“Where?”

“He didn’t say.”

“When will he say?”

“He’ll call me at five.”

Rafferty can almost hear Chu thinking. “It sounds like he doesn’t trust you.”

“Probably afraid I take after him.”

“Why so early?”

“My guess would be he thinks it’ll be easier to tell whether anyone’s with me.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I’m not crazy about it either.”

“Get him to change it.”

“You think I didn’t try that already?”

Chu says, “This feels wrong.” Rafferty can hear people in the background and the clatter of dishes and silverware. Chu is in a restaurant.

“Where are you eating?”

“McDonald’s,” Chu says.

“You’re a regular Yank.”

“They’re all over China. I got used to the food.”

“Quarter Pounder or what?”

“Big Mac and fries. Is this an attempt at friendly conversation?”

“We’re stuck with each other,” Rafferty says. “No sense in wasting testosterone. At least not until it’s time for us to kill each other.”

“I suppose not,” Chu says. Then he says, “Actually, since we’re being candid, I hate McDonald’s. Everything tastes like it’s fried in whale fat.”

“Then why are you there?”

“Takeout. Your little girl was hungry.”

Rafferty’s heart seems to have leaped intact into his throat, where it’s hanging on for dear life. He attempts to clear it away. When he’s sure of his voice, he asks, “What did she want?”

“Chicken McNuggets and a large order of fries. And one of those chemical milk shakes.”

“What flavor?”

“Is this a quiz? Strawberry.”

“Pink,” Rafferty says. He hears the word as though from a great distance, and Arthit turns at the rasp in his voice.

Chu says, “Excuse me?”

“My girl,” Rafferty says. “She likes pink.”

“She’s braver than she should be,” Chu says. “They both are. Don’t take this as a threat, please. I would hate to have to hurt them.”

“We’ve covered this before.”

“Just reminding you. It’s in your hands. I’ll expect to hear from you at five.” The line goes dead. Rafferty lets the phone fall into his lap. He exhales so hard that the entire windshield fogs.

“Anything new?” Arthit says.

“Same old stuff. Death threats and a strawberry shake.” He picks up the cracked phone and closes it, opens it, and closes it again. “I can’t actually see anything. This is like putting together a puzzle without a picture on it. All we can do is grab as many pieces as we can get our mitts on.”

Arthit puts a hand on the handle of his door. “So shall we grab another piece?”

“We shall,” Rafferty says. He pops his own door and slides out into warm rain. Arthit is already halfway to the second car, taking long strides and waving the two cops out. At the edge of his vision, Rafferty sees Ming Li and Leung fall into step with him. The two cops meet them beside their car. The plainclothes officer from the tuk-tuk comes up behind them.

“Front and back,” Arthit says, raising his voice over the sound of the rain. “Fast. In and straight up the stairs. Exactly”—he flips the watch around—“one minute from now. Nobody stays in sight of that window for more than a second or two.” To the plainclothes cop from the tuk-tuk, he says, “You get the door for us and stay there. Everybody got it?”

The cops nod. One of the two from the car is young enough to give Rafferty a twinge of paternal worry—wide, anxious eyes and not a line on his face. The other has skin like an old saddle and a burning cigarette cupped against the rain. His nameplate says kosit. He looks as anxious as someone waiting for a bus.

“Don’t take him down unless your life depends on it,” Arthit says. He checks the watch again. “Forty seconds. Go.”

Kosit and the young cop take off at a run and slant to the right of the building; they’re going to hit the rear entrance and remain on the first floor in case the Korean makes it down the stairs. Arthit slips his gun free, looks from Ming Li to Leung, and slaps Rafferty lightly on the shoulder, saying, “Now.”

The four of them round the corner, running full out, and the plainclothes cop angles across the street in front of them to get the door open. Arthit pauses midstreet for a second, the others stumbling to a halt behind him as a car slashes through the standing water on the road, and then he’s running again, up the steps and through the door, with the others a step behind.

The hallway is dirty and short. A single, cobwebbed forty-watt bulb dangles by a frayed wire at the foot of the stairs, swaying back and forth in the wind coming through the door. The stairs aren’t carpeted, and Rafferty thinks, Noise. Arthit waves them to a halt as the back door opens and the other two cops come in, dripping. The swinging light makes their shadows ripple as though they’re underwater. Arthit gestures for the older one to take a position at the front door, beside the cop who let them in. His eyes meet Rafferty’s, and he jerks his head in the direction of the back door.

Rafferty shakes his head.

Arthit studies him for a moment, reading his resolve, and then points his index finger at Ming Li and flicks it toward the door. Ming Li does something that might be the first stage of a pout but cancels it and goes dutifully down the hall, the little gun dainty in her hand. The young cop looks at her, looks again, and gives her a nervous smile.

Arthit holds up three fingers, twice for emphasis, then folds them again. He raises his hand to show one, then two, and on three, he, Rafferty, and Leung charge up the stairs. At the top they turn right and sprint to the last door on the right. In unison, Arthit and Leung lift their right legs, and Arthit whispers, “Look away.” Then the two of them snap their legs forward and kick the door in. Arthit throws something inside and leaps back.

There is a blinding flash of light and a whump, and Rafferty sees a blur of movement inside, the big man throwing himself toward the window. The flash from the concussion grenade reveals nothing but the size of the room and the presence of the man, frozen by the flash in front of a cheap blue couch. Rafferty has no time to register anything else, other than the sweet, strident smell of cheap cologne, before Leung launches himself through the air and hits the man at the back of his knees. The Korean goes down so heavily the floor shakes, kicks back at Leung, and rolls away, coming partway up with something shiny in his hand, and time seems to slow as Rafferty sees the man—probably half blind from the flash of the grenade—bring the hand around toward Arthit, silhouetted clearly in the doorway, and then the world erupts in a roar that should have blown the windows out.

But Leung has lashed out with a leg, knocking the big man’s gun up, and the lighting fixture in the center of the ceiling explodes, throwing the room into darkness except for the rectangle of gray that defines the window and a yellowish fall of light through the door. A chair or something slams to the floor, and Rafferty sees movement as someone rises from the tangled knot that was Leung and the Korean, and the standing man—too big to be Leung—bends at the waist and charges, taking Rafferty up and into the air with a low shoulder to the gut. Rafferty has just enough time to slam his gun against the side of the man’s head before he’s tossed to the floor, thrown as easily as a feather pillow, and the man is most of the way to the open door when Arthit blocks it with his body, lowers the barrel of his gun, and fires twice at the man’s legs. The Korean stumbles and lists to the left, but he keeps coming, and another shot bursts against Rafferty’s eardrums, and suddenly Arthit is no longer standing in the doorway, and the man is almost through it, one hand clasping his left thigh. He grabs the doorframe and starts to pull himself through, and then there is something small and white in front of him. He does a surprised stutter-step, and Ming Li brings up the little gun and shoots him from a distance of three feet.

The Korean drops to one knee. Instantly Leung is on him, raking his eyes with clawed fingers, and as the man reflexively lifts his hands, Leung gets his own hand around the center of the gun above the trigger guard and twists violently. Even over the ringing in his ears, Rafferty can hear fingers break. The gun comes free. Leung puts both barrels— his and the Korean’s—against the man’s head, and everything goes still.

Except for Ming Li, slowly sinking to her knees in the hallway. Behind her the older cop, Kosit, is staring down, his gun dangling forgotten in his hand. Leung says, “Cuffs here, now,” and Kosit tears his eyes away, comes into the room, and secures the Korean’s hands with flexible plastic cuffs, yanking them so tight that the Korean feels it even through the pain of his wounds, and grunts.

Rafferty crawls on all fours to the doorway. Ming Li throws him a single terrified glance and then begins again to pump with all her weight, her hands cupped and centered over Arthit’s heart.

_!37

He Doesn’t Deserve You

t’s melted,” Miaow says accusingly. “So what?” Chu has three pistols partly disassembled on

the crate beside him, and metallic fumes of machine oil compete with the deep-fried smell of the chicken and fries. The cleaning rod in his right hand slides through the barrel of the gun in his left. The cop who’d been on guard sits sulking on another crate, halfway across the warehouse. His upper lip is split and so swollen it has lifted to reveal his teeth. Every few minutes he probes the broken one with his tongue and inhales sharply at the pain.

Chu pulls out the rod and studies the cloth it is wrapped in. Satisfied, he puts the gun down and picks up another. To Miaow he says, “Your father said you wanted strawberry because it’s pink. It’s still pink.”

“You talked to Poke?” Rose asks.

“We never stop talking,” Chu says, eyes on his work. “We should get a special rate from the cell-phone company.”

“How is he?”

“How would he be? He’s worried.”

Miaow says, “He’ll get you.”

Chu shakes his head but doesn’t look up from the gun. “I doubt that. Compared to some of the people who have tried to get me, he’s thin porridge.”

Rose takes one of the chicken nuggets and feeds it to Noi, who chews it slowly, her eyes closed. She has refused to look at Chu since the moment he broke the guard’s tooth.

“Poke’s not afraid of you,” Miaow says.

“Neither are you.” Chu sights down the barrel of the gun. “But being brave isn’t the same thing as being smart.”

Miaow regards him for a moment and then dredges a piece of chicken through her milk shake and eats it. She slides her eyes to Rose, waiting for a reproof.

Giving the task all his attention, Chu serenely slides the rod into the barrel. His concentration is complete. He might be a doctor sterilizing his surgical instruments or a violinist tending to his strings. The door to the warehouse bangs open, and Pradya, the fat policeman, comes in. He’s soaked to the skin, and his wet hair has been blown stiffly to the left. It looks like something has been dropped, at an acute angle, on his head. He has to put his back to the door and push to close it against the wind.

“Where have you been?” Chu says, irritated at the distraction. He pulls out the rod, glances at the cloth, and starts on the third gun.

Pradya wipes his face. “All over the place. We picked him up a few blocks from the apartment, and then he sat with some woman in a restaurant. After a while a girl went in and sat with them.”

“A girl?” Chu says. He is scraping at something on the trigger guard with the yellow fingernail on his right little finger, a nail so long it has begun to curve under.

“A Thai schoolgirl. Young, maybe seventeen. They were watching a bank across the street.”

Rose inhales sharply enough for Chu to hear her. He stops working on the gun.

“A schoolgirl?” Chu asks her. “What’s he doing with a schoolgirl?”

“How would I know?” Rose says. “I’m here.”

Chu weighs the gun in his hand, but he is not thinking about the gun. “Is Sriyat still following them?”

“Yes,” Pradya says, “but it’s hard. We had to do most of it with binoculars, from at least a block away. They’re all keeping their eyes open.”

Chu turns his head an inch or two. He seems to be listening for something, perhaps in a corner of the warehouse. He says, “All?”

Pradya shifts his weight uncomfortably. “Rafferty, the girl, and a guy they hooked up with later.”

“Hooked up with where?” Chu glares at the cop and snaps his fingers. “This isn’t a television serial. Tell me the fucking story. What are they doing?”

Pradya goes through it: the man from the bank, the Korean, the envelopes, the followers splitting up. He and Sriyat had split up, too. “I stayed with Rafferty, but Sriyat says the Korean guy met another guy from another bank. Same thing. They swapped envelopes, and after the Korean left, the girl followed him. The man with her grabbed the guy from the bank and took away the envelope. Then he got into a police car, with her husband”—he indicates Noi—“driving. Rafferty was in the car, too.”

Chu thinks for a moment. The gun comes to rest flat on his leg. “Banks,” he says. His eyes close and reopen, focused on something that isn’t there. “Nothing to do with me.” Without looking down, he slides the automatic back and forth along his thigh, polishing it, as he studies the gloom in the corner. “But maybe Rafferty doesn’t know that.”

After a moment Pradya says, “Whatever you say.”

Chu stops the polishing and sits still. He pushes his lower lip forward. “I don’t like it. It must be important or he wouldn’t be wasting time on it.”

Rose says, “I know what he’s doing. It’s not about you.”

Chu looks at her, the sharp-cut eyes hooded. Daring her to tell him a lie. “Go on.”

Rose tells him about the counterfeit money and the visit from Elson. “He’s trying to help Peachy and me,” she says.

Chu leans back, tilts his head up, and studies the ceiling. When the words come, they are slow and dreamy, a thought spoken to the air. “And where did he get his help?”

Rose sits a bit straighter. “I don’t know.”

Chu’s gaze, when it strikes her, is as fast as a lash. “Where did he get his help?”

“I told you, I don’t—”

“Describe them,” Chu says to Pradya, his voice garrote tight. “The girl and the man. Describe them.”

Pradya closes his eyes for a better look. “The girl, like I said, about seventeen, Thai school uniform, Chinese-looking but got something about her.”

“That suggests she might be a mix,” Chu says. His voice could grate stone. He clears his throat violently and spits. “And the man is wiry, medium height, and very fast.”

Pradya nods, licks his lips, and nods again, more vigorously.

“Your husband has a snake for a mother,” Chu says. “He’s playing with me.” In a single fluid motion, he gets to his feet, snatches up a magazine, and slaps it into the gun in his hand. The barrel of the gun is pointed at Rose’s head. “I should kill you right now,” Chu says.

Miaow deliberately puts down her milk shake, stands, and takes two steps, placing herself between him and Rose.

“Good idea,” Chu says. “Save me a bullet.”

Rose puts a hand on Miaow’s arm and pushes her aside. Miaow twists away and steps in front of her again. Rose steers her away again and says, “Not the child.”

Chu lets the gun go back and forth between them, and then he spits onto the floor. He turns and kicks the crate he’s been sitting on. “Ahhhhhh,” he says. “He doesn’t deserve you. Either of you.” His eyes drop to the gun in his hand, and he puts it on the crate, beside the others. “And what good would it do?” For a moment his body goes loose, his face slack. “The girl,” he says, as though to himself. He turns to Pradya. “Get back there. Do whatever you have to do. I don’t care if you have to shoot people. Bring me that girl. And you,” he says to the one with the broken tooth. “Move these people. I want them out of here in an hour.”

PART IV

!

MILLION-DOLLAR MINUTE

_!38

We’ve Got People to Kill

he mask is clear plastic, more terrible because it hides nothing. It cups Arthit’s nose, his slack mouth, and his chin. A transparent tube runs into it, supplying oxygen; one of

the medical technicians had carefully stubbed out his cigarette before turning the valve on the tank he had wheeled up behind him. The banging of the tank against the stairs is the first sound Rafferty can remember since the shot from Ming Li’s gun that put the Korean down. The ten or twelve minutes between the time he saw Arthit sprawled on the hallway floor and the bumpy progress of the tank up the stairs seem to have passed in complete silence.

Rafferty, collapsed heavily on the couch, can’t look at Arthit’s paper-white face, can’t look at the mask. A pink froth of blood speckles the inner surface. It looks like Arthit chewed a pencil eraser and spit it out.

“The lung,” says the medical tech who is holding the mask in place. He lifts one of Arthit’s eyelids, peers under it, and lets it drop. “The bullet hit the lung. Probably took a bounce off a rib. No exit wound, so it’s still in there somewhere. Maybe a .22, not enough velocity for a pass-through.”

To Rafferty it seems that the tech is speaking very slowly. Everything that is happening in the tight knot of people gathered around Arthit seems to take an excruciatingly long time. He lowers his eyes again until he is looking at the suitcase between his knees. The suitcase is safe to look at.

From Rafferty’s left, the older cop, Kosit, says, “It’s a .22.” Kosit has the Korean’s gun wrapped in a handkerchief.

Rafferty knows he has to get up, knows he and Ming Li and Leung have to get out of there, but he can’t make himself move. Arthit going down; Arthit hitting the floor; the blood on Arthit’s shirt . . .

