And, as ever, for Munyin who holds the thread
Contents
| 46 Monsoon Christmas | 301 |
|---|---|
| 47 He’s More Nervous Than You Are | 306 |
| Note | |
| Acknowledgments | |
| About the Author | |
| Other Books by Timothy Hallinan | |
| Credits | |
| Cover | |
| Copyright | |
| About the Publisher |
PA R T I
!
SMALL CHANGE
!1
Three-Card Monte
oke Rafferty has been on
the sidewalk less than five minutes when he
spots the tail.
Three of them, all male. One ahead, two behind. Taking their time, no telltale urgency. All relatively young and dressed to fade: one white T-shirt, one red T-shirt, one long-sleeved black shirt. Pants of that indeterminate color produced by years of hard laundering, a sort of enervated second cousin to beige.
The clothes aren’t much help, but they’re all Rafferty has: no conspicuous physical anomalies, no scars, no rap-inspired dreadlocks, no tattoos, no bleached hair. He’s looking at a trio of standard hands dealt out of the Thai genetic shuffle—short and slim-waisted, with the black hair and dark skin of the northeast. Three everyday guys, out on a choreographed stroll, doing a pretty slick version of the barre rotation: changing places at random intervals, the man in front casually crossing the road to the far sidewalk and drifting back, replaced moments later by one of the pair behind. A rolling maneuver, like a deal in three-card monte.
The guy in the black shirt is what Arnold Prettyman calls “the flag.” He’s wearing reflective shades, he walks funny, it’s too hot for long sleeves, and it’s too sunny for black, even at 10:30 a.m. So either Rafferty is supposed to notice him or he’s not very good.
Prettyman’s First Law of Espionage, drummed into Poke’s head over the past couple of weeks: Always assume that the other guy is good.
So. Take score. Moderate foot traffic, average for an early weekday morning in an upscale Bangkok shopping district. Stores just open, offering lots of nice, big, reflective display windows, useful to both the stalkers and the target. The sun is still low, so shadows are long, which can be either helpful or deadly around corners. The usual blast-furnace, wet-blanket Bangkok heat, heat with an actual weight to it that frequently takes Rafferty by surprise even after more than two years here. It changes the way he dresses, the way he breathes, and even the way he walks. The way everybody walks. It shortens the stride and makes it pointless to waste energy lifting the feet any higher than absolutely necessary; all the effort goes into moving forward. The result is what Rafferty has come to think of as the Bangkok Glide, the energy-efficient and peculiarly graceful way Thai people have of getting themselves from place to place without melting directly into the sidewalk.
Unlike the other two, whose glides are so proficient they might as well be ice-skating, the guy in the black shirt moves like a man wearing cast-iron boots: heavy steps, a lot of lateral hip action. He looks like Lurch among the ballerinas. The man has, Rafferty finally recognizes, a clubfoot, so put a check in the physical-anomaly column after all. The clubfoot is housed in a black architectural structure half the size of a tuk-tuk, the three-wheeled taxis so ubiquitous in Bangkok. So here’s Black Shirt, aka Tuk-Tuk Foot; him, Rafferty can spot.
Okay, he can spot him. So what?
Thought One is to lose Black Shirt first. Reduce the opposition numbers and then worry about the others. Thought Two is to stay with Black Shirt and try to lose the others, on the assumption that he can spot Black Shirt anytime.
But.
The men who are following him probably expect him to proceed from Thought One to Thought Two. Of course, they might know he’d realize they’d expect that, and they’d revert to Thought One. That’s what Prettyman would probably do in this situation.
Or is it? And is there a Thought Three that hasn’t even come to him?
Rafferty feels a brittle little arpeggio in his forebrain, the opening bars of the overture to a headache.
A long time ago, he learned that the best course of action, when you’re faced with a difficult problem, is to choose one solution, at random if necessary, and stick with it. Don’t question it unless it kills you. Okay. Lose Black Shirt and keep an eye on the other two.
The flush of comfort that always accompanies a decision recedes almost immediately at the thought of Prettyman’s Second Law. There are usually more than you can spot.
Moving more slowly than the flow of foot traffic, forcing the trackers to lag awkwardly, Rafferty passes the entrance to a five-story department store, one of the newly cloned U.S.-style emporiums that have sprung up all over the city to serve Bangkok’s exploding middle class. He pulls his followers out of position by moving an extra twenty steps or so past the polished chrome of the revolving door, as yet unsmudged with shoppers’ fingerprints. Then he stops and searches the glass for reflected movement while he pretends to be fascinated by whatever the hell is on the other side of the window. He counts to five, turns away, takes two steps in the direction he’s been moving in, then decides that whatever was in the window—on second glance it seems to be women’s shoes, of all the stupid fucking things—is indispensable after all. He reverses direction abruptly, seeing the pair behind freeze at the edge of his vision and then scramble to separate, and goes back to the store entrance, moving quickly and decisively, trying to look like a man who’s just spotted an irresistible pair of high heels. Pushes at the revolving door.
Cool air like a faceful of water.
He finds himself in the cosmetics department, where a hundred mirrors point back at the door he has just come through. In the closest one, Rafferty watches White T-Shirt come through the revolving door, snap a quick, disbelieving look at the mirrors, and keep right on going until he’s outside again.
Rafferty is practically the only customer in the store. Half a dozen hibernating saleswomen gape at him. One of them shakes herself awake and says, in English, “Help you, sir?”
“I’ve got a terrible problem with . . . um, tangling,” he says, tugging at his hair and keeping his eyes on a mirror that frames the two men talking in the street behind him. White T-Shirt with his back to the door, Red T-Shirt displaying dark skin and a pimp’s thin mustache. Lots of gesturing.
“You hair okay,” says the woman behind the counter. She employs the unique Thai-style selling technique; the chat is more important than the sale. “You hair pretty good.” She squints dubiously. “Maybe too long, na? Maybe cut little bit here.”
In the mirror Rafferty sees Red T-Shirt lose the argument on the sidewalk and push the revolving door. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” Rafferty says, shoving off from the counter. “Before I brush.” He walks quickly through the cosmetics department and boards the store’s central escalator.
Standing sideways as the escalator’s sole passenger, he watches Red T-Shirt do some broken-field running between the counters to catch up, and then Rafferty turns and takes the rest of the steps two at a time.
Turn right at the top of the escalator, move at a half run through a voluptuary’s forest of mannequins wearing impractical underwear the colors of extinct tropical fruits. The women’s-underwear department borders the housewares department, a broad expanse of gleaming white marble and porcelain meant to awaken kitchen envy in female shoppers. Rafferty stops at the first of a long line of gleaming stainless-steel sinks, complete with a homey assortment of washed dishes in a drying rack, and grabs the squeeze bottle of detergent, hoping it’s not just a prop. It is reassuringly heavy. Without looking back, he pops the top and spews a long zigzag of clear, thick liquid on the tile floor as he retreats up the aisle. At the far end, he waits until Red T-Shirt has found his way through the glade of underwear. Once he is sure the man has seen him, Rafferty turns and breaks into a full-out bolt. He is rewarded by the distinctive sound of running feet behind him, then a cry of despair followed by a clamorous crash as some display or another goes down. A glance over his shoulder shows him Red T-Shirt at the bottom layer of a heap of broken dishes, flailing to get his hands and feet under him on the slick floor as shopgirls come running from all directions.
The down escalators take Rafferty in easy stages to the basement, which is positively arctic. Housewives on the verge of hypothermia paw listlessly through piles of bargain clothes. At the far end of the sale area lurks an ersatz McDonald’s, complete with its own frightening clown. Beyond the bright plastic tables, their chairs bolted gaily to the floor, a set of tiled steps leads up to the sidewalk, and Rafferty takes them in two springs.
Hot air again. Hot pavement through the soles of his shoes. Traffic noise.
Lots of pretty women wearing bright colors. No White T-Shirt; he’s almost certainly watching the entrance. No Black Shirt. Red T-Shirt is probably flat on his back picking slivers of crockery from his hair.
Rafferty slows, debating the wisdom of turning the tables and grabbing one of them for a brief conversation. He is weighing the pros and cons as he makes a right into a side street and the little man with the black shirt and the clubfoot steps out of a doorway, smiles apologetically, levels a small black gun at Poke’s head, and shoots him square in the face.
!2
The Fourth Watcher
rom his perspective half
a block away, where he appears to be entirely focused on choosing a
spray of vaguely reptilian orchids from a sidewalk vendor, the
fourth watcher—the
one the other three don’t know about—tracks the movements of the gun. He stiffens as the little man in the black shirt brings his hand up, takes a useless step forward as Rafferty stumbles back, watches open-mouthed as the trigger is pulled.
Not until he is walking away, his orchids tightly wrapped in newspaper, does he permit himself to laugh.
!3
The First One She’s Had in Years That Isn’t a Street Fake
he first thing Peachy
notices is that the man counting her money is perspiring very
heavily, almost as heavily as a foreigner.
Like many Thais, she finds it perplexing how much
farang sweat, although Peachy, who has persisted in regarding herself as a lady through a lifelong roller coaster of social ups and downs, would never use a word as common as “sweat.” During one of the brief periods of prosperity her family enjoyed when Peachy was growing up, they hired a British governess named Daphne. Almost forty years later, what Peachy remembers most vividly about Daphne is her hatred of the word “sweat.” “Horses sweat,” Daphne had said, sweating generously in the Bangkok summer. “Men perspire. Women glow.”
So the bank teller fumbling with the bills for her payroll is perspiring, in defiance of the glacial air-conditioning, which is cold enough to raise little stucco bumps on Peachy’s bare arms.
In fact, the teller’s shirt is so wet it’s transparent. Peachy has seen horses sweat less profusely, even after one of the races to which she used to be . . . well, addicted. If there’s a more polite word for “sweat,” Peachy thinks, counting silently to herself as she watches the stack of thousand-baht bills grow, there should be a more polite word for “addicted” as well. “Habit” is a bit weak, considering that the horses cost Peachy practically everything she owned. She managed to hang on to her business only because a farang, an American, had handed her an irresistible, absolutely life-changing wad of money that she couldn’t refuse even though it came with a mandatory partner. Together, she and Rose, the partner by command, have rebuilt the business until they have actually begun to show a profit. But the horses had cost her dearly, had cost her much of what she had taken for granted in life, had cost her—
Had cost her, in fact, much more than she is prepared to think about now, especially when she should be watching this very nervous man count out her money.
The teller’s hands are shaking, too.
His eyes come up to Peachy’s and catch her regarding him. He smiles, or tries to smile. It looks like the smile of a man who wants to prove he can take bad news well. Cancer? No problem. The smile is impossible to return. Peachy begins to feel distinctly uneasy.
“Forgive me,” she says, leaning forward slightly and politely lowering her voice. “Are you feeling all right?”
The teller straightens as though someone has plugged his stool directly into a wall socket, and his eyes widen into an expanse of white with the irises marooned in the center. Peachy involuntarily thinks about fried eggs. “Me?” the teller asks, swallowing. “Fine, fine. And you?”
Peachy takes a discreet step back. The man smells of something, perhaps illness or even fear. “Fine, thank you.”
“It’s just . . . you know,” the teller says, blinking rapidly. He makes a tremulous gesture at the stack of white-and-brown bills in front of him. “Lot of, um, um, money,” he says.
“We pay the girls today,” Peachy says, and then replays the sentence in her mind. “They’re housemaids,” she clarifies. “We run a domestic agency. Bangkok Domestics.” Although she’s grown fond of Rose, she still can’t bring herself to call it Peachy and Rose’s Domestics.
The teller tries to square the bills into a neat pile, but his hands aren’t steady enough, and he gives up and shoves them under the glass partition like a pile of leaves. “You must be doing well.”
“It’s getting better,” Peachy says. Although the bills all seem to be brand new, they look damp and a little bit sticky, as though they had been absorbing moisture in the perspiring man’s pocket. She doesn’t, she realizes, actually want to touch them. Below the counter she unsnaps her purse—Gucci, the first one she’s had in years that isn’t a street fake—and holds it wide. Then, using her expensive new fingernails and hoping she’s not being rude, she sweeps the money off the counter and into the purse. “Bye-bye,” she says in English, turning away.
THE BANK TELLER’Seyes follow her all the way across the lobby: a woman in her late forties, wearing clothes that could provoke buyer’s remorse in a seventeen-year-old. He resolutely refuses to look out through the picture window at the front of the bank, where he knows the man will be. Watching him.
He looks up to face his next customer.
!4
Karma Is a Soft Drink
ose draws the usual quota
of stares as she navigates the crowded sidewalk of Bangkok’s
Pratunam district, threading her way between the stands of the
sidewalk vendors.
She slows to take a closer look at a T-shirt with a picture of the plump, fuzzy forest spirit Totoro on it. As she looks at the shirt, other people look at her. Almost six feet tall and—as Rafferty insists—hurtfully beautiful, Rose has been conspicuous since she turned fourteen. She has grown used to it.
But she feels the gaze of the extremely pretty girl who is eyeing her from two stalls away. Women look at Rose almost as much as men do, although usually for different reasons, and not for four or five blocks. This girl, Rose is certain, has been tagging along behind her for at least ten minutes.
Someone she knew at the bar, perhaps? No, she’d remember. The girl is probably hasip-hasip, literally fifty-fifty, half Asian and half Caucasian. The only hasip-hasip girl in the bar where Rose danced, back in the bad old days, was half Thai and half black. Anyway, this girl is too young. It’s been a couple of years since Rose last took the stage at the King’s Castle in Patpong Road, and this girl can’t be more than seventeen.
Still, the face tugs at her. Rose has a remarkable memory for faces, a side benefit of her years in the bar, when a dancer’s profits, and occasionally her physical safety, depended on remembering customers’ faces. There’s something familiar about this girl. Something in her bone structure?
For a moment their eyes meet and Rose smiles, but the girl quickly turns away, browsing yet another stall.
Rose offers one-third of the asking price for the Totoro shirt, settles in thirty seconds for half, and bags it. It’s her present to herself. Although she’s squeezed every baht since she moved in with Rafferty and stepped out from under the waterfall of money that flowed from the pockets of the customers in the bar, today she can buy herself a present. After all, this is her day. Then, feeling a little guilty, she buys another—girl’s size eight—for Miaow. Unlike virtually all of Miaow’s other T-shirts, this one isn’t pink, but the child has watched the animated film about Totoro so many times that she goes around the apartment she shares with Rose and Rafferty singing the theme song in phonetic Japanese.
A glance at her oversize plastic wristwatch tells Rose that Peachy will already be in the office, and she has come to expect Rose to be on hand. She dumps the bag with the T-shirts into her purse, a leather tote the size of home base, and edges through the press of shoppers toward the soot-stained four-story office building, an architectural monument to melancholy, where Peachy and Rose’s Domestics operates.
As she nears the door, she is reassembling the girl’s face in her mind. Just as a tingle of prerecognition begins to build, someone swats her lightly on the shoulder, and the image dissolves.
“Fon,” Rose says, feeling the smile break over her face. “Money day.”
“Seven months,” Fon says proudly. “It’s been seven months.” In her mid-thirties, dark-skinned, with a plain face made even plainer by a dolefully long upper lip, Fon is still beautiful when she smiles. She barely comes up to Rose’s shoulder, so she embraces the taller woman by hugging her arm. “So the money’s small, no problem,” she says. “They like me, and I like them.”
“They should like you,” Rose says. “They’re lucky to have you.”
They start up the stairs, and Rose resolves for the fiftieth time to sweep them sometime soon. They may have been swept to celebrate the millennium, but not very well. Grit scrapes beneath her shoes. It sounds like someone chewing sand.
“It’s the kids,” Fon says. “I love those kids.” With two children of her own, in the care of her mother, up north, Fon has adopted the family who employs her. She stops climbing, and Rose pauses with her. “When I think I was going to go to work at the Love Star, I can’t believe how lucky I am.”
The Love Star is among the grimmest of the bars that line the red-light street Patpong, a dank little hole where men sit at a bar chugging beer while kneeling girls chug them. Working at the Love Star is the lowest rung on the ladder for aging go-go dancers, last stop before the sidewalk. Fon was only a few days away from spending her working hours on her knees when Rose found her a family who needed a housekeeper and babysitter. While some girls enjoy dancing in the better bars, no one enjoys working at the Love Star.
