s too much work to learn that it might not be true. You’ve been living in your side of the story since you were sixteen. Now you don’t want to hear his side.”

“I already heard it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Whether I like it or not, he’s barged back into my life, without an invitation—”

Rose raises an arm and lets it drop. “Oh, Poke.”

“—and he’s toting a bag of threats.”

Rose turns her head enough to give him her profile. “Against who?”

“The whole hemisphere, is what it sounded like.” He hesitates, then takes the plunge. “I asked Arnold to find out what he could.”

“This is impossible,” Rose says. “Your father comes all the way to Bangkok, bringing your sister, and instead of welcoming them, instead of bringing them home so I could meet them, you . . . you assign Arnold to him. Do you know what I think?”

“I already do. I’m stubborn, I don’t know anything about love—”

“I think you’re afraid of what it might mean to you. Here you are, with this opportunity. So what do you do? You go looking for facts. More facts. Like facts can tell you how to feel or what you should do. He’s your father, but you don’t want to know what that might really mean.”

“Well, how do I know what he’s up to? What’s his agenda? He’s not exactly aces in the trust department. Anyway,” he adds in English, “it takes one to know one.”

“What does that mean?” Her voice is several degrees chillier.

“It’s just the way he is. He may be my father, but he’s more like Arnold than he is like me.”

He turns to her, puts a hand on her arm. “I’m just being careful. This,” he says, “this room, you, me, Miaow—nothing can threaten this. I can’t let anything threaten this. Not my father, not Elson, not anything.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow. For now go to sleep.” She puts out her cigarette and lies down again with her back to him. Then she says, “This is silly,” and turns and puts both arms around him. He feels her breath on his cheek.

He is asleep in seconds.

He is back in the Lancaster house, in the living room, which has developed windows that look out on a Southeast Asian landscape, all palms and heat shimmer, when the phone rings.

He sits up, says “Shit” in his wake-up frog voice, and flips the phone open.

“Who’d call at this hour?” Rose asks.

Before Rafferty can say a word, he hears his father’s voice.

“Get out of there,” Frank Rafferty says. “All of you, get out of there this minute.”

_!22

The Color of Ancient Ice

et dressed and wake up Miaow.” Rafferty slips the cell phone into his hip pocket and goes to the safe hidden in the headboard of the bed. “Don’t turn on any lights.”

Rose is throwing on a T-shirt. “Who was it?” “Dear old Dad. We have to get out of here right now.” “But where can we go?” Her jeans are halfway up her thighs. “Grab your purse.” He waves a hand in a useless effort to dispel

Rose’s cigarette smoke. “I want this place to look empty.”

As Rose heads for Miaow’s room, Rafferty pulls over his head the heavy chain he wears around his neck. Dangling from it is a small key, which he uses to open the safe. From it he removes a thick stack of thousand-baht notes from the money he keeps in reserve, folds the bills once, and stuffs them into his pocket. Then he withdraws a shapeless package wrapped in oilcloth. He drops it heavily onto the bed and pulls out a couple of loaded nine-millimeter magazines, grabs a corner of the cloth and lifts, and when the Glock rolls free, he slips one of the magazines into the grip. As always, the click of it snapping into place

both reassures and frightens him.

The gun feels like dry ice against the skin of his stomach.

He barrels through the door to the living room, and in the haze of light through the glass door he sees Rose with Miaow in her arms, wearing her pink bunny pajamas. She is half awake, eyeing the room groggily. The sight fills him with fury. These people, except for his mother, are the only people in the world he loves, and now they’re in danger. Thanks, Pop.

No, he thinks. Arnold.

Rafferty surveys the room and then opens the door to the hallway. “Out.”

Cold blue fluorescent light, the color of ancient ice, the old embedded smell of cooking oil. “Go down to Mrs. Pongsiri’s,” he says.

He turns to his own door and slips the key into the lock that controls the dead bolt. He clicks the lock home and then thinks better of it and turns the key back, leaving only the flimsy Indonesian lock that he can literally pick with a bobby pin: no point inviting them to kick the door in. He hears Rose and Miaow moving down the hallway, and then the elevator, directly opposite Rafferty’s front door, groans into motion.

Heading down to the lobby. Someone coming up.

“Hurry,” he calls. “Bang on the door.” He twists the key, tries to pull it out.

It sticks in the lock.

“She’ll be asleep,” Rose says.

“Now.” He yanks at the key again. The lock won’t let it go.

It’s been giving him trouble for weeks, but not like this. The lock has been reluctant to let the key slip out, but he’s always been able to wiggle it free. He tries a wiggle or two and then puts a foot against the door and uses all his body weight. The key won’t budge. His shirt is suddenly wet beneath the arms.

He can hear Rose knocking politely on Mrs. Pongsiri’s door, halfway along the hall on the other side, and he swears aloud, lets go of the key, runs down the hallway, and slams his fist against the thin metal door, heavily enough to buckle it. The elevator is louder now, coming up, probably only three or four floors away. He raises his fist again, and the door opens to reveal Mrs. Pongsiri in a silk bathrobe, her face smeared with some kind of white cream.

“Mr. Rafferty,” she says.

“In,” Rafferty says to Rose. Miaow’s eyes are wide now. To Mrs. Pongsiri he says, “Sorry, sorry. I’ll explain later.”

Mrs. Pongsiri blinks at him as though he’s out of focus, and then something hard happens to her face beneath its mask of cream, something that tells Rafferty she knows what it is to be on the run in the middle of the night. “Of course,” she says, stepping aside. “Come in.”

Rafferty pulls the door closed behind them and sprints back to his own door. He twists the key and yanks all the way from the knees, practically wrenching his back. Nothing. Grabbing a deep breath, he forces himself to be still for a moment, then gently turns the key all the way in the other direction, brings it vertical again, and tugs.

The elevator bell rings.

The key glides free.

No time to get to Mrs. Pongsiri’s. He runs to the end of the hall, hearing the elevator doors begin to slide apart, and slips through the door to the fire stairs. At the last moment, he sticks the tongue of his belt between the latch and the doorframe to keep it from clicking shut.

Voices in the hall, speaking Thai.

Rafferty eases the door open half an inch and puts an eye to the crack.

Three of them, gathered at his door. They look like farmers, burned dark by the Thai sun, wearing loose clothes and flap sandals, but they don’t move like farmers. The one in the center motions the others away and puts his ear to the door. In a fluid movement, he lifts his shirttail and pulls out a gun.