“What about him?” asks the other tech, thumbing the Korean, trussed and bleeding on the floor in front of the couch.

“Fuck him,” says the first tech. “Let the second team—”

“Blood pressure dropping,” says the second tech. His voice is tight.

“Up and out,” the first tech says. “Now.” The two techs and their helpers lift the stretcher and carry it down the hall, moving fast. Rafferty hears their feet on the stairs, synchronized with the flashes of red on the ceiling, thrown by the lights on the ambulance below.

He feels the young cop’s eyes on him. “I saw what you did,” the young cop says. “I saw you take the money.”

“I did . . . I did what Arthit would have done,” Rafferty says. In fact, he can barely remember his frenzied rush through the apartment, fueled by sheer terror at the thought of Arthit’s dying. He couldn’t help Arthit, but he had to do something. What he recalls is a blur of motion, punctuated by full-stop images: a closet filled waist-high with neatly stacked brand-new counterfeit bills, a canvas bag stuffed with loose money, dirty and well handled, a big hard-sided suitcase under the bed. He and Leung jamming money into the suitcase, Leung grabbing the canvas bag. But now that energy is gone. Now there’s nothing except the apartment, the sound of the men rushing downstairs, and the weight of his own body. He can’t lift his head to meet the cop’s stare. He remains focused on the suitcase and, beyond it, the bare feet of the wounded Korean. If he raises his eyes, he’ll see the broad smears of blood on the front of Ming Li’s white blouse, as though someone had wiped a paintbrush across it.

Arthit’s blood.

“You can’t just steal—” the young cop begins.

Kosit says, “Stop it. Just shut up.”

“You saw us together,” Rafferty says to the younger cop. He can barely form the words. “We’re friends. We did this together. I did what he would have wanted me to do.”

“It’s true,” Kosit says. “Arthit talked about him all the time. They were friends.”

“We are friends,” Rafferty says sharply. “He’s not dead.”

No one replies. Kosit studies the floor.

“Oh, dear sweet God,” Rafferty hears himself say.

“We have to go,” Leung says from the window. “More cops will be coming.”

“Coming?” Kosit says. “They should be here by now.”

Rafferty says, to no one in particular, “I’m not sure I can stand up.”

“Yes you can.” Ming Li is standing in front of him, although he isn’t aware of her having crossed the room. “You have to.”

“What you have to do is get out of here,” Kosit says. “You’re just going to make things more complicated. Arthit is the only one who can explain why you were here in the first place. Not to mention why you’re with a couple of Chinese.” He goes to the doorway and looks down the hall. “If my colleagues find you here, they’ll take you all in. I’m not sure even Arthit could get you out of it. Even if Arthit . . .” The words hang unfinished.

“Listen to him, Poke,” Ming Li says. “If they arrest you, if you’re not there to meet Chu at five-thirty, your wife and daughter will die. I promise you. He’ll kill them.”

Kosit turns back to the room. “Whatever this is about, get moving. And use the back door. We called in more than ten minutes ago. They’ll be here any second.” He fumbles in his pocket and comes out with a card, which he extends to Leung. “Give this to him. It’s got my name and number. You,” he says to Rafferty. “Wake up. Do what you’re supposed to do. You can call me later about Arthit, about how he’s doing.”

“Poke,” Ming Li says. She bends down, bringing her face to his. He feels the warmth of her breath. “One thing at a time, remember? Right now we need to go. The only thing that matters is getting out of here.

You can’t help Arthit now.” He feels her hands on his arm, feels the strength flowing from them, and somehow he finds himself on his feet. Leung has come from nowhere to grasp his other arm, and Rafferty hears a grunt as Leung lifts the suitcase with his free hand. Ming Li has picked up the canvas bag. Propelled between them, Rafferty sees the straight lines of the door grow nearer, as though the wall were coming toward him in some amusement-park mystery house, and then the hallway slides past and he is on the stairs, the world tilting downward. Leung moves in front of him to catch him if he falls.

Outside, car doors closing, men’s voices.

“Faster,” Ming Li says, and then they’re through the back door.

Rain slaps Rafferty in the face. His eyes sting.

Two steps lead down to a small garden: broad-leaved palms whipping around in the wind, tall ferns blown almost flat against the ground, black water standing a few inches deep. In one corner the spirit house, made of rough wood, has toppled over. The garden ends in a low, unpainted wooden gate, and beyond and above it there’s a streetlight, a yellow flame in a halo of rain.

“Don’t move,” Leung says. He drops the suitcase in front of them and goes through the gate without a backward glance. The gate squeals open into a narrow alley and then is blown shut. In seconds, Leung is invisible, a shadow wrapped in rain.

“Are you here, Poke?” Ming Li asks. Her hair clings to her face in long tendrils. “We need you to be here.”

He lifts his face to the rain, lets it needle his eyelids and cheeks. “I’m here.”

“Hate,” Ming Li says. She pinches his arm and gives the pinch a twist. “What you need is hate. Hate will keep you moving.”

“I’ve got enough hate for that,” Rafferty says.

“Good. Hang on to it. Feed it. Hate got us out of China. It’ll get your wife and little girl back.”

“And Arthit’s wife,” Rafferty says raggedly. “Noi. He’ll want . . . he’ll want her near him.”

“He’ll have her,” Ming Li says. She lets go of his arm and steps back, searching his face. “By the time he opens his eyes, he’ll have her.”

Rafferty wraps his arms around her and hauls her so close that he can feel her spine pop. She stiffens, and then her arms go around him and they stand there, hugging each other, as the rain pours down on them. Ming Li says, “It’s all right, older brother,” and something dark blooms in Rafferty’s chest, spreads long, soft wings, and then seems to vaporize and disappear, escaping into the night on an endless breath.

“Okay,” he says, releasing her. Her gaze locks with his, and the muscles beneath her eyes tighten in recognition. She takes a step away, turns her head to look at him again.

“Let’s move,” he says. “We’ve got people to kill.”

THE PLAINCLOTHES COP’S tuk-tuk, which Leung has borrowed without asking, makes an uneven popping sound, one of its cylinders misfiring occasionally, as it threads through the rain-slowed traffic on Silom. The water falls in sheets, the windshield wipers sluggish with the sheer weight of it. Rafferty and Ming Li sit side by side in the back. Ming Li holds on her lap the canvas bag full of older, well-used money, and Rafferty squeezes the big suitcase between his knees.

Rafferty has no way of knowing how long they’ve been traveling: It could have been ten minutes or ten hours. He seems to have been journeying through some internal space, the space between thoughts. The space between gunshots. He feels vast and icily empty inside, but he is intensely aware of the mass of his body as it presses against the seat, of the touch of Ming Li’s thigh against his, of the cold wetness on his skin. The hardness of the suitcase, the contents of which Arthit may have died for.

“We’re almost there,” Ming Li says.

Rafferty shakes himself, the way he sometimes does when he wakes from a dream gone wrong. A dream Rose would want to hear every detail of, looking for the scraps of meaning that might help them avert disaster. The movement brings him back to himself, in a tuk-tuk, on a wet night, next to his new sister, in a world where disaster has already struck. He leans down to peer beneath the tuk-tuk’s sloping roof. “Twice around,” he says. “I need to see if we’ve got watchers.”

“No one following!” Leung shouts over his shoulder.

“That’s not going to help if they’re already here. Do the block twice, like I said.”

“What now?” Ming Li says as Leung makes the turn.

“What now? Damned if I know.” His eyes are on the sidewalks. “But I think you should drop me and then get back to Frank. Talk it over with him, see what you come up with. What I’ve got barely qualifies as an idea.”

“Fine,” Ming Li says. “We’ll call you in a couple of hours.”

“Chu’s not going to give me any more time. Whatever the hell we’re doing, we need to be ready.”

“We’ve been ready for years,” Ming Li says. “Now we’re down to details.”

Rafferty says, “Frank did a good job with you.”

“He did some of it,” Ming Li says, watching the other sidewalk. “Some of it is talent.”

THE MONEY HEgrabbed from the closet and packed into the suitcase is stiff as starch, the greens and browns too green and brown, the whites too white, the paper too clean. It stacks in perfect rectangular towers, each bill flat enough to have been ironed.

In a quantity this large, it wouldn’t fool a blind man.

On the other hand, the money jammed into the canvas bag is soft, worn, dog-eared, soiled from use. The oil and grime from a thousand hands have given it a smudged patina like a layer of dirt on an old painting. It’s seen wallets, purses, bar spills, hot coffee, knife fights, crowded cash drawers. It smells of sweat and dirt and face powder. It has notes written on it: phone numbers, prayers, aimless chains of obscenity. It’s been exchanged for drinks, drugs, food, a dry room, a doctor’s care, sex, a lover’s gift, perhaps a murder or two. Hearts have been drawn here and there, stick figures, arrows, candles, teardrops, interlinking squares, the marginalia of idle minds.

In short, Rafferty thinks, it’s money. The stuff in the suitcase is printing.

The new bills in the suitcase are what the Korean was circulating. The bills in the canvas bag were taken from the banks by the tellers and then passed on in those manila envelopes.

Rafferty keeps seeing Arthit’s face, the colorlessness of Arthit’s face.

Halfway through a distracted count, he heaves a stack of bills across the room. They separate and flutter to the floor, covering the carpet and the coffee table. A wad with a rubber band around it lands on the hassock. He stares at it. It’s real money, taken from the envelopes the Korean grabbed from the tellers, and the rubber band compresses it in the center, leaving the ends loose and soft. It looks almost . . . fluffy.

The paper-banded stacks of counterfeit look like bricks.

He thinks, Fluffy.

The word galvanizes him. This is something he believes he knows how to do. And then, in an instant, he sees the rest of it, or at least a possible sequence, as though, during the hour or more of paralysis, it’s been quietly assembling itself, waiting for him to notice. For a moment he sits perfectly still, staring at the money and seeing none of it, trying to sequence the stepping-stones that might lead them out of this cataclysm. Looking for the surprise, the wrong turn, the ankle breaker, the gate that won’t open, the twig that will snap in the night, the stone that’s poised over a hole a hundred feet deep.

He knows he can’t see it all. So small steps first. Things he knows how to do.

He goes to the kitchen and checks the cabinet beneath the sink, where they keep the laundry supplies. Straightening up, he realizes that the sound he just heard was his own laughter. He leaves the cabinet yawning open and goes to the living-room desk, where he takes Rose’s phone book out of the drawer she uses. He finds the numbers he wants and makes four short calls.

When he leaves the apartment, he leaves the door ajar. His helpers may arrive before he returns.

_!39

He Wasn’t Much, but He Had a Name

afferty covers the peephole with his thumb and then knocks again.

The door opens only two or three inches, and the chain is secured, but Rafferty’s kick yanks the entire assembly out of the wooden doorframe, and the door snaps back, cracking Elson on the forehead. Rafferty catches it on the rebound and pushes it open, and Elson retreats automatically, one hand pressed to his head. Rafferty follows him in and closes the door with his foot.

“My turn to visit,” he says. “Nice pj’s.”

Elson’s face is naked, defenseless, and even narrower without the rimless glasses. He hasn’t shaved since morning, and he is a man who should shave twice a day. The stubble holds shadows, accentuating the high, nervous bone structure of his face. He wears loose white pajamas in what appears to be light cotton, patterned with little blue clocks, a theme that is repeated on the buttons. He rubs his forehead and checks his fingers for blood. With the hand still in front of him, he says, “You’re looking at jail.”

“I’m looking at you,” Rafferty says. “I’m looking at someone who hasn’t done one thing right since he arrived in Bangkok. You’ve stumbled around like someone using a map that was printed on April Fools’ Day. You’ll be lucky if you don’t wind up on library patrol.”

Elson glances toward the low dresser, where his holstered gun sits next to his computer, and says, “Get out of here.” His lips have vanished completely, baring the thumb sucker’s dent in his front teeth.

Rafferty comes farther into the room, pushing into the man’s space and shifting to his right, toward the dresser. “Don’t like it much, do you? I didn’t either. There’s a difference, though. You came to cause me trouble. I came to save your ass.”

Elson seems to realize how he looks and gives the shirt of his pajamas a downward tug, straightening it as though that could turn it into something else. “I’m not going to engage in a dialogue with you, Rafferty. I came in the discharge of my lawful duty.”

“And you wrong-footed it, didn’t you? Chasing a couple of women who haven’t got fifty thousand baht in the bank. Grabbing the wrong teller out of the bank. Letting Petchara lead you around like a pony in a ring. Petchara’s crooked. I own inanimate objects that could have seen that. My fucking toaster could have seen it.”

“I’m calling security,” Elson says, taking a step toward the phone on the table between the beds.

“Wrong,” Rafferty says, and Elson glances back and stops, off balance, in midstride at the sight of the gun Rafferty has pulled from the tote bag hanging from his shoulder. It takes a quick little shuffle for Elson to remain upright, and he looks furious that it was necessary. “Here’s what you’re doing,” Rafferty says. “You’re sitting on the end of that bed. I’m sitting on this one. We’re going to talk, just a couple of Americans in a confusing foreign country. And I’m going to be generous, by way of an apology for what a jerk I’ve been. I’m going to show you mine first, and then you can decide whether you want to continue the conversation.”

Elson sits slowly, as though he thinks the bed might be wet. The bed is low and his legs are long, forcing his knees to fold in acute, storklike angles. He shifts his legs to the left for balance and starts to lean right, toward the table, then stops. He says, “I need my glasses.”

“Get them. Just leave the phone alone.”

“I heard you.” Once the glasses are in place, Elson sits a little straighter. He puts his hands on his knees, fingers spread. He has a pianist’s hands.

Rafferty sits and puts the gun down beside him on the bed, lifting his own hands to show that they’re empty. Elson doesn’t even register it, just watches and waits. “First,” Rafferty says, “I’m sorry. I’m not consumed with guilt, it’s not keeping me up nights, but I’m sorry for the way I treated you. You came on wrong, and you threatened someone I love, but I shouldn’t have been such a smart-ass. You can accept the apology or see it as weakness or do whatever you want, but I’m making it anyway.”

Elson offers a stiff-necked nod, more a punctuation mark than anything else. His left hand fingers one of the little clocks on his pajamas as though he’s curious about the time printed there.

“Second. Here’s a present. Late last night the government you work for lost an asset here, or at least a former asset—God knows which. Have you heard about this?”

Elson tilts his head an inch to the right. “Prettyman. The CIA guy.” He shrugs. “I know about it, but so what? Not my business.”

“It’s your business if you clear it up.”

For a moment Elson’s eyes lose focus and slide down to Rafferty’s chest, and then they come most of the way back, with quite a lot going on behind them. “Marginally, I suppose.” He is talking to Rafferty’s neck.

“If you’re going to lie, at least choose a lie I might believe. A former CIA guy gets killed in Bangkok, the American government loses face, and in Asia that’s important. Even this administration is smart enough to know that. The man who comes up with the killers is going to get a little gold happy face on his lapel.”

“Maybe.” Elson shifts his weight uncomfortably. His eyes are making tiny motions, as though he is counting gnats. “You’re saying you know who did it.”

“I know exactly who did it, and I can give him to you.”

He puts a hand on the bed behind him, leans back slightly, and eases one foot forward with a small grimace of relief. “How?”

“I’ll tell you, if this chat gets that far. But I can promise you he’s somebody you want anyway. Somebody who is your business.”

Elson straightens his glasses, which already look like they were positioned by someone using a carpenter’s level. “I need to know who it is and why he’s my business.”