“You made your own luck,” Rose says. “Anyway, that’s what Poke says. ‘Everybody makes their own luck.’”
“What about karma?” Fon asks, eyebrows raised. They are climbing again.
“Poke’s an American. Americans think karma is a soft drink.”
Fon gives her a light, corrective pinch on the arm. “How can you explain luck without karma?”
“Americans are crazy,” Rose says. “But I’m working on him.”
“Any progress?”
They reach the top of the stairs and start down the hall. Three women, wearing the street uniforms of jeans and T-shirts, are lined up outside the open door of the office. They look much more like domestic workers than the go-go dancers they used to be. “Some,” Rose says. “He’s not living entirely on meat. He’s beginning to realize he doesn’t know anything.”
The women greet Rose and Fon at the door. Fon takes her place at the end of the line, and Rose goes in to see Peachy, looking harried behind her desk. She wears one of her memorable collection of work outfits. This one somehow manages to combine bright-colored stripes and polka dots in a design that looks like the first draft of an optical illusion. Like all of Peachy’s dresses, today’s is held in place by buttons the size of saucers.
“Everybody was early,” Peachy says, lifting a hand to her lacquered hair without actually touching it. Her eyes register Rose’s jeans and white men’s shirt—one of Rafferty’s—with a barely perceptible wince. “There were five of them here when I arrived.”
“You look very pretty today,” Rose says. The statement is not entirely truthful, but she knows how good it makes Peachy feel. If you can bring sweetness to somebody’s day, Rose’s mother always says, do it.
“Really?” Peachy’s hand returns to the general territory of her hair. “You like these colors?”
“They’re very vivid,” Rose says. “Like your personality.”
Peachy’s smile is so broad her ears wiggle. “I wasn’t sure,” she says. “I thought it might be a little young for me.”
“Poke always says you’re as young as you make other people feel.”
“And to think,” Peachy says, “I didn’t like him when I first met him.”
“Lots of people don’t,” Rose says.
Peachy shakes her head. “You’re a lucky girl.”
“Peachy?” It is the woman at the head of the line. “I’m going to be late for work.”
“Sorry, Took,” Rose says, stepping aside. “Come in and get rich.”
Peachy counts out the week’s wages for Took, a gratifying wad of crisp thousand-baht bills and some of the friendly-looking red five hundreds and hands it to her. “Too much,” Took says. “I still owe you six thousand from my advance.” She gives back fifteen hundred baht. “Only three more paydays,” she says happily, “and we’ll be even.”
Peachy sweeps Took’s returned money into the open drawer and pulls out a ledger to enter the repayment.
“Lek,” Rose says to the next woman in line, a girl who had danced beside her at the King’s Castle. “How is it at the new place?”
“The woman’s fine,” Lek says, wedging past the departing Took to get to the desk. She is a very short woman whose plump face displays frayed remnants of the baby-chipmunk cuteness that tempted so many men in the bar when she was in her early twenties. Now, ten years later, she has the look of a child’s toy that’s been through a lot. “The man has something on his mind, but he hasn’t done anything stupid yet.”
Peachy’s eyes come up fast, and Rose mentally kicks herself for raising the topic. When Rafferty first forced the partnership on her, Peachy had been terrified of placing former bar dancers—prostitutes, in her mind—with the firm’s clients. “Are you provoking him?” Peachy asks.
“It’s hard to dust without bending over,” Lek says. “If I could leave my behind at home, there’d be no problem.” Peachy blushes, but Lek laughs and says to Rose, “Remember the guys who always looked at the mirror behind us? He’s one of them.”
“I was always careful of those,” Rose says. “No telling what they wanted.”
“Oh, yes there was,” Lek says. “Anyway, Peachy, don’t worry. If he comes on too hard, I’ll just ask you to find me someplace else. No way I’m going back to that.” She folds her money and slips it into her back pocket. “You know how people talk about money as units? Like this many baht is so many dollars or pounds or whatever? I have my own unit of currency.”
“What is it?” Rose asks, against her better judgment.
“The short-time,” Lek says. “This money is about six and a half short-times. Six and a half times I don’t have to pretend that the guy who’s grunting on top of me is the prince I’ve been waiting for all my life. Six and a half times I’m not lying there reminding myself where I put my shoes in case I have to get out fast.”
Rose can’t help laughing, but Peachy is scarlet.
“I’m just joking,” Lek says to Peachy.
“I should hope so,” Peachy says. She looks like she’s about to start fanning herself.
“I always knew where I left my shoes,” Lek says.
“Next,” Peachy says, looking past Lek.
BY TWO O’CLOCKall the women have been paid, and Rose and Peachy face each other over the desk. Peachy takes the remaining money, sadly diminished now, and divides it into four unequal piles: one for the rent, a smaller one for bribes to the cops charged with protecting the business, and one of medium thickness for each of them. Handling the money carefully, out of respect for the portrait of the king on the front of every bill, she politely slides Rose’s money into an envelope before
handing it across the desk.
“So,” Peachy says, leaning back.
“You’re doing a good thing, Peachy,” Rose says. She stretches her long legs in front of her and crosses her feet. A silver bell dangling from her right ankle jingles. “You’re making merit.”
“I hope so.” Her eyes search the familiar room. “I have to admit, one or two of them worry me.”
“They’re good girls,” Rose says. “Or at least they’re trying to be. Some of them probably need more practice.”
“At any rate,” Peachy says, “it’s been an education. I knew about Patpong, of course, everybody does, but I never thought about who the girls actually were. I just thought of them as, well . . .” Her face colors as she searches for a term that won’t offend.
“Dok thong,” Rose suggests, using the name of an herb employed as an aphrodisiac in folk medicine, a word that has come to mean “slut.” She adds, “Women who would do anything for a thousand baht.”
Peachy makes a tiny fanning gesture beneath her nostrils, Thai physical shorthand for “bad smell,” then says, “Such language.”
“Well, they were,” Rose says, “or rather we were.” She wiggles a hand side to side. “Although fifteen hundred is more like it.”
Peachy leans forward and laces her fingers. She purses her lips for a second as though trying to hold something back that wants to get out and then says, “Please forgive me. How bad was it?”
“Don’t take this wrong,” Rose says, “but in some ways it was fun. We weren’t planting rice or hauling a buffalo around. We were in the big city. We could go to the bathroom indoors. There was food everywhere. Some of the men were nice, and we were just swimming in money. And we had the satisfaction of sending a few hundred baht home every week. That took a bit of the sting out of it.”
Peachy is leaning forward on one elbow, her chin in her palm, so absorbed she doesn’t notice that her elbow is crumpling a stack of money. “But then there was the other end of it,” Rose says. “Going into rooms with men we’d never seen before, not knowing what they wanted. Even when it was just the normal minimum, just the basic guy-on-top, quick-getaway boom-boom, we knew we were damaging ourselves. You know, you can only sleep with so many strangers before making love stops meaning anything. You begin to wonder whether you can still fall in love.”
Peachy opens her hand so her fingers cup her cheek. “You did,” she says.
Rose feels the heat in her face, and Peachy courteously drops her eyes to her desk. This is territory the two women have always avoided until now. Then, abruptly, Rose laughs, and Peachy’s eyes swing up to hers. “Poor Poke. I made him prove himself a thousand times. I think part of me wanted to believe he was just another customer.”
Peachy’s powdered brow furrows. “Why?”
“I knew how to deal with customers,” Rose says. “It was love I didn’t know anything about.”
“Love,” Peachy says. “Love is so hard.” She glances down and sees that her elbow is on the king’s face, and lifts her arm as though the desk were hot. She smooths out the bills. “I mean,” she adds, “I mean it can be. Back when . . . when I was married—” She stops. “Well, obviously I’d think it’s hard, wouldn’t I? Considering that my marriage fell apart, that my husband . . . left me.”
As Rose searches for something to say, Peachy straightens the papers on her desk and then straightens them again. Then she lines them up with the edge of the blotter. “Listen to me ramble,” she says. “What matters is that you and Poke are happy, and that he brought you to me.” She hits the stack of paper with an aggressively decorated fingernail, fanning it across the desk blotter. “Why is this so difficult? What I’m trying to say is how happy I am that we’re partners, how much I appreciate what you’ve helped me to do.” She looks directly at Rose. “This business is my family. It’s my . . . um, my baby. So I wanted to say thank you.”
Rose feels the slight prickling that announces that tears are on the way. She blinks. “That’s so sweet of you, Peachy.”
“I mean it. And today is obviously the right day to tell you.”
Rose looks up, surprised. There’s no way Peachy could know. “Today?”
“It’s eight months today,” Peachy says, as though it should be obvious. “This is our anniversary.”
“Oh, my gosh. Is it? It doesn’t seem possible.”
“You forgot,” Peachy says bravely, swallowing disappointment. “Oh, well. Your life is so full.”
“My life?” Rose asks without thinking. “Yes, I guess it is.”
“You’re lucky,” Peachy says.
“I suppose I am. I never thought I was. Maybe I’m not used to it yet.”
“Get used to it,” Peachy says, a bit shortly. “It’s a sin not to appreciate a good life. Somebody should hit you with a stick. I wish someone had hit me, fifteen years ago.”
Rose lowers her head. “Go ahead.”
“No. What I want to do . . .” She hesitates and then plunges in. “I want to invite you to have dinner with me tonight. To celebrate.”
Rose sees the hope in Peachy’s eyes, sees a different woman from the resentful partner Poke had chained her to all those months ago. She leans across the desk and puts her hand on Peachy’s. “I’d love to,” she says. “But tonight is something special. Something with Poke, I mean. Can we do it tomorrow?”
Peachy turns her hand palm up and grasps Rose’s. She gives it a squeeze. “Tomorrow,” she says. “Tomorrow will be fine.” She puts the remaining stacks of bills in the desk drawer and pushes her chair back, preparing to rise. “But what’s tonight?”
“Nothing much,” Rose says. “It’s supposed to be for me.” She stands, slipping the envelope full of money into her pocket. “But it’s really for Poke.”
!5
How Much It Means to Me That You’re There
he little man from the
bank steps out into the heat of the evening. He pauses in the shade
of the bank’s door, pulls out a cell phone, and dials the number he
knows best. One
ring. Two rings. Three rings, and his stomach dips all the way to his
feet. “Hello?” his wife says. “Oh,” he says without thinking. “Oh, thank you.” “Why? What did I do?” She sounds pleased. “You’re there,” he says. “I don’t tell you enough how much it means
to me that you’re there.” They have been married nine years, and he is not a demonstrative
man. His wife says, “Are you all right?” “I’m fine,” he says. He waits, eyes closed, listening to his heart pound. “And that’s why you called? To tell me you’re glad I’m here?” “Well,” he says, and then a hand lands on his shoulder. Another
takes the phone from his hand and snaps it closed. The teller smells cheap cologne. He has to fight the urge to bolt.
“Give it to me,” the man says. He is tall for an Asian, with a broad, pale face and very tightly cut eyes on either side of a wide nose that has been broken, perhaps several times. The body beneath the tight jacket is bulky with muscle.
The bank teller reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a fat envelope. The man takes it, gives it an experimental heft, and doesn’t seem to like what he feels. Cologne rolls off him in heavy waves, a scent many flowers died to create. The tight eyes come up to the bank teller’s face, flat as burned matches. “How much?”
“One hundred eighty thousand.”
“Not enough.” His Thai is strongly accented. He slaps the envelope against his hand in disgust.
“Slow day,” the bank teller says. His own voice sounds thick and distant.
The man pulls another envelope from beneath his belt and hands it to the teller. Like the first, the new envelope is heavy manila, with the date scrawled across it. “Have a better day Monday,” he says. “Or maybe no one will answer the phone next time.”
!6
A Perfume from About a Thousand Years Ago
t’s a perfume from about
a thousand years ago,” Rafferty says. “It’s called White Shoulders,
and the man’s squirt gun was full of it. I’m lucky he didn’t get me
in the eyes. Hand
me the bowl, okay?”
“It smells terrible,” Miaow says. She passes him the bowl, wipes pink frosting from her chin with a brown finger, glances at the finger, and puts it in her mouth.
“Terrible like what?” Rafferty says without looking up from what he’s doing. “Terrible doesn’t tell me anything. If you want to be a writer, Miaow, you need to be specific.” The cake won’t come out of the pan. He turns the pan upside down over the yellow platter and gives it a discreet whack with his knuckles.
Miaow had startled him two weeks earlier by announcing she was going to be a writer. Like him, she said. He’d had to swallow a sudden lump in his throat before he could say anything.
“It’s sweet terrible,” she says. “Terrible like . . .” Concentration plows a tiny furrow across Miaow’s flawless eight-year-old nose. “Like if a flower threw up.”
Rafferty raises his eyebrows. “Pretty good.” He burps the cake pan again. The cake doesn’t budge.
Miaow’s eyes are on the cake pan. “White Shoulders is a dumb name.”
“I didn’t name it, Miaow.”
She dredges a thumb through the frosting bowl and licks the clot of pink. “Why would they call it White Shoulders?”
“I don’t know.” He takes the spatula from the bowl and runs it again around the edge of the cake pan, exactly as the magazine recipe directs. He finds the maneuver considerably more difficult than it sounds. “Maybe somebody thought it was sexy.”
“And you?” Rose asks from the living room. She is curled like a dark odalisque on Rafferty’s white leather hassock, which she has pushed in front of the sliding glass door to catch the light. She is in an indolent race with time, trying to finish painting her toenails before the sun dips below the jagged horizon of the Bangkok skyline. Night comes fast here. Her lustrous black hair has been pinned up, baring a slender neck the color of the gathering dusk, with a throb of pink beneath. Her jeans have been traded for a pair of shorts, baring the legs that literally made Rafferty gasp the first time he saw them, when she stepped onstage in the bar. The white shirt hangs in immaculate folds; in a phenomenon that has mystified Rafferty since he met her, Rose’s clothes never wrinkle. She has stuck the ever-present cigarette between her toes to free both hands, and the smoke curls like the ghosts of snakes around her hair. Her eyes slide sideways to his. “You,” she repeats. “Poke Rafferty. Do you think white shoulders are sexy?”
“Actually,” Rafferty says, his gaze sliding easily down the familiar curve of her back, “I’m pretty firmly in the brown-shoulders column.”
“Eeeek,” Rose says languidly, fanning her toes. “A sex tourist.”
At the sound of the word “sex,” Miaow’s eyes swing to Rose and then up at Rafferty, who is looking straight at her.
“Not in front of the c-h-i-l-d,” Rafferty says to Rose, still watching Miaow.
Miaow drops her gaze to the mixing bowl and scoops out more frosting. “W-h-y n-o-t?” she asks.
“Because, Miaow,” Rafferty says, “in spite of the fact that you think you know everything in the world, you are approximately eight years old and there are still things adults only talk to adults about.” The “approximately” is necessary. None of them actually knows how old she is, but they settled on eight soon after she left the sidewalks and moved into his apartment. For all he knows, she’s a tall seven or a short nine.
“Like your dumb book,” she says. “You won’t talk about that either.”
“The word ‘dumb’ is getting a lot of work,” Rafferty says mildly. “Dumb name for a perfume, dumb book. And have you read it, Miaow?”
“You haven’t written it yet.” She turns toward the living room. “He can’t get the cake out of the pan,” she sings to Rose in Thai.
“This is just a complete surprise,” Rose replies, also in Thai. She is inserting white cotton pads between brown toes and giving her total attention to the task. She takes the cigarette from between her toes, glances at it critically, squeezes that final ghastly puff from the filter, and stubs it into submission in the swimming-pool-size ashtray on the carpet.
Rafferty twists the pan like a Möbius loop. “Of course I can get it out,” he says. “Miaow just expects me to behave like a man and put my fist through the pan or jump up and down on it. Instead I’m getting in touch with my feminine side. Look how patient I am.” He shakes the pan over the platter. “Get out of there, you bugger.”
“How about this?” Miaow says. “Let’s play I’m going to write a story about you. And you have to tell me stuff so I can write it. Why did the man shoot you? And why did he use perfume instead of water?”
