First, get Rose and Miaow out of the line of fire. Somehow. Second, separate Ton temporarily from his muscle, even if it’s only for personal satisfaction. The muscle is vulnerable, even if Ton isn’t. The muscle can be made to bleed. Third, disappear.
Fourth, work out what they really want.
It can’t actually be a book. The timing doesn’t make sense. If they’re worried about Pan suddenly announcing that he’s running for office, what good is a book going to do? It’ll take months to print and distribute, assuming that Rafferty lives long enough to write it.
Whatever it is, they’ll need it faster than that.
He studies the list of names on the yellow sheets, looking for what they have in common beyond their animus toward Pan. All but two, one of whom was Weecherat, are male. All but three are in business, according to the addresses, which are either in care of a company or are suite numbers in business buildings. He tries to pair the names with the faces he saw at Pan’s party and realizes they are all approximately the same age, in their late fifties or early sixties. Once again Weecherat was an exception. They probably chose her because she’d written unflatteringly about Pan, and, of course, when they’d put her name on the list, Rafferty hadn’t yet heard the number of the floor Ton’s office was on. They had no way of knowing he’d try to use that information for insurance.
The yellow scarf comes into his mind’s eye, her preoccupation with the drape of the scarf. The way her face had softened when she mentioned her daughter.
He fights down the anger and the guilt and makes notes, just to process the information with both his mind and his hand, to see what links might open up. Doesn’t see a meaning behind the patterns, although there’s an elusive little flicker there somewhere.
His mind keeps wandering into scenarios, based on assumptions about what it is that Ton and his accomplices might really want. He follows one line of plausibility to its end—a bad end—and backs up and starts over. This time, with slightly different variables, the process takes him to a different end, different but still bad. Start again, factor in a new initiative on his part, and this time the ending is, to view it charitably, ambiguous. Maybe ambiguous is the best he can hope for. Maybe ambiguous should sound good to him.
The tuna salad in front of him has warmed to room temperature as the restaurant has filled and then emptied around him. Now the waitresses straighten the room, squaring the chairs and dusting the seats, laying down new linen, folding napkins and wiping their fingerprints off clean glasses, joking and talking quietly, and glancing over at him from time to time. They notice that he seems to be completely unaware of them, just staring through the window and sometimes making a note in the little notebook in front of him.
And he’s cute, one of them says. Is he part Thai? Hasip-hasip, fifty-fifty? After a whispered conversation at the far end of the room, the boldest of them takes the matter in hand.
“Have problem?” she says.
Rafferty almost jumps out of his seat. He had no idea anyone was near, much less standing at his elbow. He looks up to see a girl of seventeen or eighteen, cute in a baby-puffy way, wearing the kind of accessories that girls her age in the United States would either scorn as cluelessly uncool or embrace as post-retro irony: Hello Kitty earrings, little butterfly hair clips, a long curved comb at the back of her head, decorated with a row of hearts, to pull the long black hair out of the way.
“Just thinking,” Rafferty says, ripping himself, with a certain amount of relief, out of the latest lethal scenario. “Sometimes thinking is the only thing I know how to do.”
“Food not okay?”
He’s forgotten about the food. He has to look down at it. “It’s fine.”
“How you know?”
“Excuse me?”
“You no eat.” Just a ghost of a smile to acknowledge that she won the exchange, and then it evaporates.
“I thought I was hungry, but I wasn’t.”
She opens a graceful hand, palm up, slightly curled fingertips a few inches from the plate. “You want I take?”
“Sure. Thanks. Sorry to waste it.”
“Not waste,” she says. “Can give to kid. You know? Some kid not have eat.” She raises the fingertips to her mouth, looking uncertain. “Boss not know.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell him.” This girl, and others like her, had helped Miaow survive, sometimes with their boss’s knowledge and sometimes without, when she was on the street.
When she was being protected by—
The vision of the boy who pushed past him on the sidewalk is suddenly in his mind again. And it brings with it a jumbled confusion of impressions and emotions: kindness and violence, hope and disappointment, failure. Mostly, and most deeply, failure. A failure he has hoped a thousand times to be able to rectify. He has prayed for a chance to rectify it.
But he looks at everything he’s facing at the moment, at the danger and the isolation, and his only thought is, Please, not now.
THE BOY DOESN’T come.