The man nearest Rafferty also has a gun in his hand, a tiny popgun just big enough to die from. The third holds a knife, nicked and rusty in spots, but with a honed, shiny edge, an edge that has had a lot of care lavished on it. It is maybe ten inches long, a little smaller than a machete. The man in the center makes an abrupt gesture, hand toward the floor, and the one with the knife drops to his hands and knees and looks for light seeping through the crack under Rafferty’s door. He gets up again, shaking his head.

The man in the center, clearly the one in charge, waves the others to either side of the door and tries the knob. Then he leans down to examine the lock. The gun disappears beneath his shirt, and his hand comes back out with a small piece of metal in it. It takes him only a few seconds to spring the lock. When he tries to pull the pick free, it sticks.

He tries again, but the pick is frozen in the lock. The three of them consult in whispers, apparently arguing about whether to leave it in the lock, and then the man in the middle gives it a dismissive wave and pushes the door open very slowly, standing back as it swings inward. He motions the one to his left, the one with the knife, against the wall—Stay here is the message—and the other two go in, moving quickly and silently. Their guns are extended in front of them, gripped in both hands.

They’ve had practice at this.

The man with his back to the wall purses his lips as though to whistle and looks at his watch. He is plump and almost merry-looking, except for the knife. He leans back and closes his eyes, letting the knife dangle from his hand. For a very brief moment, Rafferty considers taking it away from him and wrapping it around his head, but the man’s eyes open and he glances down the hall in Rafferty’s direction.

Rafferty freezes, feeling his heartbeat all the way down to his wrists. If he closes the door, the man will spot the motion. If he leaves it ajar, the man may see it and come to investigate. As slowly as he can ever remember moving, Rafferty eases the gun out of his pants and waits, holding his breath, and the man’s eyes travel past the door and back up the hall. He actually is whistling, very quietly, and this fact ping-pongs around in Rafferty’s mind, stirring up a substantial amount of new discomfort. He would be happier if the man were nervous.

The whistling stops, and Rafferty shifts his feet so he can see what’s caught the man’s eye. He finds himself looking at the dent he left in Mrs. Pongsiri’s door.

The fat man frowns, pushes himself away from the wall, and begins to move down the hall. He walks like a bear, heavy on his feet, his knees slightly bent and bowed out. The knife swishes once against the leg of his trousers, and Rafferty’s mind amplifies it into a slap.

Rafferty slips out of his shoes and puts his shoulder to the door.

A brusque interrogative whisper: The other two have come out of Rafferty’s apartment. The one who picked the lock looks down the hall and snaps his fingers once, a sound as sharp as a breaking bone, and the fat one turns back and then points at Mrs. Pongsiri’s door, eyebrows raised in question. The leader shakes his head and turns back to Rafferty’s door, pulling it closed and applying himself again to extricating the pick from the lock. The third man crosses the hall and pushes the button for the elevator.

The fat man whispers urgently, but the pick wins the battle for the leader’s attention, and he waves the fat man away. The fat man takes the leader’s shoulder and turns him up the hall, pointing down at the floor, at the strip of light beneath Mrs. Pongsiri’s door. The leader stops, one hand on the stuck pick, his eyes following the direction of the fat man’s finger. All three of them stand motionless.

The elevator bell rings, but nobody moves. Rafferty watches the light from the elevator car brighten and strike the three men as the doors slide open, then diminish as they begin to close again. At the last moment, the leader gives up on freeing the pick and lunges for the elevator, extending a hand to force the doors open again. The others start to follow.

Rafferty’s cell phone rings.

All three heads swivel toward the end of the hall, and Rafferty lets the door slip closed, already halfway up the first flight of stairs, the shoes in his hand hampering him as he punches at the phone to turn it off—it’s his father calling, he sees. He takes the steps three at a time, as lightly as possible, hearing the door on his landing open and the sharp whisper of commands ricocheting up the stairwell. They don’t know whether he’s gone up or down; they’ll have to split up, so the only question is whether one or two of them will be coming after him. The one thing he’s halfway sure of is that they won’t send the man with the knife on his own; the man in charge will want a gun in both directions.

Rafferty lives on the eighth floor of twelve. The door to the roof is kept bolted from inside as a burglary precaution, but there’s no way to know whether the padlock on the bolt will be hanging open, as it often is, or whether Mrs. Song, his landlady, will have secured it on her rounds. That gives him four floors to maneuver in, and he doesn’t know a soul on any of them.

He hears shoes echoing on the stairs, but there’s no way to sort them out, to see how many are going up or down. A grunt from below, something clattering, metal on metal: a ring on the handrail or a gun in someone’s hand. He can hear labored breathing—the fat man coming up? Then there’s a burst of argument from below: Something’s wrong.

He doesn’t remember having passed the tenth floor, but he tries the door to the eleventh, hoping to distract them by slipping out and calling for the elevator, and realizes what they were arguing about. The door is locked. It can be opened only from the inside.

That almost certainly means they’re all locked, including the door to the roof. The only open door will be the one leading into the lobby. He’s in a vertical dead end.

The feet below him have slowed, their owner probably listening to the discussion farther down the stairs: two voices, which means they decided that Rafferty was trying to get down to the street, and sent the weight in that direction. Only one coming after him, then. One with a gun.

On the other hand, Rafferty thinks, maybe not, registering the heft of his own gun in his hand. He sights the Glock down the stairs, aiming for the concrete wall at a thirty-degree angle, hoping for a nice, lethal series of caroms, and pulls the trigger.

A shout of surprise from the man just below him, then a sharp command from farther down. The shot is ringing in his ears, but he can hear the voices over it.

He fires again, twice, aiming obliquely at the wall. The bullets spang off it and hit several other walls before one of them bangs into the metal stairs with a sound like the Bell at the Center of the World.

The man below him gives a panicky grunt, then calls a question, but Rafferty can’t make out the words. Then there is silence.

He leans back against the wall, waiting, watching the stairs. If it was the fat man he heard panting, his pursuer is armed only with a knife. He has no doubt he can gut-shoot the man; it’s a big gut, and its owner will have a whole flight of stairs to climb between the time he comes into shooting range and the point at which he’ll be able to do Rafferty any harm. That’ll leave two, both carrying automatics.

Not the best odds.

He edges his way across the landing, tasting salt in his mouth. He’s bitten through his lower lip. When he can see the corner of the stairs, the few inches that will give him the most time to aim, he raises the Glock in both hands and waits.

Nothing.

Then a scuffle of movement, fast, and he feels the muscles in his legs loosen in panic, and he jams his back against the wall for support, but no one appears on the stairs below him, no fat man with a knife, no one ducking into view for a quick look. Just feet on the stairs.

Going down.