“He shot me to make a point,” Rafferty says, hearing the irritation in his voice. “And, by the way, we have a name for people who criticize books they haven’t read.”
“What?” Miaow demands.
“We call them Republicans,” Rafferty says, watching his knuckles go white on the rim of the pan.
Miaow shakes her head. “I don’t know what that means.”
“And they say laughter has no borders.” Rafferty tosses a glance across the room at Rose, who is bent lovingly over her foot. He would not be surprised to see her lean down and lick it, and he briefly hopes that she will. A spill of ebony hair has slipped loose, exploded by the failing sun into a riot of dark color, the way a rainbow might shine against the night sky. “Actually, the cake is just a touch stuck,” he admits.
She does not look up. “Did you remember the butter?”
“The butter?” Rafferty says, and Miaow says, in English, “Oh, brother.” He can actually hear her roll her eyes.
“To coat the pan,” Rose says to her foot. “You were supposed to rub a stick of butter around inside the—”
“Seemed like a lot of fat,” Rafferty says. Rose’s head comes up and Miaow’s comes around. Their expressions are identical, the reluctant anxiety of someone who is beginning to doubt the intelligence of a new pet. “I used honey,” he says.
“Honey,” the females say together, and Rose adds, “Why didn’t you just use cement?”
“Let me,” Miaow says, taking the pan and bumping him with surprising force for a child so small. She puts her thumbs in the center of the pan’s bottom and looks from the surface of the cake—slightly burned, Rafferty suddenly notices—up to Rafferty. Her eyes narrow in calculation. “If I can get it out, you have to tell us why you smell so bad. About the man with the squirt gun. And you have to tell Rose, too, as a present for her happybirthday.”
“Deal,” Rafferty says, watching her handle the pan. “By the way, ‘happy’ and ‘birthday’ are two words, not one.” The words somehow arrived in Thailand permanently joined, linguistic Siamese twins in Siam.
“That’s nice,” Miaow says. “What about the man with the gun?”
“Do you want to hear this, Birthday Girl? ” Rafferty asks.
“You come home smelling like something hanging from a rearview mirror,” Rose says, “and you don’t think I want to hear the excuse?”
“Okay,” Rafferty says. Miaow puts down the pan and goes to the hassock to join Rose, and Rafferty leans against the kitchen counter. “It was for my book.” As little as he wants to talk about this on Rose’s birthday, it at least postpones the moment he is dreading, the moment he is certain Rose doesn’t expect. He switches to Thai for Rose’s benefit. “I’m writing about living . . . um, sort of outside the law. Not really doing anything terrible,” he adds as Miaow’s eyebrows contract in her Executive Vice President Expression. “Not hurting anyone, but not exactly behaving either. It’s called Living Wrong.”
“So you got shot because you were being bad,” Miaow says in English.
“I was learning how to be bad,” Rafferty says. “I’ve found nine people who are . . . well, they’re crooks. Each of them will teach me how to do something that’s against the law—just a little bit, Miaow, don’t get crazy—and then I’m going to do it one time. I’ll write about learning how and then about doing it.”
“Does somebody want to read about that?” Miaow asks doubtfully.
“I don’t know. All I know is that my publishers are paying me to write it. I never ask whether people want to read it until I’ve cashed the check.”
“But what kinds of things are you doing?” Miaow demands. “What were you doing when you got shot with the perfume?”
“Learning to be a spy. Arnold Prettyman is teaching me how to be a spy.” Prettyman is a former CIA agent who, like hundreds of other spooks orphaned by the thawing of the Cold War, rolled downhill into Bangkok. “Arnold’s teaching me to follow people around Bangkok without getting caught, and once in a while he has someone follow me. I’m supposed to spot the people who are following me and then get away from them. Today I spotted three. I lost two of them, but the man who caught me shot me with a squirt gun.”
“Why perfume?” Rose asks, fanning the fumes away with a tapering hand.
“Better than a bullet,” Rafferty says. “Anyhow, it’ll help me remember not to make that mistake again. A nice faceful of White Shoulders.”
Miaow makes a roof out of her fingers and looks at it as though she is daring it to collapse. It is not a carefree pose.
“So,” Rafferty says in what he hopes is a light tone, “that’s all there is to it. I was practicing being followed, and I got it wrong, and I got squirted with perfume. Nothing dangerous about it.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Rose says, a tone so neutral it shimmers with menace.
“But—” Miaow says, and stops. “You didn’t want to tell me about this. Why would anybody write a book they can’t tell a kid about?”
“I’d like to know that, too,” Rose contributes. She has long been of the opinion that Rafferty’s books inspire bad behavior in tourists, a conviction he privately shares.
Miaow shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “Why don’t you write about bears? Or fish? Or elephants that can sing? Why don’t you write something that makes people happy?”
“Not everybody can write Fluffy Bunnies in Bubble Land,” Rafferty says, hearing the defensive edge in his voice. “People write about what they’re interested in. This is what I’m interested in.” He avoids the strongest argument, which is that he needs the advance his agent has negotiated for Living Wrong. His savings, never particularly robust, have become positively tubercular.
“What’s what you’re interested in?” Miaow challenges.
“What I always write about. What goes on at the edges.”
“Of what?”
“Of everything.” He takes a breath and slows himself. “Look,” he says. “You walk down the street, any street, and nine out of ten people are doing the same thing you are: They’re shopping, or looking through windows, or going to meet somebody, or just getting from one place to another.” He looks across the counter at Miaow. “Right?”
“So what?” Miaow says.
“That’s exactly right. So what? Those nine people aren’t interesting. But the other one, the tenth one, is doing something else. He doesn’t want us to know what it is. He’s afraid of something. He’s waiting for someone he’s not supposed to see. He’s just broken the law, or he’s just about to. He rigged the lottery. There’s a tarantula in his pocket. He put broken glass in his shoes that morning as a religious penance. He looks around a little too much. He licks his lips a lot. He’s the one I’m interested in.”
“I’m not,” Miaow says promptly. “That was me. When I was begging, or cutting purses, or sneaking behind some restaurant where they threw good food away. Or running away from some man who wanted me to be bad with him. That’s not interesting, it’s ugly.” She looks around the small room. At him, at Rose, at the cake pan on the counter. At the walls keeping them safe and together. “This is what’s interesting.”
“I agree,” Rose says.
“Then the two of you can write your own book,” Rafferty says. “That’s not what I do, okay?”
For a moment nobody speaks. Miaow is looking at him with a puzzled expression. Finally Rose says, “My, my.”
“Well,” Rafferty says, “you asked.”
Rose curves a defensive arm around Miaow. “When you touch a dog and he bites,” Rose says, “you’re usually touching someplace that hurts.”
“What if it wasn’t perfume?” Miaow’s voice is pitched a half tone higher than usual. “What if it was a real gun?”
“It wasn’t,” Rafferty says, feeling the whole evening go south. He reaches out and defiantly scoops frosting from the bowl.
“I don’t want a fight on my happybirthday,” Rose says. “Poke, you promise to stay alive for Miaow and me, and, Miaow, you stop worrying so much. You’re going to be an old lady before you’re ten.”
“I’ll be careful, Miaow,” Rafferty says. “Honest.”
Miaow starts to argue, but Rose lifts a hand. “Miaow,” she says, “you said you could get the cake out of the pan. Can you?”
“Sure,” Miaow says, her tone making it clear the discussion isn’t over. She slides off the hassock and comes around the counter, so she is standing next to Rafferty. She turns the pan over and says, under her breath, “Fluffy bunnies.” Rafferty puts a hand on her shoulder, but she steps sideways, out from under it, and says, with the same muted vehemence, “Bubble land,” and then she does something fast with her thumbs to the bottom of the pan. The cake falls onto the plate with a surprising clunk and immediately breaks in half. Miaow gives it a critical look and says, “I’ll fix it with icing.”
FROM HIS VANTAGEpoint on the sidewalk eight stories down, the fourth watcher is bored.
Lights snap on and off in the windows of the apartment he has been gazing at as the people living there move from room to room. He wishes the child had left the apartment empty during the day so he could have installed the little microphones. That would be much more interesting than this.
Anything would be more interesting than this.
He turns into the department-store doorway in which he stands, mannequins frozen fashionably in the dark windows, holding their poses as though they hope he’ll take notice. He shields the striking match with his body, worried not about the wind but the brief flare of light, which he knows—from personal experience—lasts long enough for a good shooter to do his work. Normally he wouldn’t smoke so much on the job, but this particular assignment is testing the limits of his ability to remain sane. It’s his first time in Bangkok, a city that he’s been told is the world’s largest brothel, and he’s never been so bored in his life.
The cigarette, a cheap Korean counterfeit Marlboro he brought into the country with him, burns rewardingly in the back of his throat. It’s the burn he’s become accustomed to, the burn he looks forward to forty or fifty times a day. When the watcher first arrived in Bangkok, two days earlier, he had bought a pack of real American Marlboros at the airport, lit one eagerly, taken a deep drag, and tossed the pack away. No bite. He likes a cigarette with bite.
So far this evening, he has seen no other watchers, which is something new. The only interesting thing about this job is that the man he’s watching seems to be being followed by half the city.
COMING OUT OFthe bedroom, Rafferty stops at the sight: the two of them curled together on the couch, snug as puppies. Rose’s hair falls over both of them like a lush black shawl, spilling off Miaow’s shoulders and over her plump brown knees. Miaow is gazing dreamily down at the three candles burning on the cake, one for each decade of Rose’s life. The glow of the candles paints Rose’s and Miaow’s faces with gold, making them smooth as water-carved stone. Through the sliding glass door beyond them, the lights of Bangkok glitter like bad costume jewelry. A sentence spontaneously assembles itself in Rafferty’s mind:
Everything I want is here.
“You both look beautiful,” Rafferty says. His heart is beating so hard it feels like it’s taking a hammer to his ribs. Now that the time has come, he is terrified. He slips into his pocket the small box he retrieved from the bureau in his bedroom and comes the rest of the way into the room, trailing a vaporous wake of White Shoulders. Leaning against the cake is a square of white, an envelope with a rose drawn on it in colored pencil, Miaow’s medium of choice since she decided that crayons were for babies. Although she showed him half a dozen attempts at the envelope, she has not allowed him to see the card.
“The cake is perfect,” Rose says. “I’ll remember it my whole life. Look, you can hardly tell it was broken.”
“Shall we sing?” Rafferty asks, sitting on the floor, on the other side of the table so he can see them both. His mouth is dry. “You can start, Miaow.”
Miaow sits up and crosses her hands in her lap. It makes her look like a miniature lawyer. “Not yet. I have to tell you something first.” Then she stops, her eyes on a spot on the table. After a moment she begins to move her lips as though trying out the words she will say. Finally she says, “Ohhhhhhh.” She kicks one heel against the couch. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Rose leans toward her.
“Don’t know if you’ll . . .” Miaow’s eyes go to Rafferty with an unfamiliar urgency. “Promise you won’t get mad.”
“Me?” Rafferty asks. “When was the last time I got mad at you?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” she says, “but you always forget.” And to Rose, “Maybe you . . . maybe you’ll be mad.”
Rose touches the tip of Miaow’s microscopic nose. “Why would we get mad at you?”
Miaow turns her head away from Rose’s finger. This time her heel strikes the couch harder, and a puff of dust halos the candle. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have . . .”
Rose glances at Rafferty, who raises his shoulders a tenth of an inch and lets them drop. “Shouldn’t have what?” Rose asks.
“Ohhh . . .” and suddenly Miaow is blinking fast, a sure sign she’s on the verge of tears. “It’s . . . it’s dumb. I mean, stupid.”
“You’re never stupid, Miaow.”
She reaches across the table and snatches the card she made. “Yes I am. I’m stupid. Why would you want—”
“Whatever it is,” Rose says, “if you want it, I do, too.”
Miaow looks at her hard enough to see through her. “You promise?”
“I promise. From here.” Rose touches her heart. “To here.” She touches Miaow’s. “Tell us.”
“I can’t,” Miaow says. Then she kicks the couch again, jams her eyes closed, and shoves the card at Rose. “Go ahead,” she says.
Rose holds the card to the candlelight. “What a beautiful envelope. Did you draw this?”
“Uh-huh.” Miaow’s voice is barely audible.
“Here goes.” Rose slips a nail beneath the flap and opens it. Miaow hears it and grabs her lower lip between her teeth, eyes still closed. Rose removes the card, looks down at it, and her eyes dart to Rafferty’s with an amazed appeal Rafferty has never seen in them before. Miaow has opened her eyes and is watching her with all her being, chewing her lower lip.
“Oh,” Rose says. It’s her turn to blink. “Oh, Miaow.”
“Is it—” Miaow fidgets with her entire body. “I mean, are you, are you—”
“No, no, never.” She leans down and kisses Miaow on the forehead. “I’m honored.”
“You are?” Miaow’s arms are still knotted, as if she is cold.
“It makes me very happy,” Rose says. She looks down at the card again and then across at Rafferty. “Poke,” she says, and then she swallows. “Say happybirthday to Miaow.”
“To Miaow?”
Rose turns the card toward him. It depicts a very tall woman with long hair holding hands with a very short girl whose hair is severely parted in the middle. They are surrounded by colored candles, a wreath of flame. Underneath the picture, in English, are the words happy-birthday to us. “Let me read the inside,” Rose says. “It says—” Her eyes come back to Rafferty’s, and she exhales and starts again. “It says, ‘Dear Rose. I don’t know my happybirthday. Can I have yours? Because we love each other. Sincerely, Miaow.’ ”
“It’s dumb,” Miaow says, close to tears.
“It’s beautiful,” Rose says. “It’s the best present I could have.” She puts both arms around Miaow, and Miaow pushes her head fiercely against Rose’s chest.
“Hey,” Rafferty says, “Let me have some of that.” He moves to the couch and wraps his arms around both of them, with Rose in the middle.
“We don’t have a present for Miaow,” Rafferty says.
“My happybirthday is my present,” Miaow says into Rose’s shirt.
“We have to do better than that,” Rafferty says. He leans across Rose and smooths Miaow’s hair. He knows she hates it, but he can’t help himself. “Is there something you want?”
“I have everything,” she says. A year ago she had been living on the sidewalk.
“There must be something.”
“Wait a minute.” Miaow sits forward. “Can I be nine?” Her eyes travel from Rafferty to Rose and back again. “If this is my happybirthday, I should be—”
“Okay,” Rafferty says. “You’re nine.”
“Oh,” Rose says, sitting bolt upright. “We have something else.” She reaches down and grabs her purse and then roots around in it. When her hand comes out, it has the Totoro T-shirt in it. “And look,” she says, bringing up the other one. “One for each of us. We can dress the same on our happybirthday.”
Miaow looks from one shirt to the other, and stuns Rafferty by bursting into a wail. Then she grabs the T-shirt and runs from the room. “Help me,” Rose says urgently, fumbling with the top button on her shirt. “You start from the bottom.”
In less than a minute, the white shirt has been shoved behind the couch and Rose is wearing her Totoro shirt. Miaow comes back into the room wearing hers, scrubbing at her eyes with her forearm. “We’re twins,” Rose says. “We have the same birthday, so we’re twins.” Miaow climbs back up on the couch and leans on Rose’s shoulder, two furry forest animals in their nest.
“Happybirthday to all of us,” Rose says. “It’s everybody’s happy-birthday.” She kisses Miaow on the forehead and turns to kiss Rafferty on the neck. Then, very softly, she licks his ear.
!7
Women Are the Only People Who Look Good Naked
here are you going?”
Rose’s smooth thigh lands atop his, warm as fresh bread. “Just
turning on the light.”
“I can find what I want in the dark,” Rose says in Thai. Her hand wanders down over the sensitive skin of his stomach, heading for the chakra he has come to think of as his own personal theme park, Fun World. She grabs hold. “It’s not like it moves around.”
“That’s not what you said a few minutes ago. You seemed pretty happy with the way it moved around.”
“Thai women learn early,” she says with an affectionate squeeze, “to seem happy.”
He stretches his right arm as far as it will go, and his fingers knock against a small box and just brush the base of the lamp on the bedside table. Rose raises her hand far enough to sink claws lightly into his stomach, and he gives up and relaxes into the pillow. “I am happy,” he says, surprising himself. He can’t remember ever having said that before.
