“And nobody got killed.”

A pause. “No.” Frank dumps the peanuts back into the saucer. “Not in a case like that.”

Rafferty gets up—maybe too quickly, feeling a little light-headed— and goes to the window, looks down on a wet and shining street, courtesy of yet another instant rainstorm. A car plows past, its headlights bright cones of rain against the cloud-seeded gloom of the day. The world going on, he thinks. To Frank he says, “I’m not sure I want to know any more.”

“That’s most of it.” Poke’s father sounds drained. “Just bear with me for a minute more.”

“Why not?” Poke says. “It’s raining anyway.”

“Over the next few years, I learned a lot.” Frank folds his hands, leans back against the wall, and closes his eyes. He swallows noisily and clears his throat. Rafferty realizes he has clenched his own fists, and he relaxes them, one shoulder pressed against the cool glass of the window, wishing he could melt through it, out of the room and back into his life.

“After ten or twelve years, I had a set of skills that I hadn’t known anyone possessed and a map of China in my head that didn’t look like anything on paper. Take any country, Poke, and on top of the paper map you can put another map, a map of how the authority flows and where the obligations are, a map of hidden paths and corners. Blind alleys. The feng shui of power. The secret map, under the radar. One that nobody else has.

“So I began my own map. Each project I took on, I added to that map. I built it up a province, a city at a time. Other countries, every once in a while. A relationship, a promise, a pressure point. A betrayal here, a broken heart there. Somebody’s in love, somebody owes somebody money, somebody’s got a secret, somebody wants revenge. Revenge is always a good one—you can open a lot of doors when somebody wants revenge. The Chinese are superlative haters. They honed the skill during hundreds of years of being treated like shit. I found fulcrums and figured out how much pressure it would take to use them.”

Frank nods, apparently satisfied with the way the story is unfolding. “By then they had some fulcrums of their own. Ming Li had been born, which relaxed Colonel Chu considerably. He was having trouble believing that I still cared about Wang. But with a baby, he knew he had me. Like a lot of Chinese, he believes that the bond of fatherhood is sacred, unbreakable. What he didn’t know was that I had plans for Ming Li.”

“Major-league baseball?” Rafferty asks.

“Do you mind if we discuss you in the third person, Ming Li?” Frank asks.

“Why not?” She doesn’t stir.

Rafferty has thought she was asleep. “What kind of plans?”

Frank doesn’t open his eyes. “How many windows in this room, Ming Li?”

“Three.” She still has her arm over her face.

“How many light fixtures, and where?”

“Ceiling, console, bathroom. Number four is just outside the door in the hallway.”

“Door open out or in?”

“In. Hinges on the left, if you’re facing it from inside the room. The top hinge pin is high in the bracket, easy to get a knife under.”

“What color are the bathroom towels?”

“The color of piss, but they used to be bright yellow. They say ‘His’ and ‘His.’”

Rafferty asks, “How many boys were in the lobby when we came in?”

“Six. Two of them wore lipstick. One of the pretty boys and one of the butches were talking on cell phones. One of the butches had a bleached buzz cut and a port-wine birthmark on his cheek.” She rolls over onto her side, facing him, her head resting on her arm. “Left cheek,” she adds. She pokes her tongue into her cheek to show where it was.

“We started when she was two,” Frank says. “She was drawing maps by the time she was six. At seven she followed me across town without my knowing it.”

“Not easy,” Leung says.

“Not that hard,” Ming Li says, grinning.

“And the point was . . . ?” Rafferty asks.

“Anything that was on my map that wasn’t on theirs was leverage. Ming Li was on my map. Leung was on my map.”

Frank absently checks his watch. “So Ming Li was a double-edged sword, although Chu didn’t know it. He didn’t know he’d given me Leung either. Chu assigned Leung to keep an eye on me for an operation in Pailin, in Cambodia. Industrial rubies, smuggled as costume jewelry, the biggest, ugliest stuff you ever saw. Millions of dollars’ worth, set into crud too vulgar for Imelda Marcos. No customs officer in his right mind would think it was real. Like me, Leung was under a certain amount of pressure.”

“Sister,” Leung says. “Chu never threatened her, just sent her chocolates on her birthday every year. So I’d know that he could get to her whenever he wanted to.”

“And Leung was better than I was,” Frank says. “So I learned from him, and then I turned it around, and when he called Chu to report in, I was there.”

“With a gun,” Leung adds. “We had a candid exchange of views.”

“And came to an understanding. That was two years ago. We took our time, because you don’t hurry with these boys. Five days ago Leung’s sister fell off the map, went down the rabbit hole. Caused no end of consternation on Colonel Chu’s end of the phone. I helped out as best I could, sent his guys to three or four plausible places, and while the hounds were hunting, I made Wang disappear.”

“This isn’t about that,” Rafferty says. He is so tired he can barely stand upright. “This isn’t just an escape. It’s bigger than that.”

“He’s not slow after all,” Ming Li says.

Frank’s eyes are on Poke, the fleck of gold in the left one catching the light. “You’re right, Poke. It is. I did something before I closed up shop in China. I stole the rest of Colonel Chu’s life.”

“THIS IS GREAT,”Rafferty says. He is still at the window and feels as though he has been there for hours. “You took something that could have been business—nasty, dirty business, but business—and you turned it personal.”

“Afraid so.” Frank shells another peanut, and Rafferty suddenly feels beneath his bare feet the sharp edges of peanut shells, perpetually scattered over the living-room carpet in Lancaster. Remembers his mother grumbling behind the vacuum.

“Essentially, that makes me fair game. My family and me.”

“You were always fair game. Chu isn’t someone who plays by rules. This is a guy who would shoot a hotel telephone operator who got his wake-up call wrong.”

“In case you think Frank is just being vivid,” Ming Li says, “he’s not.”

“So you . . . what? You tried to kill him? Obviously, you missed. But this means no negotiation, doesn’t it? One of you is going to have to die.”

Frank smooths his long, thinning strands of hair. “I didn’t say I tried to kill him, Poke. I said I took the rest of his life.”

Rafferty brings up his hand and massages his eyes. His chest feels uncomfortably dense, as though his lungs are full of water. “The rest of . . .” The phrase means nothing, but a word pops into his mind, and he looks at his father. “What box?”

“Ah,” Frank says. He looks at Ming Li.

“You said Chu wouldn’t want anyone to know about the box. What box?”

“Good for you,” Frank says. “Actually, there is probably some room for negotiation, enough at least to get him within range.”

“Of what?”

“A really good gun.” Frank leans down and reaches beneath the bed, and when he comes back up, there is a leather box in his hand, about the size of three hardcover books in a stack. It has a small clasp on the front, and Frank twists it open and lifts the lid. “Pailin,” he says.

Rafferty crosses to the bed, leans forward, and sees rubies, maybe three or four hundred of them, anywhere from half a carat to two or three carats. They shine under the fluorescents like frozen blood.

“They’re flawless,” Frank says. “Most rubies are occluded, did you know that? They’ve got clouds of opaque mineral material in them. Very few are clear enough to cut into big stones. That’s why they’re so expensive. Chu’s been sifting through the Pailin take for decades to fill this box. It was part of his getaway stash, just in case.”

“Worth how much?” Rafferty asks. He can’t take his eyes off them.

Frank looks down at them regretfully. “Well, if you have the luxury of selling them one at a time, through legitimate channels, maybe three million. The way I’ll have to do it, I figure I’ll get one.”

“Is this about three million dollars, or is it about face?”

“Both. And something else. Dig down through the rubies. All the way to the bottom.”

Rafferty sits and does as he’s told, the rubies cold and smooth on his skin. At the bottom of the box, he feels paper. A large envelope. He works it out carefully, not wanting to spill any of the rubies from the box.

“Open it.”

The envelope is half an inch thick. He opens the flap and pours the contents onto the bed. He sees papers, folded in thirds, and an American passport. When he opens the passport, he sees a photo of an old man with a large mole on his cheek and the name irwin lee. Slipped into the passport are a Virginia driver’s license in the same name, and a Social Security card.

“What the hell?”

“Look at the other papers.”

The deed to a house in Richmond, Virginia, also in the name of Irwin Lee. Credit-card statements, some of them showing activity less than a month old. Irwin Lee is a vigorous consumer. Rafferty says, “This is a whole life.”

“It’s Chu’s future,” Frank says. “He’s had someone being Irwin Lee for almost fifteen years. Creating a space for Chu to slip into, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle.”

“It’s his retirement plan?” Rafferty asks.

“He’s more than seventy,” Frank says. “There’s a generation behind him that’s getting impatient. They’re entrepreneurs, Poke, like so many people in China today. They’re tired of the old ways and the old men who won’t let go of them. If Chu doesn’t make a move of some kind, he’s going to get the ax, and that’s probably not a figure of speech.”

“Jesus,” Rafferty said. “Why didn’t you just kill him?”

Frank is silent, but Ming Li says, “Because we wanted him to suffer first.”

“You have to understand, Poke,” Frank says. “We never thought he’d come here. We were only going to be in Bangkok long enough to sell the rubies, and then we were going to disappear off the face of the earth.”

Poke says, “But I talked to Arnold.”

“Yeah,” Frank says. “And Arnold was a stumblebum.”

“Let’s assume you can still get out of here. Do you actually know somebody who has a million on hand to pay for a box of rocks?”

“Sure,” Frank says. “The North Koreans. Anything that’s discounted right now, anything they can turn around—”

Rafferty slices the air with the edge of his hand, and Frank stops in mid-word. “How do you know the North Koreans?”

“My shop, so to speak,” Frank says, as though it were obvious. “And shops like my shop. They’re among the very few people in the world who’ll do business with the North Koreans.”

Rafferty reaches out, grabs a handful of his father’s peanuts, and gets settled. He smiles at Ming Li, who gives him a puzzled smile in return. “Do tell,” he says.

_!27

The Snoop

ubies, he thinks. Even the word has a shimmer around it. Just behind

the shimmer, he can see something, something that looks a little bit like daylight. He has no idea how to get to it yet. But he does know what he has to do: He has to leave it alone for a while, close the door on it, and let it grow unobserved. He either will or won’t have it—whatever it is—when he needs it.

Half an hour after Frank opened the box that contains the rest of Chu’s life, Ming Li and Leung led Rafferty out into the rain and through a dizzyingly complicated route that eventually took them, unobserved as far as any of them could tell, to Sukhumvit. If there was a single back alley that they missed, Rafferty doesn’t know about it.

It is now almost three o’clock. Since leaving the Home Away from Home, Rafferty has made the stop he planned the previous day and has broken at least three laws in at least two countries. The tote bag he filled at the apartment is marginally lighter. He has reached a new and previously unimaginable level of exhaustion and is considering calling Arthit to ask for help getting to a bed when his phone rings. He pulls it out, checks the caller ID, and opens it.

“Time to go snoop on your Agent Elson,” Arthit says. “He’s just gone to eat something. The Erawan Hotel, and make it quick.”

“On the way.” Rafferty hails a cab, thinking, It’s a sign. The rain stopped.

“THE ROOMS ONeither side?” Arthit demands.

The assistant manager who has been delegated to let them in says, “What about them?”

“Both occupied?”

“Room 134 is,” the assistant manager says. A little finger brushes his lower lip. He’s tall, slender, and too handsome for his own spiritual good, and he knows it. He has a habit of touching his face as though he wants to make sure it’s still there. The fingers of his other hand are curled elegantly around a slender cell phone, which he checks between trips to his face.

The phone makes Rafferty nervous.

Arthit wiggles his fingers for attention. “And 138? On the other side?”

The assistant manager massages the tip of his chin with a fingernail that’s been coated in clear polish. Both the finger and the chin make Rafferty want to hit him, or maybe he’s just tired. “It’s empty.”

“Adjoining door?” Arthit asks.

“Yes, of course. So we can open it into a suite.”

“We’ll take the suite,” Arthit says. “Unlock the door to 138. Then let us into 136 through the adjoining door.”

If he touches his face again, Rafferty thinks, I’ll belt him. Now, though, the man’s fingers stop at the knot in his tie, which he adjusts. He takes his time, weighing the demand. He’s been told to open one room, not two. On the other hand, Arthit has his cop face on. “Fine,” he says at last. He floats down the hall to 138 and opens the door, politely stepping aside.

“You first,” Arthit says. “You’ve got another door to open for us.”

Rafferty says, “And we wouldn’t want to get between you and the mirror.” Arthit looks down at his shoes.

Inside, the man unlocks the connecting door to 136 and waits.

“You can go,” Arthit says. “We’ll let you know when we’re done.”

A reluctant nod, and the man leaves. Rafferty watches to make sure his shoes actually touch the carpet. Arthit goes into Elson’s room.

“What was all that with the phone?” Rafferty asks, following Arthit.

“Probably waiting for a call from MTV,” Arthit says. “Or the Miss Universe Pageant.”

Elson’s room is immaculate and dim, the curtains drawn against the sun. Rafferty opens them a few inches. The room still seems clean. “What are we searching for?”

“An edge,” Arthit says. “Doesn’t have to be a sharp one.” He goes to the laptop on the desk and powers it on. “You check the suitcase.”

The suitcase is open, centered on the bed nearest the window. Elson has not bothered to unpack, and Rafferty immediately sees why.

“Jesus,” he says to Arthit, “this guy safety-pins his socks together.” He pulls out a pair. “What do you think, he’s afraid they’ll have a fight and separate or something?” There are six pairs of socks, each pair pinned, identical black calf huggers so new that the writing hasn’t been laundered off the bottom. Below the socks are two narrow black ties, folded precisely into thirds. Then several sheets of dry-cleaning film, each enclosing an immaculate white shirt.

“Shit,” Arthit says from the desk. “He’s got a password program.”

“Figures.” Rafferty lifts the shirts to check beneath them. “This goes beyond neat. This is diseased.” He runs his hands over the lining of the suitcase, not expecting anything fancy: Elson will have been walked through Thai customs as though he were radioactive. The Secret Service, he’s pretty sure, doesn’t get searched much. At the bottom of the suitcase is an envelope and a pair of shoes, black lace-ups similar to the ones the agent wore the night he barged into Rafferty’s apartment. Rafferty removes the envelope and the shoes. He puts the envelope aside and experimentally inserts his fingers into a shoe. He hits something hard and cold and oddly slick. He slides it out, makes a face, and then looks in the other shoe.