_!23

It Starts Ugly and Gets Worse

onths later, when Rafferty looks back on the three days that followed their abandonment of the apartment, what he will remember is the blur of movement, the weight of

exhaustion, and the smell of rain. Bits and pieces of what happened will stay with him, hard and flashbulb bright, sharp-edged and fragmentary as reflections in bits of a broken mirror.

Snapshots in a loose pile, random and unsequenced.

Maybe, he will think, it is better that he remembers it that way. Better he doesn’t have to carry with him the fear and the fury, the desperation and the moments of soul-sinking hopelessness when he knew for a certainty that everything he cared about in the world was about to be destroyed, scattered, irretrievably lost.

He doesn’t remember the call he placed to Arthit after his shots chased the three intruders away, but he retains a vivid mental image of the blinking cherry lights on the police cars, four of them, that Arthit dispatched to the basement parking area beneath his building. Cars that took him in one direction and Rose, with Miaow bundled in her arms, in another, the two cars without passengers screeching up the driveway and vanishing aimlessly into the night. He wasn’t there to see it, but he knows that the car carrying Miaow and Rose disappeared into the parking lot of Arthit’s police station. Five minutes later three cars came out again, each taking a different direction. When the driver of the car with Rose and Miaow in it had done enough figure eights to be satisfied that any possible watchers were following the other cars, he took them to Arthit’s house, where Noi let them in, and she and Rose put Miaow to bed.

Rose said it took more than an hour, with both her and Noi sitting at Miaow’s bedside, for the child to fall asleep.

Rafferty remembers very clearly how he felt when Rose told him that. He wanted, slowly and creatively, to kill Arnold Prettyman.

Another detail: the pouches of weariness beneath Arthit’s eyes, shaded a poisonous green by the fluorescent lights bouncing off the walls in the interrogation room where he and Rafferty talked after Rose and Miaow had been safely tucked away. The room is painted that peculiar shade of spoiled pea soup that’s been sold by the millions of gallons to government institutions around the world. Rafferty, whose mind is searching desperately for something neutral to focus on for a moment, finds himself wondering what the salesman’s pitch might possibly be: “It starts ugly and gets worse”?

“He was terrified,” Rafferty says.

Arthit slides a big cop shoe over the scuffed linoleum, producing a gritty sound that makes Rafferty’s teeth itch. “You don’t actually know that, do you? He was a medium-level spook, Poke, delusions of grandeur aside. They’re good actors. Their critics kill them if they’re not convincing.”

“No,” Rafferty says. “He was sweating like a pig.”

“Do pigs sweat?” This is the kind of thing that interests Arthit.

Rafferty makes a show of pulling out his notebook. “That’s a fascinating question, Arthit, one I plan to look into as soon as I have the time.” He writes it down in large letters.

“Curiosity is an essential part of the good policeman’s armament,” Arthit says sententiously, and Rafferty realizes that his friend is trying to calm him. “Almost as important as a strong bladder.”

“So yes, I believe him. I think he was frightened enough to sell me.”

Arthit closes his eyes. He is clearly exhausted. “Before we go shoot him through the head, run it past me again. Just the high points.”

Rafferty begins to check off his fingers, starting with his thumb. “My sainted father emerges from the mists of time—”

“A coelacanth dredged from the depths,” Arthit suggests through a yawn. “The alluvial ancestor of the pangolin.”

Rafferty waves him off and goes to finger number two. “I ask Arnold to employ his skills. Many people who terrify Arnold express interest. He perspires extravagantly and keeps making eyes at his gun.” He raises finger number three, which happens to be the middle one. Arthit eyes it expressionlessly. “The Three Musketeers appear.”

“Well, if you put it like that . . .” Arthit says.

Rafferty rests his chin on his hand, realizes it is a mistake, and sits upright. That way, if he goes to sleep, the fall will wake him. “What are those things scientists look for? Starts with a v.”

“Variables,” Arthit says, stressing the patience. “As you know perfectly well.”

“Well, there haven’t been any other variables in my life.”

Arthit sits forward. “You don’t call a U.S. Secret Service agent and thirty thousand in counterfeit money a variable? Your life must be much more interesting than mine.”

“Those people have a plan in place. It has nothing to do with busting into my apartment in the middle of the night with guns in their hands.”

Arthit’s hands are flat on the table. “About your father,” he says. “How much of this do you intend to share with us?”

“With the cops in general, not bloody much. With you personally, everything.”

“And the reason?”

“I still don’t know about those two cops with Elson.”

Arthit is still for a moment, and then he gives Rafferty a minimal nod. “So. We’ve done the A-plus-B thing and come up with C. What about your intuition?”

“What is this, Down with Reason Week? First Arnold, then Rose, now you. Is this some sort of plot to accelerate the decline of the West? Replace the scientific method with feelings?”

“The question stands,” Arthit says.

“All right. In deference to your cultural orientation, I’ll play. My intuition tells me that my father got himself into some very deep shit in China and it’s chased him to Bangkok. And that Arnold got leaned on by the chasers and decided it was easier to sell me than to get his bones broken one at a time.”

“That’s a fair summary,” Arthit says. He cups his hands on the table as though he’s trapped a grasshopper under them. “A little thin on feelings, but fair.”

“Boy. And to think I’ve been selling feelings short.”

“My own personal feeling,” Arthit says, “is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Arabs say that.”

“I’m sure they do, but I have no idea what it means in this case. I mean, who’s the enemy?”

“Your enemy,” Arthit says.

“Who’s the other enemy?”

Arthit’s gaze flickers. “You, I suppose.”

“I thought we were friends.”

“No. You’re their enemy.” He sketches an invisible diagram on the table with his fingers and stares at it. “The . . . um, enemy’s enemy,” he adds.

“The other enemy,” Rafferty says by way of clarification. “I mean, if I’m an enemy and they’re an enemy, who’s the friend?”

Arthit pulls in the corners of his mouth. “I am?”

Rafferty nods. “Do you know any other Arab sayings that burn to be spoken at the moment?”

“A good friend is like water in your camel,” Arthit says at once.

“I’ve heard that one a million times.”

“Wise people, the Arabs,” Arthit says, nodding sagely.

“They discovered zero,” Rafferty replies, “although I’ve never been sure why that’s anything to write home about.”

“Back to my feelings,” Arthit says, erasing the invisible diagram with his palm. “I feel that this is a good time to go take a tire iron to Arnold.”

“Jesus,” Rafferty says. “I thought you’d never feel that.”

ARNOLD PRETTYMAN’S TOP-SECREThideaway, which it had taken Arthit fifteen seconds to locate on a computer, is situated in a drab, two-story squat of poured cement. The street-level floor has a slide-down metal door, which is open six inches at the bottom, allowing a splash of light to paint the sidewalk. American screech rock, all guitars and tight-jeans falsetto, is playing loudly inside.