Rose bumps him with her hip and adds emphasis with a little fingernail action around the navel. “I’d be happier with a cigarette.”
“So? We’re in Bangkok, not Los Angeles. People are allowed to smoke in Bangkok.”
“They’re in the living room,” she says. Then she says, “I think I should stop smoking in front of Miaow.”
“If Miaow’s in the room at the moment,” Rafferty says, “smoking is the least of our worries.”
“Listen to yourself. After all those years on the street, do you think there’s anything Miaow doesn’t know about sex?”
“She’s probably theoretically familiar with the grunt mechanics,” Rafferty says. “But the secrets of unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged, the mystical tantric sexual techniques of the masters—I doubt she knows much about those.”
“Was that what you just did? I should have paid attention.” Rose runs the tip of her tongue over his shoulder. “The ‘grunt mechanics’? Do I grunt?”
“Like a sumo wrestler.”
“You’re just being sweet.” He can hear the smile in her voice.
“We’re not getting much done, are we?” he asks.
Rose turns her head so her lips brush his chest when she talks, and the hairs on the back of his neck snap to attention. “Aren’t we?”
“Well, I was going to turn on the light. Then you wanted a cigarette. Instead we’re just lying here.”
“Actually, I was waiting for you to get up and bring it to me. It’s my happybirthday, isn’t it?”
“It was. Must be three or four in the morning by now.”
“Already?” She stretches. “I guess I did have fun.”
He jams his eyes shut tight, makes a widemouthed goblin’s face in the dark to relieve the tension building in his chest, and lets his features return to normal. “I have something for you,” he says, flipping back the covers and getting up.
“Besides the cigarette? Turn on the light, I want to look at you.”
“Not a chance. Women are the only people who look good naked.”
“Some of us actually do like men,” Rose says.
“It’s not that we’re not useful,” he says. “It’s just a different index. Women are flowers, men are root vegetables. You wouldn’t make a bouquet of turnips.”
“Sometimes I worry about you,” she says.
“Why’s that?” He is halfway to the door.
“No one can really be as much like he seems to be as you are.”
“I’ll think that over,” he says. “I’m sure it means something.”
After the darkness of the bedroom, its one small window blocked by the air conditioner, the living room is milky with the light that spills through the glass door to the balcony, Bangkok wattage bouncing off the low clouds. The remainder of the lopsided cake sits on the table. The sight of it makes him smile, despite the electric jitter that’s broadcasting random bursts of alternating current through his nervous system.
He pulls a pristine pack of Marlboro Lights from the jumble of clutter in the purse, peels the cellophane strip, and worries one out. As he passes through the open doorway into the bedroom, Rose snaps on the light. He slams his eyes shut against the glare. When he opens them again, he sees Rose, sitting up in bed with the sheet pooled around her hips, looking brown and amused. For the thousandth time, he notices how the light bounces off the polished skin of her shoulders, how the smooth muscles announce themselves in shadows on her flat stomach.
“I don’t know,” she says, giving him an appraising glance. “Maybe you could dance go-go.” Her eyes drop as he feels himself stir at the sight of her. “Wait, wait,” she says. “This would definitely disqualify you.”
“Not at the Queen’s Corner,” he says, crossing the room self-consciously and slipping under the sheets. “Last time I was in there, half the girls weren’t.”
“Weren’t what?” she says, taking the cigarette.
“Weren’t girls.”
She lights the cigarette, draws deeply, and regards it with comfortable satisfaction. “Did you think they were pretty?”
“Who?” He breathes in the smoke she exhales, seeking to soothe his nerves, wanting one himself.
“The ladyboys.” Thai transvestites have an enthusiastic following among the international cognoscenti and have become a standard attraction in many of the go-go bars.
“No. They always look like . . . I don’t know, plastic fruit or something. They don’t seem to have real faces, or even a real age. They look like they might come in jars.”
“Pay them enough and I’m sure they’ll come in a jar for you.”
“Rose,” he says. His heart is beating irregularly.
“Uh-oh,” Rose says. She studies his face. “What’s happening?”
“I didn’t give you your present.” He reaches out and takes the cigarette from her and inhales it hard enough to blow a hole in his back. He is immediately sweepingly, reelingly dizzy. “Jesus,” he says. “I can’t believe I used to do that on purpose.”
Rose is bent slightly toward him, watching him closely. She takes the cigarette and looks down at it. “Most people don’t try to smoke the whole thing at once.”
“So—” Rafferty says, and stops. The silence widens around them like a ripple in the center of a pond.
“Poor baby,” Rose says, keeping her eyes on the cigarette as she mashes it in the ashtray. “All those words in your head, and they’re not there when you need them.”
“It’s almost four a.m.,” Rafferty says, in full retreat. “Coffee. Coffee is the answer.” He grabs the bubble-gum pink robe Miaow made him buy at the weekend market at Chatuchak. Between the color and the cheerful, slightly fey yellow dragon embroidered on the back, it always makes him feel like Bruce Lee’s gay stand-in. “Coming?”
She grimaces. “You mean, get up?”
“I know it’s drastic.”
“Wait,” she says, and reaches down to a small zippered bag on the floor. Her hand comes up with a tube of lipstick and a loose Kleenex, and she applies the lipstick quickly and blots it, all in one swift, professional movement. “Ready for anything,” she says. She tosses the sheets aside and rises, almost six feet of flawless naked woman. As always, she looks to Rafferty like some ambitious new stage of evolution, an inspired draft of Woman 3.0, a human Car of the Future. She turns her back to pick up the towel she invariably wraps around her, and Rafferty tears his eyes from the long shadowy gully of her spine and the tablespoon-size dimples above her buttocks, and grabs the box on the table. He drops it into his pocket on the way out of the room. Bumping against his hip, it feels as big as a watermelon.
The fluorescent lights reveal a kitchen that looks like it was used for grenade practice. Flour dusts the counters. Virtually every bowl, utensil, and platter Rafferty owns has ambled out of the cupboard, coated itself with something sticky, and assumed its least flattering angle. He pulls a bag of coffee beans from the freezer and drops a couple of fistfuls into the grinder, clearing a space on the counter with his pink silk forearm.
“One cake?” Rose says behind him. “All this for one cake?”
“But what a cake.” The whir of the grinder fills the room. Silently counting to twelve, Rafferty reaches up into the cabinet with his free hand and takes down a box of coffee filters. He drops the box to the counter and uncaps the coffee grinder. “Perfect,” he says, studying the grind. He opens the box of filters and pulls out a nest of tightly clustered paper cones. As always, the edges are stuck together. He ruffles them ineffectually with his thumb, trying without much hope to separate a single filter from the clump.
“You were going to say something,” Rose says, her eyes on his hands. The lowered lids make it hard for him to read her expression. The towel is brilliantly white against the dusk of her skin.
“Yes.” He manages to pry free a little clot of four filters, a minor triumph. He lets his hands drop to hide the palsy that seems to have seized control of them. “I was.”
“And you had a present for me.” She tilts her head to one side, watching his fingers fumble with the filters.
“After coffee,” he says, crimping the paper edges to loosen them. They are almost karmically inseparable.
“Is that my present? In your pocket?”
He meets her eyes and feels his face grow hot. “Yes.”
She purses her lips. “Not very big.”
“Well, it’s . . . no, it’s not very big.” His fingers feel like frozen hams, and the filters are resolutely glued together. His mind is suddenly a large and disordered room with words piled randomly in the corners like children’s toys. “I mean, it’s not—but you said that already—and it . . . it’s . . .”
“Let me.” Rose crosses the room, all business, and takes the filters from his hand. She slips a nail under the edge and separates the bundle into two. Then she places the top two filters, still stuck together, between her lips and closes her mouth. When her lips part, the filters come apart neatly, one stuck to each lip, and she removes them and extends them to Rafferty. Each of them has a dark red lip print on its edge. “The answer is yes,” she says.
He has the filters in his hands before he hears her. “It is?” is all he can think to say. He stands there, a coffee filter dangling from each hand, the box with the ring in it exerting a supergravitational weight against his right hip. “It really is?” He has to push the words around the soft, formless obstruction in his throat.
“I know what I said when you asked me before,” Rose says, and now her eyes are on his. “I remember every word I said. I’ve remembered it a thousand times. I’ve walked to work, I’ve shopped for dinner, I’ve cleaned apartments, I’ve cooked food remembering what I said, trying to find the place where I should have said something that wasn’t about me, about my family, my life, my problems, me, me, me. I was terrible to you. If I’d just stopped talking for one minute, if I’d just stopped being frightened that I’d eventually get hurt, I would have said yes.”
“Ahh, Rose,” Rafferty says.
“I told you we were a million miles apart.”
“We were.”
“The only way you could be a million miles from me,” Rose says, “would be if I were a million miles from my own heart.” Her eyes go to the filters in his hands. “Just show it to me. Put those things down and show it to me.”
“Right. Show it to you.” He sets the lipsticked filters on the counter, watching his hands from a distance, as through a thick pane of glass. Feels the cool cloth of the robe against the back of his hand as he reaches into his pocket, feels the plush of the box under his fingertips, but all he sees is Rose, although he doesn’t even know when he looked over at her, and then his hand comes into the bottom of the picture with the box in it, and she holds his eyes with her own as her long, dark fingers take the box and close around it.
“It’s going to be beautiful,” she says without looking down.
“It has to be,” he says. “It’s for you.”
She puts her other hand over the box, cupping it between her palms. “Everybody wanted to marry you,” she says. “Every girl in the bar. They looked at you and they saw a house and a passport and money for life. And so did I.”
“Most of my competition was a hundred pounds overweight.”
“Stop it. Just once, let someone say something nice about you.”
“Sorry. Thanks.” He can barely hear his own voice.
“But those girls didn’t love you,” Rose says. “I didn’t love you either. I didn’t even want to love you. I didn’t want to tell myself I loved you if what I really loved was the house and the passport. I stopped working because of you, did you know that? I told myself I stopped for me, but I didn’t. And after I stopped, I talked myself out of you a hundred times. Sometimes my heart hides from me. It took everything, Poke. It took a long time, it took months of being with you, it took Miaow, even, seeing the way you are with Miaow, but I love you.”
“And I love you,” he says helplessly. The words hang in the air with a kind of phantom shimmer, a tossed handful of glitter. Rose looks at him in a way that makes him feel like a developing Polaroid: Out of the infinite potential of nothing comes a specific human face, with all its weaknesses and limitations. When she has his face in focus, or committed to memory, or transformed into what she wanted to see, or whatever she was doing, she looks down at the box and opens it.
The ring has three stones—a topaz, a sapphire, and a ruby, none of them very large. “The sapphire is your birthstone,” Rafferty says. “The ruby is mine.” It sounds puerile and silly as he says it. “The topaz was my guess at Miaow. Now we can change it, make it a ruby and two sapphires.”
“The family,” Rose says. “In a ring.” She tilts the stones toward him. “Miaow between you and me.”
“I guess,” Rafferty says, wondering why he never saw that.
“Poor baby,” she says for the second time, but her tone is very different. “You want a family so badly.”
“I want to put a fence around us,” Rafferty says. “Something to hold us together.”
Rose says, “We’re not going to fall apart. I won’t let us.” Her face is very grave. She raises the box to him, and he takes it and removes the ring and wraps the warm smoothness of her left hand in his, and slips the ring onto her finger. It sticks at the knuckle, and he pushes at it, and she starts to laugh and chokes it off, and then raises her finger to his mouth so he can wet the knuckle with his tongue. The ring glides over her knuckle. His arms go around her, and she fits herself to him, pressing the length of her body against his. Then she laughs. “Peachy is going to be so happy,” she says.
“Peachy can wait,” he says. “I want to make love with you when you’re wearing the ring.” He starts to lead her to the bedroom. “And only the ring.”
“Make the coffee first,” she says. “I think we’re going to need it.”
“Right.” Back at the counter, he glances down at the filters with her red lip prints on them, then takes the two that are still stuck together and drops them both into the basket. He upends the grinder into them.
“What’s wrong with the ones I got for you?” she asks.
“Nothing at all,” he says, feeling as though he will rise into the air, lift off, float inches above the floor. “I’ll eat them later.”
They are halfway across the living room, sipping coffee, hands clasped, when someone begins to hammer on the door.
!8
Maybe a Problem
oesn’t anybody have a
goddamned wristwatch?” Rafferty stands there in a robe that has
never felt pinker, holding the door open a couple of inches and
looking at the two
uniformed Bangkok policemen standing in the hallway. “Do you have any fucking idea what time it is?”
“We know exactly what time it is,” someone says in American English. The cops part to reveal a thin, youngish man in a black suit. He steps between the policemen as though he expects them to leap out of his way, and they almost do. Behind the three of them, Rafferty is startled to see Fon, looking as though she’s just learned she has an hour to live.
“Open the door, sir,” the man in the suit says. He has short-cropped, receding dark hair with a part as sharp as a scar, a narrow face, and lips thin enough to slice paper. Rimless glasses, clinically clean, perch on a prominent nose.
“Oh, sure,” Rafferty says. “Maybe you’d like a piece of cake, too.” Rose has fled to the bedroom, clutching the towel.
“Mr. Rafferty,” says the man in the suit. “This is not a productive attitude. We need to talk to you and Miss . . . um, Puchan . . . Punchangthong.” After mangling the pronunciation of Rose’s name, he pushes the door open another few inches before Rafferty gets a bare foot against it. “Now,” he says.
“Who the hell are you supposed to be?”
The man reaches into the inside pocket of his suit coat, pulls out a black wallet, flips it open, and then closes it and returns it to the pocket. He takes a step forward and runs into Rafferty’s hand, fingers outspread, in the center of his chest.
The man does not look down. “Remove your hand, sir.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir’ unless you mean it,” Rafferty says. “And do that cute little wallet flip again. You’re not on CSI, and you didn’t get a close-up.”
“The hand,” the man says. His eyes have not left Rafferty’s.
“The wallet,” Rafferty says, “or you’ll be looking at the outside of the door again. How are you, Fon?”
“Not good,” Fon says.
“Sorry to hear it.” To the American he says, “What about it? We need a retake on the wallet.”
“I can’t get to it,” the man says through his teeth, “with your hand on my chest.”
“Back up,” Rafferty says. “So I can close the door if it’s a Boy Scout merit badge.”
“We’re coming in,” says one of the cops. He loses some face by looking to the American for approval.
Rafferty doesn’t even glance at him. “Maybe, maybe not. Let’s see it.”
Stiff-faced, the American brings out the wallet again and lets it hang open. A silvery shield with a star in the center reads u.s. secret service.
“I don’t know how to break this to you,” Rafferty says, “but we’re in Thailand.”
“That’s why these gentlemen are with me,” the American says.
“And very terrifying they are, too. This got something to do with you, Fon?”
“It does,” says the American.
“I didn’t ask you.” Rafferty looks past him. “Fon?”
“Yes,” she says. It barely registers as a whisper.
Rafferty studies her face: desolate as a razed house. “Then I’ll let you in. But hang on a minute,” Rafferty says to the American. “And don’t let these goons knock the door down unless you want to pay for it.” He closes the door in the American’s face and goes into the bedroom. Rose is wearing jeans and the Totoro T-shirt, the sight of which makes Rafferty’s heart constrict. “Maybe a problem,” he says, throwing on a pair of linen slacks and the first T-shirt in the drawer. He has it halfway on before he realizes it says yes i do. but not with you. He stops tugging it down for half a second, says, “The hell with it,” and leaves it on. Motioning Rose to stay put, he goes back into the living room and opens the door.
“Mi casa es su casa,” he says, moving aside.
“That may be truer than you know,” says the American. He steps into the center of the room and looks around. He registers the cake on the table, ignores it, and focuses on the view through the sliding glass door to the balcony. “You’ve got it nice here.”
“Architectural Digest is coming in the morning.” The cops trail in. One of them has his hand on Fon’s upper arm. Rafferty says, “She can walk without help.” The cop gives him hard eyes but lets go of her arm. “Do you want to sit down, Fon?” Rafferty asks in Thai.
“English only,” says the American.
“Okay,” Rafferty says, suddenly blind with fury. “How about ‘Fuck you’?”