“What do you think?” he says to Arthit. “An edge?”

Arthit closes the laptop and comes to take a look. Rafferty is holding a deck of condoms, at least twenty of them, and an economy-size tube of lube.

“If he went to the trouble of hiding them,” Arthit says, “it’s an edge. What’s in the envelope?”

The envelope isn’t sealed. The flap has just been tucked, very neatly, into the opening. Rafferty worries it open, intentionally wrinkling it a little. “Credit-card receipts,” he says. “Mr. Organized, tracking his expenses.” He picks one at random and opens it. “The Lilac,” he says. “On the back he’s written ‘Dinner with Thai police liaisons.’”

“Read me another,” Arthit says. He looks like he’s on the verge of a grin.

“Wattana Enterprises,” Rafferty reads. “The note is ‘Souvenirs.’”

“Come on, Poke,” Arthit says. “I know you haven’t slept, but still. The Lilac. Wattana.”

“Wattana,” Rafferty says. “Isn’t he that guy who ran for the senate a year back? The . . . the— Oh, good Lord, I must be tired. The massage-parlor king.”

“And the Lilac,” Arthit says, “is a no-hands restaurant. You know the drill: You’re seated between two girls and you’re not allowed to use your hands to eat anything while they feed you, but you can do anything else with your hands that might occur to you.”

“They’re on his government-issued credit card,” Rafferty says.

Arthit says, “There’s your edge.”

Rafferty puts everything back into the suitcase except the condoms, the credit-card receipts, and the lube, then goes to the desk. He takes a hotel pen and writes a single word, all caps in large print, on a sheet of stationery, then drops it dead center on top of the stuff in the suitcase. He places the condoms on one side, the lube on the other, and the envelope beneath, so they frame the word.

The word is “HI!”

_!28

As Though He’s Been Invited

bout the same time Rafferty is searching Elson’s suitcase, Arthit’s wife, Noi, is awakened, as she is so often these days, by the pain of her nerves burning away as multiple

sclerosis licks at the sheathing tissue that covers them. She has come to think of the disease as a fire in her body, sometimes banked and sometimes burning out of control, whipped up by something she does not understand. When the disease is raging, especially late at night, it seems there is a third person in the room with her and Arthit, someone who knows how to fan the flames just by staring at her. She feels his emotionless, clinical gaze through the darkness at times when Arthit is sleeping beside her, and on those nights she chews on the corner of her pillowcase to keep from moaning. Noi does not want Arthit to know how fierce the pain has become.

The room is full of light. Of course, it is afternoon. Arthit is off with Poke, making the world—as he likes to say—a more boring place. Her guests will probably be asleep, Rose on the couch and Miaow in the spare bedroom, the one she and Arthit thought would be the nursery until the disease chose their door from all the doors on the block and

knocked.

There is a child in the house, she thinks.

She stretches experimentally, feeling the coals burning in her elbows and fingers—not too bad, a thin layer of ash on them—and explores the weakness in her legs. She has learned in the past few months to test her legs one at a time while she is still in bed, putting one foot atop the other and pushing down, before she tries to stand. On the days when she knows she will be too unsteady to stay upright, she pretends to sleep until Arthit has left the house and then reaches under the mattress on her side of the bed for the aluminum cane he has never seen.

She hopes he has never seen it.

Lately it seems to her that they are playing two different games with similar rules. Noi does not tell Arthit about the progress of the disease because she does not want to burden him. Arthit pretends not to see it because he does not want to injure her pride. So the two of them, each with the other in mind, ignore the thing that has come to occupy the central place in their lives, filling that place with silence.

The place they thought a child would fill.

As she pushes back the covers, she realizes she awoke earlier, dragged up from sleep briefly and then allowed to sink again. It seems to her that the figure who fans the fire was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at her. The image creates a cold ball of dread in her belly.

Her legs tremble beneath her, but hold, as she bends over the foot of the bed to pick up the robe Arthit bought her for no reason, not even her birthday. She hates the color, a sort of faded, pickled, unripe-banana green, but loves the idea of Arthit shopping for her. She can see those thick fingers picking up one flimsy garment after another as he stands stiff and conspicuously uncomfortable in his uniform in some department store, surrounded by women but unwilling to flee until he finds the one he likes, the one that makes her look as yellow as a wax candle. She slides her arms into the sleeves, pausing as she realizes she is standing exactly where the figure stood the first time she opened her eyes. The dread in her belly solidifies into a gelatinous mass.

Pushing it aside with an enormous effort, Noi limps into the hall. No cane today, not in front of her guests. The thought of the child, Miaow, carries her along.

The door to the spare room is ajar. Noi pushes it open a few inches to find Rose sitting on the bed looking at her, with Miaow asleep at her side, the child’s head pillowed on Rose’s arm. Even in sleep Miaow looks as if she’s in motion; her knees are drawn up like someone doing a cannonball into a swimming pool, and her mouth is half open. Rose smiles and lifts a finger to her lips, then eases her arm out from beneath Miaow. Miaow shifts and emits a syllable of complaint. Rose holds perfectly still until the child seems to be asleep again.

The kitchen is as warm as a hive, rich with the honey-colored afternoon light that slants through the windows and fragrant from the small pots of basil and rosemary Noi grows on the sill. Rose’s hair is a glorious tangle that Noi briefly envies and then forgets, concentrating on moving smoothly. “Coffee or tea?”

Rose gives her a sleepy smile. “Do you have Nescafé?”

“Of course.” Noi slides to the cabinet above the counter, lifting her feet as little as possible—it is the moment when they come back into contact with the floor that gives her the most trouble. She tries to make it look like a preference, perhaps a joke, but she can feel Rose’s eyes on her.

“Poke hates Nescafé,” Rose says. “It’s enough to drive me away.”

“Arthit drinks it by the quart. Hot, cold, lukewarm. He sprinkles it on ice cream.” She unscrews the lid of the jar, smaller and lighter than the ones she used to buy, more expensive but easier to handle. “Arthit’s not happy unless he’s nervous.”

“Poke truly loves Arthit,” Rose says, stretching long arms. “It’s a good thing I’m not jealous. Or very jealous anyway.”

“Life blesses you when you least expect it.” Noi puts the kettle on the burner and listens for the little poof as it ignites; she has a deep-seated dread of the kitchen filling with gas. “Arthit was certain he was through making friends. One thing I don’t understand is why it gets more difficult to make friends as you get older. Remember how many friends you used to have?”

“Thousands,” Rose says. “You said hi to somebody and they were glued to you. And it was impossible to be nosy then. Everybody wanted you to know everything. Nobody had a subconscious. And then one day everybody turned into a box of secrets.”

“It’s not that they got worse,” Noi says. She leans against the stove, feeling the comfortable warmth at her back. “Good people get better, I think, and bad people were already bad. It’s just that people close themselves up. I think of young people as standing like this”—she opens her arms—“and older people like this”—she crosses her arms protectively across her chest.

“Or this,” Rose says, shielding her privates. Noi laughs.

“It’s one reason I’m grateful for this illness,” Noi says. “It brought Poke and Arthit together.” Arthit had originally requested an interview with Rafferty when he learned Poke was writing the book that eventually became Looking for Trouble in Thailand. He went out and bought one of the earlier books in the series, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines, to satisfy himself that the new book wouldn’t fall into the genre of self-improvement for pedophiles, and the two of them had met for the first time over an unreasonable number of Singha beers. During the course of their mutual decline into inebriation, Arthit had told Poke about Noi’s disease, then in its earliest stages, and Rafferty had put him into contact with a doctor in Japan who was working on a promising new treatment. The treatment hadn’t worked, but the friendship had.

“He talked about Arthit for days,” Rose says. He had talked about Noi, too, but Rose does not say this. Poke had pitied Noi then, something that became unthinkable to Rose after the two women met. Noi is too strong to pity.

Noi feels a draft on the back of her neck, something that happens with increasing frequency these days. Some trick of the nerves, yet another way they’ve found to call attention to themselves, the pigs. She turns back to the kettle, but the water is not boiling yet.

“You said one of the things you were grateful for,” Rose says. “What are the others?”

“It gave me notice,” Noi says, facing her again. “If it had been faster, I never would have been able to have told Arthit, to have shown Arthit, the way I feel about him. It would have been terrible to be . . . I don’t know, snatched away without the time I’ve been given to make things right.”

“You’re tough,” Rose observes.

“I’ve had practice.” She starts to maneuver herself back around to the stove and stops, staring over at Rose. “What’s that?”

“What?” Rose looks down at herself, and then back up at Noi. “Oh,” she says, putting her hands below the table.

“Ho, ho,” Noi says. “Is this something a friend would tell a friend about?”

Rose brings her hands back up, turning the ring self-consciously. It still feels thick on her finger. “There hasn’t been time. It only happened two nights ago.”

“And you said . . . ?”

“Oh, well. This time I didn’t have the heart to say no. He was terrified. He’d had it in his pocket for hours, patting it every fifteen seconds like he was hoping it had disappeared. I had to take pity on him. As Miaow says, he tries so hard.”

“They don’t deserve us,” Noi says. “Except when they do.”

“The first time I knew he was going to ask, I did everything I could to chase him away, short of shooting him,” Rose says. “I was awful. I talked for hours. I trotted out my mother and my father, their money problems, my infinite number of younger sisters, my past, other men— anything I could think of to scare him off. It’s no wonder he looked so frightened.”

“Has it changed the way you feel?”

Without thinking about it, Rose runs her fingers over the three stones. “The ring is us,” she says. “It’s a picture of us, Poke’s way of trying to make the three of us permanent. It makes me feel—I guess the word is ‘fierce.’ It makes me believe I’d do anything to protect him and Miaow.” She does not add what she thinks, which is, The way you protect Arthit.

“We all know that children need protection,” Noi says, “but we’re supposed to keep it a secret that men do.” She feels the draft again and rubs her neck. “Well,” she says, “come here.”

Noi opens her arms, and Rose gets up and embraces her. Noi’s nose barely comes to her breastbone, but the heat flows from her in waves, and Rose’s breath catches, and she suddenly realizes she is crying.

“It’s not so terrible,” Noi says, patting her. And then she starts to laugh, and the laugh turns into a sob, and the two women stand there hugging each other and weeping until Noi says, “This is silly,” and dries her eyes on the lapel of the awful green robe. “What a pair,” she says, turning back to the stove. “Do you like it strong?”

“Strong enough to dissolve the cup,” Rose says. “Has Poke said anything to Arthit?”

“If Arthit knows, he hasn’t said a word to me. I’ve barely seen him since this morning,” Noi adds, pouring.

“I thought maybe he just told you.” Rose feels a vague disappointment and realizes she should know better.

“Just told me? When?” Noi stirs the cup, which contains a liquid black enough to be a petroleum derivative.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. When he came home.”

Noi turns to her and hands her the cup, which Rose half drains. “Arthit came home?”

“I didn’t see him, but I heard him as I was waking up. He was walking in the hall.”

Noi feels a prickling low in her back and then, again, the draft on her neck, and she turns to look across the kitchen at the back door. It is ajar.

Suddenly the heat inside her is gone, and she is freezing. She goes to the door and tries to pull it closed.

Instead it is pulled outward.

The man standing there—tall, thin, with an enormous mole on his cheek—gives her a grandfatherly smile and comes in as though he’s been invited.

MIAOW HAS BEENcurled up in bed, listening to the women talking. Their voices give her a warm, comfortable feeling, softer than the quilt Rose threw over her. Then, abruptly, the talk stops. She turns her head to the open door and hears something new: quick movement, a gasp, a man’s voice.

It takes her a moment to get off the bed, slowly enough for it not to creak, and to throw the quilt over it. She slips through the door and tiptoes down the hall. The hallway is dim, but the kitchen is a warm, buttery yellow, and she can see them.

Four men. Two of them holding Noi. And then Rose comes into sight, at a run, and grabs a teapot from the stove and hurls it at the nearest man. Hot water—Miaow can see it steam—arcs from the pot and splashes on the man as the teapot hits him in the chest, and the man cries out. Suddenly there are guns, and Rose is backing away.

Miaow steps back. No one has looked toward her. Moving slowly, afraid to take her eyes off them, she reaches the room where she slept, where she thinks her cell phone might be.

But when she looks, it’s not there.

She hears a burst of protest from Rose, followed by a slap and then silence. Miaow is looking everywhere in the room for something, anything, she can use as a weapon, and then she hears voices again. The men are moving through the house now, talking in low voices. The house is not big; it’s only a matter of moments before they find her. The fear she feels is a familiar companion from her years on the street, the same fear she felt in back alleys when she was hiding from one of the men who liked to hurt children.

The important thing, she knows, is to think clearly.

They are in the living room now. One man is giving orders. He mentions a place that Miaow knows, because Rafferty took her there, and Miaow makes herself memorize the name, afraid the fear will chase it out of her mind. If they are in the living room, how much time does she have? Her mental map of the house is vague. She was very drowsy when they carried her in. She is sure, though, there are only one or two rooms to go. She forces herself to continue to survey the room without rushing, looking for anything that might be useful. On the bookshelf, she sees it. It’s not a weapon, but she can use it.

A children’s book, full of bright animals and easy words in big print, the kind of thing Rafferty used to buy her. She grabs it, snatches a pen from the desk, and creeps into the closet. The closet will give her an extra minute.

She has to leave something for Poke. It can’t be anything the men can read.

If only she had her phone.

The idea sweeps over her. She closes her eyes for a moment, trying to visualize. As she hears them coming nearer, she rips a page out of the book and begins to write, just numbers. She writes them fast, almost without thinking.

By the time they open the closet door and she looks up at them, she has shoved the book and the pen into the far corner of the closet and folded the note into a tight square in her palm. There are two of them.

Miaow keeps her face calm. At least she can deny them the satisfaction of her fear.

The tall man with the mole says something to the fat man behind him, and the fat man bends down and picks her up as though she were a bagful of happybirthday presents, slinging her over his shoulder with her arms trailing down his back.

The man with the mole is walking ahead of them, so he can’t see. Miaow holds her breath and drops the square of paper.