“A thousand baht is worth a million words,” Rafferty says. “Catch.” He dips into the canvas tote. Elson brings his hands up far too slowly, and the six-inch brick of money hits him in the middle of the clocks on his pajama top and bounces to the floor. He stares down at it, his mouth open.

“Take a look,” Rafferty says. “That’s your second present.”

Elson bends forward and comes up with the packet of thousand-baht notes. His eyes flick up to Rafferty, and then he flips through the stack, pulls a few out from the middle, and looks at them closely. He blinks twice, heavily enough to make Rafferty wonder if it’s a tic. “I need to get up,” he says.

“It’s your room.”

Tucking the brick of money beneath his left arm and clutching the loose bills in his right hand like a little bouquet, Elson goes to the desk near the window and snaps on the lamp. He holds the bills in the pool of light one at a time, inspects them front and back, and then he removes the shade from the lamp. He chooses a bill at random and positions it in front of the naked bulb, as though trying to see the bulb through it. Dropping it onto the desk, he picks up another and then another, examining each of them for several seconds. He runs a thumbnail over the front of two bills, feeling for texture. Then he shapes the loose bills into a stack and yanks a few more from the brick, repeating the routine with each of them.

“There are some American hundreds at the bottom,” Rafferty says.

Elson gives him a sharp glance and then finds the bills and gives them a moment of scrutiny. When he has finished, he turns to Rafferty and says, “You have my attention.”

“Good. There’s another sixty million baht where that came from.”

“Sixty?”

“Give or take. That’s about a million seven in U.S. All brand new and uncirculated. And two hundred thousand in American hundreds, fresh as milk. The North Korean who was passing them out is getting stitched up right now, but he’ll be good enough to travel.”

Elson squints as he replays the end of the sentence. “Getting stitched up?”

“He got shot.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“He was shot by a schoolgirl. Listen, none of this matters. What matters is that you can have him.”

“I can’t have him if I don’t know where he is.”

“You’ll know in a few hours. By then it’ll all be available: the money, the North Korean who’s been passing it, and the guy who murdered Prettyman.” He studies Elson’s face. “He’s in the same business as the North Korean, but on a much bigger scale.”

Elson’s eyes drop to the spill of money on the surface of the desk. He stands there, studying it, and then he picks up the bundle and riffles through it, making a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled. Without turning to Rafferty, he says, “I’m pretty much by the book. I don’t go outside the lines much.”

“I guess it’ll depend on how badly you want what’s on the other side.”

“I want it. I’m just telling you, my comfort level is low when it comes to playing cowboy. And I don’t like surprises.”

“Then you’re in the wrong city.”

Elson slaps the money against his thigh, then brings it up and looks at Rafferty over it. “How far outside the lines am I going to have to go?”

“Some unpleasant things may happen, but I don’t think you’ll have to do any of them. You won’t even be on the scene when they go down, if they do. You’ll have—what’s the phrase?—plausible deniability. Your end should be pretty much inside the lines.”

Elson nods. He has the distracted expression of a man evaluating a position on a chessboard: if this, then what? Finally he says, “Even assuming this is something I can do, I need a cop. I can’t do anything here without a Thai cop. That’s a rule I can’t screw with.”

“I can get you a cop.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” With a quick movement, he folds the money in half, one-handed, and his thumb pages idly through it. Elson has obviously counted a lot of money in his time. He lifts the bundle and fans it expertly, as though preparing for a card trick. “Should be a cop who’s been assigned to me.”

“It won’t be.”

Another nod, confirmation rather than agreement. “If this is big enough, I can probably get the Thais to say they assigned me whoever it is. Especially if we can prove that Petchara is dirty. They’ll be embarrassed about that.”

“Petchara put the bag in Peachy’s desk. You saw his reaction when you pulled out the old money.”

A gust of wind makes the window shiver, but Elson doesn’t seem to hear it. When he speaks, his voice has been hammered flat. “The bag. You mean the paper bag. The bag you didn’t know anything about.”

“It was originally full of counterfeit, thirty-two thousand worth. Peachy found it on Saturday, and I changed it for the real stuff.”

“She found it on Saturday?”

“She goes into the office a lot.”

He shakes his head. “But then . . . why bother to exchange it? Why not just move it? Put it someplace we wouldn’t find it?”

“I needed reactions. I needed to know who was setting us up.”

Surprise widens Elson’s eyes. “You thought it was me?”

Rafferty passes a hand over his hair, and a chilly rivulet of rainwater runs down the center of his back. “Could have been anybody.”

“I’m an agent of the federal government.” He sounds like his feelings are hurt.

“Look at it, would you? You practically kick my door in, you make slurs about my fianceé, you embargo my passport, and then all this junk money shows up, just materializes in a desk drawer. And I’m supposed to think, Oh, no, not him, because you’ve got that thing in your wallet.”

Elson fills his cheeks with air and blows it out. “Okay,” he says. He glances at the storm’s special effects through the window and shakes his head in disapproval. Finally he says, “Now I’ll show you mine. We’re under a lot of pressure. The Service, I mean. Personally, I think the administration is overreacting, but I’m not paid to have personal opinions. Look at it mathematically, though, and the level of concern is way over the top. There’s about seven hundred and fifty billion bucks in our currency—I mean cash, actual paper—circulating at any given moment, around sixty percent of it outside the country. These jokers are turning out somewhere between seventy-five million to five hundred million a year. Sounds like a lot of money, but put it all together and it wouldn’t make a dimple in this year’s deficit.”

“Somewhere between seventy-five million and five hundred million?

Is that supposed to be some sort of scientific estimate, or did somebody draw a number out of a hat?”

“It’s a punch line,” Elson says. “The work is too fucking good. We have no idea how much of this stuff is actually out there. And we’re being boneheads about getting banks to work with us.” He holds up the loose bills. “Say you run a Thai bank, okay? Or a Singaporean bank, or one in Macau, where these guys are really active. And one day you get nine or ten of these things across the counter.” He passes the bills from one hand to another, giving them to himself. “So you’re holding junk. You’ve essentially got two choices. You can call us up, wait around until we can be bothered to clear a space on our desk calendar, and we take the bills and maybe say thanks, but we don’t give you a penny. Or you can skip the call and just hand them to the next customer who wants hundreds.”

“That’s a tough one,” Rafferty says.

“I’m sure they agonize over it. So they don’t cooperate. And multiply it: These guys, the North Koreans, are operating in something like a hundred and thirty countries. They’re the first government to counterfeit another country’s currency since the Nazis, and they seem to be able to drop it practically anywhere, while we sit around looking like the only reason our thumbs evolved was so we could stick them up our butts. We’re a relatively small outfit, you know? And we’re, like, sitting at the president’s feet, and the president has a huge hard-on for Kim Jong Il, so we get a lot of heat.” He waves a hand in front of his face once, as though to clear away smoke. “And there’s the other piece, the really big piece. We want the North Koreans at the negotiating table. We’re not thrilled about their nuclear program. The idea is, if we can put a big enough crimp into their counterfeiting income, they’ll pull up a chair and listen to how much money they could make by not screwing around with plutonium. Whether they’d really sit down or not—and they might not, because these guys are certifiably nuts—there’s a lot of motivation to give it a try, so the president can declare a foreign-policy triumph and say, ‘America is safer today.’ He likes to say that.” His eyes when they come back to Rafferty’s have a kind of appeal in them. “So what I’m saying is, yeah, sometimes we act like assholes.”

“Some people probably respond to it better than I do.”

Elson says, “Pretty much everybody responds to it better than you do.” He drops the money on the desk. “In that office, when I said I’d

told you to shut up and you said you forgot, I damn near laughed.”

“Shame you didn’t. Things might have gone a little better.”

“We’re where we are,” Elson says. He comes back to the bed and sits, facing Rafferty. “I’ve got a million questions,” he says. “This all seems very sweet, but not if my ass is going to be hanging out there, getting rained on.”

On cue, a gust of wind slams against the window, rain hitting the glass like bullets. Elson bares his teeth at it and says, “How can you live here?”

“I like it.”

“This is my first monsoon,” he says. “One is enough.” Behind him, through the window, the wind is lashing palm trees around as though they were peacock feathers. “Such a great word, ‘monsoon.’ I expected something—oh, I don’t know—something more romantic. Girls in sarongs hanging on to palm trees or something.”

“You’re in Bangkok. You want girls in sarongs hanging on to palm trees, I can probably give you a phone number.”

Elson actually grins. “Bullshit.”

“Monsoons grow on you. And this one’s going to be a dilly.”

Elson regards the storm with a little more interest. A huge palm frond whips past the window, and he turns back to Rafferty. “So. I get the money, the North Korean and his connections—”

“You’ll have to get those out of him yourself.”

“Fine. And the big guy who’s also in the game and who torched the CIA man.”

“Prettyman,” Rafferty says, surprised at his own vehemence. “Arnold Prettyman. He wasn’t much, but he had a name.”

Elson lifts a palm, fingers pointing up, and wipes it back and forth, erasing the words. “Okay, okay, he had a name. I’m going to tell you something else I shouldn’t. There’s a folder in that desk over there. You’re in it. You’re not the cleanest guy in the world, but you’re not the dirtiest either. Some people say nice things about you. I should have read it before I busted in on you.”

“You’ve read it now,” Rafferty says.

“Yeah, and it’s enough to make me wonder what you’re getting out of this.”

“Something that was taken from me.”

Elson lowers his head and regards Rafferty over the top of his glasses. “Yours legally?”

“To the extent that anybody belongs legally to anybody else.”

The agent’s lips purse as though he is going to whistle. “People?”

Rafferty nods.

“People you care about.”

“Are you married?”

Elson hesitates and then says, “Yes.”

“Got kids?”

“Two.”

“What would you do to get them back if someone took them?”

Elson’s face empties while he thinks about it. “Anything.”

“What about the lines?”

“If my family’s involved? Fuck the lines.”

“Pretty much the way I feel.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. And not to be a prick, but that’s your issue and I’m sure you’re going to take care of it. On my end of things, what do I do?”

“You wait for me to call you around five this morning and tell you where it’s going down. And I’ll tell you then how it works, and you can pull out if you want to.”

“Why not now?”

“I’m waiting to put a few more stepping-stones in place.”

“Great,” Elson says. “You’re working on the fly.”

“My turn to ask a question.”

Elson closes his eyes, drops his head, and puts his fingers wearily to his forehead, where the door hit it. “Why not?”

“I’ve seen you flash that gun around. Are you any good with it?”

For a moment Rafferty thinks Elson will smile again. Instead he says, “Better than you can imagine.”

_!40

I’ll Never Sleep on It Again Anyway

e’s getting the rubies,” Frank says on Rafferty’s cell phone. “The papers.”

“He’s not going to settle for the rubies and the papers.” Rafferty is on his way home from Elson’s hotel, in the backseat of a cab. He chose a cab instead of a tuk-tuk in deference to the rain, which has achieved epic scale. In four blocks they have passed half a dozen stalled cars and two accidents. The sidewalk neons are shapeless smears of diluted color, echoed on the wet pavement.

“What about the money?” Ming Li’s voice comes from the bottom of a cave, and Rafferty has to press the phone harder against his ear to hear her. Frank has his cell phone on speaker.

“The money’s an extra. He’s not expecting it, so that could help. But let’s face it, what he wants is Frank.”

Ming Li says, “We’ve talked about this before. The answer is still no.”

Frank says, “Ming Li. Don’t talk, listen.” Then he says to Rafferty, “Where?”

“I’ll let you know in an hour or two.”

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

“Maybe you can think of something else.” A car speeds by in the opposite direction, throwing up a five-foot wave that shatters against the windows of Rafferty’s cab. His driver says the Thai equivalent of “fuckhead” and hits the horn in retaliation.

“At the very least, we need to know where it’s going to happen,” Ming Li says.

“You’re not going to know, until the last minute, and neither will I. I’m letting Chu pick the place.”

“Are you crazy? If he picks the place, we can’t set anything up.”

“That’s exactly right. He’s not stupid. One sniff of anything screwy and he’s gone. He’ll kill everyone and disappear. And he’ll still be after you. He’ll be after you until either he or Frank is dead. We have to end it here, and that means he thinks he’s in control and that he’s going to get everything he wants.”

“Poke’s right,” Frank says. “I know Chu. He’s not going to walk into anything that could be a setup.”

“So we’re going to let him set us up?” Ming Li says.

“He won’t get a chance,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to give him fifteen, twenty minutes between the time he sets the place and the time we walk into it. And I’m ninety percent sure I know where it’ll be.”

“How?” Ming Li asks.

“I’m going to force it,” Rafferty says. “Send Leung with the box. I’ll talk to you in an hour.”

He closes the cell phone, looks out the window, and resigns himself to the fact that he’s not going to be able to see where he is until he’s home. He digs a business card out of his shirt pocket and dials the number on it.

“Kosit,” says the leather-faced cop.

“This is Rafferty. How’s Arthit?”

“No word yet. The doctors are still in there.”

“I need to see you.”

“Um,” Kosit says, “I’m not sure I should leave here.”

“This is for Arthit. Believe me, he’d want you to do it.”

“What do you mean, it’s for Arthit?”

“It’s between you and me. Are you okay with that?”

“I might be. What is it?”

“Fine. You be the judge.” He tells Kosit about Noi, about Rose and Miaow, and about the meeting with Chu.

“Worse and worse.” Kosit sounds as drained as Rafferty feels. “What do you want me to do?”

“I’ll tell you at my place.”

Kosit says, “Somebody’s got to be coming out of Arthit’s room soon. Give me half an hour. If we don’t hear anything by then, I’ll leave. And listen, for Arthit I can get you a hundred cops, if you need them.”

“Thanks,” Rafferty says. “But I think Arthit would say we don’t need them.”

ONLY ONE JARof Nescafé this time. The color should vary. Rafferty stirs it in, examines the tint of the water in the washer’s tub, and rummages through the cabinets until he finds a tin of powdered green tea. He can hear the hair dryers whirring in the other room, broken occasionally by the sound of women laughing. Fon comes into the kitchen, lugging two very heavy-looking plastic bags from Foodland, conveniently open twenty-four hours.

“They’ve only got two left,” she says. “We’ve practically bought them out.” She grunts as she lifts the bags to the counter. “I got your glue, too.”

Rafferty adds half the green tea to the water and stirs with his hand. “What do you think?”

“I’m no expert,” Fon says. “When I see money, all I look at is the numbers.”

“Looks okay to me.” He reaches over and untwists the cap on one of the big jugs of fabric softener from Fon’s shopping bags and empties the entire bottle into the tub. “Let’s just use one this time,” he says. “Last batch got a little mushy.”

“Fine,” Fon says, looking down at the water. “Maybe there’ll be a bottle I can take home.”

“I’ll trade it for the basket.”

“Pretty expensive fabric softener,” she says. She bends down and comes up with a large plastic laundry basket, which she gives to Rafferty. He upends it into the washer. Crisp, flat money flutters down onto the surface of the water, and Rafferty pushes it under and adds more, repeating the process until it’s all in the tub. Fon takes the empty basket.

“I think we’ll use the delicate cycle,” he says, hearing the absurdity in the words. “It’s faster.” He is up to his elbows in water and money, so he says, “What time is it?”

“A little after two.”

“We need more people,” Rafferty says. He pushes “start” on the washing machine, dries his hands, and follows Fon into the living room.

Lek and three other women, all from Rose and Peachy’s agency, sit on the floor around another laundry tub. The tub is blue plastic with square holes in the sides. Two of the women reach in and toss the money like a salad while the others aim hair dryers through the holes. The floor is a snake farm of extension cords. When Rafferty went into the kitchen to start the new load, the basket looked only half full. Now, with the bills drier and not clinging to each other, they almost reach the top edge. As the dry bills are blown to the top, one of the women gathers them and carries them to the couch, which is covered from one end to the other in loose, dried money, nearly a foot thick. Rafferty goes to it, picks up a double handful, crumples them, then lets them drop.