There is a moment of silence, and then one of the cops says, “He asked if she wanted to sit down.”
“Sure,” the American says, his eyes locked on Rafferty’s. “Let her sit.” Fon collapses onto the couch, eyeing them all uncertainly. She sits bent forward, hands in her lap, as though trying to present the smallest possible target. The American smiles at Rafferty, making his lips disappear completely. “You’re forcing me to be unpleasant,” he says. “Unfortunately for you, I enjoy being unpleasant.”
“A name would be nice,” Rafferty says. “Just so I can be sure they bust the right jerk.”
“Elson,” the American says. “Richard Elson. E-l-s-o-n.” He looks around again. “Where’s Miss Punchangthong?”
“In the other room. She’s choosy about her company.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard,” Elson says, and the next thing Rafferty knows, one of the cops has hold of his right arm and is pulling him away from Elson.
“Actually,” Elson says, “it would be easier if you hit me. We could just take you all in and do this right.”
“Don’t do anything silly, Poke,” Rose says in Thai, and Rafferty turns to see her in the bedroom door. Elson turns at the sound of her voice, and for a moment he’s just another man getting his first look at Rose. His eyes widen slightly, his thin lips part, and he inhales sharply.
“Miss Punchangthong?” he says. He pronounces it right this time.
Rose nods without turning to him. It’s the non-look she gave to customers in the bar who had no chance of getting any closer to her than across the room.
“Richard Elson, United States Secret Service. You speak English?”
“Small.”
Elson flicks a finger at Fon. “Do you know this woman?”
Rose’s face is stone. “Yes, know. Her my friend.” The crudity of the pidgin surprises Rafferty, and he glances at Rose, who avoids his eyes.
“And an employee,” Elson says.
“Where is this going?” Rafferty demands.
“You’ll know in a second.” Elson doesn’t look at him. “An employee?”
“You say so,” Rose says. She turns her head to regard Fon. “But her my friend first.”
“I want to know what this is about right now,” Rafferty says. “Or you can come back here tomorrow with a lawyer.”
“It’s about this,” Elson says, pulling an envelope out of his jacket. He opens it and displays a thin sheaf of currency. He shows it to Rose. “Did you give this to Miss Sribooncha— Jesus, these names. What the hell did you call her? Fon? Did you give this to Fon today?”
“Not give,” Rose says.
“That’s not what she says.”
“Peachy—” Fon begins, but Elson silences her with a glance. “Miss Punchangthong?”
“Fon get money today,” Rose says. “But me not give.”
“But you own the business.”
Rose shakes her head. “Peachy and me own, same-same. Hasiphasip, you know? You speak Thai?” As angry as he is, Rafferty has to turn to the sliding door to hide his grin.
“No,” Elson says, a little grimly. “I don’t speak Thai. So, in a sense, you paid her.”
“In a sense?” Rose asks. “What mean? What mean, in a sense?”
“It means—” Elson begins. He stops. “It means, um . . .”
“English only,” Rafferty says happily.
Elson licks his lips and turns to the cops. “One of you explain.”
The cops look at each other, and one of them shrugs.
“Want some help?” Rafferty asks.
“What I’m saying,” Elson says, “is that it doesn’t matter which one of you gave her the money. It came from both of you, since you both own the business.”
Rose seems to be reviewing the sentence in her head. Then she shrugs. “Not understand. Fon need money. Her want eat, you know? Pay for room. Same you.”
“Right,” Elson says. He slides the gleaming glasses down and rubs the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Fon needed the money. So let’s go over this. Miss . . . um, Fon got the money from you and your partner, right?”
“From Peachy,” Rose says stubbornly.
Elson shakes his head. “From your company. The company you own part of. And your partner got it where?”
Rose spreads her hands, the bewildered peasant girl “Maybe bank? Bank have money, na?”
Elson turns his head and says something like, “Pssshhhh.”
“Oh, come on,” Rafferty says. “No matter what this is about, how can you even say that’s the same money Fon was paid? I mean, is it special-issue, just for her? Does it say ‘Fon’ on it or something?”
Elson slips the money back into the envelope and closes the flap. “Which bank?”
“Have many bank,” Rose says. She scratches her head at the unreasonable nature of the question. “Have bank too much.” She points through the window and down toward the street. “Have bank there, and there. . . .” She points farther off. “And there, and—”
“Okay, okay,” Elson says. “Banks all over the fucking place. So you don’t personally handle the money.”
“Me?” Rose asks, giving up on the street and pointing at herself. “I talk you already, me no give money. And ‘fuck’ talk no good. Not polite.”
Elson emits a sound that could be a groan.
“Same question,” Rafferty says. “How can anyone be sure this is the actual money Fon got this morning?”
For a moment Rafferty thinks Elson is not going to answer him. He gives Rose one last despairing look and then flicks a finger at Fon. “It’s not just old Fon here. Three of the women who work for Miss Punchangthong’s company took money to the bank today.”
“They probably all did,” Rafferty says.
“But I was only at the bank three of them used,” Elson says. “And unless all three of them stopped and swapped bills with someone for some reason, every bill they deposited was counterfeit.” He smiles at Rafferty, the smile of the smartest kid in class, the only one with the right answer. “And that’s a problem.”
“Fine,” Rafferty says. “So three women walked into a bank with a few thousand baht in counterfeit money. And that’s worth a visit at five a.m.? And it’s Thai money, so what the hell does it have to do with the United States government?”
“Quite a lot, Mr. Rafferty,” Elson says. “As you’ll find out.” He looks around the room again, as though he is memorizing it. “And now you can go back to your English lesson or whatever you were doing.” He gestures for Fon to get up, and the two policemen flank her again. Elson goes to the door.
“Have good night,” Rose volunteers from the bedroom doorway. “Maybe you find girl, you boom-boom, you feel better.”
Elson ignores her, but his nostrils are white and pinched, and his lips vanish again. “Just so we’re clear,” he says to Rafferty. “We know where you are if we need you.” Holding open the door to the hallway, he motions Fon and the cops through it. He pauses in the doorway as the cops ring for the elevator. “And don’t think about going anywhere outside Thailand,” he adds, “because as of about ten minutes from now your passport won’t even get you into a movie.”
!9
Carrots Were the Last Straw
e’s just a bully.” They
are in bed again, but the glow they shared an hour earlier is a
fading memory. Rafferty’s fury, however, is still very much
alive.
“He’s a government,” Rose says. The sky has paled during the time it took him to talk her into trying to get some rest. Early light leaks balefully through the gaps in the tape over the space around the window air conditioner. Rose gives the new day the look she reserves for uninvited visitors and follows her train of thought. “Worse, with those policemen along, he’s two governments. I may not have written a bunch of books, Poke, but I know you don’t punch a government.”
“I didn’t punch him.” He can’t bring himself to tell her what Elson said to provoke the aborted attack. “And I’m not the one who told him to go get laid.”
“He needs it,” Rose says.
“I don’t think so. He probably jerks off to a spreadsheet.”
“What mean ‘jerk off’?” Rose asks, reverting to pidgin. “Same-same ‘beef jerky’?” She takes another drag on the cigarette and hits the filter. “He has very bad energy,” she says in Thai. “He likes power too much. He needs to spend some time in a monastery. And you should have been more careful. You should have kept a cool heart.”
“He had it coming. His behavior was, as they say, ‘inappropriate.’ ” He uses the English word because he can’t think of a Thai equivalent.
“What does that mean?” Rose lights a new cigarette off her old one, not a good sign. That was the way she smoked when he met her.
“ ‘Inappropriate’ is government talk.” He slides the ashtray closer to her so she can stub the butt. The stink of burning filter fills the room. “It means someone has fucked up on a planetary scale. When an American congressman is videotaped in bed with a fourteen-year-old male poodle, his behavior is usually described as inappropriate.”
“Fourteen is old for a dog,” Rose observes.
“Gee, and I thought you weren’t listening.”
“I’m listening, Poke. I’m even thinking.” She shifts her back against the pillow propped behind her. The cloud of smoke she exhales is penetrated in a vaguely religious fashion by the invading fingers of light, good morning from Cecil B. DeMille. “This could be very bad for us.”
“Oh, relax. It’s not like you and Peachy are printing money in the basement. Today they’ll go to the bank where she got the bills, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Maybe.” She pulls the sheet up over her shoulders as though she is cold.
“Sure it will. It was an accident. Bad luck, that’s all.”
She does not reply. But then she shakes her head and says, “Luck.”
He slides his knuckles softly up her arm. “Okay, it’s not luck, it’s a kink in somebody’s karma. Worse comes to worst, you have to replace the counterfeit junk with real bills. Come on, Rose. It’s only money.”
She does not look impressed by the insight.
It didn’t cheer you up either, Rafferty thinks, and then, pop, he’s got something he’s sure will distract her. “Listen, did I ever tell you that it was money that first made me want to come to Asia?”
“Really.” She takes a drag and blows the smoke away from him. “I thought you came here because you were destined to meet me.”
“Ah, but destiny moves in strange ways.” He laces his fingers together on top of his chest and lets his head sink into the pillow, his eyes on her profile. “In my case it was money. When I was a kid.”
Now he gets the full gaze that always makes his spine tingle. “You never talk about when you were little.”
“Well, I am now. You want to hear about it?”
“Of course.” She gives him the first smile he has seen since Elson drove his snowplow through their evening. “Since it’s my job to help you become human.”
“My father . . .” he begins. Then he falters. Rose’s own father has been dead only two months, and he knows she is still grieving.
“Your father,” she says. She is silent for a moment, and he searches her face, ready to wrap his arms around her. But then she says, “Something else you never talk about.”
“That’s right,” he says, trying to sidestep the moment. “When you don’t hear me talking, it’s probably my father I’m not talking about. Anyway, he spent a long time in Asia before I was born. Ran away when he was fifteen.” He thinks about it for a second. “He was sort of a specialist at running away.”
“Fifteen? How do you run away to Asia when you’re fifteen?”
“Do you want to hear about the money or not?”
“First things first.”
In general, Rafferty would rather eat glass than discuss his father, but now that he’s opened the box, there doesn’t seem to be any graceful way to close it. “He had a fake driver’s license, and he used it to get a passport. Things weren’t so tight in those days. He’d saved a bunch of money from mowing lawns and . . . I don’t know, whatever kids did in those days.”
“He told you this?”
“I asked him. He wasn’t much on volunteering information.”
She puts out the cigarette and doesn’t light another, which Rafferty interprets as progress. “Why did he run away?”
“Carrots,” Rafferty says. “Or anyway, carrots were the last straw, so to speak. The inciting incident, as a writer would say. My father hated carrots, especially cooked carrots. When my father was thirteen, my grandmother died, and my grandfather married a woman my father didn’t like. She was probably okay; she was only in her early twenties, and I’m sure she was doing the best she could, but it wasn’t good enough for him. Just like my mother. She wasn’t good enough either.”
Rose puts her hand on his. “And here you are, trying to build a family.”
“Do you want to hear the story or not?”
“I’d be holding my breath if I weren’t smoking,” Rose says, pulling out a new Marlboro Light.
“Well, he’d been planning to leave since my grandfather remarried, but he had to wait until he looked old enough to get his passport. So he got it, and one day he came in for lunch, and in front of him was a steaming platter of cooked carrots.” He looks over at her. “Are you really interested in this?”
She waves the match until it gives up and then blows on it for good measure. “Don’t be silly. This is your family you’re talking about.”
“Okay. The carrots. He shoved the platter away, and his stepmother said something like, ‘Eat those carrots. There are children starving in China.’ ” He can feel Rose’s gaze, and he says, “Americans used to say that when their kids wouldn’t eat. To make them feel guilty about those poor little Chinese kids, I guess. Anyway, that was the end of the road for my father. He got up, went into the kitchen, got a waxed-paper bag, and brought it back to the table. He shoveled a bunch of the carrots into it and headed for the door. His stepmother said, ‘Where are you taking those?’ and my father said, ‘To the children in China.’ Then he went to his room, got his passport and a metal box that had all his money in it and . . . I don’t know, a change of socks or something, and went down to the port of San Pedro—they were living in Los Angeles—and took a boat to China.”
“Strong kid.” Rose picks up the ashtray and balances it on her stomach. She shoves it with a finger to make it wobble. “How long did he stay there?”
“Years. Until the Communists chased everybody out. Then he went back to California and bought a bunch of property. Eventually he married my mother. Then he packed up and ran away again, when I was sixteen. Back to Asia.”
Rose gives the ashtray a precise quarter turn. “Are you like him?”
“No,” Rafferty says immediately. “For one thing, I don’t run away.”
“I didn’t mean that. I know you’re not going to run out on Miaow and me. But, you know, you both went to Asia, you both wound up with Asian women—”
“Half Asian in my mother’s case.”
“Ah,” Rose says. “Well, that’s very different.”
“We both also have two arms and two legs. And that’s about all we have in common.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” She eyes the ashtray as though she expects it to try to escape.
Rafferty gives her a minute to elaborate and then asks, “Do you want to hear about the money or not?”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“No.”
“Speak to him?”
“No.”
“Did you try?”
“No,” he lies. She says nothing, so he repeats the lie. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Why would I?”
Slowly she turns to face him. “Because he’s your father.”
“The way I see it,” he says, “he chose not to be.”
She picks up the pack of cigarettes and holds it to the light, reading the health warning for the thousandth time, then takes a defiant drag. “He’ll be your father as long as he lives,” she says. “But we’ll talk more about it later. Tell me about the money.”
Rafferty grabs the rope she has thrown him. “He had this box in our house. A metal box with a lock on it. Really banged up, like it had fallen off a cliff or something. For all I know, it was the one he took with him to China in the first place. It sat on a table in my parents’ room, and I wasn’t supposed to open it.”
“So you did.”
“Well, sure. I mean, most of the time I had nothing at all to do. He bought about five hundred acres of desert outside this little pimple of a town called Lancaster and built a house right in the middle of it, then stuck my mother and me inside. The three of us and a bunch of dirt. You can only spend so many days counting rocks or whatever it is that people who love the desert do when they’re wandering around loving it. So I went to school, I read some books, I wrote some stories, and I opened his damn box.”
“Don’t pause now. It’s just getting good.”
“I popped the lock with a bobby pin. It took about forty seconds. And inside there were some old yellowed papers, an expired passport, and a bunch of money.” He holds his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “This thick. But it wasn’t American money—it was from all over Asia. And I’d never seen anything like it.”
Rose’s eyes are focused on her lap, the cigarette forgotten between her fingers. He can actually feel her listening; the energy seems to pull the words out of him.
“Where I grew up,” he says, “everything was brown. The desert was brown, our house was brown—half the time the sky was brown, courtesy of the smog Los Angeles sent us every day. Buildings were brown and square: flat roofs, small windows to keep the heat out. Nothing was ornamented, nothing was designed a certain way just because somebody thought it would look good. It was like they went out of their way to make it ugly.”
“Brown and square,” Rose says. “My village was pretty much brown and square, except when the rice was green.”
“We didn’t even have rice. We had rocks, which were brown, and here and there a plant, and that was brown, too. And then here were these pictures, on the money, I mean. I wasn’t even old enough to think about what the money could buy. I just saw the bills as pictures.”
Her gaze is warm on his cheek. “Of what?”
“Clouds. Trees. Buildings with roofs that tilted up at the corners like a prayer. Lakes with bridges over them, and the bridges looked like . . . I don’t know, lace or something. Everything seemed to float. In Lancaster the rocks were heavy and the buildings were like bigger, heavier rocks. And I unfolded that money, and I was looking at a different world, a world where everything was light enough to float. Some of the bills had faces on them, mostly old men, but they had something in their eyes, something that said they knew who they were. There weren’t many Asians near us. My mother’s family had Filipino blood, and there were a few Chinese and Koreans who ran restaurants, but they all looked like everybody else, like they were waiting for something to happen. The people on the money, though—whatever they had been waiting for, it had happened.” He puts his hand over her long fingers, touching the ring. “So there were two new worlds, one in the places and the buildings, and one in those guys’ eyes. And they both looked a lot better than Lancaster.”
“And hiding behind one of those buildings,” Rose says, putting her head on his shoulder, “was me.”
“If I’d been able to see around that corner,” Rafferty says, “I would have come here at fifteen, too.”