_!29

Asterisks Would Take Too Long

ounds to me like you’ve got a partner,” Arthit is saying. He is a terrible driver even when he’s paying attention. When he drives and talks at the same time, Rafferty would gener

ally prefer to be running alongside the car.

The wheels stray blithely over the centerline in the road.

“Forget it,” Rafferty says, looking for the inevitable oncoming truck. “You’ve got to trust a partner.”

“You’re rigid,” Arthit says. “I think it’s an American trait.”

“Would you like it if I suddenly started to list Thai traits?”

“But listen to yourself.” Arthit launches into a left turn from the right-hand lane, and Rafferty hears a peeved little “Hallelujah Chorus” of brakes and horns behind them. “You haven’t seen the man in more than twenty years. He could be completely different by now, all the way to his core. And you’re behaving like he’s been gone fifteen minutes, like he just got back from a trip to the store. Like he hasn’t even changed his shirt.”

“What he’s told me about how he spent that twenty years isn’t very reassuring.”

“That’s exactly why he can help you,” Arthit says. He accelerates out of sheer enthusiasm. “He’s right. The triads and the North Koreans do business. When they’re not trying to kill each other. Who knows? Maybe this is a chance for you to put your relationship back together.”

“I can’t tell you how tired I am of all this family counseling. I’ve gotten along without him for more than half of my life. I’m used to it. It’s not like there’s a gaping hole with ‘Pop’ written on it. Anyway, he’s a crook.”

“A crook,” Arthit says, “is just what you need. Maybe it’s fate.”

“I’m not passive enough to have a fate. And I think we’ve got the counterfeiting thing under control.”

“The best-laid plans,” Arthit says.

Rafferty settles back in his seat and closes his eyes. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“You’ll be more fun when you’ve slept.” Arthit makes a second left, onto his street this time, scraping the curb as he always does.

“Did I used to be fun?” Rafferty asks.

“Within reason,” Arthit says. “Considering that you’re not Thai. But I guess the Filipinos know how to enjoy—” He breaks off and slows the car.

“What?” Rafferty asks, and then follows his friend’s eyes.

The front door to Arthit’s house is standing wide open.

RAFFERTY’S FIRST PASSthrough the house is taken at a dead run, slamming into furniture and bursting into and out of rooms in the hope that somebody will be in them, a panicked circuit that brings him back to the living room and onto the couch, although he has no memory of having sat down. He draws four or five deep breaths to center himself, focuses on his heartbeat until it drops into double digits per minute, and decides to begin again. No one he loves, no one Arthit loves, is here, but there must be something.

He hears Arthit somewhere, banging doors open and closed.

The living room reflects Noi’s knack for graceful order. Nothing is out of place other than the canvas director’s chair he knocked over when he ran through the first time. If there was a struggle, resistance of any kind, it didn’t take place here.

Pushing himself to his feet, he moves down the hallway, his sneakers squeaking on the gleaming hardwood, and into the kitchen. Arthit stands in the doorway, looking at the table. Rafferty can’t meet his eyes. A cup of coffee, Nescafé from the thick dregs of pitch in the bottom of one of them, sits on one edge of the table, off center in its saucer. A spill of sugar surrounding the cup marks the spot as Rose’s. She has a leaden hand with the sugar, adding it in heaps and scattering it like confetti. Another cup, as yet unfilled with water, is on the stove. Coffee measured, water not poured. And then he sees the teapot on the floor, surrounded by water. An unwelcome interruption of some sort.

He can’t make himself focus on what that could have been.

The kitchen door—open, as the front had been—leads to the back garden, Noi’s pride before the disease began to make movement painful. Rafferty stands in the doorframe, his shadow stretching in front of him all the way to the stone-defined border, where dead begonias and zinnias silently signal neglect. Few things are sadder to Rafferty than a dying garden, and this one prompts a surge of the purest grief. He can still see it as a wash of bloom. Noi harvested flowers by the armload whenever he and Rose had dinner with them; he vividly remembers craning at the three of them over the explosion of color in the middle of the table.

Arthit comes up behind him and, after a moment, puts a hand on his shoulder.

Rafferty reaches up and pats the hand and then steps back inside, and Arthit closes the door and locks it automatically. Then he stops moving, looking down at what he has just done. When his face comes up to Rafferty’s, the expression on it is almost unbearable.

“The rest of the house,” Rafferty says. It is the first time either of them has spoken. “Let’s do it together.”

“Right,” Arthit says. “Together.”

The kitchen and breakfast area run the width of the house. The door on the right leads to the dining room, and the corridor on the left will take them back down the hallway to the bedrooms before it ends in the living room. They check the dining room from the doorway, Arthit snapping on the light. Rafferty can smell the lemon polish Noi uses on the table even now, when she and Arthit eat most of their meals in the kitchen to save her steps.

The chairs are pulled neatly up to the table as though awaiting tardy guests. An overly formal bouquet of silk flowers, a melancholy replacement for the loose arrangements of bloom and scent of a year ago, sits dead center on the table’s mirror-smooth surface. A spill of mail is the only spontaneous thing in the room. Everything else seems to be in place, as it was in the living room, and Rafferty feels his spirits lift slightly. He can’t imagine Rose allowing anyone to take her—and especially Miaow—out of the house without a mammoth struggle. There should be damage everywhere. He has an adrenaline-imprinted memory of the evening in the King’s Castle Bar when she poleaxed a six-foot Aussie. Beer-blitzed, the Aussie had yanked the buttons off the blouse of an excruciatingly shy new barmaid, a tiny, wide-eyed girl just arrived from the northeast. The Aussie had taken a table and two stools down with him on his way to the floor and landed flat on his back with his eyes rolling back like fruit salad in a slot machine.

“They would have put up more of a fight,” Rafferty says.

“If they could,” Arthit says.

The two of them stand there, listening to what they’ve just said. Rafferty says, “Arthit. I’m so sorry.”

Arthit doesn’t even glance at him. “We haven’t got time for that. Let’s go.” They take another look at the living room, Rafferty pausing to put the director’s chair upright, and then the master bedroom. Noi and Arthit’s bed is rumpled on one side: Noi’s afternoon nap, Rafferty guesses. The covers have been folded back neatly. The sheets have the sharp, topographical creases that come with sweat, although the room is cool. To Rafferty the sheets are a map of pain. He sees it in the sheets, he has seen it in the halting rhythm of Noi’s walk, he has seen it in Arthit’s face. He has never seen it in Noi’s.

But still: The room is neat. Against his better judgment, his hopes continue to rise.

He follows Arthit into the bathroom, spotless except for one long black hair in the tub, one of the dozens Rose sheds every day without any apparent effect. Her toothbrush stands in a glass next to Miaow’s bright pink one. Just for the hell of it, Rafferty runs his thumb over the bristles. “Damp,” he says. Arthit nods.

And then Arthit pushes open the door to the guest room, pushes it farther than Rafferty had, and they both see it: a small, tightly folded square of paper. Rafferty starts to bend down, but Arthit grunts and shoulders him out of the way, pulls a handkerchief from his pocket. Using the handkerchief, he picks up the square of paper, and the two of them go into the living room, where Arthit carefully opens it.

Rafferty could have told from six feet away that Miaow wrote it. The compulsively neat hand, the ruler-straight lines: She brings to writing the same obsessive control she puts into the part in her hair and the corners of the sheets when she makes a bed. For years she could control nothing in her life. Now she controls the things she can.

“What the hell?” Arthit says. Rafferty looks at it more closely.

It says:

4.61.32.62.41.82.62.74.61.63.53.32.52.53

“They’re pairs,” Arthit says. “Figure the periods are just separators.” He slides the note, still protected by the handkerchief, a few inches in Rafferty’s direction.

“Not the first number,” Rafferty says. “It’s alone.”

The two of them sit close together, studying it, looking for patterns, trying—Rafferty realizes—not to think about anything else. Avoiding the beast in the room: the memory of Arnold Prettyman wired to a chair with half his face burned away.

“This is Miaow, right?” Arthit demands.

“No question.”

Arthit holds the paper up to the light. A bright yellow illustration of a cheerful duck bleeds through from the other side. “Why periods?”

“They’re fast,” Rafferty says. “Anything else, like asterisks, would take too long.”

“The numbers,” Arthit says. He screws up his face. “Nothing higher than the eighties, nothing lower than the thirties.”

“The second digits in the pairs,” Rafferty says. “One, two, three, four.”

“Nothing above four.” The two of them sit, shoulders touching, heads bent over the note.

“She took the time,” Arthit says. “She hid somewhere and took the time to do this.” He looks up at Rafferty. “She was sleeping in the guest room. Maybe they came in through the kitchen. Noi and Rose are there, about to share a cup of coffee. Miaow is awake, down the hall. She hears something, sees something. She hides—” He blinks. “The front door,” he says, his face suddenly soft. “If they came in through the kitchen, she could have gotten out through the front door. Maybe even gotten away. Instead she hid and wrote this.”

“My girl,” Rafferty says. The words, heavy and rough-edged, scrape the inside of his throat. “Brave as a fucking lion.”

Arthit makes a sound that might be a sob. He makes it once. Then he wipes his face with a fist like a ham and says, “Next steps.”

Poke takes another look at Miaow’s note. “Arnold introduced me to a guy,” he says. He pushes the picture of Prettyman from his mind. “He does codes.”

“Get him.” Arthit stands and crosses the room. Looks out the window at the front yard as though he half expects to see them there, laughing and waving at him. Pleased with their joke.

Rafferty pulls the phone from his pocket, and it rings. He snaps it open and pushes the “answer” key so hard the phone flips out of his hand, and he has to scrabble beneath the table to recover it. He picks it up and puts it to his ear.

“Mr. Rafferty,” a man’s voice says. “My name is Colonel Chu.”

_!30

You Guys Are So Old

ou,” Rafferty says. “He wants you.” Frank’s eyes are lowered slightly. He sits, once again, on

the edge of the bed, seemingly unaware of Arthit’s glare. Given its intensity, Rafferty wouldn’t be surprised to see two smoking holes appear in the center of his father’s chest.

“Only me?” Frank says without even glancing up. He looks like a man listening to music from a distant room. “Not Leung? Not Ming Li?”

“Only you. Mr. One and Only.”

“He doesn’t know about Ming Li,” Frank says. He turns his head slightly, but his eyes remain fixed on a point in the middle of the floor. “He knows she exists, but he doesn’t know who she is, who I’ve trained her to be. He probably thinks she’s with her mother. I’m surprised about Leung, though.”

“I’ve been thinking about that myself,” Rafferty says. Leung, sitting on a rickety wooden chair, gives him a startled glance and looks away.

“You can’t give Frank to him,” Ming Li says.

“And why not, exactly?” This is Arthit.

“He’ll kill them all,” Ming Li says as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Your wife and daughter.” She looks over at Arthit. “His wife. Anything else would be too much work.”

“I don’t know,” Frank says. “If you give me to him, I mean. He might not.”

“He’ll kill you,” Ming Li says.

“Of course he will. But he might not kill the others.”

Rafferty stares at his father. Ming Li follows his lead. A silence stretches around them.

“He’s not stupid,” Frank continues. He still has not looked at anyone in the room. “He just needs a reason to let them live.”

“What kind of reason?” Arthit asks.

“Something to his benefit.”

“Like what?” Ming Li says. “If he gets you, if he gets the box, he’s got everything he wants.”

“No,” Frank says. “Not quite. He hasn’t gotten out alive.” He leans back against the wall. “Give me a minute.”

Arthit pushes himself away from the wall, the shoulders of his uniform dark with the rain that has begun to fall again. He and Rafferty had gotten wet changing vehicles four times on their way to Khao San Road.

While Frank thinks, Ming Li asks, “You’re supposed to call him?”

“Yeah. Let it ring a couple of times and hang up. Then, within thirty minutes, he’ll call me back.”

“He’s on a cell, and we’ve got the number,” Arthit says. “Wherever he is, he doesn’t want to get triangulated. So he’ll get as far as he can from his base and then call back.”

Ming Li says, with an edge in her voice, “So, older brother, why didn’t you just tell him where we are? If you don’t care about Frank, what kept you from handing us to him?”

Rafferty and Arthit share a glance. “Because I agree with you. We deliver Frank and he kills them all.”

“And that’s the only reason?” Ming Li asks.

Rafferty shakes his head, deflecting the question. “So I told him I’d talked with Frank once but had no idea where he was and no reason in the world to want to find out. He thought that was funny.”

“He has a keen sense of humor,” Ming Li says. “People die laughing.”

“Wrong word,” Rafferty says. “He thought it was peculiar.”

“Just to go on record,” Arthit says, “I’m not certain he’ll kill them. I’m only about sixty percent sure he would. If I could get that down to, say, forty percent, I’d hand Frank over like an old pair of gloves.”

“Guanxi,” Frank finally says.

Arthit says, “What?”

“Connections. It’s the thing he understands most in the world. For Chu, life is just guanxi. That’s his map: who’s got the power, who doesn’t. He already knows you’re a cop. What he doesn’t know is that you’re a massively connected cop, a cop with so much guanxi in Thailand that he has no chance of getting out of this country in one piece if anything happens to your wife.”

“I’m not,” Arthit says.

“Yes you are,” Frank says. “You’re connected with the other police forces—all of them—and with the military. With the administration. He set a twenty-four-hour deadline. He can’t possibly learn otherwise in that amount of time. And, Poke, you tell him that the cops will turn this whole country upside down if anything happens to the hostages before the exchange.”

They all listen to the implication in what Frank has said.

It is Ming Li who voices it. “So then what? We scare him into not killing them, and then we give you to him?”

“Maybe,” Frank says. “One thing at a time.”

“I wish to shit,” Arthit says, looking like he’d enjoy kicking a hole in the wall, “that we could read Miaow’s note.”

Frank looks up at Arthit. “What note?”

Arthit hesitates, and Rafferty says, “Why not?” Arthit reaches into the breast pocket of his uniform and pulls out a photocopy of the note. Frank and Ming Li bend over it. For what seems like a long time, no one speaks. Ming Li is tracing the line of numbers with a graceful finger. Finally she says, “This is infuriating. It’s familiar, somehow. Like an alphabet I used to be able to read.” She squeezes her eyes closed. Rafferty can see them moving, left to right, behind her lids. “I don’t know,” she says, opening her eyes and flicking a corner of the note. “It feels so close. It feels like it’s perfectly clear but there’s a layer of dust over it, and I should just be able to blow it away and read it.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” Frank says. “What’s in your frame of reference that’s not in mine?”