Arthit closes the car door quietly and motions for Rafferty to do the same. He pulls his gun.

Rafferty puts his hand on the grip of his own gun, but Arthit stops him.

“Don’t even think about it,” he says. “If anybody’s going to get shot tonight, he’s going to get shot by a cop.”

Rafferty shakes his head, and Arthit leans in. “Use some sense here,” he hisses. “There’s only so much I can do, Poke. I can’t protect you if you kill someone.”

He holds Poke’s eyes for a moment and then shifts the gun to his left hand, slips his right under the edge of the door, and slams it upward.

Two teenage boys jump to their feet, register Arthit and the gun, and put their hands on top of their heads as if they know the drill. They are covered in grease.

Rafferty scans the shop and sees six or seven motorcycles in various stages of dismemberment. The reason for the boys’ fear is obvious. This is a chop shop, where stolen motorcycles are broken up and combined into new ones.

Arthit wiggles his gun, pointing the barrel at the floor. “Sit,” he says. The boys sit at once, hugging their knees, hands in plain sight. Arthit and Poke zigzag between fragments of motorcycle until they are standing directly over the boys. Arthit studies them for a second and points his gun at the more obviously terrified of the two.

“You. Anyone upstairs?”

“Don’t know,” the boy says. The smears of black grease surrounding his eyes make them a brilliant porcelain white. “People come and go.”

Arthit glances at Rafferty, who shrugs.

“Both of you,” Arthit says. “Give me your wallets.”

The boys shift awkwardly to get their wallets out of their hip pockets and hand them over. Arthit passes them to Rafferty, who pulls out the identity cards and compares them to the faces staring up at him. Allowing for the grease, the boys’ faces match the ones on the cards.

“You’ll get these back when we come down,” Arthit says. “If you’re not here, I promise you a nice long time in the monkey house.

Clear?”

“Clear,” says the tougher of the boys.

Arthit lifts his chin toward the back of the shop, where there is a narrow flight of very steep concrete stairs. Poke follows him, and the music chases them up, echoing in the passageway.

Six feet from the top, Arthit stops and says, “Oh, no.”

By the time Poke smells it, a sharp char of flesh, Arthit is already through the door, his gun extended. He stops there as though he has run into a wall of glass, and Poke stops behind him and looks over his friend’s shoulder, looks at one of those snapshots that will stay with him forever. A single glance brands it on his brain, and he turns away, very quickly, trying to look at anything else in the world. Then he forces himself to face it again.

Arnold Prettyman is wired to a chromium-backed chair, the wire cutting deeply into his arms and shoulders. His hands, wired tightly together, rest in his lap, if “rest” is a word that can be used to describe fists. His head lists to one side at a contortionist’s angle, and the left side of his face is black. His faded blue eyes look at Poke as though Poke were a window. The stench of burned flesh is overpowering. Poke gags.

Arthit automatically looks at his watch and says, “Four-twentythree.” Then his shoulders sag and his head droops forward. “You,” he says to Poke without turning. “Get out of here.”

_!24

Major-League Heat

killed him, Poke thinks. I didn’t mention the triad, and I killed him. With Prettyman’s death reverberating in his mind, the day he originally planned, a day he meant to

spend dealing with the counterfeiting situation, suddenly seems irrelevant. The threat seems almost quaint. The new day’s first light is tinting the sky as he uses the key Arthit gave him to open the front door of the house. He locks it behind him and trudges into the living room, weighing several thousand pounds.

Rose is asleep on the couch. A yellow cotton blanket covers her to the shoulders. Her knees are drawn up—the couch is too short for her—and one arm is outthrown, the hand dangling at the wrist, palm up. There is something terribly vulnerable in that loose hand, with its pale palm and curled fingers.

Rose is not a light sleeper, and she doesn’t stir as he approaches her.

He kneels to examine the face he has come to love: the mouth, its upper lip high in the middle and the lower full and generous. The delicate seashell whorl of her nostrils, perhaps the most beautiful curve he has ever seen. The smooth swelling of her cheekbones. He studies her face, every detail, for at least five minutes.

She and Miaow are his life now. Nothing that concerns them is irrelevant.

Then he turns around and goes out into the paling day to hail a tuk-tuk.

Just to be on the safe side, he takes the tuk-tuk for a few blocks and gets out, waiting to see whether anyone seems to be paying attention to him. At this hour, though, there is virtually no one on the streets. He hails a cab, makes the driver circle his building three times as he looks for watchers, and then has the man drop him in the basement garage.

To avoid the noise of the elevator in case someone is waiting on his floor, he takes the stairs. He gets all the way to the fifth floor, each step a yard high, before he remembers that the doors are locked on each floor. Muttering unflattering self-appraisal, he goes back down to the lobby, crosses his fingers, and pushes the “up” button.

Not much he can do when the elevator doors open except stand as far as possible to one side with the gun out. The hallway is empty.

It takes him a couple of minutes to work the pick out of the lock and insert his own key. When he pulls the key back, it slips out as though it has been greased. He thinks briefly of kicking the door into small pieces but decides that the satisfaction isn’t worth the noise and enters the apartment with his gun in both hands.

He needn’t have bothered. The place is deserted.

It takes only a few minutes to get what he needs, a change of clothes for all of them and—as an afterthought—Miaow’s new cell phone, which she had left on top of her desk, surrounded by a circlet of browning ginger flowers like a small metallic shrine. The bag of counterfeit money, much to his relief, is still in its hiding place on the top shelf of the closet. The men last night had been looking for people, not loot. From the safe concealed in the headboard above his bed, he removes his third ammunition clip and the rest of his own reserve of money. He will need every baht of it. On the way out, he makes one more stop in the kitchen to get a jar of Nescafé for Rose, who lives on it, since he’s not sure Noi will have any in her kitchen. He throws it all into a canvas tote bag, takes a last, regretful look around, and heads for the stairs.

As he reaches the seventh floor, his cell phone rings.

“Where the hell are you?” Arthit demands.

“How nice to hear your voice.”

“Why aren’t you at my house? You’re not supposed to be out wandering around.” He can hear Noi’s voice in the background, questioning and concerned. “Tell me you haven’t gone someplace really stupid,” Arthit says. “Your apartment, for example.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you I went to my apartment.”

“There are moments, long moments, when I doubt your sanity. You’re contaminated now. There’s no way you can come back here until I can arrange something so complicated it would take a small army to track it.”

“I’ve got things to do. I won’t come back without calling you.”

“You certainly won’t.”