“Sweet mouth.” She yawns. Then she says, “Poke, I love my ring.”
“And I love you.” He picks up the ashtray and puts it on the table. “We’ll work this out, Rose. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m all right. But I’d feel better if I knew more about it. Right now the only thing I know is that the money was bad and we’re in the middle of it, Peachy and I. Is there someone you can talk to? Someone who could tell you more?”
“I don’t even have to think about it,” he says. “When the government is causing you trouble, you go to the government.”
!10
Better Than the Real Thing
oung or old?” Arnold
Prettyman asks. “Youngish,” Rafferty says. “He’s like what someone
said about Richard Nixon: He’s an old man’s idea of a young
man.”
“Nixon got a bum rap,” Prettyman says, toying with an eighteen-inch-long tube of rolled paper on the table between them. He has eyes the color of faded denim, as remote as the eyes of a stuffed animal. Rafferty always half expects to see dust on them. His features have bunched for company in the center of his square face, below wavy, rapidly receding, light-colored hair he brushes unpersuasively forward. Lately he has cultivated a pointed little goatee apparently inspired by Ming the Merciless. Before he sprouted the chin spinach, people occasionally told him he resembled the singer Phil Collins, but to Rafferty he’s always looked like what he is, or was: a spy. He spends way too much time staring people directly in the eyes when he’s talking, a trait Rafferty associates with Scientologists and liars, such as spies. He’s fairly sure Prettyman isn’t a Scientologist.
“As hard as it may be to believe, Arnold,” Rafferty says, “I didn’t come halfway across Bangkok to reopen the file on Nixon.”
“Just taking a stand,” Prettyman says. “Anyway, the young ones are the worst. They all think they’re Eliot Ness. Probably carries a pearl-handled gun and is dying to put a notch in it.”
“But you don’t know him.”
“Richard Elson,” Prettyman says, without much interest. He pulls the tube of paper toward him and raps out a quick three-finger rhythm on one of the rolled edges. “Nope. Never heard the name. Not that I really hung with the Seekies. The Service keeps to itself.”
“Just out of curiosity,” Rafferty says, “why would a theoretically secret organization call itself the Secret Service? Kind of lets the cat out of the bag, don’t you think? I mean, why not something innocuous? The Adolphe Menjou Fan Club or the Mauritanian Triangle Stamp League or something?”
“If you’re looking for logic in Washington, I envy your optimism.” Prettyman lifts one end of the roll of paper and lets it drop again. “Don’t forget, these guys want to be important. They’re like twelve-year-olds. If they had their way, they’d probably call it Heroes Anonymous.”
“Okay, so forget Elson personally. What’s the Secret Service doing in Bangkok?”
“Under this administration, anything they want. Mostly, though, they come here about counterfeiting. It’s a little weird, since you’d expect Treasury to be in charge of counterfeiting, but it’s the Seekies’ job. That’s what I mean about logic in Washington.”
“Well, counterfeiting is what he kicked my door in about.”
Prettyman’s eyes have not left Rafferty’s since he looked up from the roll of paper, but now they dart away for a tenth of a second and come right back, and there is real interest in them. He leans forward an eighth of an inch, which for Prettyman is an expansive gesture.
“American currency?”
“No, that’s what I can’t figure out. Thai.”
“Thousand-baht notes,” Prettyman says.
Rafferty squares his chair so the sunlight reflecting off the mirrored wall won’t hit him in the eyes. “Very impressive, Arnold.”
“You don’t want to fuck around with this at all,” Prettyman says. “I know that’s hard for you, but resist the impulse.”
“Why so ominous, Arnold? And what do you know about counterfeit thousand-baht notes?”
“North Korea,” Prettyman says. His lifeless eyes wander the room. He and Rafferty are sitting in a small bar on the second floor of Nana Plaza, a three-story supermarket of sex off Sukhumvit Road. There’s not much affection in Prettyman’s gaze; few places are more forlorn than a go-go bar in the light of morning. He recently either bought the bar or didn’t, depending on which day he’s asked. Rafferty waits; Prettyman is a miser with information. He parts with it as though wondering if he’s spending it in the right place. Eventually he says, “The American government, and especially the Seekies, is obsessed with North Korea.”
Rafferty gives it a beat to see whether anything else is coming. When it’s apparent that Prettyman is finished, he says, “I think it’s pretty interesting myself, but what’s the connection with bad thousand-baht notes?”
Prettyman grimaces as though the prospect of answering the question causes him physical pain. “That’s where they come from. The NKs turn them out by the tens of thousands. And they’re not bad. Aside from the fact that they’re not real money, they’re better than the real thing. That’s one way they spot them: The engraving is actually too good.” He glances at himself in the mirror opposite and feathers his hair forward with his fingertips until he looks a little like Caligula. “Do you know anything at all about this?”
“About North Korea? Or counterfeiting?”
“Both.”
“Not enough,” Rafferty says. “So clue me in.”
“Fine.” Prettyman gives his head a quarter turn, right and left, to check the tonsorial repair job and then sits forward, crossing his hands. “Are you paying me?”
“Oh, Arnold,” Rafferty says. “After all these years.”
Prettyman dismisses the appeal without a moment’s thought. “You know what Molière said about being a professional writer?”
“No,” Rafferty says. “But I’ll bet it’s fascinating.”
“He said, ‘First we do it for love. Then we do it for a few friends. Then we do it for money.’ ”
“Sounds like prostitution.”
“I left that out,” Prettyman says. “That’s what he was comparing writing to.”
“I can see why you might have skipped it.”
“The operative word was ‘professional.’ I’m a professional. Twenty thousand baht.”
“Ten.”
“Fifteen.”
“Twelve-five, and that’s it. You’re not the only spy I know.”
“I’m not a spy,” Prettyman says automatically. “Okay, North Korea. The Norkies have almost no foreign trade. First, they don’t make much of anything, and second, most countries won’t do business with them. And why not, you ask?”
“I do,” Rafferty says. Prettyman reflectively chews his lip as though wondering whether to renegotiate. Rafferty asks, “Was that enough of a response, or would you like me to actually formulate the question?”
Prettyman does a minimalist head shake, little more than a twitch. “Because they’re nuts, that’s why. Just completely, totally, off-the-wall nuts. If North Korea were a person, it would be wrapped in an old blanket, muttering to itself on the sidewalk. Relief organizations send them boats full of rice, since half the fucking country is starving to death, and the Norkie navy sinks the boats. They buy stuff from other countries and don’t accept the shipment, or they accept it and don’t pay for it. This is not a policy that’s going to produce large streams of foreign revenue.”
“Sort of like opening a store and keeping the doors locked.”
“And shooting the guy who delivers your merchandise.” Prettyman picks up the tube of paper and holds it to one eye, like a telescope, then lowers it. “But they need money. The Socialist Paradise—that’s what the Norkie government calls it—spends every nickel it can generate on the military, which, as you might guess, leaves a hole in the budget when it comes to luxuries like food. So they raise money by counterfeiting stuff.”
“You’re telling me that a government is producing funny money.”
“It’s not a government, it’s the Sopranos. You want a statistic?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, here comes one.” He holds up the roll of paper and says, “Remind me to ask you about this. So . . . the statistic: North Korea makes more foreign revenue from counterfeiting than it does from
trade.”
Some sort of response seems called for. Rafferty says, “Gadzooks.”
“Prescription drugs, cigarettes—your girlfriend smokes, right?”
“Like Pittsburgh.”
“Marlboros?”
Rafferty nods.
“Well, your girlfriend’s cigarettes come straight from Kim Jong Il. In 1995, agents intercepted a boat on its way from Taiwan to North Korea carrying cigarette papers with the Marlboro logo. Wrap them around some junk tobacco, and there were so many papers they’d have brought one billion dollars on the street. That’s billion with a b. Nine-tenths of the Marlboros in Southeast Asia are forgeries, courtesy of Office 39, which reports directly to the little guy with the Eraserhead haircut.”
“Another reason for her to quit.”
“But your Mr. Elson doesn’t care about cigarettes, or fake Viagra, or AIDS drugs that don’t actually do anything. He cares about money, American money. The same printing plant in Pyongyang that makes the extra-fancy thousand-baht bills makes American fifties and hundreds that are so good they’re called ‘supernotes.’” Prettyman shakes his head in what might be admiration. His eyes briefly border on expressive. “You have to give them credit. These things are so perfect the Seekies had to blow them up to about twenty feet long and project them on a floor in Washington to find the telltales. They even got the ink right. You heard of color-shifting ink?”
“Is this going to cost me extra?”
“Look at it from different angles, it’s different colors. Green and black, mostly. We use it on the new bills now, because it was supposed to be impossible to counterfeit. Well, it isn’t. And the paper is the same, with a cloth fiber content of three-quarters cotton and one-quarter linen.”
“I thought the paper was a secret, like the formula for Coca-Cola.”
“The Norkies were bleaching one-dollar bills for a while but they finally figured the hell with it, that was too expensive, and analyzed the paper six ways from Sunday. Then they started making it on their own. They’re printing this stuff like mail from Ed McMahon. Why do you think American money’s gotten so fancy all of a sudden? Office 39, that’s why. And don’t bother getting used to the new bills, because they’ll have to change again in a few years.”
Rafferty glances at his watch. “So Elson is in Bangkok because the same North Koreans who are making the American play money are also making the Thai stuff.”
“And because they pass a lot of the American counterfeits here.”
“In Bangkok? Why?”
“About the only thing they haven’t figured out is how to get tons of the stuff into the States. About three hundred thousand dollars showed up in Newark on a boat from China a year or so ago, and another seven hundred thousand got snagged in Long Beach. Peanuts, probably just trial runs. So they pass them here, or in the United Kingdom and a bunch of other countries, anywhere they can get them in by the boatload.”
“Still,” Rafferty says, “how many billion U.S. bucks are in circulation? This has got to be like putting a drop of iodine in a swimming pool.”
“People in the Bush administration referred to it as an act of war.”
“To the Bush administration, double-parking is an act of war.”
“Elson’s a Seekie,” Prettyman says. “The guys in the Service are the president’s men, remember? They tend to take the executive branch’s perspective pretty seriously. Also, here’s a chance for them to make headlines. I mean, how often does someone take a shot at the president? You can put on those suits and plug in that earpiece and scan the crowd for your whole career without ever feeling like anything except a civil servant whose feet hurt. But lookie here, a chance to put an end to an act of war.” He fingers the goatee experimentally. “So I’m telling you, don’t get in Elson’s way. He’s gonna run over you like a cement truck hitting a feather. And the Thais won’t lift a finger.”
“I think it’ll be okay. The bills came from a bank. Elson will talk to Rose’s partner, and she’ll clear the whole thing up.”
“You’d better hope so. Speaking of money.” He rolls the tube of paper back and forth beneath his palms.
“Got it,” Rafferty says. He pulls out a wad of money with a rubber band around it. “Two consultations, and what you told me you were paying your guys.” He reaches into his pocket for more. “And the twelve-five.”
“Speaking of my guys,” Prettyman says, taking the money, “they pretty much had you for breakfast yesterday.”
“You heard about that.”
“I didn’t need to hear about it. I can smell it.” He flips through the bills. “No thousands, right?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Uh-uh.” He peels off two thousand-baht bills and hands them back. “Give me five-hundreds. Last thing I need is the Seekies.”
As Rafferty makes the change, Prettyman surveys the room again. It follows the basic scheme: a square bar in the center, surrounding a raised and mirrored stage on which several scantily clad young women sleepwalk each night, more or less rhythmically. The sole distinguishing feature is at the far end of the room: three curtained booths where customers can retire with the sleepwalker of their choice for the house specialty, which requires the sleepwalker to service the seated patron for however long it takes heaven to arrive. This is exactly the kind of bar from which Rose rescued Fon.
“Thinking about an upgrade,” Prettyman says.
“Hard to imagine,” Rafferty says. “The booths are an interesting touch. Curtains and everything. Very upscale.”
“Thanks. But, you know, times change. I think maybe new lights and speakers, maybe a mirror on the stage floor. Old guys get stiff necks trying to look up all the time.”
“Next thing you know, you’ll be serving fruit shakes.”
Prettyman regards the room for another moment, eyes half narrowed to make it look better, then seems to come to a decision. “Tell me what you think of this,” he says, unfolding the paper and turning it so it faces Rafferty. It is a chalk drawing that depicts a neon sign, obviously in the design stage, with penciled measurements in meters scribbled here and there. Most of the space is taken up by a large crimson word in balloon type.
“ ‘Gulp’?” Rafferty says, reading.
“Too subtle?” Prettyman asks. He is frowning down at the page.
“It’s too a lot of things, Arnold, but subtle is not one of them. What’s wrong with ‘Charming’? That’s been the name of this place for years.”
“Fails the basic criteria of business communication,” Prettyman says.
It sounds like he’s reciting something somebody said to him. “Doesn’t tell you anything. Not memorable, not distinctive.”
“But Gulp? As in, ‘Whaddaya say, guys, let’s go down to Gulp?’ Or, ‘No problem, honey, I stopped off at Gulp?’ I don’t know, Arnold.”
Prettyman looks disconcerted. “I was thinking about calling it ‘Lewinsky’s,’ ” he says, “but somebody’s already using it.”
“It’s dated,” Rafferty says, just to mollify him. “Gulp is . . . um, timeless.” He looks down at the paper again. “But what’s with the bird?”
Prettyman studies the picture. A blue, somewhat lopsided bird with its wings outstretched hovers above the G in “Gulp.” “Nobody gets it,” he says with some bitterness.
“At least I’ve got company.” Rafferty checks his watch once more.
“You in a hurry?” Prettyman rolls up the paper with uncharacteristic vehemence.
“Come on, Arnold. Tell me about the bird. For once in your life, hand out some free information.”
“It’s a swallow,” Prettyman says shortly.
“I take it all back,” Rafferty says, rising. “You are subtle.”
!11
The Other End of the Line
wo cops,” the fourth
watcher says into the cell phone. The phone is a floater,
purchased, along with four others, from the people who stole them
from their original owners. Each
will be used for one day. By six tonight this one will be at the bottom of the river.
Against his will, the fourth watcher yawns; he had a long night, but a yawn is an admission of weakness. “They were dragging some girl along. But here’s the interesting part: There was a guy with them. Dark suit, even a tie.”
“Thai government?” says the man on the other end of the line.
“I’m tired,” the fourth watcher admits. “I should have told you the guy in the suit was an Anglo.”
There is a pause. The fourth watcher yawns again, silently this time, and looks at the traffic. Traffic where he comes from is bad, but nothing like this. Then the man on the other end of the line says, “Shit.” He puts a lot into it.
“And since our guy’s American, I’m figuring the guy in the suit—”
“Yeah, yeah.” The fourth watcher can almost see the other man rubbing his eyes. “Half of Thailand is following him, and now this. Cops and an American at four-thirty in the morning. What the hell is going on, Leung?”
“I just stand around and watch,” the man called Leung says. “You’re supposed to figure out what’s going on.”
“They went into the building. How do you know they went to his apartment?”
“Lights,” says the fourth watcher. “A minute, a minute and a half after they all went in, the lights went on in what I figure is the living room. Opens onto a balcony. Fifteen, twenty minutes later—make it five o’clock—they came out, all of them. Both cops, the Anglo, and the woman. About thirty seconds after that, the lights in the apartment went off again.”
“Where are you now?”
“Sex city. Nana Plaza. Our guy just went inside, into a bar.”
“At this hour? With a woman like that at home, he’s doing a morning quickie?”
“Bar’s closed,” says Leung. “Some Anglo guy showed up and unlocked it for him.”
“Describe him.”
“Only saw him for a second. Balding and combing it forward, little-bitty features in a big face. Oh, and a goatee. Got maybe twenty pounds he doesn’t want, mostly around his belt.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Any followers on our man?”
“Not unless they’re invisible.”
“Okay,” the man on the other end of the line says. “Wait a few minutes until Ming Li shows up, and then come on in and get some sleep. She’ll take him for the rest of the day.”
Leung stifles another yawn. “Three or four tails practically riding on his back all the time. Cops in the middle of the night. A guy who couldn’t be any more government if he had an eagle on his jacket. What do you think it is?”