“Hip-hop? MTV?” Ming Li looks at her father and shakes her head. “The Internet? Can’t be Internet addresses, can’t be chess moves.”

“I’d recognize chess moves,” Frank says. “If you’re right, if you’re close to being able to read this and I’m not, then it’s something generational. Something you do, something you know, that I don’t.”

“I’ve been trying to reach a guy who works with codes,” Rafferty says. “I could try to phone him again.”

Ming Li looks up. Her eyes are slightly glassy. “Phone?” she says.

“Yeah,” Rafferty says. “You know, small object, you push a bunch of buttons and put it to your ear. Then somebody says—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Ming Li says. She extends a hand. “Give it to me.”

Rafferty passes her his phone. For a moment her eyes go back and forth between the phone and the note, and then her face splits into a wide grin.

“Your little girl is really smart,” she says. “And you guys are so old.” She looks at the phone again, her lips moving. “It’s a text message,” she says. “Somebody get me a pencil.”

“ONCE YOU SEEthe pairs, it’s obvious,” Ming Li says. “There are no three-digit numbers, there’s no second number higher than four. I should have recognized it the minute I looked at it. Look. The first number in each pair is the number on the button. The second one is the number of times you push to get to the letter you want. So ‘6’ is the six button, and if you push it one time, you get M. Push it twice, you get

N. Three times is O.” She points at the paper, isolating the one pair of numbers. “Here, the first time she writes it, it’s ‘61,’ so that’s M.” They are all gathered around her. “And the ‘4,’ the one that’s not in a pair?” Rafferty asks.

“It’s just what it looks like, silly,” Ming Li says. “It’s a four.” She finishes writing, puts dashes between the words, and pushes the pad away so they can all see it.

It says: 4-men-guns-mole-kl

Tears spring to Rafferty’s eyes. He turns his head to blink them away, but he can’t do anything about the sudden catch in his throat. Miaow.

“You should be proud of yourself,” Ming Li says. “That’s some kid.”

He swallows, hard. “I can’t take the credit,” he says.

“She was interrupted,” Arthit says, bent over the pad.

Rafferty grabs a ragged breath. “She needed time to fold it, time to put it someplace, probably hide it in her hand, so she could drop it.”

“KL,” Ming Li says. Her eyebrows are contracted so tightly they almost meet.

“Look what she gives us,” Arthit says. “Everything is important. A count, a description. She tells us there are guns. She’s got no time. What else is that important?”

Rafferty says, “Destination.”

Leung speaks for the first time. “Kuala Lumpur?”

Rafferty and Ming Li say, in unison, “No.” Then Rafferty says, “He’s here, obviously. And he’ll stay here for this swap or whatever it’s going to be.”

“It has to be a destination,” Frank says. “Maybe . . .” His voice trails off.

“I’m not even sure Miaow knows Kuala Lumpur is two words,” Rafferty says. “I think she probably would have started with Ku or something.”

“I know where it is,” Frank says. “I know what she was writing.”

“So do I,” Arthit says. “Klong Toey.”

“Where their ships come in,” Frank says. “Where they offload everything. Illegal immigrants, illegal pharmaceuticals, endangered animals, aphrodisiacs made from endangered animals, weapons, truck parts, hijacked American cars, Korean counterfeit money. They’ve got three warehouses down there, prime position near the docks.”

“Three,” Ming Li says. “Two too many. We could watch all week.”

“No,” Rafferty says. “All we have to do is get some eyes on them and then pull him out.”

“Pull him out?” Frank says. “How?”

“He’s set it up himself.” Rafferty holds up his phone. “I call him.”

_!31

Aurora Borealis

hoever is in charge of the rain has turned it up and provided an enhancement in the form of random bursts of wind that send people running for cover. The rain falls

through a pinpoint mist that diffuses the light from the neon signs above

them and scatters it through the night like a fine, colored powder. “So what do you think of Dad?” “I think he could be useful,” Arthit says, lighting up and blowing

smoke through his nostrils like a cartoon bull. The smoke fills the car, and Rafferty takes a surreptitious secondhand hit. “I’ll suspend further judgment until we see just how useful he is.” The rain spatters the top of Arthit’s car and sends rivulets racing each other down the windshield. The sidewalk where they are parked is deserted except for one beggar huddled under a bright blue plastic sheet, and the car smells of wet cloth. “If I’d had any idea Noi would be in danger—” Rafferty begins.

Arthit holds up the hand with the cigarette in it. His face is hard enough to deflect a bullet. “Stop it. It was my decision, not yours. We can either sit here and comfort each other or we can do something.

That means focus on the data. Despite what I said to you last night, one thing cops learn is to ignore leaps of intuition and look at the data.”

“And one thing writers learn is to ignore the data until a leap of intuition tells you what it means.”

“So somewhere between us, we ought to be able to figure out what to do next. I just wish I shared your father’s conviction that Chu doesn’t have time to learn how connected I’m not.”

“I suppose it depends on who he’s connected to. On the force, I mean.”

Arthit puts two fingers on the wheel and wiggles it left and right. Cigarette ash tumbles into his lap. “These guys get a lot of protection. That’s not something you can get from a sergeant. And the cash flow is tremendous. Enough to buy a lot of weight.”

“The three at my apartment,” Rafferty says. He has wanted to say this before but has been reluctant to do so. “They were dressed like farmers, but they moved like cops.”

“Probably were. Probably street cops.” Arthit makes a fist and slams it against his own thigh. “In case you had any doubt about how good his connections might be, ask yourself where he got my address and the information that Rose and Miaow were there.”

Rafferty says, “Here’s something that might matter: My father thinks Chu will have kept this whole thing a secret. Nobody’s supposed to know that he’s arranged an escape route. His colleagues would see it as a betrayal.”

Arthit thinks about it, takes a drag, and then nods. “I guess that’s interesting.”

“So Frank thinks Chu’s traveling solo, with no Chinese foot soldiers along. And he won’t want word to get back that he’s chasing some laowai who ripped off his retirement plan.”

Arthit takes the two fingers from the wheel and holds them up. “Two assumptions.”

“Here’s another one: He might not kill Noi anyway. The main reason kidnappers kill their victims is to keep from being identified. We already know who he is.”

“Unfortunately,” Arthit says, “the other reason is revenge.”

“Right,” Rafferty says. The cramps that have been at work in his belly since he saw Arthit’s open door pay another visit.

“So we have to get them back.” Arthit checks the sidewalk, just a cop’s reflex. “By the way, you’re fortunate in your women.”

“Meaning?”

“Rose and Miaow, of course. And your sister is, as they used to say in England, crackerjack.”

Rafferty watches Bangkok ripple through the windshield like a ghost city. “I guess so.”

“We’ll get them,” Arthit says. “Your father is right: One thing at a time.”

“Set up the watchers.”

“Two cops and Ming Li,” Arthit says.

“I still think he might recognize her.”

“He hasn’t seen her since she was ten,” Arthit says. “And even then, your father says he didn’t pay any attention to her.” He cracks the window, gets a faceful of rain, and rolls it up again. He takes another puff in self-defense. “Anyway, half the cops I could pull aren’t as good as she is.”

“She’s a kid.”

“A very smart kid. And there’s one more thing to recommend her: Unlike some cops, we know she’s not on Chu’s payroll.”

“I wish I were certain Leung isn’t.”

Arthit shakes his head. “Doesn’t make sense. If Leung were working with Chu, none of this would be necessary. Your father would be ten feet underwater and halfway to the gulf by now.” He starts the car and slides the lever to kick up the air-conditioning. Then he stares out through the windshield and sighs deeply. “You don’t know this,” he says, “but my father was a cop.”

Rafferty looks over at him. Arthit fiddles with the temperature controls.

“On the take, of course.” Arthit still does not turn to face Poke. The air conditioner seems to require all his attention, and the cigarette burns forgotten in his free hand. “All Thai cops were on the take in those days. He took from everybody. He took money to keep people out of jail. The old one-two-three: Get the case, crack the case, take a bribe. Pimps, thieves, hired muscle. Twice, or at least twice that I know of, a murderer.” The rain kicks up, shaped by a sudden gust of wind into a curtain of faintly colored mist that ripples and curls in front of Rafferty’s eyes like the aurora borealis. “Of course, usually that meant other people went to jail. See, when a cop takes a payoff, the crime doesn’t go away. Somebody’s got to take a fall.”

Poke wants to put an arm around Arthit’s shoulders but is sure it wouldn’t be appreciated. “I know.”

“So the guilty got off and the innocent got screwed,” Arthit says. “That’s what my father did for a living. He did it practically every day. But you know what, Poke? There was always food on the table. My brother and I went to school. I wound up in England, getting a very expensive education paid for by crooks and, I suppose, by the people who were stuck in those cells for things they didn’t do.” He puts his face near the window and exhales a cloud of smoke onto the glass, then wipes it clear with his sleeve. “Because of where my father was, who he was. That was what he had to do to live, to take care of the people he loved. And he did. He took care of all of us.”

Poke says, “I know why Noi married you.”

“Really?” Arthit says. He stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray, so hard that sparks fly. “I wish I did.”

IT SEEMS SILLYat this point not to go home, now that the only things worth protecting have already been taken. So when Arthit heads for the station to line up his two cops, Poke goes back to the apartment.

The place feels immensely empty. When he first rented it, almost three years ago, it seemed like the perfect size for a man on his own. He filled it completely. He had a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, and an office. He rattled happily from one room to another, doing his work, making his mess, and cleaning it up. He ate at the kitchen counter and drank his morning coffee on the balcony overlooking the Chinese cemetery his landlady had proudly pointed out as the source of the building’s dubiously good feng shui. Never once had it felt too big for him.

Now it seems enormous.

There’s nothing in it anymore that is his alone. His office is Miaow’s room. The bedroom is the secret space he shares with Rose. The living room, the kitchen, all the objects in them—they belong to his family. The pencils have Rose’s tooth marks on them. Miaow’s sneakers have left ghost marks on the carpet. The surface of the sliding glass door has reflected all of them.

Living on that barren acreage in Lancaster, enveloped in his father’s silences, Rafferty grew used to being alone. His mother was affectionate one moment and distant the next. Frank’s attention was thousands of miles away. The solitary child who lived in the space between these adults developed into a solitary man. In many ways he had enjoyed it. Being alone gave him freedom. He did what he wanted, when he wanted. After he discovered Asia, he went where he wanted. A passport and an airline ticket were the only traveling companions he needed. Rafferty persuaded himself gradually that he had chosen to be alone, that this was the life he had created for himself, a life he filled completely. Now, standing in the center of his empty living room, he asks himself whether he could survive being alone again.

He has things to do to prepare for the next day—one thing at a time, as the world keeps reminding him—but first he goes down the hall into Miaow’s room. The cardboard smiley face she drew to mean “Come right in” is hanging on the doorknob, its companion, the frowny face temporarily banished to one of her drawers.

Except for the mussed bed, abandoned in the middle of the night, her room is, as always, immaculate. Her shoes are in a regimentally straight line. There are still times when Miaow sits in the center of the floor, carefully lining up her shoes so she can scatter them and line them up again. For most of her life, she went barefoot.

Drawings in colored pencil are taped to the walls, along with a few older ones in crayon. Here and there he sees a version of the cheerful house below a blue sky and a fat primary-yellow sun that children everywhere draw, but most of the pictures are of the three of them: Rose, preternaturally tall and slender; Rafferty in an ugly T-shirt; and between them—always between them—Miaow, her skin darker than theirs, the part in her hair drawn with a ruler. The wall above the dresser is filled with pictures, but lower and to the left Rafferty spots a brand-new one. He leans down to take a closer look. It shows a lopsided birthday cake, candles gleaming, with three people barely visible in the darkness behind it. In the center of the cake, written in the inevitable pink, is the number 9.

Rafferty lets out more air than he knew he had in him. The cake.

It feels to Rafferty, at that moment, like they had baked that cake and lit those candles months ago. But they had celebrated Rose’s birthday on Friday night, and this is Sunday night. It had been only forty-eight hours.

“I’ll bring you back,” he says to the room. “Both of you. I promise.”

He closes the door behind him gently and goes into the living room to call Peachy.

_!32

In the Bag

eachy and Rafferty are watching from a stall four doors away when the two uniformed cops and Elson, looking sharp and mordantly businesslike in his black suit, enter

the building at 8:10 on Monday morning. Peachy is perspiring as anxiously as someone waiting for a firing squad, and Poke carries a wrinkled brown supermarket shopping bag. When she sees Elson, Peachy takes a step back, and Rafferty grabs the sleeve of her blouse to make sure she won’t keep going.

She has already been upstairs once, at 6:15, to open the more daunting of the two locks, so they wait only three minutes—enough, Rafferty is sure, for the cops to pop the easy lock—and then he more or less hauls her through the street door and up the stairs. Rafferty stands to one side and puts an encouraging hand in the small of her back. When Peachy tries to slip her key into the lock, the door swings open.

Men’s startled voices, Peachy expressing surprise. Rafferty counts to ten and gives the door a shove.

Peachy is up against the wall to the left of the door. One of the cops has the top filing drawer open, and the other is going through the papers on Peachy’s desk. Elson stands beside the cop at the desk, one hand extended to Peachy, palm out, meaning Stay there. The door hinge squeals as Rafferty pushes in, and all of them look up.

“What the hell are you doing?” Rafferty says, bringing the paper bag protectively in front of him. And then he watches their eyes.

Elson glances down at the bag and opens his suit coat. Rafferty can practically see the word “weapon” form in his mind. One of the two cops—the one at the filing cabinet—looks at Rafferty and goes back to work. The cop sitting behind Peachy’s desk sees the bag, and his jaw drops. His hand starts to go for the middle drawer and stops.

His nameplate, pinned on the left side of his chest, says petchara.

“We’re conducting a legal search, under authority of the Bangkok police,” Elson says. “Stand over there, next to your friend, and stay there. Where’s Miss, um . . . ?”

“She’s up north,” Rafferty says, going to stand next to Peachy. “The buffalo is in the hospital.”