“Are we still on to creep Elson?”

“We are. I need some sleep first.”

“So why aren’t you getting it?”

“The chopper choppers,” Arthit says. “The boys downstairs from the apartment we visited a few hours ago.”

“Yes, Arthit? Are you going to make me ask you about them?”

“Aren’t we touchy this morning? Four guys, they said. Three of them you’ve already met, by the descriptions. The fourth was a very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies. Military-looking, they said.”

“Anything more? A tonsure, a third eye, or anything? Something that would distinguish him from any other very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies?”

“One of those moles the Chinese seem to admire. About the size of a ten-baht coin—or, to translate it into American for you, a quarter— with hairs growing out of it. Three or four inches long.”

“How’d they know he was Chinese? As opposed, say, to Korean.”

“One of the boys has a Chinese mother. He heard the thin man swear at one of the others in what is apparently a timelessly popular Chinese oath.”

“They hear any names?”

“If they had heard any names,” Arthit says, more than a bit briskly, “do you think that information would be so far down on this list?”

“Sorry. Guess we’re both a little cranky.”

“Well,” Arthit says, “when you want some sleep, call me and I’ll arrange some way for you to get to my place.” He yawns. “I’ll phone you

later. And, Poke?”

“Yeah?”

“Try to keep today’s to-do list of stupid things really short. You might limit it to the one you’ve already done.”

“My phone’s breaking up,” Rafferty says. He punches it off and slips it into his pocket. Then, for the second time in less than six hours, he walks away from the place he has grown to think of as home.

IN THE SILOM BRANCHof Coffee World, he fools around on Google for thirty minutes or so as he drinks a quart of black coffee with half a dozen shots of espresso thrown in to raise the octane level. The words “Chinese triads” bring up 1,180,000 hits. He narrows it to “Chinese triads Shanghai,” and the number is still something on the magnitude of science’s best guess about the age of the earth, so he gives it up and concentrates on the act of jangling his central nervous system into some persuasive imitation of consciousness.

When he realizes he has reached the point of diminishing returns, he takes out the phone and punches in the number he had thought he would never dial.

“Poke.” It is Ming Li, sounding cool and unsurprised as always.

“Is he there?”

“He’s asleep.”

“Wake him up.”

“You’re on your cell,” she says. “Nothing worth waking him up for should be said on a cell. What time is it?”

“Eight-twenty. And it’s important to you and important to me.”

“Tell me where you are.”

Why not? It’s a little late to worry about any threat from Frank. He tells her.

“Twenty minutes,” Ming Li says. Then she hangs up.

It’s too early for his first planned stop of the day. The man he is going to see, whom he interviewed when he was in the first stages of researching his abandoned book, works seven days a week, but he won’t be open for business until eleven or so. Since Rafferty’s in front of a keyboard, he decides he’ll take the most optimistic outlook: Everything will work out, and he still has to earn a living. He pulls his notebook from his pocket, opens Word, and begins to key in his notes about the spies.

He’s surprised at how easily it comes. He transcribes a few words from the notebook, and then new impressions and new observations crowd in on him, and he weaves them into his notes. What had been the outline of a story begins to become the story itself, complete with the details that bring a place, a person, to life. Tired as he is, the words slip out with little resistance, and gradually the picture assembles itself, sentence by sentence, before his eyes. The trails these men took to come here, the peculiar mixture of openness and secrecy that characterizes their conversations, the eyes, different colors and different shapes, but always in motion.

Arnold Prettyman’s eyes, open and unseeing.

His burned hands wired to the chair.

“Not very vigilant,” Ming Li says, and he jumps two inches straight up from his seat. Ming Li steps back and says, “My, my. Maybe you shouldn’t have any more coffee, older brother.”

“I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours,” Rafferty says. “If it weren’t for coffee, I’d be speaking to you from the floor.”

She pulls up the stool next to him. She is immaculate in a free-hanging white T-shirt and loose-fitting black slacks. Every man in the coffeehouse stares at her. “What’s that?” she says, leaning forward to read the screen.

“It’s money,” he says. He highlights the text, hits “copy,” drops it into an e-mail to himself, and sends it off. Then he gets up and says, “Let’s go.”

“I want some coffee.”

He looks through the window at the developing day. “Get it to go.”

IN THE NEXTtwenty minutes, Ming Li leads him through a tangle of turnarounds, drop-backs, blind alleys, stop-and-watch points, and random reversals that would disorient a homing pigeon. Even Rafferty doesn’t know where they are, and he says so.

“Six weeks with city maps before we came,” Ming Li says. “I must have spent a hundred hours on Google Earth.” She turns into a clothing store and positions herself at the window, behind the mannequins.

“Frank’s drill,” she says, watching the street. She finishes the coffee, slurping it a bit.

“Frank’s drill,” he repeats, looking over her shoulder. Nothing catches his eye. “Did Frank’s drill include teaching you to throw major-league heat?”

Her eyes continue to search the sidewalks. “Major what?”

“Pitching. Like you did with the lychee seeds.”

“Ahh,” Ming Li says. “Day in and day out.” Without a glance back at him, she leaves the shop. Rafferty follows like a good little puppy.

“Why?”

“Why what?” They are side by side in the morning sun, and Ming Li leads them across the street. To most people it would look like a simple maneuver to get into the shade, but Rafferty knows that it pulls followers out of position, if there aren’t many of them.

“Why did he teach you to pitch?”

She looks at him and then past him. Satisfied that no one is there who shouldn’t be, she says, “He wanted me to be good at it.”

Rafferty experiences a pang of something so much like jealousy that it would be silly to call it anything else. “He never taught me squat.”

“Poor baby,” Ming Li says without a hint of sympathy.

“Unless you count sitting silently around the house. He taught me all there is to know about that. My father the end table.”

“Maybe when you were a kid, he wasn’t homesick,” she says.

Rafferty burps some of his newly acquired coffee. “He may not have been homesick, but he read every fucking word about China he could get his hands on.”

“China wasn’t home, older brother. China was my mother. She’s pretty much a nightmare in some ways, but he loves her. He loves yours, too. But he couldn’t bring her with him, could he? Had to leave her back there, with the rest of America. But baseball, baseball we could get. He picked it up on the shortwave at first, and then on satellite TV. Everything in our lives stopped for the World Series. Soon as I was big enough to get my fingers on the seams of the ball, he started to teach me. Hung an old tire in the courtyard of the house we shared with nine other families and had me throw through it, and I mean for hours. Every couple of weeks, I’d move a step back. I’m good to about fifty feet, but I haven’t got the lift for longer.”