They look and feel a lot better. Not ready yet, but better.

“We’re never going to finish at this rate,” he says. “Who else can we call?”

As if in answer, someone knocks on the door. Rafferty waves the women into the kitchen, realizes there is nothing he can do about the money everywhere, and pulls the Glock. He opens the door an inch and sees Lieutenant Kosit. “Oh.” He sticks the gun into his pants, behind his back. “It’s you.”

Kosit’s eyes are red-rimmed, his face tight enough to have been freeze-dried. He peers past Rafferty and pulls his head back a fraction of an inch in surprise. “What are you doing?”

“Laundering money,” Rafferty says. “To buy Noi back.” He pulls the door open, but Kosit stands rooted where he is, and Rafferty’s heart sinks. “News?”

“He’s in intensive care,” Kosit says. “The bullet hit the lung, but it also nicked a ventricle. If that tech hadn’t been on top of Arthit’s blood pressure, he would have bled to death internally.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They don’t know shit. They’re talking about shock, infection, a whole list of stuff that could kill him. But I’ll get a call if anything changes.”

“Come on in.”

Across the hallway the elevator doors open, and Mrs. Pongsiri steps off, wearing a short black cocktail dress and carrying the world’s smallest handbag, on the surface of which five or six sequins jostle for space. Her eyes go to Rafferty and then travel to Kosit’s uniform, and she begins to smile. Then she sees the money spread over the couch, and the smile hardens into a mask. She says, “Oh, my.”

From behind Rafferty someone squeals “Anh!” and he turns to see Fon grinning at Mrs. Pongsiri like a long-lost sister.

“Fon,” Mrs. Pongsiri says in a voice Rafferty has never heard before: higher, softer, younger, the voice of the bars and clubs. She opens her arms like a soprano reaching for the top note. Fon shoves her way between Rafferty and Kosit, and the two women embrace. Mrs. Pongsiri kisses Fon on the cheek and squeezes her so hard that Fon lets out a little squeak. Holding Fon at arm’s length, Mrs. Pongsiri looks back to the couch full of money and says, “But what in the world—”

Now the other women reappear. Lek and one other, whose name Rafferty doesn’t know, give Mrs. Pongsiri wide, white smiles as they pick up their hair dryers and get back to work.

“You’re . . . drying money?” Mrs. Pongsiri asks, the question wrinkling her forehead.

“We need to make it look old,” Rafferty says. “So we washed it.”

Mrs. Pongsiri blinks heavily, obviously sorting through, and rejecting, half a dozen questions. Finally she settles on the practical. “Don’t you have a dryer?”

“Sure,” Rafferty says, “but I think it’ll make them too stiff.”

Mrs. Pongsiri wearily shakes her head. “Softener sheets,” she says, as though speaking to a disappointing child. “Just throw them in with the money.”

Kosit and Rafferty look at each other.

“I bought a box of them today,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. “I’ll be right back.” She gets a new grip on her purse and bustles down the hall. As she unlocks her door, Rafferty hears her say, “Men.”

KOSIT GIVES Adisbelieving glance at the shirt cardboards Rafferty has glued together, looks at the suitcase and the bent coat hangers Rafferty plans to use for support, and says, “Never.”

Through the open door to the living room, Rafferty hears the women talking. He feels like his battery died and corroded days ago, but the women are fully charged. For most of them, this is the first time they’ve worked their normal hours in months.

“Why not?” He and Kosit are sitting on the bed.

Kosit picks up the shirt boards. Rafferty’s newly laundered shirts, stripped from the cardboard, litter the floor. “Too flexible,” Kosit says, bending them. “Even glued together. You need it to be rigid. This stuff is heavy. And the lever won’t work. Not enough pressure.”

“Start with the boards. What can we do?”

“Can’t add much weight,” Kosit says, thinking. “What about those books in the living room?”

“Books are heavy,” Rafferty says.

“The covers aren’t. Get a bunch of hardbacks and some sort of cutter. Look.” He frames a book cover in his hands and mimes placing them across the platform of shirt boards. “Overlap them,” he says. “Crisscrossed. Glued on both sides, so they don’t bend.”

“That leaves the lever,” Rafferty says.

“It leaves a lot of things,” Kosit says. “The hinges on the suitcase, for example. You need to oil them so they’re almost friction-free.” He opens and closes the suitcase several times. “Too much resistance,” he says.

“I’ve got oil. What about the lever?”

“I can fix the lever. But you need more . . .” Kosit searches for the word, then brings his hands slowly together and pulls them apart quickly.

Rafferty says, “Shit. Well, it’s not the end of the world. I don’t think I’ll need this. It’s just insurance.”

Kosit sits back, looking doubtfully at the suitcase, at the mess they have made. Then his face clears, and he points at the mattress. His eyebrows come up in a question.

“Sure,” Rafferty says. “If the next four or five hours go wrong, I’ll never sleep on it again anyway.”

He gets up and goes into the living room to get the books and an X-acto knife. The production line is in full swing. The dryer, with the last load in it, is running in the kitchen. Two women crumple or fold the bills and smooth them again. Another chooses one bill out of four or five and makes a small mark with a felt-tip, either black or red, like those used by banks. Fon has taken to writing random phone numbers with a ballpoint pen on every tenth or twelfth bill. She passes the bills on to Mrs. Pongsiri, who sorts the baht and the dollars into two stacks and smooths them again.

Suddenly Mrs. Pongsiri breaks into a laugh and then reaches over and swats Fon lightly on top of the head. The other girls gather round to look at the bill, and then they all laugh. Rafferty reaches for it and turns it over. It is an American hundred. In the slender margin at the edge, Fon has carefully written, “Love you long time.”

Getting into the spirit, Mrs. Pongsiri says, “Roll up some of the American hundreds. Roll them very tightly and then unroll them again.”

Kosit, framed in the doorway to the bedroom, eyes her narrowly for a moment and then says, “Good idea.”

“Americans in my club,” Mrs. Pongsiri says, hurrying the words. She has apparently just remembered that Kosit is a cop. “They do that all the time, and then they inhale something through it.”

“Probably vitamin C,” Kosit says. “I’m sure there are no drugs at your club.”

“Very high-end,” Mrs. Pongsiri agrees.

“What’s the name of your club?” Kosit asks.

“It’s called Rempflxnblt,” says Mrs. Pongsiri, sneezing most of the word into her palm. She presses an index finger beneath her nostrils. “Sorry. It’s the perfume in the fabric softener.”

“Mrs. Pongsiri my mama-san once,” Fon says cheerfully in English. Mrs. Pongsiri blanches. “Same-same with Lek and Jah. Very good mama-san. Never hit girls, never take money.”

“Almost never,” Lek says, and the other women laugh again.

Lek is wrapping rubber bands around the stacks: ten thousand dollars per stack in American hundreds, one hundred bills in each stack of thousand-baht notes. She ran out of rubber bands ten minutes ago, and the women removed a remarkable variety of elastic loops from their hair. Mrs. Pongsiri traipsed down the hall a second time and came back with a box containing enough scrunchies to style a yeti. Rafferty is a little worried about the predominance of beauty products, but he figures if the stacks are mixed up enough, they won’t be so conspicuous.

With a thwack, Lek snaps a bright pink scrunchie around a wad of thousand-baht notes, and Rafferty’s cell phone shrills. Every eye in the room goes to him as he opens the phone and puts it to his ear.

“Coming up,” Leung says. “With a surprise.”

“What I don’t need right now is a surprise.”

“This is a surprise you’d rather have now than later. You might want to meet me in the hall.” He hangs up.

“How much more?” Rafferty asks the women.

“Halfway done,” Fon says. “We kept some to speed things up.” The other women laugh, some more heartily than others.

“If you do,” Rafferty says, “take the stuff on the coffee table. It may not be as pretty, but it’s real.” He pulls a dozen hardcover books of approximately the same size off the shelf and heads for the bedroom. He has just dropped them in front of Kosit, who is sitting on the bed, which has a long rip in it where the policeman worked out a spring, when the doorbell rings.

“Listen,” Kosit says. “The bedsprings aren’t enough.”

“Well, Jesus,” Rafferty says. He can barely focus on the problem. “Use anything.”

Kosit shakes his head. “I don’t know—”

“Use those,” Rafferty says, pointing to the stun grenades hanging from Kosit’s belt. “That ought to open things up.”

Kosit tilts one up and lets it drop back. “I’m not sure. The pins are hard to pop. They take a good hard tug. I don’t know if the lever—”

The doorbell rings again. “Please,” Rafferty says. “Solve it.” He goes back into the living room and opens the door, just enough to squeeze out into the hallway.

Leung stands there, water dripping off the end of his nose, a canvas bag hanging from his shoulder. The gun in his hand is pointed at the fat cop and the thin cop. Pradya and Sriyat, Rafferty thinks. The fat cop, Pradya, tries on a smile.

Rafferty looks at the three of them, and an overwhelming weariness seizes hold of him. He leans against the wall and closes his eyes for a moment, trying to find a way to make this new development work to his advantage. When he opens his eyes again, Pradya has given up on his smile. “You,” Rafferty says to Sriyat. “Go back to Chu. Take your time, but go back. Tell him whatever you want. Tell him Leung caught you, I don’t care. Tell him we kept Pradya.” Sriyat doesn’t even nod, just turns to ring for the elevator. “Do you still know which side you’re on?” Rafferty asks.

Sriyat turns his head a quarter of the way, his mouth a taut line. “Not much choice,” he says.

“Make sure you remember that,” Rafferty says. To Pradya and Leung, he says, “Come on in. I’ll try to find you someplace to sit.”

_!41

The Deal Just Changed

ery fucking cute,” Rafferty says into the phone. “Sending those clowns after Ming Li.” “You changed the rules when you lied to me,” Chu says.

“Oh, gosh,” Rafferty says, “and we’d established such an atmosphere of trust.” His eyes scan the room. The fat cop, Pradya, sits on the couch, head down, with Leung standing over him. The women paw through the rubies in the box, their eyes wide. Leung is watching their hands. Kosit is busy with the suitcase in the bedroom.

“You’ve been in contact with Frank,” Chu accuses. “All along.”

“No. Just the past eight hours or so. He called me with some news, and I didn’t want to share it with you.”

“What news?”

“Don’t get excited about this. In the end you’ll be happy about it.”

“I’ll decide what I’m happy about. What is it?”

“He sold your rubies.”

“Yes,” Chu says, dragging the word out. “I can see why you wouldn’t want to tell me that. Just out of curiosity, how much did he get?”

“About a million four.”

“Dollars, of course.”

“Sure. Even with you on his tail, he’s not going to sell them for a million and a half baht.”

“He could have gotten more. I assume you have the money.”

“I’ve got better than that. I’ve got the money and I’ve also got the rubies.”

“You’ve got . . . you said he sold them.”

“He did.”

“Then how did you get them?”

“Violence,” Rafferty says. Leung looks over at him and grins.

“You’re better than he is,” Chu says. “Better than he was in his prime.”

“Don’t make me blush. Here’s the deal: The money evens things up. You have three items of Arthit’s and mine, and I have three items for you. We’re going to make one trade at a time. No promises, no IOUs, no payment for future delivery, no address left behind where we can find them. Cash for Noi, in the flesh. Rubies for Rose. Frank for Miaow.”

Chu says, “Have you looked in the box?”

Careful, Rafferty thinks. “Frank popped the lid and showed me the stones. That’s a lot of rubies.”

“Didn’t you go through it? After you got it back?”

“Why would I? I don’t know anything about rubies. What am I going to do, weigh them one at a time?”

“Mmmm,” Chu says.

Rafferty waits.

“I want Ming Li, too.”

“Not part of the deal.”

“The deal just changed.”

Rafferty says, “Hold it. I need to think.” He looks at Leung, whose eyes have returned to the women’s hands. Pradya is frankly listening to the phone call, but he looks away when Rafferty catches him. “Buy her from me.”

“Buy her? With what?”

“The rubies. Ming Li for the rubies.” Now Leung is looking at him, and he’s not grinning. Rafferty shakes his head.

“No,” Chu says. “She’s a bonus, for the trouble you’ve caused me.”

“Half the rubies.”

“You really are venal,” Chu says, almost admiringly. “You’re giving me your father and proposing to sell me your sister.”

“It’s a dysfunctional family.”

“Two handfuls,” Chu says. “In front of me. You can dip your hands into the box and bring up as many as you can hold. Put them in your pockets and give me the girl.”

“Four.”

“Two, and that’s the end of it.”

“Okay. Two.”

“Send her to me now.”

“No. Nothing gets traded on the basis of futures. No deferred transfers. Payment in one direction, person in the other. Right there, on the spot.”

Chu says, “It sounds like you don’t trust me.”

“That’s funny,” Rafferty says. “The last person who said that to me was Arnold Prettyman.”

Chu doesn’t even hesitate. “What a peculiar name. Since we’re both putting everything on the table, I’m assuming you have some safeguards in mind.”

“Lots of them.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’ll have your guys on hand, and I’ll have my own. I’m keeping one of your guys with me—the fat one, Pradya, I kind of like him—and he takes charge of Frank. He’s got a cell phone. He’ll call you when we pick Frank up. You can even talk to Frank, if you want to make sure he’s with us. I arrive with the money. You have someone bring out Noi. We swap, right there. Cash for Noi. The rubies and Frank—and Ming Li, I guess—are out of sight until they’re needed. You can’t shoot me or you lose everything else. I can’t shoot you because you’ve still got Rose and Miaow, and your guy, Pradya, could pop Frank. With me?”

“So far.”

“Then one of your people brings out Rose, and one of my people brings out the rubies.”

“Who? Who are your people?”

“Only one of them has skills. The people who bring out your items will be girls from Rose’s agency. Former go-go dancers.” He can feel

the women look up at him.

Chu laughs. “Go-go dancers? In costume?”

“They’ll be in their underwear.” Fon’s mouth drops open. “Nowhere to put a weapon. Just wet girls.”

“In my youth,” Chu says, “I was partial to wet girls.”

“I’ve looked at a few myself.”

“What then?”

“Then it’s Frank for Miaow and Ming Li for my share of the rubies.”

“Very tidy. And when we’ve finished our exchanges?”

“My people will be out of sight, out of range. Sitting in a car with the engine running. You’ll have everything, including Frank. You can have half a dozen guns on me, since shooting me won’t get you anything back. We say good-bye, and you leave.”

“Leaving is always the sticky part.”

“So I’ve heard.” He crosses his fingers. “What do you suggest?”

“I choose the place,” Chu says instantly, and Rafferty relaxes. “I’ll give you a general direction and call back a few minutes before you’re due, to tell you exactly where you’re going. Pradya will tell me where you are and who’s with you when I call. I’ll have people watching you arrive, just to make sure there aren’t a dozen cops behind you. If I see anything I don’t like, I kill the hostages, and you’ll never lay eyes on me.”

“You choose the place?”

“Of course.”

“We could be walking into a setup.”

“Why would I set you up? This is business. I’m not going to kill all these people if I don’t have to. Bodies everywhere? That could come back to sting me. We Chinese come from villages, we live with hornets. We know better than to punch holes in the nest. I get what I want, you get what you want, and we shake hands. The hornets stay home.”

“I’m not happy about you choosing the place.”