“Excuse me?”

“The family buffalo,” Rafferty explains. “Fallen arches, very painful. It’s something of a crisis for a farming family. She’s gone up to offer moral support.”

“Moral?” Elson asks.

“That’s twice,” Rafferty says. “One more remark like that and I’ll break your glasses in half and show you how to use them as a suppository.”

“It’s too bad for the rest of us,” Elson says, “that someone once told you that you were amusing.” His voice is level, but there are pinched little white lines on either side of his nose. “Get back to it,” he says to the cops, and they return to work, although Officer Petchara has to tear his eyes from the paper bag first.

“Why are you here, Mr. Rafferty?” Elson asks. “I didn’t think you were in the domestics business.”

“Sloppy research,” Rafferty says. “I own twenty percent of the company.”

Elson smiles. His front teeth are uneven and pushed in slightly, a characteristic Rafferty has always associated with thumb suckers. “Your name’s not on the license.”

“Gee,” Rafferty says, “am I in trouble?”

“You’re willing to admit you’re part owner?”

“I just did.”

“In writing,” Elson says.

“Sure,” Rafferty says. “Though I doubt anyone will ever read it.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“My supplies.” Rafferty starts to open it. Elson puts his hand inside his coat, and Petchara looks like he will slide off Peachy’s chair.

“Very slowly,” Elson says. His hand comes out with an automatic in it. “Open it very slowly, and don’t put your hand inside. Tilt it and show it to me.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to feel a little silly,” Rafferty says. “Of course, you’re probably used to that.” He holds the bag wide open and tips it toward Elson. It contains what looks like the back half of a rooster.

“What in the world is that?” Elson says.

Rafferty tilts the bag back and looks down into it. “My feather duster,” he says. “Monday is cleaning day.” He takes one of the feathers between two fingers and pulls, and the duster comes out. “You want to be careful,” he says. “Might get dust on that nice budget suit.”

“Let the bag drop,” Elson says. Rafferty does, and it drifts to the floor and lands with a hollow little popping sound. “So. You clean, too. Maybe the agency should find you a job.”

“Golly, Dick. Was that a joke? Is that Secret Service humor?”

“You’re just making my job easier,” Elson says.

“Glad to hear it. If it were any harder, they’d have to give it to someone else. And then I’d have to start creating rapport all over again.”

“Just stand there and shut up. Keep your hands in sight. Come on,” he says to the cops. “This isn’t worth the whole day.”

“Take your time,” Rafferty says. “It isn’t often I get to watch my tax dollars at work.”

The cop at the filing cabinet pulls out folder after folder and flips through them. Papers float free and drop to the floor. The cop at the desk—Petchara—picks up one piece of paper after another, glances at it, and throws it aside. Within two minutes there are papers all over the floor, and Peachy has begun to tremble.

“You guys going to clean this up?” Rafferty asks.

Elson is watching the cop at the filing cabinet. “I told you to shut up.”

“I forgot.”

“Would you like to be handcuffed?”

“It might be more effective to gag me.”

“Mr. Rafferty. One more word out of you and you’ll be gagged, cuffed, and sitting on the floor.”

Rafferty nods and mimes zipping his mouth shut.

Officer Petchara opens the middle drawer.

“What’s this?” he says to Rafferty, pulling out the paper bag. His hands are shaking slightly as he opens it.

“I don’t know. What’s that, Peachy?” Rafferty asks.

“I can explain,” Peachy says.

“Of course you can,” Elson says, elbowing Petchara aside and sitting behind the desk. He reaches into the bag and pulls out a pile of crisp new bills. Since both his hands are full, he clears a space on the desk with his elbows and drops the money there.

“A big withdrawal,” he says to Peachy. “I’m sure the people at the bank will remember it clearly.”

“I didn’t—” Peachy begins, and then she grabs a new breath and says, “I didn’t get it at the bank.”

Rafferty says, “Peachy. What the hell?”

“Still so eager to sign a statement that you own part of this business?” Elson is messing the bills around on the desk with both hands. He looks almost happy.

“As you said, Dick, it’s not on the license. I must have remembered incorrectly.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Elson says. He dips back into the bag and comes up with more money. “My colleagues heard your admission.”

“I guess you’ve got me, then,” Rafferty says, watching Officer Petchara, whose head has snapped forward on his neck at an angle that looks painful. He is staring at the money as though it has spontaneously burst into flame.

Elson feels the attention and glances at Petchara, then looks down at the money in his hand. Some of it is old and soft, crumpled from use. He drops it onto the desk and reaches into the bag again, bringing up more well-worn money. He looks from the money to Petchara and down at the money again. Then his eyes swing up to Rafferty’s.

“I didn’t know about any of this,” Rafferty says.

Elson says, “Goddamn it, shut the fuck up,” and picks up some of the bills. He examines them, one at a time, and then drops them and picks up some more. And then he is scrabbling through the older bills to get to the new ones, smoothing them out, turning them over, holding them to the light. After what seems like ten minutes, his hands drop to the desk.

“You lucky son of a bitch,” he says to Rafferty.

“I’ve always been lucky. Some are, some—”

“The horses,” Peachy interrupts faintly. “I play the horses.”

“You.” Elson is blinking fast. “You play the horses.” He sounds like someone who has learned a language by rote.

“I thought she had it under control,” Rafferty says. “But, golly, I guess . . .”

Elson doesn’t even glance at him. He paws listlessly through the money, nodding to himself, picking up bills at random and holding them up, then letting them drop again. “I don’t suppose,” he says to Peachy, “that you paid the girls out of this money.”

“No,” Peachy says. “I told you that I went to the bank.”

“Rose told you that, too,” Rafferty contributes.

“The bank,” Elson repeats. He looks up at Officer Petchara in a way that makes Rafferty happy the man isn’t even standing near him. “The bank,” Elson says again. “Where we could be right now.”

Petchara has dark half-moons of sweat beneath his arms. His eyes flick to Rafferty’s and away again. “Right. The bank.”

Elson begins mechanically to shovel the money back into the bag. To Peachy he says, “You have backup for this?”

Peachy winces. “Backup?”

“You know—winning tickets, disbursement slips, anything to show you really won it.”

“No,” Peachy says as though she barely understands the question.

“Peachy doesn’t go to the track,” Rafferty says. “This is street betting. As an industry it’s really meticulous about not keeping written records.”

“Of course,” Elson says lifelessly. To Petchara he says, “Can you arrest her for this?”

Even Petchara looks surprised. “For betting?”

“They’d have to arrest half of Bangkok,” Rafferty says.

“Maybe that would be a good idea.” Elson lets the rest of the money drop to the desk and stands up. He looks at Rafferty for several seconds, his mouth pulled in at the corners, and then says, “We’re not going to find anything here, are we?”

“Not unless Peachy had a really terrific week.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Elson says. He kicks idly at the nearest leg of the desk. Then he buttons his jacket, lifts the bag a couple of inches, and lets it drop again. “You know,” he says, shaking his head, “you shouldn’t keep this much money in a paper bag.” He slides his palm down his tie, straightening it.

“Why?” Rafferty asks. “Will it spoil?”

“A safe,” Elson says absently. “A strongbox.”

Rafferty says, “Haven’t got one.”

“A briefcase, then. At the very least. With a lock.”

“People leave paper bags alone,” Rafferty says. “I mean, not people like you, of course. Real people. But they open briefcases. There’s something about a briefcase that just begs to be opened.”

“Whatever you say.” Elson steps around the desk.

“They’re like suitcases,” Rafferty says, and Elson stops dead, so abruptly he looks like someone caught by a strobe. “It’s amazing,” Rafferty continues. “The things people put in suitcases.”

Elson slowly swings his head toward Rafferty, and Rafferty gives him the Groucho Marx eyebrows, up and down twice, very fast. Elson’s eyes narrow so tightly they almost disappear, and a dark flush of red climbs his cheeks.

Rafferty steps up to him. “Anybody ever do this to you in high school?” he asks, and then he puts his index and middle finger into his mouth, pulls them out again, and draws a line of spit down the center of the lenses of Elson’s glasses. Elson inhales in a slow hiss. Then Rafferty leans in and whispers, “If I were you, I’d keep an eye on Officer Petchara.”

PART III

!

TO CHOKE A HORSE

_!33

That Makes Me the Fool

he sky over Bangkok is as gray as Arthit’s disguise. The weather front has decided to acquire an address and stay. “It cost seven thousand, and it was worth it,” Rafferty says.

“Seven thousand? You mean U.S.?” Arthit is dressed in shapeless, style-free clothing that’s supposed to make him look like a maintenance man, and it might, from across the street. Up close, Arthit is cop all the way through; he has the look of a man who sleeps in his uniform. He picks up his coffee, gives it a sniff, and puts it down again.

“That’s what it cost to trade the Korean money for the real thing,” Rafferty says. “Thirty-one thousand in counterfeit for twenty-three thousand in genuine baht and bucks. I got a special rate, but I had to put in my rainy-day money to get the total up.” Rafferty is on the hassock, giving Arthit the place of honor on the couch. “Something wrong with the coffee?”

“The coffee’s not the problem. Did you have to do that thing with his glasses?”

“Yes,” Rafferty says. “I did.”

“You’ve made an enemy.”

“We weren’t on the same tag team to begin with. And he’s such a hypocrite. He’s carrying enough lube to service a Buick, eating at a no-hands restaurant, and making bar-girl cracks about Rose. And he hasn’t got any lips.”

Arthit smooths the unfamiliar shirt, which sports a patch over the pocket that says paul. “It’s bad policy to make people lose face unnecessarily.”

“It was the best moment of my week.”

“You may need him later.”

Rafferty waves it off, more brusquely than he intends. He’s been having second thoughts, too. “If I need him, I’ll get him. Petchara is the one I’m worried about.”

The light in the apartment thins, and the buildings on the other side of the sliding glass door begin to fade as a falling mist dims the day. “Petchara is spotless,” Arthit says. “No blots at all. Eighteen years on the force and not a complaint from anyone. They’re not going to give the Secret Service some hack.”

“Well, they did. And a crooked hack, at that.”

“I don’t doubt you.” Arthit picks up the coffee and blows on it, although it can’t be much above room temperature by now. He’s been toying with this one cup while Rafferty drank three. “I’m just telling you he’s not an easy target.” He puts the cup down again and glances at his watch, a shiny hunk of shrapnel on a band so loose that the watch continually slips around to the inside of his wrist. That’s where it is at the moment, so Arthit gives it a practiced flip to bring it into position. “Our guys should be on the scene by now.”

“And Ming Li,” Rafferty says, the doubt finding its way into his tone.

“She’ll be fine. The question is where Chu’s local help is at the moment.”

“You want a guess?”

“No,” Arthit says tightly. “But I wouldn’t mind some informed speculation.”

“At least two of them are keeping an eye on this building.”

Arthit gives him a That’s obvious shrug. “I’d hate to think I’m wearing this outfit if nobody’s watching.”

“Chu’s got to have someone on me. He can’t really believe I don’t know where Frank is.”

“That would be the easy way, wouldn’t it? Follow you to Frank and kill everybody, including you, right on the spot and then disappear.”

“Yeah.” Rafferty thinks about it for a second. “Shame I don’t have somebody else behind me.”

“One of ours?”

“Sure. Maybe we could take them.”

Arthit sticks his index finger into the coffee, licks it, and makes a vinegar face. “And the point would be . . . ? Other than getting Chu pissed off?”

“Corroboration. Suppose Chu’s not staying in the warehouse where they’re keeping Noi and Rose and Miaow. Maybe he’s too smart for that. Maybe he’s in the warehouse next door, or the one two over. I draw him out, he gets spotted, and a few hours later we hit the wrong warehouse. We might as well send in a truck with a loudspeaker: ‘Look, we’re coming!’ I doubt Chu has stayed alive this long by being stupid.”

Arthit picks up the cup, glares at it, and puts it down with a clatter. “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Sorry.”

“Damn it. I’m not thinking clearly.” Arthit gets up and goes to the glass door. He opens it, shoving it hard enough to bang it against the frame. “Great following weather,” he says nastily. “Can’t see across the street.”

“Arthit. It’s the weather we’ve got.”

“I don’t even know who I’d call.” Arthit’s hands are jammed into his pockets. From the bulges they make, they’re curled into fists.

Rafferty joins him at the door, and the two of them gaze into the gray. “There are times when I hate this city,” Arthit says. “I don’t know why we stay here. Noi would be happier in some three-buffalo village where I could be the big whistle, chief of police. Get to know everybody’s face, break up the occasional fight, nab the occasional motorcycle rustler, get fat and sloppy, and enjoy the time we have left.”

“I guess that sounds good.”

“I’d be bored senseless, of course. But Noi and I would have more time together.”

“One thing at a time,” Rafferty says. “That seems to be the theme. First, let’s get them back.”

The mist is heavier now, the air is the soft gray of goose down. “Make the call,” Arthit says.

RAFFERTY SPOTS THEMthrough the glass doors of the lobby the moment he gets off the elevator. Two of the three probable cops who showed up at his apartment the night he, Rose, and Miaow ran: the fat one who had the knife and one of the two gunmen, not the leader. They are huddled in a doorway across the street and a few doors down. He turns up his collar, pushes the door open, and goes in the opposite direction without a backward glance.

Colonel Chu should call back in ten or twelve minutes.

Rafferty walks fast, trying to look like a man who knows where he’s going. The mist has intensified to a drizzle. He crosses Silom, dodging cars until he is beneath the elevated track of the Sky Train, hearing brakes behind him as drivers slow for his followers. Prettyman’s laws swarm in his mind, and one floats to the top: Stay out of blind alleys unless you want one.

He wants one.

A left takes him up Patpong, its neon dark, the sidewalks deserted now except for the occasional wet, resentful tout waiting to lure some hapless newcomer into a second-story rip-off bar where he’ll be charged ten dollars for a Coke and a nonexistent floor show. Rafferty waves them off and picks up the pace.

Minus the obstacle course of the night market and the distracted throng of bar customers, Patpong is a surprisingly short street. He reaches Suriwong in about a minute and turns right. Maybe nine minutes now. He reflexively checks his watch, and on the way back down, his hand brushes the Glock jammed into the front of his pants. When he put it there, he made sure the safety was on. Now he’s having some doubts. He can feel the tension gathering beneath his heart, coiling like a living thing in a space too small for it.