“Huh,” Rafferty says from the middle of a cloud of feelings. They swarm around him like mosquitoes, except he can’t swat them away.

“When I was pitching, I was America,” she says. “And I was you.”

The words distract him so much he stumbles off the curb. “How did you feel about that?”

“I liked it. It made me feel important. It was getting the ball through the tire that was hard.”

Rafferty realizes he can see it all: the dusty courtyard, the perspiring girl, the inner tube in the tree. And, behind her, his father. Her father. A life he never imagined. “Where is Frank?”

“He’s where we’re going. He did talk about you, you know. He was—he is—proud of you.” The two of them turn into a small street that Rafferty, after a moment, recognizes as Soi Convent, now known more for its restaurants and coffeehouses than for the religious retreat responsible for its name. “He’s got all your books.”

Rafferty says, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Too bad. And he’s kept up with you in Bangkok.”

This strikes a nerve. “Just exactly how?”

“Frank knows everybody.” She steps off the curb into the morning traffic and raises a hand. “Too many people, in fact. That’s part of the problem.” A tuk-tuk swerves to the curb, its driver gaping at Ming Li as though he’s never seen a woman before, and Rafferty thinks she must get a lot of that. “Mah Boon Krong,” she says, naming a neighborhood Rafferty rarely frequents. She slides over on the seat. “Get in.”

He does, and she gathers her loose black trousers around her.

“What about Leung?” Rafferty asks.

“One thing I’ve learned,” she says, “is never to worry about Leung.”

The driver lurches into traffic, both eyes on Ming Li in the rearview mirror.

“And does Leung worry about you?” He catches the driver’s eyes in the mirror and says, in Thai, “Look at the road.”

“More than he needs to. Frank’s a good teacher.”

The courtyard, the dust, the girl, the woman upstairs. All real, moment to moment, day after day, as real as his life in Lancaster. He forces his mind to the present. “It’s not all baseball, huh?”

“Baseball and other games. Frank thinks four, five moves out.”

“So where is he?”

“I’m not sure thinking ahead like that is something you can learn,” Ming Li says, ignoring the question. “You have to keep all the pieces in your head all the time, be able to see the whole board in six or eight possible configurations. Either you have it or you don’t. Do you play chess?”

Rafferty’s turn to ignore the question. “I suppose he taught you.”

“You know,” she says with a hint of impatience, “all this started long before you were born, before Frank went home and met your mother. He had a life in China, he wasn’t just a tourist. If anything was an afterthought, it was you.”

“That’s not exactly the point, is it? You don’t start a family when you’ve already got one. In America it’s called bigamy.”

“In China it’s called common sense. He had no way of knowing he’d ever be back. The Communists took the whole country, older brother. A lot of lives were changed. It looked permanent, and not just to Frank. What was he supposed to do, go into a monastery? Although,” she adds, “I’ve always thought Frank would make a good monk. He’s got the discipline and the patience for it. And the focus.”

“A Jesuit, maybe.”

“Exactly, although I’m sure you don’t mean it the same way I do.”

“What’s he running away from?”

“You’d know already if you hadn’t ridden your stupid horse out of that restaurant.”

“Whatever it was,” Rafferty says, “it followed him.”

“No it didn’t,” she says with considerable force. “Nothing follows Frank unless he lets it.” She turns and pokes him square in the chest. “You brought it here.”

_!25

Ugliest Mole in China

olonel Chu,” Frank says. He looks at Leung, who does something economical with his shoulders that might be a shrug. “Ugliest mole in China.”

“He and three others,” Rafferty says. “Thai.”

“Local help,” Frank says. “Nobodies,” He sits on the edge of the bed in a backpackers’ hotel on Khao San Road. Ming Li had changed tuk-tuks in Mah Boon Krong and redirected them to Bangkok’s budget travelers’ district, her eyes on the road behind them every yard of the way. Now Rafferty sits on the opposite bed, beside Ming Li. Leung squats peasant style, smoking a cigarette in a corner near the door.

Frank wears a rumpled shirt that he obviously slept in, and his thin hair has a bad case of bed head. “Arnold Prettyman,” he says disgustedly. “Why didn’t you just hire a skywriter?”

“You knew Arnold?”

“Knew about him. Arnold was a stumblebum. Now he’s a dead stumblebum.” He looks older and frailer in the morning light. When he glances up at Poke, Poke sees the little burst of gold in the brown iris of his left eye, something that had fascinated him as a kid and that he had forgotten completely. “Christ,” Frank grumbles, “even when he was working, Arnold was usually the flare.”

“The flare?” Rafferty glances at Ming Li, who has her eyes fastened disapprovingly on the wrinkles in Frank’s shirt.

“The distress signal, the guy you give the wrong info to, so he can leak it to make people look somewhere else while you do whatever you have to do. Of course, the flare can’t be smart enough to figure out the dope is wrong, because if the other guys decide to come after him and get persuasive, he has to believe it. That’s what Arnold was really good at, believing nonsense. For that, he was highly qualified. He was unevolved, one foot in the Mesozoic and the other in his mouth. You were probably okay until you called him. We came here to warn you just in case, because you’re my kid, but now you’ve really screwed yourself. And worse than that. Not just yourself.”

“You, for example,” Rafferty says.

Frank pulverizes a peanut he has been holding and lets the whole thing drop. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I don’t.” The sharpness in Rafferty’s voice surprises even him.

“No, of course not. You’re the aggrieved party, the blameless victim.”

“Actually,” Rafferty says, “that’s my mother. I’m just fine.”

Frank reaches out to the small table between the bed and picks up the bowl of unshelled peanuts he has been dipping into. Beside it is a saucer with several shelled nuts on it. “Fine? You’re an open wound.”

“Like a lot of egotists, you overestimate your impact.”

“I wish that were true,” Frank says. “But it’s not.” He drops a shell to the floor and adds a nut to the pile on the saucer, then holds the saucer out with exaggerated politeness. “Peanut?”

Poke gives him the politeness right back. “No, thanks, but it’s so kind of you to offer.”

“You’re being a horse’s ass.” Frank’s eyes wander away from Poke and gradually settle on Leung. “Colonel Chu. Well, that’s not a surprise.”

“I assume he’s got some weight,” Rafferty says.

“Oh, yes,” Frank says. “The colonel has some weight.”

“If he’s here,” Leung says, “there are others.”

Frank makes the face of someone who’s just realized he put salt in his coffee. “Not a chance. He can’t let anyone know about the box. That’s why he’s using locals.”

“Who went after my family,” Rafferty says, and suddenly he is furious. “Picking my lock in the middle of the night. Going into my apartment with their guns drawn. Where my wife is. Where my child is.”

