He’s a great man,” Rose says. She blows on her cup of Nescafé.
“Are we talking about the same guy?” Rafferty’s on his third cup of coffee, waiting for Miaow to finish getting ready for school, since he’s decided not to let her go alone today. She has grudgingly agreed to allow him to accompany her.
He eyes Rose’s cup of instant with resignation. He’s abandoned his two-year campaign to get her to give up Nescafé, the coffee she grew up on. He’s spent a fortune on exotic beans, coffeemakers, gold filter cones, and bottled water to convert her, and her dream cup of coffee still involves hot water run from the tap onto a heaping clot of brown powder.
“We’re talking about Pan,” she says. “The gold car and the girls.”
“He’s a thug. And a drunk.”
“So what? The way he acts, he knows what he’s doing. He’s like a bone in their throats.”
“Whose throats?”
“The good people,” she says, and he is taken aback at the bitterness in her voice. “The big people, the people who have everything and want more. The people who take, take, take, own, own, own. The people who go to fancy parties with blood on their hands. With their expensive cars and their big houses and their beautiful clothes and their terrible, spoiled children. The people who own the streets underneath the bars the girls work in and the rooms they sleep in when they’re finished screwing tourists. And then sell them the drugs for AIDS.” She slaps the cup down, loudly enough to straighten his spine. “You know. The people who have run everything forever.”
They are seated opposite each other at the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room. The brilliance of the new day spills into the room behind Rose, catching flyaway locks of her hair and exploding what seems like a hundred colors out of the long fall of black that stretches to the dimples at the base of her spine. He leans across and touches her wrist.
“He drives them crazy.” She turns her hand palm up and wraps her fingers around his. “He’s dirt, up from some pigshit village, and he rubs their noses in it every day of the year. He shoved his way in here, with his awful skin and his burned hands and his one low shoulder, and grabbed a place at the dinner table without being invited, and then he pushed all their plates and glasses onto the floor, and spit on them. And then he bought everything they owned, two or three of everything, and covered them with gold just to make them uglier. And he takes the most beautiful women in the country, the ones they all want, and drags them behind him like a parade.”
“What’s the point?”
Rose shakes her head. “To prove that someone like him can have everything they have, everything that makes them special, and then shit on it. That someone can get rich without pretending to be one of them or trying to hide where he came from. The richer he gets, the cruder he gets. It scares them. They think he does it on purpose, just to build his personal power base.”
Power: the word Arthit had used. “Does what? Act like a pig?”
She turns the cup in the saucer, just doing something while she thinks. “That’s one side of it. But then he also gives money away like old newspaper. He sets up what he calls ‘banks’ up north. But they’re not really banks. Real banks lend money at interest and take away houses and things. His banks make small loans, maybe three or four hundred dollars, to poor people who have an idea for a business. If the business works, they pay back a little more than they borrowed. If the business fails, they don’t owe him anything. There are weaving villages now, woodcarving villages, silver-jewelry villages. There are men who own three or four trucks that they rent to farmers whenever they’re needed.”
“Why does that upset anyone?”
She dips her index finger into her cup and flicks coffee at him. “You’re supposed to understand this country. You wrote a book about it, remember?”
“I’ve never claimed to understand it. That’s why I married you.”
She pushes the coffee aside. “It upsets people because poor people are supposed to stay poor. They’re not supposed to have papers that say they own their land. They’re not supposed to have money in the bank so they can stockpile their harvests until the prices go up. They’re not supposed to do anything except live and die, and get fucked over in between. Grow the rice and sell it for nothing. Clear the land so some godfather can kick them off it and build ugly, expensive houses. Go where they’re told and stay where they’re put. Present themselves for sacrifice on a regular basis so the rich can stay fat.”
“And Pan is rocking the boat?”
“Sure. Rich people steal from the poor and pretend they’re giving. And here he is: He was poor, he still behaves like a peasant, and he’s really giving. He’s built two hospitals in Isaan, not big hospitals but good ones, and he pays doctors to work there, to take care of people who have never seen a doctor in their lives.” She stands and goes to the sink. He looks at the day heating up through the window, hearing the clink of her spoon against the jar of instant coffee and then the flow of water as the tap goes on. “Do you remember a girl from the bar, short and a little fat, always laughing, named Jah?”
Rafferty searches his memory. “Sort of. Maybe.”
“You have to remember her. There was that girl, the ugly, awful one, who was dancing when you first came into the bar. She wore glasses, and you can’t tell me you’ve forgotten that.”
Rafferty feels his face go hot.
“So you thought she was a college student or something, and you gave her—”
Rafferty tries to wave the rest of the story away. “I remember.”
“—you gave her five hundred baht. Because you were a sap. And the next night when you came in, everybody was wearing glasses.”
“Oh,” Rafferty says, the light dawning in the east. “Jah.”
“Right. She was the one whose glasses were so strong she walked off the edge of the stage and landed on that foreign woman. Anyway, Jah tested positive.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Rose is right, Jah had always been laughing.