“Think of it as an opportunity for greater understanding. Learning that you don’t actually run the world can be a valuable lesson. Perhaps we should both consider this interaction a step toward enlightenment.”

“Gee,” Rafferty says. “How can I say no to that?”

“You can’t,” Chu says. He hangs up.

Rafferty folds the phone and says, “Let’s pack the money.”

AN HOUR LATERLek says, “It’s going to be cold.”

“It was colder in the bar,” Fon replies. “Didn’t you bathe in the rain in your village when you were a kid? I remember waiting with my shampoo every time it got cloudy.” She has sacrificed the rubber bands in her hair to wrap money, so she roots through Mrs. Pongsiri’s box of scrunchies for a color she likes, a heavy twist of hair wrapped around her free hand. “Anyway, it’s for Rose.”

“Done,” Kosit says, carrying the suitcase into the room. Judging from the slump in his right shoulder, it’s heavy. “I only fastened one clasp because you’re going to need a hand free. Just remember to put it down flat. Keep the handle toward Chu.” He sets it carefully on the couch. “And if you pop the lever, don’t look down at it.”

“Is it going to work?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Jesus. Couldn’t you lie to me?”

“It’s foolproof,” Kosit says.

His cell phone rings.

“Kosit,” he says, and he looks up at Rafferty, and then his eyes bounce away. “Yeah, yeah. What’s he say?” He closes his eyes as though he is praying. “Fine,” he says at last. “Thanks for the call.”

Rafferty’s forehead is suddenly wet. “What?”

“He’s stable. They’re still worried about shock and infection, but if he makes it through the night, he’s got a chance.” He wipes the back of his hand roughly over his mouth. “I’d kill for a beer.”

“You don’t have to exert yourself. Got some in the refrigerator.”

“No. I’d pass out. I feel like I’ve been awake for a week.”

“We’ll have one later. Together. When this is over.”

“With Arthit,” Kosit says. “We’ll all go—” he says, but he’s cut off by his phone, which is ringing again. He pats his pockets frantically before realizing it’s still in his hand. “Kosit,” he says. He listens for a second and then says, “Fine.” He folds it, looks at it like it just materialized, and puts it in his shirt pocket, tapping it once so he’ll remember where he put it. “Car’s downstairs,” he says. “White Toyota, pulled out of the impound lot. No antennas, no fancy paint job. No super-duper ultra-

beam halogen headlights. Looks like every other car in Bangkok.”

Rafferty nods. “Ladies?”

For a moment he doesn’t think they heard him. The women sit absolutely still as the silence stretches out. Then Fon reaches into the front of her T-shirt. When her hand comes out, it has her Buddhist amulet in it. She puts it between her palms, presses her hands together in a praying position, and raises them to her face. She bows her head. One by one the other women repeat her movements. Last of all, Mrs. Pongsiri fishes inside her silk blouse and brings out a golden amulet on a heavy chain. She brings her hands around it and lowers her head. They sit there, five women whose lives have been almost impossibly difficult, and offer their prayers for Rose, Miaow, and Noi.

Rafferty puts his hand on his own amulet, the one Rose gave him, and then he bolts from the room. He closes the bathroom door behind him and lets the sobs rise up and escape. It feels like they’ve been battering at the door for days. When he can control his breathing again, he throws cold water on his face, scrubs himself dry, and goes back into the living room. Fon, Lek, and Kosit are waiting at the front door, Kosit holding the suitcase. Leung stands behind Pradya, a cautionary hand on his shoulder.

Rafferty picks up the box of rubies and says, “Time for the swap meet.”

_!42

They’ve All Got Their Little Hatchets

he chalkboard nailed to the wall says speciasl of the weke. Below the misspellings, which are hand-lettered in what looks like indelible paint, the board is blank.

“I hope that’s not my week,” Frank says.

Rafferty says, “We’ll try to see that it isn’t.”

Ming Li sips a watery iced coffee and says, “How do you find these restaurants?” She puts the glass down, and the sound when it hits the table makes Pradya, seated across the restaurant with Leung, jump. Pradya is on the phone with Chu, letting him know they have Frank. His hand is cupped over the phone, but Leung has leaned forward to listen. He glances up at Rafferty and nods.

“I guess we’re on,” Frank says. His forehead is beaded with sweat. One leg jitters up and down beneath the table, providing a rhythm track to whatever is going through his head. He looks at the tabletop, dips a finger in the condensation at the bottom of his own glass, and begins to draw a series of wet loops, like a stretched spring. Ming Li watches his finger move, as intently as if he were writing a secret language only they can read, and Rafferty briefly wonders whether it is. Frank’s hand is trembling, and he pulls it back and puts it in his lap.

Not surprisingly, given the hour, they are the only people in the restaurant, which is just off Khao San, a few blocks from the guesthouse. Fon and Lek are waiting in the car, chattering nervously. When the five of them came in, the waitress, who had been bent over a brightly colored book called Let’s English! had gotten up and turned on the television. During the ten minutes they’ve been there, Steven Seagal has killed a dozen people with no apparent change of expression.

“Poke,” Frank says. He is drawing loops again, and he waits until Rafferty looks over at him. “I’m sorry.”

“I should be apologizing to you,” Rafferty says. “You were right. If I hadn’t brought Arnold into this, you’d probably be gone by now.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Frank says, the words so soft that Rafferty’s not sure he understood them. A series of grunts from the television is followed by a stitchery of gunfire from an automatic. No one bothers to look. “I meant for everything.”

Ming Li has fixed an urgent stare on Poke, but Rafferty can’t find a reply. Something Rose said goes through his mind, something about his having all those words in his head, but none of the ones he really needs.

“Just . . . you know,” Frank says. “Whatever happens, I wanted to say that.”

Rafferty says, “Thank you.”

“Is this going to work?” Ming Li demands.

“I don’t know.” Rafferty picks up his own iced coffee and drains it. It’s awful, but he needs the caffeine. “What I do know is that we have to try. I owe it to Arthit, I owe it to Rose and Miaow, and I guess I owe it to you. Chu’s not going to quit. If you got up right now and walked out of here, he’d find you and it would all start over again.”

“You’re right,” Frank says. “Chu’s never given up on anything in his life.”

“What haven’t we thought of?” Ming Li asks.

“A hundred things,” Rafferty says. “What if he just shoots us all as we come in? What if there are a dozen guys we don’t know about? What if the place is booby-trapped?”

“He won’t shoot us when we come in, and there won’t be a booby trap,” Frank says. “He won’t do anything until he knows we’ve got everything he wants. He probably won’t do anything until it’s all in his hands. Chu is a lot of things, but he’s not impulsive. It’s taken him years to build all this—the rubies, the documents, the American identity. He needs this exit more than he needs anything else in the world. So as much as he wants to kill me, he’ll wait. He’ll wait until he’s got everything.”

“And then,” Ming Li says, “he’ll put your head on a spike.”

A bleating sound cuts through the mayhem on the television, and Pradya opens his phone. He says something, hangs up, and leans over to Leung. Leung gets up and comes over to their table.

“Klong Toey,” he says.

“He wants to kill Frank, and you’re just handing him over,” Ming Li says. She puts both hands on Rafferty’s arm. “He’s your father, and you’re giving him away.”

Rafferty gets up. “We’re going to see if we can’t make it a loan.”

_!43

A World of Wind and Wet

hey’re barely inside the warehouse complex when Rafferty gets the first indication that things are going wrong. “Keep coming,” Chu says into the phone. Blooming in the rain-dimmed headlights, directly in front of them,

is a long wall of corrugated steel with an enormous red 3 on it. “We’re at three,” Rafferty repeats. “Yes, I heard you. Keep coming. Turn between two and one. I’m

here.” “Fine,” Rafferty says. “Coming.” He leans forward, says to Leung,

who is at the wheel, “Stop beside number two.” “Two?” Leung doesn’t sound surprised, but it’s close. Rafferty presses his thumb over the phone’s mouthpiece to mute it

and says to Pradya, “You said three.” “Maybe he moved them,” says the fat cop from the backseat. Something about his tone accelerates Rafferty’s pulse. He settles back against the upholstery, taking long, slow breaths and looking at alternatives. There aren’t many, and he wishes he could be

alone for a minute or two. They are packed so close together he feels like his thoughts are audible. The car, which had looked big enough when it was empty, smells of anxiety and wet cloth. They’ve had to open all the windows a few inches to keep them from steaming up. Frank and Ming Li share the front seat with Leung, and Rafferty is bookended by Fon and Lek. Beyond Lek, jammed up against the door, is the fat cop Pradya, his empty gun in his lap. Lek is muttering resentfully as she works her jeans down over her thighs, lifting herself from the seat to get them below her knees. Pradya is watching with more than professional interest.

Kosit is a minute or two away in his own car, with Elson beside him.

“We’re at two,” Leung announces, slowing.

“Turn the car around,” Rafferty says. “I want it pointed at the exit.” He hands Pradya the magazine for his automatic and says, “You can load it now.” Then he reaches across Fon, yanks the door handle, and climbs over her into a world of wind and wet. As he starts to close the door, he feels Fon’s hand on his arm.

“It’ll be fine,” she says.

He gives her a nod, suddenly on the edge of tears, and closes the door. Lifting his face to the rain, he opens his eyes wide, letting the fall of water wash them clean. He returns the cell phone to his ear and says, “We’re here.”

Chu says, “I’m waiting.” Rafferty touches the Glock nestled into the small of his back and walks to the corner of the building.

The alleyway between the warehouses is wide enough for two trucks to pass each other, and about 120 feet long. Bars of yellow light stripe the asphalt as far as Rafferty can see through the rain, reflecting the bulbs set every ten or fifteen feet beneath the overhangs of the warehouse roofs. Rafferty has expected to be ankle-deep in water, but the entire area slopes down very slightly toward the river. Except for the occasional black puddle, which could be anywhere from an inch to a foot deep, there is almost no water underfoot.

Rafferty is trying to figure out whether the absence of water is good or bad when the rain eases for a moment, and he sees Chu, gleaming at him in a black rubber slicker that hangs almost to his feet. He is about sixty feet away. Chu lifts an arm and waves like someone in a home movie—Hi there!—and then the rain hammers down again, and Rafferty can barely make out his shape, just a vertical darkness drawing the eye like a cave behind a waterfall.

“Come on along,” Chu says into the phone. “I want to get a look at you.”

“This phone’s going to short out,” Rafferty says, moving forward. “It’s too wet. I’m turning it off now.”

“Up to you.”

Rafferty’s thumb finds the “disconnect” button and then, very quickly, he highlights the next number he will need. He slips the phone into a small Ziploc bag and puts it in his shirt pocket, buttons facing out. Instinctively he finds the “dial” button with his thumb. Then he does it again, walking all the time. He is about to do it yet again when Chu’s form begins to solidify in front of him. Rafferty drops his hands to his sides and flexes his fingers repeatedly like a pianist about to tackle something difficult. They feel as stiff as sticks.

Ten feet away he stops and waits. Chu waves him closer, Asian style, palm and fingers down, but Rafferty shakes his head. A moment passes. Rafferty can feel something extending between him and Chu, something taut that pulsates like a high-voltage wire. Chu mutters irritably and trudges forward. Once Chu is moving, Rafferty continues toward him.

Chu is frailer than Rafferty imagined, and older. Somehow he had continued to see the Colonel Chu his father had described from all those years ago in Wang’s room, not this papery retiree. The sudden image of Wang, stripped and shivering, being offered to dogs and horses, ignites a hot surge of fury. Rafferty damps it down as fast as he can, fearing it will travel the wire to Chu, and in fact Chu slows and regards him quizzically. But then he shakes his head again and smiles.

“You don’t look like him.” They are three feet apart.

“I thank my mother daily,” Rafferty says.

Chu’s face is a nest of creases, a topography of age folded into the skin around his eyes and mouth. His eyelids hang down at weary forty-fivedegree angles, the eyes behind them as dry and hard as stone. His neck is two vertical ropes, the tendons taut beneath the skin. Deep grooves have been carved on either side of his mouth, and they deepen when he smiles. He is smiling now, a kind, grandfatherly, yellow-toothed smile that makes Rafferty wonder how much strength it would take to snap his neck. Beads of water glisten on the hairs sprouting from his mole.

“You’re smaller than I thought you’d be,” Rafferty says.

“Our fears always are,” Chu says, “when we finally have the strength to look at them.”

“I’ll remember that.”

A gust of wind catches Chu’s slicker, billows it out, and snaps a corner up, throwing a spray of water at Rafferty. “This is a filthy city,” Chu says. “I’m quite ready to leave it. I assume you have everything you owe me.”

“And you?”

“I never go into a business meeting,” Chu says, “without the currency I’ll need. They’re all here, a little wet but otherwise well. Eager to see you. Shall we begin?”

“Let’s,” Rafferty says. “I’m ready for you to leave Bangkok, too.”

“First, though,” Chu says, and he waves his hand. A man comes around the corner of the warehouse behind him. He carries an automatic weapon slung from his shoulder. When he gets closer, Rafferty sees a swollen upper lip, pulled high enough to reveal a broken tooth.

“This is Ping,” Chu says. “He’s going with you, just to see whom you’ve left around the corner.”

Rafferty says, “The hell he is.”

“Be reasonable. For all I know, you’ve got a car full of cops.”

Rafferty looks at Ping. Ping sucks his tooth and winces.

“I thought you watched us come in.”

“You may not have noticed,” Chu says, “but visibility is limited. Ping is not negotiable. He takes a look or we both walk away right now.”

“The gun stays here,” Rafferty says.

“Fine,” Chu says, too easily, and it causes Rafferty a twinge of discomfort. “Ping?”

Ping unshoulders the gun and passes it over to Chu. Rafferty steps forward, pats Ping down, extracts a small, flat automatic from under Ping’s shirt, and holds it out. Chu looks at it but makes no move to take it.

“Think fast,” Rafferty says. He flicks the safety and drops the gun to the asphalt. It lands with a clatter and a bounce. Chu takes a quick step back—a hop, really—and when his eyes come back, the grandfather is gone and there is murder in them.

“Don’t worry,” Rafferty says. “Nobody saw you jump except me. And old Ping here. Not much loss of face there.” He turns to go and says, over his shoulder, “And if you’re worried about Ping, you can always kill him later.”

When they’re ten or eleven yards from Chu, Rafferty says, “Have you thought about that? About him killing you later?”

“Shut up,” Ping says, and then gasps. His tongue probes the tooth again.

“There must be something about me. Everybody tells me to shut up. How’d you break that tooth?”

No answer.

“Hard to break a front tooth like that. Usually it’s a molar. Or did somebody else break it?”

Ping just slogs through the rain, but he brings a hand up to cover his mouth.

“You should have it looked at.”

“I know.”

“Of course, you may not need to get it looked at. You know how the triads cure a toothache? They amputate the head.”

“She’s just like you,” Ping says. “Your daughter.”

Rafferty looks at him quickly but can’t find his voice to speak.

“Those pajamas,” Ping says. He squints and puts the hand back over his mouth. “They’ve got bunnies all over them, and she acts like they’re a suit of fucking armor. She even told him off. He went out and got her a milk shake or something, and she laid into him because it had melted.”

The full weight of what he’s doing—what he’s trying to do—is suddenly pushing at Rafferty from all sides. He feels like a man walking the bottom of the ocean. The air and the darkness press in on him. His lungs are an inch deep. “Here we are,” he says as they turn the corner.

Leung is standing by the car. He shades his eyes against the rain, sees Ping, and raises a hand, palm up, meaning, What the fuck? Rafferty says, “Get everybody out. Open the trunk. This is a paranoia check.”