The drizzle is shouldered aside by a light rain.

It’s not even noon. Normally the sidewalks would be jammed, but now they gleam almost empty except for the food vendors, busily putting up the plastic tarps that will keep their charcoal burning despite the damp. Smoke and steam mingle into a single, needle-sharp smell.

The tarps are bad for visibility, so Rafferty slows slightly, fighting the urge to make it as difficult for them as possible. The few pedestrians are not taking the rain cheerfully: They glance at the sky, shield their eyes with an open hand, and mutter to themselves. One fat and extremely drunk farang, his shirt half tucked in, his eyes as unfocused as poached eggs, bumps heavily into Rafferty and mumbles an apology that seems to be all consonants. A moment later Rafferty hears it again as the fat man lurches into the pursuers.

Just to get them wetter, Rafferty stops at an ATM. Sheltered by the overhang, he fumbles slowly with his wallet, takes out the wrong card, puts it into the wrong slot, pulls it out, puts it into the right slot backward, tries to force it, then withdraws it, a man defeated by technology. He turns around, watching out of the corner of his eye as the fat cop scrambles back between two parked cars. Wallet in hand, Rafferty stands there, looking irresolute. Then he spends a minute arranging his credit cards in alphabetical order before deciding it’s more harmonious to organize them by color. Then he does it in ascending order of the balance due. The chore done, he slips the wallet back into his pocket and loiters comfortably beneath the overhang, safely out of the rain. He checks the sky and then his watch, then the sky again. With a little surge of malicious pleasure, he sees the rain intensify. He slips his hands into his pockets and leans back against the ATM to wait it out, and his cell phone rings.

The display says chu. Rafferty takes two fast, deep breaths, flips the phone open, and says, “I still don’t know where he is.”

“You brought me out in this weather to tell me that?”

“This is nothing,” Rafferty says. “By Bangkok standards this is sunny.”

“According to my watch, you have a little less than nine hours left.”

“It might as well be nine days. I’ll never find him.”

“This is your problem, not mine.”

“Really? I thought you wanted him.”

“You’re his son,” Chu says. “He came to Bangkok because you’re here. He’ll get in touch with you again.”

“I doubt it. I pretty much told him to go fuck himself.”

“You said that to your father? I’m glad you’re not my son.”

“That’s two of us.”

Chu clucks in disapproval. “No one should speak to his father like that.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t know him like I do.”

“I think I know him much better than you do. Until recently, I actually liked him.”

“I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry you have problems with your father,” Chu says slowly. “That’s a terrible thing. But believe me, he’ll try to overcome it. Put yourself in his shoes. You’re a father now—”

“Don’t,” Rafferty says. “You, of all people. Don’t say another word.”

“Time is passing, Mr. Rafferty.”

“He didn’t come here to see me,” Rafferty says.

“Of course he did.” Chu actually sounds surprised. “Why else would—”

“I was an afterthought. As usual. He came here to sell something.”

There is a silence on the line. Rafferty scans the street and sees the fat cop still huddled behind the parked car. Then Chu says, “He told you that?”

“That was one of his topics.”

“Did he tell you what it was?”

“I didn’t care enough to ask.”

“It will be extremely unfortunate for you if he succeeds.”

“If it’s any comfort to you, I didn’t get the impression he was in a hurry.”

“Oh, he’s in a hurry,” Chu says. “And you should be, too. Don’t call me again unless you have something to tell me.”

“Got it.”

“And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll make sure you know where to find them. What’s left of them.” Chu hangs up.

Rafferty’s heart is pounding in his ears like a battering ram, and his lips feel thinner than Elson’s. He jams his finger at the button to return the call, and the phone rings for a long time before Chu picks it up and says, “What?”

“You don’t get the last line,” Rafferty says. “Listen to me. If you kill the cop’s wife, you’re dead. This is a guy who knows everybody. He’s assigned to help the United States government on terrorist issues, the Muslim unrest in the south, and all that. He’s connected like a fucking octopus. And I personally guarantee you that if anything happens to my wife and daughter, I will devote my life to finding you and killing you. And don’t think I can’t find you. You were the other thing my father talked about.”

“I’m terrified. Are you finished? I’m getting wet.”

“No, I’m not finished. You hurt them and you’ll spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.”

“I already spend my life looking over my shoulder. But thanks for the tip about the cop. And don’t call back until you’re ready to tell me where Frank is.” Lightning freezes the day for a second, and there is a burst of static on the line. When Chu comes back, he is saying, “Tick, tick, tick.” Then he hangs up again.

Rafferty slams the phone closed with such force he cracks the display screen on the outside of it. Black paramecia swarm through the rain in front of his eyes. He grabs his wallet, turns back to the ATM, pushes in a card, and then reaches down and flicks off the safety on the Glock. He keys in his PIN, waits, snatches the ten thousand baht from the machine’s jaws, and pockets it, along with his card. Then he walks straight across the sidewalk and into the street. A truck is lumbering past, and Rafferty slants past it as it roars by, then darts behind it and runs alongside for a quarter of a block before peeling off and crossing the rest of the way to the sidewalk. He slows to a quick walk without looking back.

Half a block past Patpong, the sidewalk borders a construction site for a building that has been going up for years. Hiding it from the sidewalk is an ugly fence of rippled metal. It has an opening in it just wide enough for one person to slip through, and Rafferty snags his shirt as he squeezes through it. He finds himself in an expanse of mud, liberally pockmarked by puddles too wide to jump: red-brown mud and the slate gray sky framed on the surface of the standing water. The skeleton of the building stretches skyward to disappear into the rain and mist. The floors and the elevator shafts are in place. Rafferty thinks briefly about the elevator and then dismisses it. All they’ll have to do is wait at the bottom.

He needs them closer.

He hears the corrugated fence creak as the two of them force their way through the opening.

Work on the site has been called on account of the rain, but in a small trailer all the way across the site a light gleams through the falling water. The door is on the far side, and he heads for it, his feet slipping in the mud. It seems to take much longer to reach it than it should, and his back feels like it’s six feet wide and painted bright orange, but eventually he is there, and he circles around, climbs the first two of the four steps leading to the trailer, and tries the door.

It opens. The light inside is a leathery yellow, an incandescent bulb in a lampshade the color of parchment. No one home.

Moving quickly, he climbs the last two steps, leaving muddy footprints on them, and plants his boots on the floor. The trailer sags slightly beneath him. He moves left, all the way to a door, which he opens. It’s a bathroom. He leaves the door ajar and then pulls off his shoes and backtracks, avoiding his footprints. At the top of the stairs, he jumps. The mud underfoot is amazingly cold.

He figures they will split up and come around both sides of the trailer, so he drops to his belly and slithers beneath its center, pulling himself along on his elbows until he is facing back the way he came. In a moment he sees their boots approaching.

They pause in front of the trailer and hold a whispered conversation. The one on the right—the thinner one, Rafferty guesses—is in charge. He has the last word. They do as Rafferty expected, one going left and the other right. Silently, Rafferty pulls himself around 180 degrees so he is looking at the side of the trailer where the door is.

The two pairs of boots trudge through the mud, pausing cautiously at the trailer’s corners, approach the steps, and stop. They are probably listening. Then one of them disappears behind the steps, followed by the other. Rafferty can no longer see their feet.

But he can hear them. More whispering, followed by the sound of one pair of boots climbing the steps. The door opens, hard and fast. An instant later the other follows.

Rafferty is out from under the trailer in two seconds flat, clawing at the gun. It is in his hand as he steps through the door and realizes immediately that he has made a mistake.

The fat one is to his left, in front of the bathroom door. He turns in surprise as the trailer dips beneath Rafferty’s weight, glances at the gun, and brings his hands up, but he’s not the one Rafferty is thinking about as the door creaks behind him. A point of ice touches the back of his neck.

“Put the gun on the desk,” the man behind him says in Thai. The fat one smiles. He has a merry smile.

“Or what?” Rafferty says, not moving.

“Or I’ll shoot you. It’s not what I’m supposed to do, but right now your gun is all I’m thinking about.”

“How about this? How about you give me your gun, or I shoot your friend.”

“That’s his problem,” says the man behind him. The fat one’s smile slips a notch.

“Shoot me and Chu will kill you.”

“Chu’s not here,” says the fat one. “You are.”

Moving slowly, Rafferty puts his gun on the work desk to his right. “Now what?”

“Now is a little awkward,” says the man behind him. “Why didn’t you just let us follow you? Why did you have to make fools of us?”

“With all due respect,” Rafferty says, “I just put my gun down, and you didn’t. I think that makes me the fool.”

“It’s a problem,” says the fat one, not entirely unsympathetically. “You spotted us, you pulled us into this place. Our superiors won’t be happy.”

“Why don’t we just keep it to ourselves?” Rafferty says. “Go somewhere, get dry, maybe have a cup of coffee.”

“You’re joking,” says the one behind him. He prods Rafferty’s neck with the gun. “Take three steps forward.”

“I’ll buy,” Rafferty says. Once he has moved, there will be no way he can reach the gun.

“You shouldn’t have embarrassed us,” says the fat one.

Another prod. “I said move.”

“Oh, come on. There’s got to be a way—”

“Now.”

Rafferty steps forward, and as he does so, he sees the fat one reach behind himself, sees his hand come back with the long knife in it.

The fat one shrugs an apology and starts to move in, and Rafferty balances on the balls of his feet, ready to leap forward. Then the man behind Rafferty gasps, and the cold spot of the gun barrel disappears. The fat one backs up hastily, fast enough to bang his back on the bathroom door.

Rafferty turns, sees the arm around the thin one’s throat, the gun at his temple, and behind him the cold, calm eyes of Leung.

_!34

You Have Thirty-One Left

he needs her medicine,” Rose says. “She should have told us that at the house,” says the man with the gun.

Noi moans again, this time at a higher pitch. Her eyes are clamped closed, her face sheened with sweat that glues her bangs to her forehead. Her arms are drawn in as though she is chilled, and bent at acute angles, bringing the knotted hands to the level of her heart. Fine vertical lines edge her mouth. Rose had piled up ten or twelve empty burlap sacks to make a bed for her, but Noi has twisted herself halfway off them, so that her legs are bare against the cold concrete floor.

“Are you human?” Rose says. “Look at her. She’s in pain you can’t even imagine.”

“Probably not,” the man says. “Although that hot water hurt.” He looks at an irregular red patch on his forearm.

“I can go get it,” Miaow says. “I can take a taxi.”

“Listen to you,” the man says. The rain rattles on the tin roof like a handful of tacks. In places water has seeped in beneath the walls. The man is sitting on a wooden packing crate, the gun dangling lazily between spread knees. A dozen cigarette butts lie at his feet, folded over and smashed flat in a light snowfall of ash.

“I can go now,” Miaow says. She stands up, and the gun comes to life, the barrel lifting six inches, a snake poising to strike.

“No you can’t,” the man says. “Sit down or I’ll shoot you.”

“You will not,” Miaow says. “I’m a little girl.”

“And I’ve got one at home,” the man says. He hitches up his left trouser leg to preserve the crease and gives it a critical glance. “But I’ll shoot you anyway. Sit.” Miaow steps back, so she is flat against the wall, but she remains standing.

“That means you have a wife,” Rose says. “Suppose Noi was your wife. Suppose your wife was in this kind of pain.”

“Suppose I shoot you all now,” the man says. “I’m going to have to do it sooner or later.”

Miaow says, “You won’t.”

The man inserts two fingers into his shirt pocket and comes up with a cigarette. He checks the position of the filter, puts it between his lips, and picks up the lighter that’s beside him on the packing case, next to the empty ashtray. “I don’t particularly want to,” he says, lighting up. “But I will.”

“Will not,” Miaow says.

Rose says, “Miaow.”

Miaow says, “Give my mother a cigarette.”

The man’s eyes widen, and then he chokes on smoke, and the choke becomes a laugh. “Give your mother . . .” he says, and then he laughs again.

“She needs one,” Miaow says. “She smokes all the time. Even more than you.”

“She burned me,” the man says. Miaow just stands there, one hand extended. He laughs again. “Okay, come here. You take it to her.”

Miaow, still in her pink bunny pajamas, pushes herself away from the wall and goes to the man. He takes out a second cigarette and gives it to her, and Miaow puts it between her lips. The man lights it. Miaow blows the smoke out of her mouth, uses her sleeve to wipe the taste off her tongue, and eyes the coal professionally to make sure it’s alive. Then she looks up at the man.

“You won’t, you know,” she says.

“HE CAME OUTof Warehouse Two,” Arthit says into the phone.

“Are Ming Li and your guys still there?” Rafferty says. “Make sure they see which one he goes back into.”

“Thank you,” Arthit says. “Are there any other routine procedures you’d like to suggest?”

“That’s the only one that occurs to me. Listen, we’ve got kind of a problem at this end.”

“Kind of a problem? And who’s ‘we’?”

“Leung and me.”

“Leung’s at your apartment?”

“Well, no.”

Something slams down on Arthit’s desk. “Poke—”

“I know, I know. I couldn’t stay there. So I went out, and two of Chu’s goons picked me up. Anyway, Leung and I have them now.”

“Leung and you have them now,” Arthit parrots.

“Yeah. Both of them.”

“And you think this is kind of a problem?” Arthit’s voice has risen into an unfamiliar tenor range. “What’s Chu going to do when they don’t come back? For all you know, they’re supposed to be checking in every half hour.”

“Okay, but in the meantime we’ve got them.”

“What a cock-up.” The British schoolboy inside Arthit occasionally surfaces in times of stress.

“That’s not really constructive,” Rafferty says.

“Fine. Constructive. Let’s think positively here. Give me your ‘ideal scenario,’ as they say in those books.”

Rafferty eyes the two men, now sitting on the floor with their fingers interlaced over their heads while Leung leans against the desk, staring at them as though they were already dead. Their police badges are on the desk. The fat one doesn’t look so merry anymore. Neither of them meets Rafferty’s eyes. He says, “Just a minute,” and goes out onto the steps and closes the door behind him. “Okay. We get them to tell us which warehouse, and then we let them go, and they hurry back to Chu and keep their mouths shut.”