“She’s okay.” She comes back and takes her seat again. “She got into a place here in Bangkok with about a hundred and fifty women in it. I know five or six of them. They get the drugs without having to pay for them, they have a place to sleep, they get three meals. They’re not out on the street, dying, or curled up in some shack up north, with the whole village pointing at them. Pan pays for it all.”
Rafferty says, “Last night he was calling the women on Patpong whores.”
“They are,” Rose says.
“Well, yeah, I mean, sure, literally.” This is not his most comfortable subject. “But he used the word—I don’t know—contemptuously.”
“That’s who he is. He uses the worst words he can think of. And then he goes and sets up a place like the one Jah is in.”
“I’m ready,” Miaow says, coming into the room in her school uniform. Her hair has been meticulously reparted and slicked down, and the skin on her cheeks literally shines. She is, Rafferty thinks, the cleanest child on the face of the earth.
“Let’s go, then,” he says, standing up.
“Why are you taking me?” Miaow demands. “I get there by myself every day.”
“Why not?” Rafferty says. “I’m awake, it’s time, and you’re my daughter. You said so yourself.”
Miaow slips into the straps of her backpack. “He’s weird today,” she says to Rose.
Rose says, “He’s weird every day.”
FOR THE FIRST five minutes of the taxi ride, Miaow gives him the brooding silence that seems to be her new default mode.
When she finally talks, he gets the topic he wants least. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“Why would something be wrong?”
“I saw you when you were talking on the phone. You got all tight and squinched.”
“Squinched?”
“That’s English,” she says. “I think.”
“I suppose it’s closer to English than it is to anything else.”
“Anyway, you looked like that.”
Rafferty gazes longingly out the window, which is too small for him to escape through. In retrospect, being alone with Miaow right now is not a tremendous idea. For some obscure reason, possibly because she knows he loves her with all his heart, she thinks she can ask him about anything. And, of course, she’s right.
He opts for selective honesty. “You know that book they mentioned in the newspaper?”
She blows out, her upper teeth against her lower lip to create a very long and slightly irritated “Ffffffffffff” sound. “I remember. It was only half an hour ago.”
“Well, that was someone who told me not to write it.”
Miaow says, “Or what?”
He should have known better. “What do you mean, ‘or what’?”
She crosses her arms high on her chest. “People don’t tell you not to do something without saying ‘or what.’ You know that.”
“You’ve been watching too many movies.”
“No. He said ‘or something,’ and then you got all squinched.”
The cab, at long last, makes the right into the street that leads to the street that leads to the street that Miaow’s school is on. Rafferty exhales heavily and says, “Jesus, this is a long ride.”
Miaow’s not giving him an inch. “That’s because you can’t think of anything to say.”
“Why have you been so grumpy lately?” Rafferty asks.
“Don’t change the subject. They said ‘or something.’”
“All right, you’re absolutely correct. They said if I wrote the book, they’d attack me with garden tools, chop me up, and make me into sandwiches.”
“I’m not five,” Miaow says. “Why would anyone make a sandwich with garden tools?”
“They’re farmers,” Rafferty improvises. “That’s all they have.”
“Why don’t they just back the buffalo over you?”
“Then they wouldn’t have the sandwiches.”
The remark gets the silence it deserves, and Miaow allows it to stretch out. Then she puts a small brown hand on top of his, the first time she’s touched him in days. “Are you going to get us into trouble?”
“Absolutely not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Very simple,” he says. “I’m not going to write the book.”
IT TAKES ONLY a second for his life to change.
The thrust of something hard into his back. The solid grip on his upper arm.
“It’s a gun,” a man says in English. “Stop walking. Don’t look around.”
“Or what?” Rafferty says, Miaow’s voice in his ears. The door to her school is a few yards behind him. She disappeared through it ten seconds ago.
“Or I’ll blow your spine to bits.” The English is almost completely unaccented.
“Just asking.”
“Hold still,” the man says, and something dark brown is pulled over Rafferty’s head and he’s shoved forward. “Bend down, pull the hood away from your chest, and look at your feet. There’s an open car door in front of you. Get in. Leave the door open behind you and sit in the middle. Clear?”
“Crystalline.”
“Then go.”
The car is black, and the bit of it he can see is clean and highly polished. He climbs in. It is cool and smells of leather. He slides to the center of the seat, his feet straddling the bump for the drive shaft, and waits. The front door opens, and the car dips as someone very heavy climbs in. A second later the back door to his left opens. A man gets in, and then there is another man sitting on his right. A gun probes his ribs on each side.
“With all friendly intent,” Rafferty says, “if those bullets go through me, you’re going to be shooting each other.”
“They won’t go through you,” says the man who had spoken before, who is now to Rafferty’s right. “They’re .22 hollow-points. They’ll just turn you to hamburger inside and stay there.”
Rafferty says, “Good. I’d hate to worry about you.” He hears a ticking that he identifies as the turn signal, the driver preparing to enter the stream of traffic.
“On the other hand,” the man says, “no exit wounds. You can have an open-casket funeral.”