In a few moments, the car is empty. Fon and Lek, in bra and panties, huddle against the rain, which is hard enough to sting their bare skin. Ming Li and Leung face the car, their hands folded on their heads, while Pradya holds his gun—loaded now, Rafferty remembers—steady on Frank. Ping motions Rafferty to the trunk, where the suitcase and Chu’s wooden box are stored. “Open them,” he says.

“The suitcase,” Rafferty says. “I don’t know if I can close it again.”

“Your problem, not mine.”

“Fine. Be a hard-ass.” He lifts the suitcase’s latch, and the oiled lid pops up five or six inches as Rafferty holds his breath. Very carefully, he opens it the rest of the way and watches with some satisfaction as Ping’s involuntary gasp sends him into a spasm of pain. Then Rafferty closes the suitcase gently and lifts the lid of the wooden box to display the rubies. “Okay?”

“Okay.” The car sags suddenly as Fon and Lek scramble into it, ducking the rain. Ping pulls out his cell and dials. Chu takes his time picking it up. “It’s fine,” Ping says at last. “They’ve got everything, and no one is here who shouldn’t be.” The volume of the rain increases, and Ping says, “What?” He presses a palm against his free ear, screwing up his face to hear. “No. No weapons. Nothing obvious anyway.” He listens for a moment and then tilts his chin at Pradya and hands him the phone.

Rafferty steps under the overhang of the warehouse roof and watches the sheet of water sliding over its edge. He is fighting for air.

“No problem,” Pradya says into the phone. “Sure, sure he’s here.” He holds the phone out to Frank. “He wants to talk to you.”

Frank snatches the phone as though he were planning to bite it in half. He puts his mouth to it and says, “I choose the people I talk to,” and then shuts the phone and hands it back to the fat cop. “And fuck him,” he adds.

Rafferty thinks, Introductions over. Forcing his mind to focus only on what he needs to do in this instant, he goes back to the trunk and lifts the suitcase out, holding it flat. He turns it carefully so the hinges are against his chest and Chu will be able to open it and see the money. To Ping he says, “Let’s go.”

He follows the man into the rain.

The bars of light on the asphalt again, the now-familiar landscape of looming warehouse walls, black sky, falling rain. Slowly the form of Chu emerges, shapeless and dark at first, then slender and almost frail, with the wind and rain lashing at him. Chu watches them approach, perfectly still except for the bottom of his slicker blowing around his legs.

Rafferty stops three feet away, lifts the suitcase an inch or two, someone presenting an infant to a priest. “Noi,” he says.

Chu takes a step forward.

“Uh-uh,” Rafferty says. “I see her first.”

Chu raises two fingers to his lips, inserts them, and lets loose an earsplitting whistle. Two people come around the far corner of Warehouse One. Rafferty keeps his eyes glued to Chu’s until they are close enough to see clearly, and Chu raises a hand to stop them.

The thin cop, Sriyat, with Noi on his arm. She is bent in agony, one hand thrown up over her shoulder to hold her neck. Something kindles low in Rafferty’s stomach.

“Your turn,” Chu says.

Rafferty raises the top of the suitcase all the way, and Chu says, “Bring it.”

When Rafferty has covered the space between them, Chu reaches into the suitcase and shoves aside the top few inches of loose bills, pulling out the ones beneath. Rafferty tries to keep his exhalation silent. He anticipated this. The real money, some of it wrapped, but quite a bit of it loose, is buried beneath a stratum of the laundered counterfeit bills. Chu rummages through the loose bills and removes five or six stacks, weighing them in his hands and then flipping through them, making sure there’s nothing there except what should be there: no newsprint trimmed to size, no small bills slipped in among the big ones. He drops the packets and says, “More,” and reaches this time completely through the top layers of money to bring up the stuff on the bottom, all of which is counterfeit. To Rafferty it still seems breathtakingly false, the color, despite all his efforts, too uniform, the edges too clean and straight. He smells the back-of-the-throat sweetness of fabric softener, but the wind is blowing toward him. A bright hair scrunchie, the color of a tangerine, circles the top stack in Chu’s hand. Chu gives it a glance and a bemused snap, then drops it back into the suitcase.

Rafferty lowers the lid and puts the suitcase at Chu’s feet. “I’ll take her now.”

Chu says, “Certainly.” He waves Sriyat forward. They move slowly, Noi taking tiny steps as Rafferty’s heart pounds angry fists on the inside of his chest. Hoping Fon is in position, he turns to gesture her to them and sees her, arms crossed and shoulders hunched against the cold, halfway to the end of the building. As she nears them, Chu registers her. He looks at her analytically and then brings his eyes, ancient and unsurprisable, to Rafferty. “You must have more charm than you’ve shown me,” he says.

“Can the chat,” Rafferty says. “Noi’s got to lie down and get dry.”

Fon is at his arm by now, returning Chu’s interested appraisal with the kind of disdain that could freeze a bar customer at thirty feet. She is covered in goose bumps but not shivering, and Rafferty knows she is denying Chu any pleasure, however small, she can withhold. He wants to kiss her.

“Go with her, Noi,” Rafferty says. “It’s almost over.”

“Poke,” Noi says. Her voice is sandpaper on silk. “Is Arthit here?”

“Not yet,” Rafferty says, surprised by the sudden spark in Chu’s eyes, feeling that there’s something wrong about it. He pushes it aside, forcing himself to stay focused on this moment, this exchange, the need to get Noi around the corner of that building and into that car. “We brought you some painkillers,” he says.

“Arthit and I love you,” Noi says in the same frayed voice, all strain and tendons. “Miaow and Rose are fine.” Fon puts a sheltering arm around her and leads her slowly into the rain. Sriyat gives the suitcase a curious glance, puts one hand above his eyes to keep the rain out, and retreats, back the way he came.

Chu says, “One down.” He is watching Fon’s rear end. “If only I were younger.”

“That would be nice,” Rafferty says. “Maybe someone could kill you before you get to this point.”

“There is no reason for this business to be any more unpleasant than necessary. We both want the same thing.”

“Rose, now,” Rafferty says.

Chu says, “Rubies.”

Rafferty doesn’t even look back this time, just raises a hand and brings it down again. Chu leans forward and says, “This one is prettier.”

“If you want to see her up close, get Rose out here.”

“Rose,” Chu says. “Unusual name for a Thai girl.”

Rafferty raises his hand again, the sign for Lek to stop. “Colonel Chu. As you say, I have to do business with you, but I don’t have to make small talk with you.”

“You’re mistaken, laowai. If I want to chat with you, you’ll chat with me. If I want you to hop up and down on one leg and do birdcalls, you’ll do that, too.” He leans forward, close enough for Rafferty to smell the cigarettes on his breath. “You can walk away when we’re done. Until then you do as I say.”

Rafferty can’t look at him, can’t let the man see his eyes. “Speech over?”

“If I choose it to be.”

“And do you choose it to be?”

“For the moment.” He whistles again. Rafferty is powerless to keep his head down. He strains to see past Colonel Chu, to see through the rain. To catch a glimpse of Rose.

“She’s coming,” Chu says. “It’s interesting. You have no feeling at all for one family, but you’ll put your life on the line for the other one.”

“What do you want, Chu? Do you want me to agree that it’s interesting? Okay, it’s interesting. It’s fucking fascinating. A lot more fascinating than this conversation. Can we get on with it?”

“Occasionally,” Chu says, “I think it’s too interesting.”

“I chose one family,” Rafferty says. “I was stuck with the other one.”

“Mmmm,” Chu says. “Here she is.”

Sriyat has both hands around Rose’s upper arm, but she pulls it away and gives him a look that, Rafferty thinks, should dissolve him where he stands. Rafferty signals for Lek to come the rest of the way. “Your goddamn rubies,” he says.

“Not all of them,” Chu says. “Some of them will be yours soon.” He watches Lek come. When she starts to hand Rafferty the box, he snaps his fingers, and she looks up, confused. “To me,” Chu says.

“When Rose is here,” Rafferty says.

Lek steps back, the box clutched to her bare stomach. Unlike Fon, she is shivering. And then Rose says, “Hello, Poke,” as though she’s just come back from an hour at the library, and a band around Rafferty’s chest breaks, and he throws his arms around her.

They hold each other for the space of a dozen heartbeats, and then Rose disengages herself and says, “Miaow.” She kisses Rafferty on the cheek and looks beyond him and says, “Hi, Lek.” Lek smiles like a lighthouse in the rain, gives Rafferty the box without a glance at Chu’s outstretched arms, and holds out a hand to Rose.

“Let’s get you dry,” Lek says. “In fact, let’s get both of us dry.” The two women turn and move off, toward the car at the far end.

Rafferty hands Chu the open box, and Chu reaches straight to the bottom and pulls out the envelope. He opens it and thumbs through the papers, then slips it into the pocket of his slicker. His eyes come up to Rafferty’s. Rafferty is trying to look surprised at the envelope.

“A detail,” Chu says. “Nothing important.” He is running his fingers through the rubies. Cupping the box against his body with his left arm, he reaches inside the slicker with his right, and Rafferty puts a hand on his hip, as close to the gun as he can get it without giving it away, but Chu comes out with a jeweler’s loupe and a small flashlight. He screws the loupe into his right eye, flicks on the light, and examines half a dozen stones, taking his time. Then he removes the loupe, drops it into the box, and says, “I’ll do you the honor of not counting them.” He puts his left hand back under the box.

“If you’re short,” Rafferty says, “you know where to find me.” He turns to look over his shoulder at Rose and Lek, most of the way to the end of the warehouse by now, and sees someone a dozen steps behind them.

Sriyat.

“Where’s he going?” he asks Chu.

“I have an exit to arrange,” Chu says. “This is the time to arrange it.”

Rose and Lek turn right, around the corner of Warehouse Two. Sriyat goes left, behind Warehouse One.

“Any more surprises?”

“Not from my end,” Chu says. He is still holding the box of rubies, and Rafferty thinks, Both hands busy.

The thought must have shown in his face, because Chu says, “Now, now. We’re doing so well.”

“If you can see all that, how did you ever let Frank get away?”

Chu nods as though he’s been waiting for the question. “This is a time of great opportunity. Expansion everywhere. New markets opening up. I took my eyes off him for too long. When the cat’s away—”

“If I were you,” Rafferty interrupts, “I’d stick with the canned Eastern wisdom, all those wheezes about enlightenment and confronting our fears, and leave the Western clichés to people with too much sense to use them.”

“Let’s not spoil things. I’ve actually enjoyed dealing with you. You have many characteristics I admire. You’re devious, ingenious, energetic. You have a certain flair, which as far as I can see you’re wasting completely.” Chu eyes him speculatively, and then he laughs. “What I think you’re doing,” he says, “is stalling. Do I sense a little reluctance after all?”

“You have my daughter,” Rafferty says. “I’d give you five copies of my father for her.”

“One will do.” Chu takes his open cell phone out of the pocket of his slicker and says to the fat cop, “Pradya. Bring him around.”

“Tell Pradya to stop the moment he can see us,” Rafferty says. “If he doesn’t, I’ll have him shot, and we’ll see what happens after that.”

Chu gives him the flicker of a smile and repeats Rafferty’s command into the phone. Then he turns and shouts, “Come!”

The rain has lightened to the point where Rafferty can almost see the far corner of the warehouse. A form emerges, a larger form behind it. Like a color at three or four fathoms, shifted to the blue, Miaow’s pajamas take what seems like an eternity to warm to pink, and when they do, Rafferty can’t do anything about the catch of breath.

“A father,” Chu says with considerable interest. “Selling a father.”

The man grasping Miaow’s neck is the one with the broken tooth. He steers her toward them and then stops, looking past them at something, and at the same moment Rafferty hears a shout behind him.

The fat cop is struggling with Ming Li, who has grabbed her father’s arm and is pulling him back with all her strength. Her head whips back and forth in the rain, No, and her hair flies around her like snakes, suddenly frozen into sculpture by a flash of lightning. Chu says into the phone, “Point the gun at her, you idiot. I want both of them.”

Pradya levels the gun at Ming Li’s head, and she stops. One hand drops, and then the other, and all her strength deserts her, and she sinks to her knees at Frank’s feet and cups her face in her hands.

“There’s a lesson there,” Chu says. “It’s her father, after all. Pradya, bring her.”

Rafferty says, “One at a time, remember?”

“I’m getting bored,” Chu says. “Just take the rubies, and let’s get it over with.”

Rafferty shoots one more look at Ming Li, sees Pradya pulling her to her feet as Frank stands there, loose and empty, looking a century old. Rafferty dismisses the image and crouches down, sinking his hands into the loose stones in the box.

“In fact,” Chu says above him, “we’ll take them all.”

The gun in his hand is aimed between Rafferty’s eyes.

“I just can’t make it work,” Chu says, shaking his head. “I know that Western culture doesn’t honor old people, and I know that you and your father have had problems. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t believe that you actually intend to let me take him.”

“Believe it.” Rafferty looks over his shoulder again, sees Sriyat and two other men shepherd everyone around the corner. Fon and Lek are half dressed. Rose has her arm around Noi. Leung’s hands are once again on top of his head. Sriyat and the two others have weapons trained on all of them.

“And even if I could believe it, there are all these witnesses,” Chu says. “I can’t leave them behind. So I’m afraid you’ll all have to board the ship with us. A short sail, followed by a long sink. Except for Frank, of course. I have other plans for Frank.”

“You forgot Arthit,” Rafferty says. “You haven’t got Arthit, and he knows everything.”

“I have the hospital’s name, the room number. A policeman of his rank gets shot, everyone knows.”

Rafferty shifts a millimeter or two, centering his weight over his heels. “So what? Only cops can get anywhere near him.”

“That’s right,” Chu says. “Only cops. And tonight he’ll be visited by two he’s not expecting.”

“More information than I need,” Rafferty says, just as Ming Li screams again, in anger this time, and beyond Chu he sees the man with the broken tooth pull a gun and shove Miaow violently to the pavement, and as she falls, there’s another whiplash of lightning and a burst of wind, and Rafferty clamps his teeth tightly, closes his eyes, and presses down on the lever at the back of the suitcase.

He hears a little metallic click, not much louder than someone flicking a lighter, and opens his eyes to see the bottom of the suitcase pop up, maybe three inches, maybe four, and a few loose bills flutter up and get caught by the wind.

The barrel of Chu’s gun touches the center of Rafferty’s forehead, and he looks up to see Chu studying the suitcase quizzically. “What was that?” he asks. “Special effects?” And the pressure of the gun on Rafferty’s forehead lessens slightly as Chu pulls back on the trigger.

And then it’s as though the suitcase somehow contains all the light that’s falling on the other side of the world, the bright side, and the light abruptly expands and escapes, cracking open the darkness with a dazzle that turns Chu stark white, followed by a deep, percussive boom, and suddenly the bottom of the suitcase is five feet in the air, and rubies and money are everywhere: rising against the rain, whirled and tossed by the wind, and pelted earthward by the weight of the falling water.

Chu was looking down when the bottom of the case exploded, and now he backs away, blinded, the hand without the gun in it clawing at his eyes, a shining-wet black figure in a downpour of water, money, and precious stones. Some of the money is plastered to Chu’s slicker.

Rafferty hears two shots from behind and sees Chu trying desperately to focus his eyes just as a massive strobe of lightning freezes money, rain, and rubies in midair. Past Chu, Rafferty sees Miaow, flat on the pavement with Ping lying across her, the gun in his hand. Rafferty has his own gun out now, and he leaps across the suitcase and brings the gun up two-handed with everything he has, raking it across Chu’s throat, trying to crush the larynx, then slamming it back against the man’s cheekbone, and Chu’s head whips around, taking his shoulders with it, the slicker billowing out like a magician’s cloak. Rafferty is on his feet now, seizing Chu’s gun hand at the wrist, grabbing his elbow, and bringing up a knee to break the arm across it.