“That certainly qualifies as ideal,” Arthit says.

“You asked.”

“I was hoping for something in the realm of the possible.”

“It’s possible,” Rafferty says.

“Would you like to— Wait, hang on. Call you back. My other phone’s ringing.”

Rafferty folds his own phone, goes back into the trailer, and tries to emulate Leung’s stare. He might as well be intimidating furniture, for all the reaction he gets.

“Hey,” he says. They look up at him. “It’s a funny thing,” he says. “I look at you guys and I don’t see killers.”

“We’re not,” says the fat one.

“Tell you what, then. Let’s sit here until Arnold Prettyman walks through this door.”

“That was Chu,” the fat one says. “We wired Prettyman to the chair and knocked him around some, and then Chu sent us out of the room.”

“He didn’t want us to hear anything Prettyman said,” the fat one says. “He never wants anyone to hear anything.”

Rafferty looks at the badges on the desk, which say sriyat and pradya. “Which one of you is Pradya?”

“I am,” says the fat one.

“Well, Pradya, it’s too bad nobody got that on video, because right now it looks like the nail in your coffin.”

“We didn’t know Chu was going to kill him,” says the thin one, Sriyat.

“Right.”

“He said he had questions, said it might get rough. But he never said that—”

“Fine. I’m sure it came as a total surprise.” Without looking away from the prisoners, Rafferty goes to Leung, the trailer creaking beneath him, and whispers into Leung’s ear. Leung nods and pockets the gun he took off the thinner cop. Then he straightens and gestures to Pradya, the fat cop, to go into the bathroom.

Rafferty pulls his own gun and points it at Sriyat.

Both men look confused, but Pradya gets up and reluctantly opens the bathroom door. Leung lazily trails him in.

Rafferty gazes down at the seated cop for a moment and then waves him to his feet and backs up to the far side of the trailer. Sriyat follows. Rafferty puts a finger to his lips, raises his eyebrows, and waits. Fifteen or twenty seconds creep past.

From the other side of the bathroom door, a shot. Then another.

Sriyat goes white, and his head involuntarily jerks around so he can look at the door. It remains closed.

“Sriyat,” Rafferty says. “I’m over here.” The man turns to face him. His mouth is working as though he’s trying to dry-swallow a handful of pills.

“Your friend just gave the wrong answer,” Rafferty says. “This is the question. Which warehouse are the women and the girl in?”

“Three,” the man says at once.

Rafferty raises the gun so it points directly at the man’s right eye. “Which one? And louder.”

“Three!” Sriyat shouts.

The door opens, and Leung pushes Pradya through it. Pradya looks wetter than he did when they came in from the rain, and he walks as though the trailer floor were pitching beneath his feet.

“Same answer,” Leung says.

Rafferty’s phone rings, and he flips it open.

“He went into three,” Arthit says.

“It’s three,” Rafferty says. “We’ve got confirmation here.”

“Of course,” Arthit says, “Chu will probably move them when those guys don’t come back. If he doesn’t just kill the girls and leave them there.”

“They’re going back,” Rafferty says. “That’s where you come in. Hold on. I can’t talk here.”

He goes out again through the trailer door and into the rain. “Offer them a ticket,” he says. “They’re cops, right? Badges and everything. We’ve got them dead to rights. Murder, kidnapping, practically anything you can think of. You could come here and arrest them right now, and their lives would be over. Or you can promise to let them walk if they’ll go back to Chu and keep their mouths shut.”

“I don’t know whether I can keep that promise.”

“Arthit. Who cares?”

“How do we know that they won’t—”

“We don’t.”

After a moment of silence, Arthit says, “That’s what I was looking for. Certainty.”

“If you were in their shoes, whose side would you come down on?”

“I wouldn’t be in their shoes. But I take your point. If they stick with Chu, they’re going to take a big one the minute he’s gone. If they go with us, they’ve got my promise. It doesn’t mean much, and they’ll probably suspect that, but . . . If the boat is sinking, you’re going to grab anything that looks like a life vest.”

“I couldn’t put it better myself.”

“Still, it all depends on how much faith they put in my promise and how scared they are of Chu, and there’s no way for us to know any of that.”

“So we’re back where we started.”

“Let me think about it.”

“When Chu called, I gave him a line about you, one that might be tough for him to check.” He tells Arthit the story he sold Chu.

“It’s not bad at all,” Arthit says. “That counterterrorism stuff, they keep all that pretty close. I doubt that Chu could get a line to anyone who could contradict that.” He pauses. “But it only works for Noi. The goal has to be to get all three of them.”

“Look, Arthit, you can put these guys away forever. They’ve probably got families to worry about. And cops in prison have a short life expectancy. When they finally get out, if they ever do, they’ll still have to worry about Chu. We have to persuade them that if they play with us, the whole thing goes away.”

“We could make them promise to try to protect Rose and Miaow.”

“We could try.” Poke hopes Arthit can’t hear the doubt in his voice. He looks out over the mud-smeared desolation of the building site. All it lacks to mirror his emotional state is a dead dog. “So will you talk to them?”

“Oh, well,” Arthit says. “Let’s give it a go.”

Rafferty climbs back up the stairs, feeling like he’s done it a hundred times, and opens the door. The two men on the floor follow him with their eyes, trying to read his face. He puts the cell phone on the desk and presses the “speaker” button. Into the phone he says, “Arthit, meet Pradya and Sriyat.” He points at the two cops. “You’re going to talk to someone. He’s a police colonel, and he’s the only guy in the world who can get you out of this.”

“YOUR SHIRT ISyellow,” Miaow says.

Noi, her head in Rose’s lap, opens her eyes and looks, startled, at Miaow.

The man with the gun glances down at himself, as though checking. “And?”

“That means you love the king.”

The man squints at her, puzzled. “Everybody loves the king.”

“And you have a bracelet,” Miaow says. “Can I look at it?”

“Why not?” The man transfers the gun to his left hand and extends his right. Miaow comes up to him and slips a finger under the yellow rubber bracelet. “ ‘Long live the king,’” she reads aloud. Like yellow clothing, the bracelets are everywhere in Thailand since King Bhumibol entered the fiftieth year of his reign.

“The king is everyone’s father,” the man says.

Miaow tugs the bracelet and lets go, so it snaps lightly against the man’s arm, and brings her eyes up to his. “Would the king be proud of you now?”

The man straightens as though he has been struck, and the muscles in his face go rigid as plaster. He brings his right hand up, across his chest and all the way to his left shoulder, and he backhands Miaow across the face.

The blow knocks Miaow sideways. She lands on her right arm, her elbow making a cracking sound as it strikes the cement. A line of blood threads down from one nostril, but she ignores it and raises herself on the injured elbow to look the man in the eyes.

Rose has started to rise, but Noi’s weight holds her down. “You,” Rose spits. “You would make the king weep.”

The man gets up very quickly and holds the gun out, his arm shaking and his face tight enough to crack. He racks a shell into the chamber.

The rain grows louder as the door to the warehouse opens, and Colonel Chu comes in, peeling off a raincoat. He stops at the tableau in front of him and hisses like a snake. The man with the gun snaps his head around to see Chu’s eyes blowing holes in him.

“Lower the gun,” Chu says quietly, almost a whisper.

The man does so, looking down at the floor. He is suddenly perspiring.

Chu crosses the floor and extends a hand. After a one-heartbeat pause, the man holds out the gun. Without looking at it, Chu pushes the magazine release. The magazine snicks out into his waiting hand. He ejects the shell in the chamber and flips the gun so he’s holding it by the barrel. He says, “Show me your teeth.”

The man glances around the room as though he hopes there is help there somewhere, and says, “My teeth?”

“Now,” Chu says. “Show them to me now.”

The man peels back his lips to reveal two crooked lines of teeth, and Chu lifts the automatic and snaps it forward precisely, using a corner of the grip to break one of the man’s incisors. The man chokes off a scream and drops to one knee, a hand clapped over his bleeding mouth.

“You have thirty-one left,” Chu says, “and I’ll break every one of them.” His face is as calm as that of someone who is reading an uninteresting book. “These people are my currency,” he says. “Shoot them and you’re stealing from me. People who steal from me have short, unhappy lives, although I’m sure that many of them would like to die long before they’re allowed to.” His eyes slide over to Miaow, still on the floor, and he says, “You. If you want to grow up, wipe your face and get back over there, where you belong.”

_!35

Not Really the Go-To Guy on Hip-Hop

ne thing at a time. He can only think about one thing at a time. If he doesn’t focus, he’ll be paralyzed. He won’t know which direction to pursue. Can’t think about Miaow, Rose, and Noi. Can’t think about his father. Can’t worry about Colonel Chu. What he can do right now is sit next to Peachy, in what must be the worst restaurant in Bangkok, and look through the window at the bank.

“It’s the wrong man,” Peachy says for the second time. This time she yanks at his sleeve to drive the point home. “They’re talking to the wrong man.”

“What a surprise,” Rafferty says. “Since it’s Petchara who pointed him out.”

The only thing in the restaurant’s plus column is a tinted front window, covered with a reflective film on the outside, installed to keep the afternoon sun from roasting the diners before they die of food poisoning.

Rafferty is thankful to be unobserved, although no one on the other side of the street is exercising much vigilance. He and Peachy might as well be standing on the sidewalk in Ronald McDonald costumes and waving. Elson hasn’t looked up in a quarter of an hour. After ten minutes of bullying the teller through the glass divider, he did his CSI wallet flip and was led to the other side of the partition, where he shooed the teller off his stool and took control of the man’s computer. He attacked it like a finalist in the Geek Olympics, occasionally shaking his head in impatience. The teller hovers anxiously, literally wringing his hands, while Petchara and the other cop stand around on the lobby side of the glass in the loose-jointed stance of people with nothing to do.

The most attentive person in the bank is the teller Peachy identified as the one who passed her the bad bills. He sits bolt upright at his station, three windows down, his eyes darting everywhere, a man following the flight of an invisible hummingbird. His pallor is evident even under the bank’s fluorescent lights.

Elson stands, shoving the stool back, his finger jammed accusingly against the computer screen. He snaps a question. From behind him a man in a wrinkled suit, who seems to be the branch manager, ducks his head several times. If he had a cap, Rafferty thinks, he’d doff it and tug his forelock. Without turning away from the computer, Elson says something, and the manager scurries off.

“I don’t understand,” Peachy says.

“Sure you do.” Rafferty sips his coffee, made from some instant left over from World War II and three times the suggested amount of water. “They did everything they could to keep Elson away from the bank. We screwed that up, so now they’re keeping him away from the man who knows where the money came from.”

Peachy says, “Oh.”

Outside, a young woman wearing the blue skirt and white blouse of a Thai high-school girl, a stack of books clasped to her chest, dawdles indolently up to the window, exuding the flat rejection of the entire planet that characterizes teens everywhere. There’s nowhere in the world, her stance says, that she wants to go, and she isn’t even eager not to get there. She stops and leans wearily against the window with her back to Rafferty, giving him an excellent view of her shoulders and her long, straight black hair. If she were transparent, he could see Elson,

but as it is, he can’t.

“That’s funny,” Peachy says.

“Not very,” Rafferty says, craning to see around the girl.

“She shouldn’t be standing there. She’s very pale. Why would she stand in the sun like that?” Thais are keenly aware of skin color, with the pale end of the spectrum being the most desirable.

“Pale, is she?” Rafferty asks, being polite. He still can’t see Elson, but the bank manager comes into view from some office somewhere, carrying a cardboard box full of small pieces of papers—deposit slips, Rafferty would guess.

“Pale as a Chinese,” Peachy says, and makes a tsk-tsk sound. She puts her fingers to her cheek. “She’s going to ruin her skin. Prem always says—”

Rafferty says, “Chinese?” He leans forward and raps the glass twice, sharply, with his ring.

The girl turns and smiles. It is Ming Li. She gives him a snotty little schoolgirl wave, just the tips of her fingers, and heads for the door.

In the bank across the street, Elson is also waving, waving a piece of paper beneath the nose of the unfortunate teller. The teller takes it, and his face falls. He looks at Elson, and his shoulders rise and drop down again, the universal gesture for Huh? Then Elson does a Come here gesture to the cops and holds out his hand for the slip.

“Food any good?” Ming Li slips into the booth.

“Depends,” Rafferty says, watching the bank. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Last night. We had to be at the warehouses pretty early.”

“Not long enough,” Rafferty says. “Give it a week and come back.”

Ming Li studies Rafferty’s plate. “What have you got?”

He ignores her, intent on the scene across the street, but she bangs the edge of the plate with a fork as a prompt, and he says, “Gristle, fat, elderly tomatoes, and some sort of roots with dirt on them.”

“Yum,” Ming Li says. She picks up his chopsticks, dips them in his water glass, and wipes them on a napkin. He turns to watch her tweeze some shreds of meat and put them into her mouth. She chews experimentally and swallows. “Awful,” she says, taking more.

Peachy jams a finger into his arm and says, “Look.”

Elson has brought the teller out of the enclosure and into the lobby area. The two cops pat the man down, then take him by the elbows and steer him toward the doors to the sidewalk. Elson follows, being trailed by the bank manager, who’s obviously protesting. Something he says stops Elson, and the Secret Service man turns to him. The two of them have a somewhat heated exchange.

“Do you know about the other guy?” Ming Li asks with her mouth full.

“The other guy,” Rafferty says.

“I knew you hadn’t spotted him. I passed him a couple of times, just leaning against a building a couple of shops up and looking through that same window. Big, broad in the shoulders, maybe some kind of weight lifter. Looks like a steroids poster. Scarred face, broken nose. Maybe Chinese, maybe Korean.”

“You passed him twice? And he didn’t see you?”

“Actually,” Ming Li says, using her fingers to scrub dirt from the roots of whatever she’s eating, “I passed him three times. And no, he didn’t see me. Why would he? You didn’t.”

“You didn’t pass me three times.”

“If you say so.” She wipes her fingers on the napkin and looks at the smear of dirt. “Can I have some of your coffee?”

“It’s not actually coffee,” Rafferty says. “It’s a cup that might have held coffee in 1973, and hot water has been poured into it.”

Ming Li picks it up and drinks anyway. Then she looks down at the cup and says, “That’s nasty.” She reviews the word for a moment and says, “Nasty? Is that what they say?”