“I called you,” Frank says. “If I hadn’t been watching . . .”

Rafferty feels his face grow hot. “Gee, and I forgot to bring your fucking medal. Just once, just for practice, why don’t you try seeing something from somebody else’s perspective? Just for the sake of your tiny, mummified little soul. You pop up, materialize out of whatever dimension you normally hang around in, and barge into my life—which is finally on the verge of being the life I want, the life I’ve worked for— dragging a bunch of unwholesome shit, like Marley’s chains. You were dead, remember? And you’ve been gone longer than I knew you. How do I know who you are by now? So I tried to find out. Poor old Arnold was the litmus paper, and guess what? He turned blue.” Poke gets up, just to move. “Whoever you are, you failed the acid test. You said you were on the run. I didn’t want to know why, I didn’t want to spend a few chatty hours catching up with you. I just wish to Christ you’d run in a different direction.”

“I knew this was going to be difficult,” Frank says.

Ming Li says, “Poke. You have to know.”

He stops pacing. He feels light, empty, as though there is a vacuum at his center.

“For God’s sake, sit down,” Frank says. “Trust me for three minutes. Stretch yourself. It’s good for your character. Have a fucking peanut.” He holds out the dish.

Rafferty takes a seat on the other bed. Ming Li sighs. The bed is hard and narrow, the room furnished with nothing small enough to steal. The guesthouse in which Frank has gone to ground is a recessed, nondescript building announced by a sign that originally said home away from home guest house before someone changed one letter with Magic Marker to make it read homo away from home. A statistically improbable number of teenage boys had been lounging on the couches in the lobby when Rafferty and Ming Li came in. A couple of them had been wearing lipstick.

“I already know some of it,” Rafferty says. “Courtesy of my chat with that woman—I mean, Wang, Ming Li’s mother—all those years ago.”

“Back further.” Frank makes a waving gesture, paddling time toward the past. “I told you I stole her. What I didn’t tell you, because you walked out, was that I stole more than that.” He reaches behind him and plumps a pillow, settles it against his lower back, and leans against the wall. “This is ancient history, but it’s pertinent.” He sighs and glances up at Ming Li.

“I was young,” Frank says. “Hell, I was just a kid. You ever do anything stupid, Poke? And of course I was in love, which, for all the nice songs about it, doesn’t really raise the old IQ. You have no idea how beautiful Wang was. Or maybe you do. Look at Ming Li—that’s where she gets it. She was so beautiful it made me ache, and she was lost. More lost than I ever thought anyone could be. Just a kid, and about to be punctured by some fat toad, and then she’d have eight, ten years of getting screwed front, back, and sideways seven or eight times a day before they tossed her into the street to fight dogs for garbage.”

Ming Li gets up and moves to the other bed to sit beside her father. She puts her right hand on the back of his left. He uses his other hand to pat his shirt pocket.

“You don’t smoke anymore,” Ming Li says.

“And if I did,” Frank says to Rafferty, “she’d tell Wang.”

“She’d know,” Ming Li says, “without me telling her.”

“But obviously,” Frank says, resuming the thread, “my employers weren’t going to give me any bonuses for stealing Wang. She was capital to them, they’d invested money in her—all those bowls of rice, all those nights sharing the bed with twelve other girls. They’d paid her mother for her, probably twenty dollars. And the problem was, they were as real as she was. They really did kill people once in a while, sometimes even for cause. So I used the skills they’d taught me, and I took a little something along when Wang and I decided Shanghai wasn’t home anymore.”

“How little?” Rafferty asks.

“Twenty-seven thousand dollars, American. A fortune in those days.”

“It’s not scratch paper now.”

“And to these particular guys, it was also a loss of face. They couldn’t allow it. It would have been like taking out a full-page ad: ‘Free Money.’

The trouble with being a crook is that you have to work with crooks.

Give them an inch and they’ll take your foot.”

“Worse still,” Ming Li says, “you were a foreigner.”

“So it was a racial slap, too,” Frank says. “There were still signs in Shanghai then, ‘No Dogs or Chinese Allowed.’ The men I worked for took that personally, and why wouldn’t they? They’d been shit on often enough.”

“All this,” Rafferty says. “It’s a long time ago.”

Frank gives him an assessing glance. “That’s what I thought, too. When I went back.”

AS FRANK TELLS IT, it had taken him almost a year to find Wang. It took his former employers less than a week to find the two of them.

At the time Frank thought they’d been watching Wang. It wasn’t until later that he realized that the People’s Republic was a nation of spies, a tightly woven fabric of betrayal. All the way from the top down, from cities to neighborhoods to blocks to individual apartment houses, there was always someone whose job it was to keep an eye open, to report anything out of the ordinary. A white man in China, living with a Chinese woman, in the 1980s—that was out of the ordinary. Word was passed along. And, unfortunately for Frank and Wang, word reached the wrong ears.

They’d been shopping that day, buying a space heater. Shanghai was cold in December, and Wang’s room had no heat. They’d been huddling beneath blankets for days, watching their breath drift upward as they talked. When they returned to the room and opened the door, two men were waiting for them.

They wore the same gray, shapeless uniforms that Frank saw everywhere, had the same nicotine-stained fingers, the same winter-city pallor. They could have been anyone: fry cooks, night-soil collectors, gardeners. Their rank showed only in their eyes and in the heavy jade rings they wore. The man in charge, the taller of the two, had sharply incised Mongolian eyes, the lids sloping heavily downward to frame pupils as hard and dry as marbles. A large nut-brown mole, bristling with coarse hairs, decorated his left cheek. The shorter one trained a gun on Wang, but it was the tall one Frank feared. The tall one didn’t need a gun.

The man without the gun smiled, a perfunctory rearrangement of the facial muscles that could have signaled either enjoyment or gas pains, and said, “Welcome back.”

Suddenly Frank needed badly to visit the bathroom. “Mr. Chu,” he said.

Mr. Chu snapped the smile off, quick as a binary switch, and let his eyes flick from Frank to Wang and back again. “Colonel Chu,” he said, and slid the hard eyes back to Wang. He made a sympathetic clucking sound. “She’s changed more than you have,” he said. “Do you like her this way?”

“I like her fine,” Frank said. His mouth was so dry his lips stuck to his teeth.

“Time is so cruel to women. How much do you weigh now, darling?” Chu asked Wang.

“Seventy-three kilos,” Wang said in a whisper.

“And how much did you weigh when he left?”

“About forty kilos.”

Chu nodded. “Seventy-three kilos. What does that come to in pounds, Mr. Accountant?”

“About one-sixty,” Frank said.