Chu screams, pivots, yanks the broken arm back, and screams again as a bullet hisses through the rain, just missing his ear, and he freezes. Ping, still covering Miaow with his body, sights to fire again. Rafferty holds out a hand, palm up, to stop him, then kicks Chu’s legs out from under him. Chu goes down, a slight, crumpled form in a wet black shroud, twisting in pain as money rains upon him.

Rafferty reaches down and takes Chu’s gun and pats him for another. Chu hisses at him but doesn’t move. Once he’s satisfied that Chu has nothing else, Rafferty turns to see one of Chu’s men flat on the ground, arms and legs splayed, and the other with his hands in the air. Pradya, Sriyat, and Leung all hold guns. Frank has Ming Li in his arms. Rose is half carrying Noi back to the car, with an over-the-shoulder look at Miaow.

Rafferty tosses Chu’s gun a few yards away and pulls the Ziploc bag from his pocket. He removes the cell phone and pushes the “dial” button. It is answered on the first ring. He says, “Between Warehouses One and Two. Come now.” He closes the phone, kicks Chu once, hard, in the area of the kidneys, just by way of letting off steam, and waves at Ping to bring Miaow. After an evaluative moment, Ping rolls off her, and Miaow gets up, her pink pajamas wet and filthy, and extends a hand to help Ping up. Ping stares at the hand for a second and then gives her an enormous broken-tooth grin, followed by an agonized grab at his mouth with his free hand. Miaow pats his arm and leads him, hand in hand, to Rafferty.

“This is Ping,” she says. “I told him he wouldn’t shoot us.”

Rafferty picks Miaow up and hugs her so tightly she grunts. Her arms circle his neck. She says, “Is your father all right?”

“He’s fine.” He kisses the part in her hair, feeling like his heart will explode.

“That’s good,” Miaow says, pulling away. She hates being kissed on the head. She takes a sniff at herself, makes a face, and says, “I want a shower.”

“If you want it,” he says, putting her down, “you’ve got it.” He turns to Ping. “Can you take her to the car?”

“I don’t know,” Ping says. “Miaow, can I take you to the car?”

“You’re silly,” Miaow says. She gives him her hand. As they walk away, Rafferty hears her say, “Does your tooth still hurt?”

Chu slowly rolls over until he is on his back. He is cradling his broken arm at the elbow. He says, “You’re dead. All of you.”

“Promises, promises.” Cones of light sweep the alleyway, silhouetting Miaow and Ping in gold, and then the car is in sight. “You’ve got a full schedule for a while.”

“You idiot,” Chu says. “I’ll be out in a week. There’s nowhere in the world you can hide. And this time I’ll make you watch people die.”

The car slows to a halt a few feet away. Rafferty says, “That thing you said about how there’s a valuable lesson in learning you don’t run the world? I hope you meant it, because you’re about to take a quantum leap in personal growth.”

The car doors shut, and Elson stands over them. “Colonel Chu,” he says, “I’m Richard Elson, United States Secret Service, and this is Lieutenant Kosit of the Bangkok Municipal Police. We’re jointly taking you into custody on behalf of the Thai authorities and the government of the United States of America, on charges of counterfeiting, racketeering, kidnapping, and the murder of an American intelligence officer.” Chu’s mouth works, but nothing comes out. “Would you mind cuffing him, Lieutenant Kosit?”

“He’s got a broken arm,” Rafferty says.

“That’s a terrible shame,” Kosit says, grabbing it. Chu emits a high-pitched shriek as Kosit twists the arm behind him and fastens the cuffs.

“Jesus,” Elson says, looking around. “We’ve got to pick up this money.”

Kosit is still bent over Chu, and Rafferty tugs his sleeve. “Get some cops into Arthit’s room,” he says. He nudges Chu with the tip of his shoe. “This murderous old shit has sent some guys after him. And choose your men wisely, because the thugs he sent are cops.”

Kosit gives Chu a look that does not suggest that the coming interrogation will be gentle. Then he moves a few feet away and pulls out his cell phone.

Elson shoves a hand under Rafferty’s nose. There are eight or nine red stones in his palm, and his brow is wrinkled. “What the hell are these?”

“They’re rubies, and they’re all over the place,” Rafferty says. “And just to keep things straight, they’re not counterfeit and they belong to my father.”

For a second, Elson is wearing his old face. “How does your father come to have a bucket of rubies?”

“Same as Peachy,” Rafferty says. “He won them in a horse race.”

_!44

Ping, Rose, Milk Shake, Tooth, Gun

n the middle of the wettest, warmest tangle of arms, legs, and hearts of his entire life, Rafferty is barely aware of the torrent of Thai coming from Miaow, perhaps two hundred

words a minute, far too fast for him to catch more than a phrase or a name or two: Ping, Rose, milk shake, tooth, gun. All he can do is hold on, Rose on his right and Miaow on his left, but now they’re a circle, and so Miaow is, as always, in the middle. Where she needs to be.

The circle opens to absorb Fon and Lek, both of them crying like children, and closes again. With the rain hammering down, the five of them squeeze together even more tightly, the two half-naked women no longer feeling the cold, and then the arms open a second time, and there is someone there who feels new, someone who smells new to Rafferty’s heightened senses, and they wrap themselves around Ming Li. The sky cracks, a fork of lightning fingering its way down, followed by a sound like someone crumpling iron.

With the thunder, Poke feels Rose straighten, remove her arm from his shoulder, and pull away. He looks at her. With her other arm still around Miaow, she is gazing beyond him. Rafferty turns his head to see Frank. His father stands sideways to the group, not even sheltering from the rain. He faces back down the alley between the warehouses, where it all happened.

Something warm fills Rafferty’s chest, and suddenly there are words in his mouth. And then he looks again at his father’s profile, so familiar and so strange, a face he had thought was permanently turned away, and he can’t say them. He swallows, so hard it feels as though he is forcing the words down.

Rose says, “Mr. Rafferty?”

Frank turns, and Rose raises the arm that had been around Rafferty, inviting him in. Frank stands there, not moving, until Rafferty steps aside, closer to Fon, expanding the space between him and Rose. Rafferty lifts his arm exactly as Rose has, the space between them wide and welcoming, and he hears something catch and break in Ming Li’s throat. Slowly, like a man approaching a door he thinks will be locked, Frank joins the circle. It closes around him.

THE CAR ISeven more crowded on the way out: Fon sits in Lek’s lap and Ming Li in Frank’s. Miaow has spread herself across both Rafferty’s and Rose’s laps, dead weight against them. She fell asleep the moment the car door slammed shut.

Leung is at the wheel. Noi is slumped against the front passenger door, next to Frank. Rafferty can hear her breath whistling in her throat.

With a last look back, Leung puts the car in gear and heads for the gates.

The silence in the car is a kind of warmth, a comforting insulation that makes the events of the last hour seem very distant, perhaps not even real. What’s real now is a car jammed with people, bunched up against each other as though by choice, the steam of breath on window glass, the walls of the warehouses as they slide by in the headlights.

Frank suddenly sits upright and looks back, and Rafferty cranes his neck around, expecting the nightmare to reemerge: men with guns, Chu free somehow, looming out of the darkness with his slicker flapping around him, but he sees nothing. And then Frank begins to laugh.

“What?” Ming Li asks. “What is it?”

“Nothing important,” Frank says, and then he laughs again. “I forgot my rubies.”

_!45

White

e has been underground a long time. Stones push down on his chest. Some of them have been sharpened to points. Every time he breathes, he has to push the stones up with

his chest to make room for the air. The air smells surprisingly of linoleum, alcohol, something unidentifiable that’s as sweet and heavy as syrup, and, floating on top of all the other smells, a razor-sharp note of fresh linen.

The light comes closer. It seems to be finding its way by touch, spreading pale tendrils in all directions: forward, left and right, up and down, but always moving toward him. He waits, pushing up the stones with every half breath, watching the light extend itself toward him, now not so much smoke as a shining vine. When the vine reaches him, it will wrap itself around him, put down microscopic roots, fill him with light. Once he is charged with light, feels it surging tidally through his body until he is radiant with it, he will be able to lift the stones.

The bum-BUM noise has increased in frequency, faster now, and then faster still, until it begins to vibrate inside him, not unpleasantly but with the urgency of an indecipherable message. Bum-BUM, he thinks, pairs; what’s so important about pairs? Pairs of drumbeats, pairs of breaths, pairs of people, pairs of numbers.

Pairs of numbers?

Something dims the light. Whatever it is, it’s not between him and the light; it seems to be behind it somehow, throwing a shadow that travels down the vine like dirty water in a clear stream, and as the light thins and clouds, the stones feel heavier and sharper, and they grate against one another, a sand-gritty sound, less like stones than like . . . what? A room, he sees a room, and it’s a terrible shade of green. It, too, smells of linoleum. Someone is with him, someone who doesn’t like the sound of a shoe scraping over dirty—

A shoe. On linoleum.

Then the vine brightens again, blooming with light, and he opens one eye, just a crack, narrow as a blind drawn against the massed brightness of the day, to see a world of white. Close to him, only a foot or two away, is a white shape, white without outlines but brighter than the white beyond it, and it is moving. Moving parallel to him, away from his feet and toward his head, and he hears the scraping sound again, and then a whisper.

There is a second figure, this one brown, a brown he knows very well. A brown that makes him think for a second or half a second that he is looking at himself; he is out of his own body and looking at it as it moves across this white room, following the figure in white. He closes the eye, but the urgency of the tom-tom sound warns him to open it again, and he forces the lid up. The light floods into him and strengthens him, and he can focus.

A hospital room. White but for a darker rectangle where black is in the slow act of giving itself over to blue, with a note of orange bleeding upward, warming it from below. A window. Dawn? What dawn? How long has—

A doctor, dressed in white. Masked in white. Behind him a Bangkok policeman. Dawn through the window, the sharp pain of the stones on his chest, the smells, the sound of shoes on linoleum, a brilliantly clear sudden memory of a dark room, a big man, some kind of enormous, rib-caving punch to the chest, a slow fall. A girl in white.

White. The white-clad doctor, at the head of the bed now, reaching up. A gentle tug at the wrist, no more intense than a fly landing on it. The doctor has a clear plastic bag in one hand, filled with a liquid as transparent as water. In the other hand is a hypodermic syringe.

The policeman comes closer, watching the doctor. He is close enough for the man on the bed to see his face, a new face, a face he doesn’t know, and to read the name tag on the uniform. The name tag says petchara.

Arthit’s eyes open wider as the doctor inserts the syringe into the top of the clear IV bag and pushes the plunger. Something—some tensing in his body—brings Petchara’s eyes down to the bed, and he starts to speak, but Arthit rides a bolt of ten thousand volts of neural electricity to rip the intravenous needle from his own wrist and shove it into Petchara’s thigh, while with his other hand he grabs the clear plastic bag and squeezes. Petchara leaps away, and Arthit lets the bag drop and sees the policeman stagger, dragging the bag with him, until his back hits the window where dawn is announcing itself, and finally it occurs to him to yank the needle. He stares at it in his hand, stares at the mostly empty bag, and then all his muscles let go, and he drops, loose-jointed and as awkward as a marionette, to the floor.

The doctor is already out the door when Arthit finds and pushes the big red button on the side of his bed. He can no longer hold his head up. His vision blurs and darkens at the edges, narrows, and the room disappears, leaving nothing but the rectangle of dawn, more orange now, framed by the window.

He sleeps.

_!46

Monsoon Christmas

rank’s a bonanza,” Elson says. “Monsoon Christmas.” He is seated comfortably on an uncomfortable chair as angular and uncompromising as he is, his black suit soaking up a

surprising amount of the light streaming through the window behind him. The chair, just strips of black leather on a chromium frame, looks like he designed it. “Frank’s the kind of gift that makes you wonder what you’ve been doing right all your life, why you deserve this. I mean, we’re going to be able to dam up one major river of counterfeit into this awful country, without the North Koreans even knowing it, for a few months at least.”

He bounces a couple of times in the uncomfortable chair, just out of enthusiasm. He’s doing something with his mouth that might pass for a smile if the room was a little dimmer. “And it’s extra-good we’ve got Frank, because Chu’s not talking. And I mean not at all. On the other hand, we’ve got the other cop, the one who was dressed like a doctor, and he can’t stop talking. He talks even when there’s no one else in the room. Seems to think we’re going to send him to Syria for interrogation.” Elson rubs his hands together. “And there’s all that fake money.”

“For example,” Rafferty says, “about Frank. What kind of things has he given you?”

“Frank,” Elson says in the tone Miaow uses to say chocolate. “Well, Frank’s just something that happens maybe once in a decade. He’s given us fucking flow charts of the counterfeiting structure. A map of routes used to take money out of China, routes we can seal up. He’s given us a bank in Harbin, China, owned by his former . . . um, company, that’s a central distribution point, a bank we can crack into electronically. It’ll let us put enough pressure on the North Koreans that the cash flow will dry up. No more cognac, no more new cars for the fat cats. It’s probably enough to bring them back to the negotiating table.”

“That’s good,” Rafferty says.

“And more. There’s an American end, a sleeper who’s been in place for almost twenty years, reporting directly to Chu. And he was nowhere on our radar.”

“Irwin Lee,” Rafferty says.

Elson’s eyebrows go up. “Your radar is better than ours.”

“Shucks,” Rafferty says.

“Isn’t it a wonderful name?” Elson says. He makes a frame with his hands and says the name into it. “Irwin Lee.”

“Lee is one of the two most common Chinese names,” Rafferty says, but Elson’s enthusiasm tickles some obscure area of Rafferty’s brain that specializes in obscure connections, and suddenly he’s sitting bolt upright. “That’s what this whole thing was about, isn’t it?”

“What?” Elson asks.

“Irwin Lee. My father’s going to be Irwin Lee, right?”

Elson looks disappointed, as though he’s been deprived of his big surprise. “Nobody knows about Irwin Lee except Chu,” he says. “It’s a perfect fit. Lee has a twenty-year legend, one of the best I’ve ever seen. A house in Richmond, Virginia, that I can guarantee no triad member ever heard of. We’re going to remove the current Irwin Lee and install your father. He’ll live in Richmond and consult with us.”

Rafferty leans forward. “What has Chu said about Frank?”

“About Frank? That’s the one thing he’ll talk about. Says he doesn’t understand it, can’t figure out why Frank betrayed him. They were friends, he says. Says he’d have made Frank his successor if Frank had been Chinese.” He starts to add something and thinks better of it.

“What?” Rafferty demands.

“The, um, story about Chu insulting Frank’s wife. I mentioned it as a way of suggesting why Frank’s loyalty might be a little weak, and Chu said it never happened.”

“Of course it didn’t,” Rafferty says. He can feel the blood rise in his face. “I can’t believe I fell for it. You’d think, by now, I’d know. It’s always about my father. Whatever it is, whatever is happening, it’s always about my father.”

“I’m not following you,” Elson says.

“He took the goddamn box in the first place because he wanted to be Irwin Lee. The rubies were a bonus. All the stories about Chu being the worst thing since Grendel’s mother were his way of justifying himself to me. His way of making sure I was on his side. He needed Chu either dead or put away forever, so he could be Irwin Lee. And I could help, so he sold me that line of crap.”

Arthit says something that comes out as a croak, and Rafferty says, “Arthit. Don’t try to talk.”