“I think it’s the same thing you do,” says the man on the other end of the phone. “Trouble.”
!12
A Yellow Heart
he go-go clubs of Nana
Plaza, where Prettyman’s bar is located, don’t light up until 6:00
p.m., but the open-air bars flanking the end of the Plaza that
spills into Soi Nana are
already packed at 10:30 in the morning and exuding an air of desperate fun. The tables are jammed with drinkers, some of whom can barely sit upright and most of whom look as though they haven’t been to bed in days: Bags sag beneath eyes, graying whiskers bristle, hair as lank as raw bacon hangs over foreheads. Trembling hands hoist glasses. Here and there, Rafferty sees a morning-shift girl, her arms draped around one of the drinkers, looking at him as though he’s just emerged, naked, gleaming, and perfect, from the sea.
Bad 1980s rock and roll, big-hair metal at its most aggressively ordinary, elbows its way onto the sidewalk. The as-yet-unclaimed women, who will be doing short-times until 7:00 p.m., hug the stools they’ve staked out, their miniskirts riding up over their thighs as they scan the crowd in the hope of intercepting a speculative glance. Most of them aren’t even pretending to be interested. It’s too early.
Rafferty knows exactly how they feel. Thanks to the visit from Elson and Rose’s nervousness afterward, he got maybe ninety minutes of sleep. His eyes feel like someone poured a handful of sand beneath his lids, and there’s something sluggish and heavy at his core. He knows there’s only one cure: coffee. The question is whether to go home and drink a pot with Rose or grab some here. He’s thickheaded enough that his indecision actually stops him in the middle of the sidewalk. One of the girls in the bar, seeing him pause, calls him in. For a moment he considers it—they’ve got coffee—but the music and the clientele combine to create a richly textured awfulness that’s better avoided at this hour. The light level drops slightly, and he looks up to see some truly alarming clouds.
Can he even make it home before the rain hits?
He is turning to walk to Sukhumvit Road when he sees the girl.
She instantly stops and drops to one knee to fiddle with a shoe, lowering her head so a veil of black hair falls forward and covers her features. In the half second or so that he sees her, however, the face leaps across the darkening day as though a flashbulb has exploded. She is extraordinarily beautiful. Her pale face is angular, sharp-boned, almost unnaturally symmetrical. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. Not Thai. Chinese, perhaps, or even Korean, although something about her features—the high bridge of her nose, the curve of her lower lip—suggests she might be hasip-hasip, fifty-fifty Western. But the thing that arrests his gaze is that there is something familiar about her. He knows he has never seen her before. He would remember if he had; she is definitely material for the memory bank. But he recognizes something in her face.
He is still staring at her when she glances up from her shoe and catches his eye. She gives him a sliver of a smile, more the thought of a smile than the thing itself, and then stands and walks away, her back to him, heading back up Soi Nana. He is certain she just reversed direction. As she retreats, he sees that she is taller than most Asian women, perhaps five-eight, another reason to think she might be hasip-hasip.
Not as tall as Rose, he thinks, and a bolt of guilt pierces him. He should be doing something—anything—about Agent Elson. And Fon, if he can; for all he knows, Fon is still in jail. The first thing that comes to mind is the two cops who were with Elson. He pulls out the phone again, turns it on, and dials the number of his friend Arthit, a colonel in the Bangkok police. As he waits for the ring, he turns back in the direction of Sukhumvit and begins to amble toward it. Arthit’s voice mail picks up, and Rafferty leaves a message, asking whether they can meet for lunch in a couple of hours at an outdoor restaurant near Arthit’s station.
He snaps the phone shut and asks himself again: home or somewhere here?
His decision arrives in the form of a typical Thai raindrop, perhaps half a pint of warm water, that smacks the top of his forehead much as a Zen master might clobber a meditating student whose attention has wandered. Before he can blink, thunder rumbles and the sky flickers: lights on, off, then on again, and suddenly it’s much darker than before. A giant burps high overhead, a noise like someone rolling cannonballs in a huge pan. Rafferty has learned respect for Thai rainstorms, which can empty an Olympic swimming pool on one’s head in a matter of minutes, and he hurries toward the intersection, hoping to flag a tuktuk before the deluge strikes.
Hope, as is so often the case, is disappointed. Poke hasn’t gone ten yards before the drain opens in heaven, tons of water falling, the drops so fat and heavy that their splashes reach his knees. A whiplash of light precedes by scant seconds a sound like the sky cracking in half. The rain increases in volume, slapping his shoulders sharply enough to sting. His world shrinks to a circle a few yards wide with himself at its soaked center. It is literally impossible to see across the street.
Rain means the same thing in what the tour books call “exotic Bangkok” that it means in more prosaic cities around the world. It means that there will not be a taxi within miles. It means Rafferty could stand on the curb for hours, stark naked, painted fuchsia, and waving a million-baht note, and no one would hit the brakes. It means he has a chance to find out whether his new jeans are really preshrunk or just Bangkok preshrunk, meaning that some seamstress spent several minutes painstakingly sewing on a label that says “preshrunk,” which is usually the item that shrinks first.
He’s running by now, the phone folded and sheltered in his fist, looking for a restaurant, coffee shop, bar—anyplace he can wait out the rain. As if on cue, golden lights bloom to his right, haloed in the rain. A bell rings as he pushes his way through the door, into a small bakery and coffee shop. He is alone, facing a long glass case full of pastries frosted in an improbable yellow the color of Barbie’s hair. The air is thick with coffee, and stools line the window, framing a gray rectangle of rain. He takes a seat and drips contentedly onto the floor, watching the water fall.
As a native of California, where a cloudy day makes the TV news, Rafferty is thrilled by Thailand’s enormous weather. Its sheer magnitude seems a kind of wealth, spending itself extravagantly day after day: thunderous rain, blinding heat, clouds as greasy and dark as oil shale. Nothing makes him happier than being in his apartment with Miaow, all the lights on in midafternoon, as monsoon-force winds lash the rain around and rattle the glass door to the balcony.
And now Rose will be there, too. As his wife.
The lie he told Rose in bed that morning nags at him. In fact, he had tried to find his father. Within two weeks of his graduation from UCLA, he had returned to Lancaster and ransacked his father’s metal box. Two days later he was on a plane to Hong Kong. Once there, he used the decades-old names and addresses he had copied into his notebook to track his father across China, where he ultimately found the woman—fat and blowsy now—for whose decades-old memory Frank Rafferty had left his wife and son behind.
His father had refused to see him.
The only thing Rafferty owes his father is that the search had brought him to Asia, where he has been more or less ever since.
Frank has a yellow heart, his fierce mother had said, the one time she allowed Rafferty to raise the subject of his father’s disappearance. At the time he’d thought she meant he was a coward. Only after he realized that he, too, had a yellow heart did he grasp that his father simply loved Asia, could not live anywhere but Asia. Rafferty’s mother, half Filipina herself, had understood her husband, although that didn’t stop her from hating him later, with that special talent for hatred that Filipinos carry in their blood, mixed in with gaiety and music.
A yellow heart, he thinks.
“Sawadee, kha,” someone says behind him. He turns to see a girl, perhaps ten years old. She wears a pair of shorts more or less the same yellow as the pastries behind the glass and a much-laundered T-shirt that says happy together above a picture of two fat hippies whom Rafferty recognizes as the singers in an old-time band called the Turtles. She is as brown as a paper bag.
“Sawadee, khrap,” Rafferty says. “Caffee lon, okay?”
“One hot coffee,” Happy Together says. “It will coming up.” She looks past him at the rain, and her lips move experimentally. Then she narrows her eyes and takes the plunge. “Have raining, yes?”
“Have raining, yes,” Rafferty says. “Have raining mak-mak.” The Thai phrase for “a lot.”
“Hokay,” Happy Together says proudly. “Talking English, na?”
“More or less. You speak it well.”
“Ho, no,” she says. “Only little bit.” It sounds like “leeten bit.” “Where you come from?”
“U.S.A.”
She raises an index finger as though she is going to lecture him, but the message is mathematical. She says, “U.S.A. numbah one.”
“No,” Rafferty says. “Thailand is number one.”
“Hah.” Her grin is enormously white. He has passed the national test. “Caffee lon now.” She disappears behind the counter, only the top of her head visible. She is no taller than Miaow.
Miaow, he thinks. Miaow is Rafferty’s family now. Rose is Rafferty’s family now. It has taken him years to assemble a home, and now he has one. I’m really hasip-hasip now, he thinks. I have a Thai family. With his mother’s Filipina blood evident in the high bones of his face and his straight black hair, he has often been mistaken for half Thai, although he’s only one-quarter Asian. Still, he thinks, he’s genetically entitled to his yellow heart.
The coffee, when it is slapped down in front of him, is thick enough to whip. He lifts the heavy china mug and stares at the rain.
“Think too much,” Happy Together says, standing beside him. “Think too much, no good.”
“Thinking about good things,” Rafferty says. “I’ve got a little girl at home just like you.”
“Thai girl?” Happy Together gives the operatic rain a disdainful glance. She’s used to it.
“One hundred percent,” Rafferty says.
Happy Together glances at his face, looks again. “You, what? Hasiphasip?”
“Part Filipino.”
“I know where Pipinenes are,” she says, pointing more or less east. “Over there.” It comes out “Oweh dah.”
“My daughter’s smart, too.”
She thinks for a second, pushing her lower lip out. “Some farang no have baby, right?”
“Right.” He has been asked this question before. Most Thais cannot imagine an adult choosing not to have children.
“Why? Why not have baby? No have baby, not happy.”
“I don’t know. But you’re right. Babies are necessary.”
Happy Together fills her cheeks with air as she checks the dictionary in her head and then squints at him. “You say what?”
“Necessary,” Rafferty repeats, following it with the Thai word.
“Word too big,” she says decisively.
“Not for you. You’re smart.”
She goes up on tiptoes. “You know twelve times twelve?”
“One hundred thirty-eight.”
“Ho.” She punches him on the leg, hard enough to raise a lump. “You joking me.”
“See how smart you are? And look, you’ve already got your own shop.”
She balls her fist to punch him again and thinks better of it. Maybe her hand hurts. “My mama make shop. But I make caffee. Good, na?”
“Excellent.” Rafferty brings the cup to his lips and watches as someone comes into sight through the window, shrouded in rain. A woman, her clothes pasted to her slender form. She does not keep her head down against the downpour but shields her eyes with a hand, obviously looking for something or someone. He watches idly for a moment, wondering why she hasn’t ducked inside to wait out the storm, and then, with a start, realizes who she is.
He pushes back his stool. “How many baht?” he asks Happy Together.
“Twenty. Caffee no good?”
The girl has passed from sight. So he was right; she had reversed direction, then turned around and followed him again. “It’s excellent,” he says. “But I just saw someone I know.” He gives Happy Together a bright blue fifty-baht note and hurries out into the rain.
THE MOMENT HEsets foot on the street, a sheet of lightning flattens everything, turning the raindrops ice-white and freezing them in midfall. The boom that follows feels like his own skull crumpling. He starts walking, as fast as he can without breaking into a run, waiting for the girl’s form to solidify through the gray curtain in front of him.
He had meant to tell Prettyman to call off the trackers. He decided over his morning coffee to drop the book idea as too risky for someone with a wife and child, kicking off the first day of his new life with a firm resolve that made him feel briefly adult, despite a twinge of resentment; the book’s topic had interested him. But now things were different. He had responsibilities. He’d write magazine articles. He’d review books—that sounded safe. Maybe he’d do advertising copy.
The prospect had all the allure of a glass of warm milk, but his wife and daughter would be happier. He and Rose would economize; they’d pay Miaow’s tuition, and then worry about everything else. He’d left the apartment with every intention of abandoning the project. Then he had been distracted, thinking about the conversation about Elson, and he’d forgotten to tell Prettyman he was quitting.
Or perhaps, he acknowledges, he likes the excitement. Or maybe he doesn’t want to let go of the advance money.
But now he can clear it up.
He passes a drugstore, a restaurant, a small hotel, a hair salon full of women anxiously lining the window, staring at the rain that will ruin their new hairdos, barely paid for. Cars splash by in the street, throwing up sheets of water three feet high. The light increases by several f-stops, and he realizes the rain is lifting. He can see half a block ahead now.
The girl is nowhere in sight.
He breaks into a run, his feet slapping through the water. Then some giant hand turns off the faucet and the rain stops, as suddenly as it began. The boulevard yawns in front of him, gleaming wet, its sidewalk almost deserted.
She must have turned into a side street. He looks back, certain he didn’t pass one, and sees nothing. Half a block ahead, though, a tuktuk fords a temporary lake across the boulevard and vanishes to the right, obviously heading down a soi. Without breaking stride, Rafferty chases it and enters the soi.
And sees her, walking briskly, almost a block away. She turns, checking behind her, and spots him. At the same moment, she sees the tuktuk and raises a hand to flag it. The tuk-tuk swerves suicidally to the curb, its driver having obviously seen her face, and she climbs in. As it pulls away, she looks back at Rafferty again. Then, with that same quarter smile, she lifts her hand and waves good-bye.
!13
My Sweetness Is Classified
magazine article.
His notebook is pocket-size, awkward for anything
but brief reminders, but he scribbles in it anyway, sitting at the outdoor table until the rain drives him inside. “Spytown,” he titles it, ten thousand, maybe fifteen thousand words about the oddly matched collection of spies who, like Prettyman, drifted to Bangkok when the world no longer looked like it was heading for a shooting war. He’d met a few of them. His second conversation with Prettyman had taken place in a bar so discreet it didn’t even have a sign. Rafferty had needed half an hour, trekking up and down the soi on foot, to find it, and when he went inside, it was full of spies.
Well, retired spies, or so they said. Now older and fatter, they looked like traveling salesmen whose territories had shrunk out from under them. There was something unanchored about them, something about the way their eyes checked the room without settling on anything, the way they looked at every face twice, and then twice again, that was unnerving. They seemed always to be reassuring themselves that they had an exit, from the room, from the conversation. Rafferty had heard it said that the only people who were at home everywhere were kings and prostitutes. These men were on the other end of the scale. They weren’t at home anywhere.
All of them were men. They congregated in the booths in groups that assembled and broke up constantly, rehashing operations from twenty years ago, operations on which they’d been on opposing sides. It quickly became apparent that half the men in the bar would have killed the other half on sight in 1985.
Nineteen eighty-five: the year his father had returned to China.
Prettyman had been different in the bar. Rafferty is trying to capture the difference in words when he notices that the rain has stopped again, and he grabs his coffee and his notebook and moves back outside. Arthit will be able to see him better out there, and the air-conditioning on his wet clothing has given him a chill.
A waitress mops the table, but Rafferty, eager to write, sits before she tends to his chair, which has half an inch of water gathered in the low point of the seat. He barely notices, seeing in his mind’s eye the loose, confident way Prettyman moved in the bar, as though he were outdoors and in familiar terrain. Until then Prettyman had always struck Rafferty as someone who navigated the world too carefully, the kind of person who checks frequently to make sure the top is screwed tightly on the salt shaker.
Arnold had been in his element in the bar. As Rafferty was when he was writing the kind of material he enjoyed writing.
“Stop that,” he says out loud. He starts to write again, thinking he might have to reevaluate Arnold. The man in the spies’ bar was more formidable than the vaguely comic ex-spook he thought he knew. Suddenly he realizes he’s been patronizing Arnold.
He stops writing, the point of his pen still touching the page.
“Doing a Raymond Chandler?” someone asks, and Rafferty looks up to see Arthit peering down at the notebook.
“What’s that mean?”
“Chandler wrote on little pieces of paper,” Arthit says, pulling out a chair. “About the size of a paperback book. The trick, he said, was to get a tiny bit of magic on every one of those little pages.”
“Is that so?” Rafferty watches Arthit’s expression as his bottom hits the miniature pond on the seat. After his friend’s eyes have widened
rewardingly, Rafferty says, “The seat’s wet.”
“I know,” Arthit says through his teeth. “It’s very cooling.”
“And how does that piece of information about Raymond Chandler come to be in the possession of a Bangkok policeman?”
“Chandler went to Dulwich, my school in England,” Arthit says. “He was the only famous graduate who interested me, so I read about him. He drank too much. Why do writers drink too much?”