“If I could sell her for two hundred dollars a pound,” Chu said, “I could recoup what you stole. Unfortunately, she wasn’t worth that much when she was beautiful. Now she’s not worth anything. Enough fat to make a few dozen candles. Would you like some candles, Mr. Accountant? The nights are long now. You could read by her light.”

“I can pay you back,” Frank said.

The man holding the gun laughed, a sound rough enough to have bark on it.

“I don’t believe you can,” Chu said. He turned to face Wang, his whole body, not just his eyes. “Undress,” he said.

Frank took a step forward, feeling heavy as iron, and the gun swiveled around to him. “Leave her alone,” he said to Chu. He barely recognized his own voice. It sounded like something from the bottom of a well.

Wang was already taking off her coat.

“Don’t do it,” Frank said to her.

“She’s smarter than you are,” Chu said. “If I’d known how stupid you were, I’d never have hired you. I was paying for brains, discretion, and honesty. I didn’t get any of them. The pants now,” he said to Wang, and Wang untied the drawstring on her pants and let them drop to the floor. She hooked her thumbs under the elastic of her frayed underpants. “Come on, come on,” he said sharply. “Are you out of practice? They used to come off quickly enough.”

He had been speaking English, but now he switched to Mandarin for Wang’s benefit. “You thought she was a virgin, didn’t you? You whore-loving son of a pig. She’d been taking it in the ass for years, from me, from my partners, from anyone with a dollar and some grease. You could have bought her from me, you stupid Anglo, I’d have sold her to you for a hundred dollars, employee’s discount. Tell him, Wang. Tell him about all your butt-pluggers.”

“It’s true,” Wang said. She was naked, her arms at her sides, making no effort to hide her heavy breasts, her sagging belly. She was covered in gooseflesh. The sight of the broken arm brought the sting of tears to Frank’s eyes, but the hopelessness in her face filled him with a heat so intense he thought it would blow the top of his head off, and he stepped toward Chu, barely seeing him through the sudden darkness in the room.

“Look at her,” Chu said, his eyes locked on Frank’s. “Old and fat, gorging at the people’s trough. She’s obviously expensive to feed now, and for what? What’s she good for? I know a man not far from here who makes films of women with dogs and horses. He might use her, if no one else was available. I don’t know about the dogs and horses, though. They’re used to better.”

Frank took another step. Each leg weighed a hundred pounds.

“Would you like those candles?” Chu asked pleasantly. “Or would you prefer the film? For me the candles would be easier.” He shrugs. “But of course you’d use up the candles eventually, and you could keep the film forever. The mind’s eye,” he said. “It fades as we get older.”

“I have the money,” Frank said without hope.

“And the interest? Must be a couple of hundred thousand by now. For that? It must be true,” he said to the other man, eyebrows lifted as though he’d just discovered something interesting. “Love is blind.”

“I can get it. All of it. I can pay it back.”

“And you will,” Chu said with enough venom to stun a snake. “But not that way. You’ll do it our way, or she’s a present to the dogs.” He cleared his throat roughly and spit at Wang, hitting her midchest. Wang didn’t even flinch. “Get dressed. Your ugliness offends me. And you,” he snapped at the other man, “put the gun away. It’s rude.”

Chu watched the gun being holstered and then sank cross-legged to a sitting position. “Get those clothes on, whore, and make us some tea. And, Frank,” he said, “sit.” The smile returned, and for an instant he looked like someone’s happy, benevolent grandfather. “We have so much to talk about. You’ve only just come back to us. I’m not sure you know how much the world has changed.”

_!26

The Secret Map

ou became their white man,” Rafferty says. It has dimmed outside, and Leung has gone out twice to make the circuit and come back in, wet enough to tell Rafferty it is raining

again. The room is uncomfortably hot. Ming Li is stretched out on the opposite bed, an arm over her eyes, either asleep or pretending to be. Leung drips silently in the corner.

“Chu was right,” Frank says. “The world had changed. Assholes were still on top. But now they were Chinese assholes, vindicated after all those years, finally fulfilling their destiny as the only true humans in a world of apes. They had power at last. The problem was that white people still had most of the money.

“China was Opening Up,” he says, framing the last two words with his hands, as though they were on a marquee. “I always loved that phrase. It sounded like part of some master agenda, another damn five-year plan, when what really happened was one day they woke up and looked around and realized they’d built a new Great Wall, and all the money was on the other side. The government woke up, I mean. Colonel Chu and all the other Colonel Chus had always known where the money was, and they’d erected some amazing financial structures, cash siphons of staggering complexity, mostly through Hong Kong and a few million overseas Chinese who had thoughtlessly left their loved ones behind as collateral. Every time your mother bought dim sum at Choy’s Café in Lancaster, Colonel Chu, or someone like Colonel Chu, pocketed a dime.”

“Was that why you never ate there?”

“You know,” Frank says wearily, “one of the three or four million things I regret is that I never got all dressed up and took your mother there. Not that it was the kind of place you dressed up for, but . . .” His voice trails off, his gaze on Poke.

“I know what you mean,” Rafferty says.

Frank lets his eyes roam the room. “I didn’t understand anything then, not how anything worked, or . . . I just knew that it hurt to eat Chinese food. It might as well have been glass. Even the smell of it made me hate myself. I read the papers every day. I knew what was happening there. You have to understand, Poke, that none of it made me love your mother any less. I loved her every day I was with her. I still love her.”

After a moment Poke says, “Fine.”

Frank lowers his head, looking down at his lap. “Thanks,” he says.

“China was opening up,” Poke prompts, more at ease with the past.

“They needed me. Well, they needed somebody, and I was there, and they knew I’d do anything to protect Wang. They could have told me to walk on coals, and I would have asked which shoe to take off first. But they didn’t want me to walk on coals. It was my face they needed. They knew that white people were more comfortable dealing with white people. I was the front.”

“And this involved what?”

“A lot of things. Business, you know? If a business deal wasn’t forthcoming, we pushed it along. ‘Facilitated it,’ Colonel Chu would say. Drugs, girls, boys, espionage frames, if that’s what was needed. Take some rough-and-tumble tire executive from . . . oh, I don’t know . . . Akron, Ohio, some bush leaguer with a crew cut and a calculator who’s holding out for a deal breaker, and put him in a room with a willing girl or boy. Let the tape roll. Get his hotel to put the movie on next time he turns on the TV. Or give him a bunch of papers in Chinese that turn out to be specs for some outdated missile system and point the cops, whom you own, at him. Akron’s a long way off, and the contracts are in the next room. The deal breakers turn out to be not so serious after all, and suddenly you own part of a tire factory.”