But Arthit lowers a heavily bandaged hand—the doctors had to do a little emergency repair where he yanked out the intravenous line—and pushes a button that raises the top third of the bed to a forty-five-degree angle. As he comes up, he ages ten years; he has lost fifteen pounds in three days, and his face has slackened and droops downward as it comes toward vertical. His throat is as loose and rippled as a theater curtain. When he is upright, he reaches for a small carton of apple juice, sips it through a straw, closes his eyes for a moment to gather some strength, and says, “Dangerous. Chu . . . dangerous.” The words are barely audible, not much louder than someone tearing paper.

“You bet he is,” Elson says. “He’s got fangs like a wolf spider. Your friend’s right. Your father wanted you to be afraid of Chu, wanted you to realize how dangerous he was. He was doing you a favor.”

“If you believe that, don’t spend too much time with him,” Rafferty says. “He’ll have you nominating him for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

“You’re overreacting,” Elson says.

“Irwin Lee,” Rafferty says, and he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “My father is going to be Irwin Lee. Do you know what Lee means?”

“No idea,” Elson says.

“The character used to write it,” Rafferty says, the sentence not coming easily, “is a tree over a child. It’s an image of parental care.”

“That’s nice,” Elson says. “I can’t see the immediate usefulness of the information, but maybe something will come to me.” He crosses his legs and looks approvingly at the shine on his shoe. “We’re flying him back to America tomorrow. Get him out of here and put him somewhere safe. So we’re going to have to take him away from you, just when you guys have sort of gotten together again.”

“Take him today,” Rafferty says. “That way I don’t have to feed him dinner tonight.”

Arthit says, “Poke.” He puts a hand to his throat and tries to clear it. The effort obviously hurts. “He’s . . . your father.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“So anyway,” Elson says, “he’ll be leaving. And I won’t forget that I owe you.”

“Yes,” Rafferty says with some vehemence. “You do.”

“Well, don’t get too comfortable with it.” Elson turns and looks out the window, which opens onto a world of merciless sunlight. The monsoon has moved on, and it is so hot outside that the air-conditioning in the hospital room is producing a misty film of condensation on the inside of the glass. “You may have overachieved.”

“That’s the curse of talent,” Rafferty says, still furious, and Arthit lets go with something that sounds like a toy steam engine releasing its first little puff. It’s a laugh, Rafferty realizes, and in spite of everything he finds himself grinning at his friend so hard he feels like his face will split. Arthit has a hand pressed to his chest, damping down the pain of the laugh, but he laughs again. This one doubles him up, and when he sits upright again, he shakes his head and wipes the sweat off his brow and says, “Over . . .” He breathes. “Achieved . . .” He grabs another breath. “How?”

“Remember how I hated the monsoon?” Elson says to Rafferty. “Well, I hate this heat more. I hate everything about this climate. I hate the traffic here. I hate the food—it gives me the squirts, and they feel like lighter fluid. So what’s my reward? I’m an expert, they say. I’m the guy with the map, they say. I’m being assigned here for a year.”

Arthit, who has been sipping at the apple juice, suddenly spurts a substantial amount of it through his nostrils and into his lap. He bends forward, making the puff-puff sound again, and Rafferty takes the apple juice out of his hand and puts it on the tray, letting his free hand rest on his friend’s shoulder.

To Elson he says, “I’ve got a great maid for you.”

_!47

He’s More Nervous Than You Are

our hours later Rafferty opens the apartment door and finds himself in the Seven Dwarfs’ cave. Little white lights create a rectangle of diamond sparkle to frame the evening

sky, darkening through the sliding glass door. Small colored lights— rubies, emeralds, sapphires—have been strung to outline the inside of the front door. Looking around, focusing through the dazzle, he sees that his desk has been cleared and polished, that the dirt worn into the white leather hassock has been scrubbed away, that three new chairs have been crowded around the living-room table. A white candle flickers on his desk, and another gleams on the coffee table, beside a large crumpled plastic bag from Bangkok’s new Book Tower.

The room smells like someone is cooking flowers.

And it is empty.

Going farther in, he sees a partial explanation for the fragrance of frying lilies. The counter between the living room and the kitchen is teeming with flowers, enough of them to create an optimistic send-off for a midlevel Mafia don. Beyond the flowers, on the kitchen side of the counter, is a sloping ziggurat of cookbooks, all open. Rafferty has never seen a cookbook in the apartment. He starts curiously toward them and remembers the Book Tower bag on the table. He gives the living room a second survey.

The door to the bedroom opens, and Rose comes in. She stops at the sight of him, so abruptly that for an instant he thinks she has failed to recognize him. Then her eyes clear, and she comes up to him and kisses his cheek, leaving a faint coolness behind. Rafferty touches it involuntarily and quickly pulls his hand away. Rose’s upper lip is damp with perspiration.

This is practically a first. He has seen her weave through a crowded Bangkok sidewalk in the full glare of the sun, carrying Miaow’s weight in plastic shopping bags, without popping a bead of moisture. When she does deign to perspire, it’s always at the edge of her hairline. He resists the urge to check.

“How’s Arthit?” she says, but her eyes are everywhere in the room.

“He’s fine. He’s amazingly fine.”

He watches her hear the tone of his voice, her mind a mile away, and then put the words together. She gives him the smile that always puddles him where he stands. “That’s wonderful. Noi must be so happy.” Then her gaze wanders off again.

“Rose?”

Her eyes come to his, then slide down to take in his clothes. Her lower lip is suddenly between her teeth.

She says, “You have to get dressed.”

He looks down at himself. “I am dressed. I’ve been outside and everything.”

“I mean dressed.” She tugs at his shirt and checks her fingers to make sure the color hasn’t come off on them. “Your good clothes.”

“I don’t have any good clothes. Since when do we have cookbooks? Have I been complaining about the food?”

“Don’t talk about the cookbooks,” she says. “Never say ‘cookbook’ to me again.” She goes past him into the kitchen, and he sees that she is dressed entirely in white linen: a flowing, midthigh something that he supposes is a blouse, over a pair of loose pleated slacks. The gold bracelet he gave her hangs on her left wrist. She starts slamming cookbooks closed. Without looking at him, she says, “Tell me you didn’t forget.”

“Of course I didn’t forget,” he says. “I just don’t know why you need cookbooks.”

“Oh, Poke,” she says hopelessly. Then she stops, sparing the last couple of cookbooks in the stack, and stands still for a moment. Turning to him, she opens her arms. He’s holding her in an instant, feeling the long arms wrap around him, feeling the cool dampness of her cheek against his, and then all there is in the world is the two of them, trying to press themselves into one.

“They’ll be here in ten minutes,” she says. “Your father and Ming Li.”

“The place looks beautiful,” he says. Then he says, “I need a beer.”

“There isn’t time.”

“Please, Rose. I can actually drink beer while I get dressed.” He opens the refrigerator and stares openmouthed. Every shelf is full of food: dishes, bowls, pans, even cups have been pressed into service and jammed any old way onto the shelves. “How many people are coming?”

“It’s all terrible,” Rose says. “I’m taking these books back tomorrow, every single one of them. I ordered steak from the Barbican. Your father will like steak. You always like steak.”

“My father will love anything you cook,” he says, finally locating a Singha and reaching over several dishes to get to it. “Anyway, you don’t want to waste all this.”

“We’ll eat it tomorrow. After they leave.”

“Rose,” Rafferty says, popping the can. “My father isn’t even going to taste anything. He’s more nervous than you are.”

“I’m not nervous,” Rose says nervously. She steps around him and closes the refrigerator with the air of someone drawing a veil over a dicey past. “Your clothes are on the bed. I chose them. I got that stain off your slacks. And he’ll love steak.”

He knocks back half the beer. “Listen, I have to tell you something.”

She’s halfway out of the room, but she stops. “You mean now?”

“It’s about Frank.” And he tells her all of it, about how his father manipulated him, about Irwin Lee. When he is finished, she continues to look at him as though expecting more.

“And?” she finally says.

Rafferty looks at the tension in her body, and he thinks his heart will explode. “And I love you,” he says, giving up. “More than I’ve ever been able to say.”

“Then make me happy,” she says, spinning the bracelet around her wrist like a twenty-four-karat hula hoop. “Get dressed.”

THE DOORBELL RINGSas he is buttoning his shirt—one he’s never seen before—and his stomach muscles tie themselves into an instant knot, but from the sound of Rose’s voice it’s the delivery from the Barbican. He hears the clatter of things being cleared away and wonders how many kilos of rare beef Rose ordered. He checks himself in the mirror, decides he’s still relatively nice-looking, and suddenly thinks of Miaow.

The smiley face is on the door, but he knocks anyway.

“I’m home,” Miaow says, and he opens the door.

She is sitting in front of her mirror, braiding her hair so tightly it looks painful. Her eyes meet his in the mirror. She regards him critically without turning and says, “You look nice. I picked out the shirt at the store.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s okay,” she says, eyeing it in the mirror.

“Are you all right?”

Now she does turn. She gives him a squint as though he’s gone out of focus. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, you know. . . . I mean, tonight is . . . It’s the first . . . I mean, if you want to talk about it or anything . . .” She is still looking at him. “You know?” he adds.

“I got along with Ping,” she says, “and he was going to shoot me. This won’t be that hard.”

“He’s going to love you.”

She purses her mouth and tugs it to one side. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll love him, too. Maybe we’ll start by just liking each other.”

“You and Rose, the miracle girls,” Rafferty says. “How can I be so lucky?”

“Beats me,” Miaow says. “I put water on my hair. Does it look good?”

“You look beautiful.”

“I hope so,” she says. “It would be nice to be beautiful.” She turns back to the mirror and studies herself. “They’ll come soon. Go away now, okay?”

“I’m gone.” He closes the door and, just for a moment, leans against the wall, every muscle in his body slack with love. “We’re back,” he says aloud. “We’re all back.”

WHEN THE DOORBELLrings again, Rose calls from the kitchen, “You.”

Rafferty takes a breath deep enough to empty the room and opens the door. Frank stands there in an ancient, rumpled tweed sport coat, his right arm clamped rigidly to his body with three bottles of wine beneath it. Ming Li stands beside him, looking as cool and remote as ever, except that she has half of her father’s left sleeve knotted in her fist. Her knuckles are paper white. Hanging upside down in her other hand, completely forgotten, is a bouquet of flowers.

Without thinking, Rafferty makes a move to shake his father’s hand, sees a spark of something like panic in Frank’s eyes, and has a sudden vision of him extending his hand and dropping the wine. So instead he pats his father on the shoulder and says, “Hello, Frank, Ming Li. Give you a hand with those?” and reaches for the bottles.

“Poke,” Rose says from behind him. He feels her hand on his arm and turns.

Tall and draped in white, she is framed by the colored lights behind her, the guardian spirit of an enchanted cave. Slowly she brings her hands together in a wai, raises them to her forehead, and says, “Hello, Father. Hello, sister. Welcome home.”

And steps aside, her head slightly bowed, her hands still high. Frank glances quickly at Poke, licks his lips, and says, “Thank you, Rose.” Without looking up, Ming Li tugs at the fabric of his sleeve, and Frank says, “Hello, son.”

“Dad,” Poke says, the word enormous in his throat. “Ming Li. Please come in.”

As they come through the door, Ming Li gives him a smile that almost blinds him.

!Note

f any government in the world today needs overthrowing, it’s North Korea’s. Everything in this book about the country’s international counterfeiting activities is true. They pump

out currency, cigarettes, and medications—including AIDS “drugs” that do nothing but make the victim retain water so he or she experiences a weight gain. And all of this is to provide a cash flow to enrich a few swine at the top of the pyramid.

A brilliant Stanford graduate thesis by Sheena Chestnut dubbed North Korea “the Sopranos State,” and I recommend it to anyone who wants to know more. Chestnut reveals in considerable detail a nation whose foreign policy is based on thuggery.

The greediest thug, of course, is Kim Jong Il, recently revealed to be the biggest individual consumer of Hennessy Paradis cognac in the world. “Dear Leader” spends somewhere between $650,000 and $800,000 a year on this elite happy juice, which retails in Korea for $630 a bottle.

The average North Korean makes less than $900 each year. The country suffers periodic famines. Millions of North Korean children display the bloated bellies and stunted bone development associated with severe malnutrition. Meanwhile, the swollen cadres atop the power pyramid live in monarchical luxury.

The teensy (five-feet, two-inch) dictator also sends squads throughout the country to compel especially attractive women and girls, some still in junior high school, to serve in “joy brigades” that provide sexual companionship for ranking Communist Party officials.

The participation of the Chinese triads in North Korean counterfeiting scams is well documented, especially in Macau and the boomtown Special Economic Zones. Banks in Macau and Harbin have been identified by U.S. investigators as complicit in these schemes.

!Acknowledgments

irst thanks go to my agent, Bob Mecoy, who spotted several holes in this story from twelve thousand miles away, and to my editor at William Morrow, Marjorie Braman,

who has read the book more often than I have and who reshaped it to make it leaner, meaner, and a lot faster.

The story was written in California, Thailand, Cambodia, and China. The people of Southeast Asia are famously hospitable, and I was well and warmly taken care of everywhere. As always, I wrote most of the book in coffeehouses. Thanks to the people at Lollicup in West Los Angeles and the Novel Café in Santa Monica; Coffee World in Bangkok; Mito Café and Coffee Language (great name) in Shenzhen and ChangPing, China; and, in Phnom Penh, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club on the riverside and Black Canyon Coffee at Paragon Center.

A waitress at the Mito Café, Ah-Qiu, let me borrow her face so I could give it to Ming Li, and while I was at the Mito, my friend Randell Jackson told me about the ideogram for the name “Lee” that depicts a tree sheltering a child

Thanks to both of them. Gratitude also to the people at Apple for the iPod, a boy’s best friend when he’s writing in a country where the local pop music is both ubiquitous and (to his ears) unendurable. This time out, Vienna Teng and Aimee Mann were indispensable, as were Bob Dylan (always), Rufus Wainwright (ditto), the phenomenal Fratellis, Emmylou Harris—who could sing in Latvian and still break my heart, Vince Gill, the criminally underrated BoDeans and Gin Blossoms, the Jaynetts (one record, but what a record), KT Tunstall, Kim Gun Mo, Puffy AmiYumi, the ever-essential Kinks, Los Lobos, Richard Thompson, Snow Patrol, and a bunch of others.

I’ve been remiss in not thanking Chris Lang and Maria Sandamela, who programmed and designed my Web site, www.timothyhallinan.com. They got the whole thing online, looking good, in about three weeks.

Marvin Klotz, Ph.D., showed me by example that it is possible to live a life centered on books and has told me more jokes than anyone else in my life. I’ve owed him a heartfelt thank-you for years.

And finally, overall inspiration for this book, as for all the others, was provided in more or less infinite amounts by my wife, Munyin Choy.

About the Author

TIMOTHY HALLINAN divides his time between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia, primarily Thailand, where he has lived off and on for more than twenty years. As a principal in one of America’s top television consulting firms, he advised many Fortune 500 companies and pioneered new methods for making quality television programming accessible to teachers. He has also taught writing for many years. He is married to Munyin Choy.

www.timothyhallinan.com

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ALSO BY TIMOTHY HALLINAN

A Nail Through the Heart The Bone Polisher The Man with No Time Incinerator Skin Deep Everything but the Squeal The Four Last Things A “Christmas Carol” Christmas Book

Credits

Designed by Laura Kaeppel Jacket design by Ervin Serrano Jacket photographs: shadow of man by Hayden Verry /Arcangel Images, Grand Palace by Paul Quayle/Axiom

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE FOURTH WATCHER. Copyright © 2008 by Timothy Hallinan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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