Looking out the window, Rafferty says, “Is that what who says?” Elson, his argument over, makes an impatient wave at Petchara and the other cop, and they hustle the teller through the doors.

Ming Li gives Rafferty a little whuffing sound to indicate how obvious it is. “Those hip-hop singers on MTV.”

As the doors close behind him, Elson calls for the others to wait, pulls out a cell phone, and punches a number.

Rafferty says, “I’m not really the go-to guy on hip-hop. If you want to know anything about OFR, though, I’m your man.”

“What’s OFR?”

“Old Fart Rock.”

“No, thanks. Except, how long do you think until the Rolling Stones are doing ads for Viagra? Maybe use that song—what’s it called?—‘Start Me Up.’”

“The young are so cruel.”

Ming Li is watching Elson and his crew approach the corner, the teller arguing at every step. “So we’re not going to follow those guys?”

“They’re not going anyplace interesting. See the guy three seats away from the empty window?”

Ming Li counts chairs. “The one with the wet shirt?”

“Him,” Rafferty says. “I think he’s going someplace interesting. And my guess is that your steroids guy is going there, too.” He glances at his watch. “About forty-five minutes left. Can you get Leung here?”

Ming Li picks up some more of the greens between her chopsticks, touches the roots, and rubs her fingers together. “I know they grow vegetables in dirt, but this is silly.”

“Leung,” Rafferty repeats. “Can you get Leung here?”

“He’s here already,” she says. She chews, and he can hear the grit between her teeth. “If you can’t see Leung, it means he’s here.”

FORTY MINUTES LATER,Rafferty says, “This is it.” He is watching the bank. “You straight with it?”

“Sure,” Ming Li says. “Leung’s half a block from here, on the other side of the big guy. I dawdle my way up there, looking demure and harmless. Just chillin’.”

“Jesus,” Rafferty says.

“So the big guy’s between us, in the tweezers,” Ming Li says. “That’s what Frank calls it, the tweezers. You and Peachy pick up the teller. Then we see what happens.”

“Okay, good,” Rafferty says. “Are you armed?”

Ming Li lifts the cover of the book on top of her stack to reveal a recessed square cut into the pages. Nestled into it is a small automatic, maybe a twenty-five-millimeter. It’s been blued, but the bluing has worn off around the grip and trigger guard to reveal the shine of steel. It’s seen some use. “School’s fierce. Got to watch out for the homeys.”

“And you can shoot that thing?”

“Better than I can pitch.”

The lights in the bank lobby flicker and dim, and the manager opens the door for the last couple of customers.

“Here we go,” Rafferty says, but Ming Li is already out the door. He throws some bills on the table. A moment later the bank door opens again, and two men and a woman exit. The last one out is the man they want. Peachy says, “I’m not sure I can do this.”

“I’m not sure you can either,” Rafferty says. “But I haven’t got anybody else.”

_!36

Death Threats and a Strawberry Shake

he little wet man’s coming toward us,” Ming Li says on the phone. “Don’t turn the corner. He looks over his shoulder all the time.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re standing here. I’m a rich schoolgirl on the phone, and Leung is my faithful servant. He just took the books so I could make a call, and now he’s standing a respectful distance away, appropriate to our class difference. Ouch.”

“What happened?” Rafferty and Peachy are stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, people parting left and right to get around them.

“Leung pinched me.”

“You had it coming. What I mean is, why are you with Leung? You’re supposed to be on either side of the big guy. What happened to the old tweezers?”

“He noticed me. Looked at me a couple of times. Probably got a thing for schoolgirls. So I had to pass him. Don’t worry, he’s written me off. He’s watching your little wet man, and the little wet man keeps

looking behind him.”

“I need to know everything they do.”

“Gosh,” Ming Li says. “Everything? I’m just a girl.”

“This is the big leagues.”

“Okay, here he comes. The big one. I think you can come around the corner now.”

Rafferty grabs Peachy’s sleeve and hauls her behind him, with Peachy apologizing to everyone they bump into. They round the corner, and Rafferty sees the big man take the arm of the teller and drag him to the curb. There is a quick verbal exchange, the big man bending down to get his face close to the teller’s, and the teller nods eight or nine times, very fast, and then attempts some sort of argument, which is broken off when the big man shakes him like a rag mop. The teller looks like he is going to burst into tears. Then the big man reaches into his suit coat, and the teller mirrors the movement. Each comes up with a manila envelope.

Ten or twelve yards beyond them, Ming Li chatters brightly into her phone, right foot lifted and hooked behind the white sock on the left ankle. With her free hand, she toys with her hair, rolling a wisp of it between her fingers as though nothing in the world were more urgent than split ends.

The men exchange envelopes.

“Ming Li. You and Leung stay with the big guy. I don’t care what it takes, don’t lose him.”

“Big brother,” Ming Li says. “I’ve been training for this all my life.”

“Good. Keep your phone on.”

The big man gives the teller a shove, just enough to make him stagger back a step, and heads off down the sidewalk. He passes Ming Li and Leung without a glance but then sneaks a look back at Ming Li. The teller exhales heavily, wipes his face, and pulls out a cell phone.

“Go, Peachy,” Rafferty says.

Reluctantly Peachy covers the distance to the teller, as slowly as someone navigating a forest of thorns. She has lifted a hand to touch him politely on the shoulder when he looks up and sees her. The cell phone drops from his hand and hits the pavement, and the battery pops out. He takes a quick step back, mouth open, as though Peachy has fangs, claws, and a snake’s forked tongue. A second backward step brings him up against Rafferty. Rafferty has already pulled his wallet out, and when the man whirls to face him, Rafferty lets it drop open and then flips it closed again before the man can register that the shiny object inside it is a large silver cuff link.

“Give me the envelope,” Rafferty says in Thai.

Half a dozen emotions chase each other across the teller’s face, but the one that stakes it out and claims it is despair. He slowly closes his eyes and reaches into his jacket. Eyes still shut, he holds it out. Rafferty takes it, opens it, looks inside, sees the bright new money, and says into the phone, “You still with the big guy?”

“He’s waiting outside another bank, half a block down,” Ming Li says. “I’m putting my hair up.”

“Gee, that’s interesting.”

“Well, who knew he liked schoolgirls? Probably hangs around playgrounds. Leung has a different jacket for me, too. And some glasses. I’ll look like an office lady.”

“Good,” Rafferty says. “If he meets someone, let Leung take the one he meets, and you stay with the big guy. When Leung’s got whoever he talks to, I want him to call me. You just follow the Chinese guy—”

“I think he’s Korean.”

“I don’t care if he’s a Tibetan Sherpa. You stay with him. I mean this, Ming Li, you can’t lose him. He could be your father’s emergency exit.”

“Poke?” Ming Li says.

He brings the phone back to his ear. “What?”

“He’s your father, too.” She hangs up.

Rafferty stares down at the phone and then dials Arthit’s number.

HEADLIGHTS ARE BLOSSOMINGon the oncoming cars. Arthit reaches down and flips on his own.

“There has to be more than one teller at each bank,” Arthit says. He is balancing two fat manila envelopes in his lap as he drives. “No single teller could pass a quarter of a million in one day.”

The two envelopes, one taken from the little wet teller and the other from the teller the Korean grabbed outside the second bank, contain a total of five hundred thousand baht in brand-new counterfeit bills, plus thirty-eight thousand dollars in bogus American hundreds.

“I was wondering about that,” Rafferty says. He has his cell phone against one ear, with Ming Li on the other end, but he is talking to Arthit. “Elson found something at the other teller’s station. Probably the distributor—the Korean weight lifter—contacts only one teller directly, and that teller gives it to the others. So Petchara handed Elson someone who has no idea where the junk money comes from. As much as that might interest Elson, I don’t give a shit. I personally don’t care about the mechanics. What I care about is what we’re going to do with the money.”

“Which is what?” Arthit asks.

“I’m thinking about that.”

“Americans are so collaborative.” Arthit makes a turn against an oncoming stream of traffic, and Rafferty closes his eyes. Leung, alone in the backseat, laughs. On Rafferty’s cell phone, Ming Li says, “I’m pretty sure he’s finished.”

“Why?”

“He’s home, I think. A guesthouse, two stories. A light just went on, second floor right.”

“You’re extremely good.”

“Tell that to Frank. He’d like to hear it.”

“I will. Where are you?”

“Soi 38, half a block off Sukhumvit.”

“We’ll be there in—” He looks out the window. Neon signs glow above the sidewalks now, beacons in the premature dusk. Arthit hits the switch for the wipers, and for what seems like the thousandth time since Rose and Miaow were taken, Rafferty inhales the sharp smell of newly wet dust. He locates a landmark. “Make it ten, twelve minutes.”

“It’s a shame we couldn’t get the third teller,” Ming Li says.

“We got two,” Rafferty says. “That’s two more than we had an hour ago.”

“We should have had Frank with us.”

“No. Frank needs to stay where he is. He’s out of sight, and he needs to stay out of sight.”

“He must be going crazy.”

“Call him,” Rafferty says. “Let him know what’s happening.”

“I don’t know what’s happening.”

Rafferty says, “Why should you be different?” He hangs up.

“Where?” Arthit says.

“Soi 38. Can you get us some help there?”

“Cops?” Arthit’s reluctance is both visible and audible.

“Unless you have connections with the army.”

Arthit brakes behind a bus and drums his fingers impatiently against the wheel. “Do we think he’s alone?”

“We don’t have the faintest idea.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Arthit says, cutting around the bus, “but I’m slowly becoming comfortable with that condition.” He picks up his own cell phone. “I can get three I’d trust to keep things to themselves.”

As Arthit dials, Leung leans forward in the backseat. “What’s in the other envelopes? The ones the big guy kept.”

Rafferty turns to him, feeling the stiffness of exhaustion in his neck and shoulders. “My guess is that it’s real money. The tellers pass the bad stuff and pocket good bills to balance it out. Say you withdraw five thousand baht. They give you five thousand in counterfeit and then pull the same amount out of the cash drawer and put it into the envelope. They’ve got the withdrawal slip, the drawer is minus the right amount of money, and they’ve passed the counterfeit. Everything adds up at the end of the day, and Mr. Korea’s envelope is full of real money.”

“Yes, now,” Arthit says into his cell phone. “Soi 38, stay out of sight.”

“And they keep the tellers quiet by threatening their families,” Rafferty says. “Poor schmucks.”

“Schmucks?” Arthit says, dropping the phone onto the seat. “Is ‘schmucks’ English?”

“English is a polyglot tongue,” Rafferty says. “A linguistic hybrid enriched by grafts from many branches of the world’s verbal tree.”

Arthit nods gravely. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Anything I can do,” Rafferty says, closing his eyes and leaning back, “to illuminate the path of the ignorant with the torch of knowledge.”

“He talk like this a lot?” Leung asks.

“Inexhaustibly,” Arthit says. “If bullshit were oil, Poke would be OPEC.”

Rafferty, eyes still closed, says, “I think this is going to work, Arthit.”

“What’s going to work?”

“I don’t know yet.” He feels himself start to drift sideways, like a boat on a tide, and forces his eyes open. He turns to Arthit. “But look what we’ve got. Half a million bad baht plus almost forty thousand counterfeit U.S., and probably more where that came from. We know where the women and Miaow are, where Chu is. We’ve got—maybe—a couple of people inside, unless those two cops get really stupid. We didn’t have any of that eight hours ago. I’ve got a door opener for Elson, if I can figure out how to use it.”

Arthit says, “Why would you want to?”

“Weight. Just plain old weight.”

“A bullet weighs a lot if you put it in the right place,” Leung says. “Why not just kick the door in? Get your women. Kill Chu.”

“We might,” Rafferty says. “But if we do, I want to make sure one more time that they’re where we think they are. And I want to know who’s holding the gun on them.”

“There’s one thing we don’t have,” Arthit says. “Time.”

“Yeah,” Rafferty says. His watch says they have less than three hours left. “Right now I’d trade rubies for time.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER,Rafferty, Ming Li, Leung, and Arthit sit in Arthit’s car, around the corner from the Korean’s guesthouse. Water from Ming Li’s long hair is dripping onto the upholstery, sounding like a leak in the car’s roof. Arthit has a window cracked open so he can smoke.

“My hair is going to stink,” Ming Li says, waving the smoke away.

“Be glad it’s not a pipe,” Arthit says.

“You should really quit.” She is haloed by the headlights of the police car that has pulled up to the curb behind them. The wet skin on her neck gleams. Two of Arthit’s most trusted cops sit in the second car while a third, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, sits behind the wheel of a tuk-tuk and waits in the rain outside the guesthouse, keeping an eye on the door.

“You know, quitting is at the very top of my to-do list,” Arthit says. “Right after I get my wife back and ice Colonel Chu. Oh, and figure out what to do about this counterfeiting thing.” He looks at his wrist, flips the watch around so he can see it, and says, “He’ll call any minute now.”

“Why don’t you buy a shorter band?” Rafferty asks.

“It gives me character, makes me memorable,” Arthit says. “The same way some men wear bow ties.”

“That’s kind of sad,” Ming Li says, wringing out her hair. “Why don’t you get some cowboy boots or something? Or let your eyebrows grow together above your nose?”

“This is a carefully calculated affectation,” Arthit says. “It calls attention to the weight of my very masculine watch. It shows that I care what time it is but I’m not obsessed with it. It has a certain enviable flair.”

“What it does,” Ming Li says, “is make you look like a kid who borrowed his father’s watch.”

“Speak right up,” Arthit says. “No need to be deferential.”

“It is so not the bomb,” Ming Li says. To Rafferty she says, “Did I get that right?”

“It’s about as dated as Crosby, Stills and Nash.”

Ming Li says, “Well, how am I supposed to know? I’m from China, for heaven’s sake.”

Rafferty’s phone rings, and when he opens it, Chu says, “Where is he?”

“No idea.”

“That’s very sad. My watch says—”

“The nice thing about watches,” Rafferty says over him, “is that you can reset them. They’ve got that little stem you can turn, right next to the three.”

Chu’s voice is cold enough to lower the temperature in the car. “And why would I do that?”

“Because you have to. Frank just called me. He’ll meet me at five-thirty in the morning.”