“They’re alone too much.”
“Why don’t you drink too much?”
“I more or less live in a permanent crowd. How’s Noi?”
“She hurts,” Arthit says. “It comes and goes. Lately it mostly comes.” Arthit’s wife, Noi, whom he loves without reservation, is taking a defiant stand against multiple sclerosis. She’s two years into the battle now, and despite all the medicine, herbal remedies, prayer, and love, she’s losing. Arthit slides back and forth on the seat and then lifts himself a couple of inches and glares down at the wet chair. “She’d love to see you and Rose.”
“Is tomorrow night okay?”
“That’s what I like about Americans,” Arthit says in his best British-inflected English. “They take small talk literally.” He resigns himself to being wet and settles in. He’s wearing his uniform, natty brown police duds stretched tight over broad shoulders and a hard little bowling ball of a belly. Arthit gives the cop’s eye to the other people in the outdoor café, and they either look away or return it with wary curiosity. Bangkok cops have worked hard to earn their reputation for unpredictability.
“So here’s the bad news,” Arthit continues as a waitress materializes to hover politely above them. Arthit waves her off. “If this Elson is who he says he is, you’re not going to get much help from my shop. Counterfeiting is a problem we actually share. The Secret Service gets carte blanche.”
“Wow,” Rafferty says. “Bilingual.”
“I don’t want to leave you out of the conversation,” Arthit says, “so let me put it another way. As far as my bosses are concerned, these guys shit silver.”
“A minute ago, when you were still speaking English, you said that was the bad news. That usually implies that there’s also good news.”
Arthit starts to put an elbow on the table and thinks better of it. “The good news is that this is a big deal. The Secret Service didn’t come to Bangkok to bust maids. They’re looking for a source, and we both know that Rose and— What’s her name?”
“Peachy.”
Arthit’s mouth tightens in distaste. “Self-named, no doubt.”
“Seems like a safe bet.”
“They’re probably not passing out millions, are they? Your Mr. Elson will backtrack it to the bank, and that’ll be it.”
“That’s pretty much what I told Rose.”
Arthit leans back in his chair and folds his hands over his belly. “Then why are you bothering me?”
“Just an excuse to get together. And I figured, this being a day of rest for ordinary mortals, that you’d be rattling around, bored senseless, and looking for something to do. Instead here you are, all suited up and spit-shined.”
“You may have heard that we’ve had a coup,” Arthit says. “When people wake up and see tanks in the streets and then learn they’ve got a new government—one they didn’t elect—the police find themselves putting in a lot of overtime. The official line is that our presence is reassuring, although you and I know that having a whole bunch of cops all over the place all of a sudden is a pretty effective implied threat.”
“If they only knew how sweet you actually are.”
“My sweetness is classified. And if it were to become public knowledge, it would no doubt be blamed on the former prime minister.” Arthit does a quick local survey to make sure no one is listening. “As part of the never-ending effort to find something else to blame on the former prime minister.”
“I’d have thought the airport would satisfy anyone.” In the wake of the coup, the sparkling new Suvarnabhumi International Airport has been found to be quite literally falling apart. “Cracked runways, no bathrooms, leaking roofs. Sagging Jetways. Should be enough corruption there to keep everybody’s pointing finger busy for a couple of years.”
“As a loyal servant of the Thai government,” Arthit says, “I prefer to think of the problem as one of misplaced optimism. We Thais have a sunny turn of mind. Who but optimists would build an airport on a piece of land called Cobra Swamp? Even if one ignores the cobras, the word ‘swamp’ should have given someone pause.”
“They probably paused long enough to buy it,” Rafferty says. “Somebody sold that land to the government. Of course, it’ll probably turn out to have been the former prime minister.”
Arthit glances at his watch. “As much as I’m enjoying sitting here in this nice, wet chair and chatting with you about the state of the nation, I’ve got things to do. But before I go, I want to make sure that you took my larger meaning, which I implied with all the Asian subtlety at my command. Do not do anything to anger Agent Elson.”
“That’s pretty much what Arnold Prettyman said.”
“Arnold’s good at survival,” Arthit says.
“How’s Fon? Is there anything I can do for her?”
“She’s fine,” Arthit says. “Nothing severe, just sitting in a cell with the two other girls who deposited Peachy’s money, talking up a storm. How do women do that? They’ve known each other for years, and sometimes two of them are talking at once. Don’t women ever run out of things to say?”
“My guess is that they’re sort of furnishing the cell,” Rafferty says. “They’re in an uncongenial environment, probably feeling threatened, so they fill it up with words and feelings until it’s more comfortable.”
“Aren’t you Mr. Sensitivity?” Arthit says. “Anyway, they’ll probably get out on Monday, when the banks open.”
“Not until then?”
“Probably not. Your Mr. Elson seems to be a bit of a hardnose.”
“That’s what worries me. Rose says he enjoys power too much.”
“Rose is a good Buddhist.” Arthit checks his watch again.
“Arthit,” Rafferty says. He pauses, looking for a way to frame it, and then plunges straight in. “Rose said yes.”
Arthit looks at him blankly. “In a vacuum? When she was by herself? Was there a question involved?”
“I asked her to marry me.” Even now he can feel his pulse accelerate.
Arthit’s smile seems to reach all the way to his hairline. “And she said yes?”
“Believe it or not.”
Arthit reaches over and pats Rafferty’s hand. “Noi will be so happy.” He gets up and pushes his chair back. “See what I mean? We Thais are optimists.”
RAFFERTY HAS BEENwriting for fifteen minutes, working on his magazine story with a certain amount of guilty enjoyment, when the first one hits. It strikes him in the temple, hard enough to brighten the day for a heartbeat. For one absurd, soul-shriveling tenth of a second, he thinks he is dead, and in that transparent slice of time he forms two complete thoughts. The first is a question—Will I hear the shot before I die?—and the second is a statement—I will never marry Rose. And then the world does not end, and he glances down to see the small black ball that is rolling back and forth at his feet, smooth and gleaming, about the size of a large marble.
A chill at his temple brings his fingers up, and they come away wet. Whatever the fluid is, it is clear. So at least he’s not bleeding. He touches the tip of his tongue to his finger. Sweet.
The restaurant has filled now that the rain is gone, but no one seems to have noticed anything. Since the world has not ended, time continues to flow. Traffic creeps by on the boulevard uninterrupted.
Rafferty looks for the source of the missile. No eyes are turned his way, so he bends and picks up the little ball. He is holding the pit of a fresh lychee nut, from which someone has just gnawed the sugary pulp. Hard as a marble, although not exactly a lethal weapon. But what produces that kind of accuracy—some sort of blowgun?
Yeah, he is thinking, a fruit-hurling blowgun, when the second one catches him square between the eyes. He sees a burst of stars, something out of a cartoon, and then he’s blinking away tears. He looks in the direction from which the seed was blown, shot, thrown, catapulted, projected. There are no likely suspects, so he gets up and surveys the outdoor portion of the restaurant, which is now crowded almost to capacity: round white plastic tables jammed together in a space about forty feet wide and eight feet deep, from the building’s glass wall to the quaint white picket fence that borders the sidewalk. People glance over at him, but they’re all occupied, eating, talking. The sidewalk is crowded, but every sidewalk in Bangkok is crowded when the rain stops.
He sits down again, and instantly a wasp stings his cheek. This time he sees her, finishing up a follow-through that would impress Randy Johnson. The girl from the tuk-tuk. He shoves his chair back, drops some money on the table, and begins to push his way between the tables.
!14
It’s Not Coming from the Direction You Expect
he is taking her time.
She can afford to dawdle. She has a half-block head
start.
Rafferty had to negotiate his way between the tables of the restaurant, had to explain to the woman at the front that he’d left the money on the table. He’s walking fast but not running.
She makes a turn into an elbow-shaped soi that Rafferty knows is a dead end. As she rounds the corner, she glances back at him. The smile is a little fuller this time.
When he enters the soi, she has vanished.
Nothing. An empty sidewalk, some parked vehicles. A few shops, closed early for Saturday. Rafferty picks up the pace, trying to avoid looking at any one thing, taking in as much of the picture as possible. Prettyman’s Third Law: It’s not coming from the direction you expect.
Studying the street, he feels another pang of regret for his abandoned book. This is exactly the kind of episode he enjoys writing. Except, in the final draft, he wouldn’t have lost her.
And then, halfway down the short block, he sees it.
A van, sitting at the curb. With the passenger door wide open. He steps off the curb and approaches it from the traffic side, only to find the girl gazing at him through the open window.
“You’re not very good at this,” she says. She is sitting sideways on the backseat, looking over her shoulder, legs curled comfortably under her. On her lap is a purse large enough to satisfy Rose.
“You speak English,” Rafferty says.
Her eyes widen. “I do?” She reaches up and scratches her head in mock amazement. “How about that?”
“Listen,” he says, “you can leave me alone now.”
“I’m just getting started,” she says. “If you want to talk, come around to the other side. I’m getting a stiff neck.” Her English is pure American.
“No, I mean it’s off,” Rafferty says through the window. “Wait a minute.” He goes around to the other side of the van. He can see her better this way, and he is struck once again by her beauty. “I meant to tell Arnold, but I forgot. I’m not going to write the book.”
She shakes her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Just tell Arnold,” Rafferty says. “And you’ve got quite an arm.”
“Years of practice. The old inner-tube-hanging-from-the-tree technique.”
“Very impressive. Anyway, good-bye. Go back to Little League or whatever it is.”
“Stop,” she says, and her hand comes out of the big purse with a gun in it. “Don’t take a step. And put your hands about chest-high. Nothing obvious, just away from your belt.” If she’s nervous about holding a gun on him, it doesn’t show. Her hand is as steady as a photograph, and her eyes are calm.
“This is silly,” Rafferty says. “Arnold never—”
“I don’t know who Arnold is,” the girl says. “And I don’t want to use this.” She produces an apologetic smile. “But I will.” She slides further across the seat, away from him. “Slowly, now. Get in.”
Rafferty’s cell phone rings. He reaches automatically toward his shirt pocket, but she says, “Uh-uh.”
Rafferty says, “So shoot me.” He pulls out the phone and looks at it. Sees rose and peachy, opens it, and puts it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Poke,” someone wails. “Poke, it’s Peachy. I need— I need to talk to you. Now. Now, can you come?”
The girl extends the hand with the gun in it and lifts her eyebrows. There is no way she can miss at this distance.
“I’m a little tied up at the moment.”
The girl says, “You certainly are.”
“You have to,” Peachy says, and then she starts to sob. “It’s—it’s the end of the world.”
“Hang on, hang on,” Rafferty says. “Just get hold of yourself and tell me—” He sees the girl’s eyes go past him, sees the shadow of the man behind him, actually feels the warmth of the man’s body, and then his head explodes.
SOMEWHERE IN THEfog, his mother and father are arguing.
This is unusual. They rarely speak enough to argue.
Poke has grown up with his father’s silence. It fills the house they share, the small stone house Poke’s father built with his own hands. No other house is visible, and the unpaved driveway washes out in the infrequent winter rains to make their isolation complete. The desert is silent, the house is silent. His mother communicates mostly by banging pots and pans. Most of the time, the only conversations are the ones in Poke’s mind. But now his mother and father are arguing.
“. . . fucking idiotic thing to do,” his father is saying.
“There was no other choice,” his mother says. Then there is silence again.
“. . . a thug’s grab,” his father says. “Leung should have known better.”
Leung, Poke knows, is a Chinese name. Knowing this, knowing that he knows it, brings him back to himself.
His head hurts.
Sandals slap a hard floor.
He is cold. It seems to him it has been a long time since he was cold. His clothes are still damp from the rain, and he is lying on a cold floor, probably cement. Something is beating at the back of his head, even though the back of his head seems to be resting on the floor. He wants to touch his head, but he cannot move his hands.
There had been a cement floor in the old Shanghai apartment house where he’d finally found the woman his father had run to. She was short and almost spherically fat. She held her arm at an oblique angle where it had been broken in some Chinese upheaval or other, and her cheeks were painted with spots of bright red, round and hard-edged as coins. Her lipstick shrank her mouth by half, turning it into the flower of some poisonous fruit. She had been distantly kind to him but had said nothing about his father, redirecting his questions into paths of her own. She had neither denied nor admitted that Frank was there, but Poke knew. The air in the apartment had been sweet with the aroma of his father’s pipe.
“Give him the blanket,” says the woman’s voice, and something soft settles over him. Poke opens his eyes.
A large room: maybe a garage or a warehouse. The ceiling is high enough to be dark beyond the two bare bulbs that dangle from wires above him. He has a vague impression of metal beams, more the shadows than the beams themselves, and then a head comes into his field of vision. He cannot see the face against the bright lights above it, but it is surrounded by straight dark hair.
“How are you?” It is the female voice he has been hearing.
“Nice of you to ask.” He wants to reach behind him and lift himself up, even though his head is swimming, but his hands are fastened together in front of him.
“Oh, great,” says the young woman from the van, giving the irony back to him. “Now everybody’s mad at me.”
“ ‘When all men are arrayed against you,’ ” Rafferty misquotes, “ ‘maybe you’re the problem.’ What’s with my hands?”
“They’re cuffed,” she says. “Just to make sure you’ll sit still long enough to realize we have to talk.”
“We could have talked in the street.”
“We thought you had watchers. You’ve been quite extravagantly tailed the last few days. Did you know that?”
Poke does not reply.
“Who are they? Who’s Arnold? Who was the guy with the police last night?”
“None of your fucking business.” He shifts his back on the floor to see her better. Still beautiful. “Okay, we’re talking. Do something about my hands.”
“Let me give you some information first, and then some rules. The information is that nobody wants to hurt you. Not any more than we already have, I mean, and that was sort of an accident. We’re actually here to try to help you.”
“Maybe a greeting card,” Poke suggests. “With a perfume strip. Or a phone call. Something casual, something that doesn’t involve brain injury.”
She continues as though he has not spoken. “The rules are that you’re not going to do anything stupid, at least not while we’re talking You’re going to listen to us until we’re finished, and then it’s up to you. You can do anything you want. If you decide to ignore what we tell you, it’ll be your own fault. You can walk right out of here. We felt obliged to warn you, but we’re not your guardians.”
“I don’t need guardians.”
“You have no idea.” She holds up her right index finger. “Humor me for a second. Can you see this?”
“Of course.”
“Only one? No ghosting, no double vision?”
“No.”
“Follow it with your eyes.” She moves it slowly from side to side, and Poke tracks it. Then she moves it toward the bridge of his nose until his eyes cross, and she laughs. The merriness of the laugh makes him even angrier. “You’ll live. If we take off the cuffs, will you behave?”
“I’ll listen. After that, it’s anybody’s call.” The word “call” brings back Peachy’s anguished voice. “But I need my phone. Now.”
“Afterward,” she says. “And we’re not concerned with what you do after we talk.” She looks over her shoulder. “Or at least I’m not. Leung.”
A man peers into the circle of light above Poke’s head. A cigarette dangles from one corner of his mouth. “Feeling better?” His English is heavily accented.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Say hi to Leung,” the young woman says. “He’s been following you. Actually, we’ve all been following you. If you didn’t spot us, it’s because we were lost in the crowd of other people who were following you. You want to tell us what that’s about?”
“Just get the cuffs, okay?”
The blanket is whisked back, and the man called Leung bends down and busies himself with Poke’s hands. Needles drill them as the circulation rushes back in. Poke gets both hands on the floor behind him and pushes himself to a sitting position.
It seems to be a garage, the floor irregularly spotted with pools of dark oil. The light is cast entirely by the two bulbs overhead, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. Either there are no windows or the sun has gone down. The van lurks in the gloom at the near end, ticking as the engine cools.
The back of his head hurts badly enough to be dented.
“Here’s a chair,” the girl says, pushing one forward. It’s a cheap folding chair, made of battered gray metal. “Get off that cold floor.”
His damp clothes feel heavy as he works himself up—first to his hands and knees and then, grasping the back of the chair, to a posture that makes him feel like Rumpelstiltskin. His head begins to spin a warning, and he eases himself sideways onto the chair without rising further.
“Better?” she asks.
“What about an aspirin?”