Da sits there, the inverted red bowl as conspicuous to her as a fire on the sidewalk, terrified that Kep will suddenly materialize, swearing at her, threatening her. Maybe snatching Peep away from her.
She constantly scans the crowd for the blue shirt. Twice she glimpses blue and grabs the bowl and holds it upright, but it’s someone else both times. Someone who doesn’t look anything like Kep.
She thinks, I could get up and walk away myself.
And go where? says a voice in her head. And do what? You couldn’t take care of yourself before, when you were alone. And now look at you, you’re stuck with a baby. And you’re waiting for this boy? You don’t even know anything about him.
“I do too,” Da says aloud, without realizing it. “I saw him disappear.” One minute he had been there, and an instant later he wasn’t. She had recognized it then. This place was his forest, just as the land around her village had been her forest. She’d grown up there, gotten into danger there, escaped it there. She’d known where to go, how to live there, what was safe and what wasn’t. If someone had been lost there, Da would have been the person to trust.
Trust, the voice says. Why do you think you can trust him?
Da thinks, Because his face was clean. Because his clothes were dirty but his face was scrubbed. There was something about him that said he was more than he seemed to be. And because she believes that she can sometimes see things in people that are invisible to others.
Blue down the sidewalk. She grabs her bowl and turns it upright. As she watches Kep stride down the sidewalk, she pulls the coins from her pocket and drops them inside. Looking away, as though she doesn’t know he’s coming to get her, she raises the bowl.
RAFFERTY CLAPS HIS hands twice. With the floor covered by the cheap, worn rug, taken from a dusty room full of stuff that tenants have abandoned over the years, and with blankets tacked to two walls to create a soft corner, the sound of the clap dies immediately. The sheets hung over the windows soak up the echoes, too. When he’d started putting the pieces together, two hours ago, the sound had reverberated with a spang like a gunshot in a tunnel. The acoustic revisions were made between trips to the eighth floor every seven or eight minutes to make some noise for the microphones until Rose and Miaow came home, but for the past ninety minutes he’s been able to stay on the fourth floor. He’s finished making the place functional with a chipped and splintered coffee table flanked by two rattan chairs adopted from the leave-behind room, one of which sags drunkenly to the right, and a wooden stool, painted apple green, with a crack running down the center of the seat that widens when it’s sat on and snaps back closed again quickly enough to pinch the sitter’s bottom.
Pinch or not, this is better. This will work.
His watch says 4:50. Miaow had been sulky when she peeked into the fourth-floor apartment on her way up, practically rolling her eyes at Rafferty’s efforts. For all Rafferty knows, she and Rose are planning her new life, her life as Mia, right now. Father of the year, he thinks, not even realizing that his newly introverted daughter is going through a crisis. When he finds his way out of this mess, he’s going to rethink this whole fatherhood thing. He’s obviously not doing it right. He knows nothing about little girls. And his own father, who abandoned the family when Rafferty was seventeen, didn’t provide much in the way of a paternal role model. But he’ll do better.
It’s comforting to look forward to a time when he can focus on being a better father. When Miaow’s problems will be as important to him as they are to her.
“Looks great,” someone says. “You’ve got a real eye for decoration.”
Rafferty turns to see Lieutenant Kosit leaning against the edge of the doorway. He is in street clothes, and looped over his thick fingers is the handle of a fancy plastic shopping bag from an electronics shop on Silom.
“I think the blankets provide a kind of unexpected élan,” Rafferty says. “Who would ever have believed those colors would go together?”
Kosit says, “No one.” He holds out the bag. “You owe me seven thousand baht.”
“Jesus. I’m not using it for opera.”
“You needed some way to jack it into your speakers, right? Well, that’s where they get you. Connectors. That’s where they got you, anyway.” He fishes out a receipt and flaps it in Rafferty’s direction. “See? Connectors, twenty-three hundred baht.”
“How about we forget the money and I come over and redecorate your apartment?”
Kosit looks around the room with great interest. “Sure. I have a cute little French maid’s outfit, all black and white with ruffles. I haven’t been able to talk anyone into wearing it.”
Rafferty says, “Will you take a check?”
IN THE ELEVATOR Rafferty says, “Seen much of Arthit?”
“Nobody has. He’s like the Ghost of the Station. You see him around corners once in a while, but by the time you get there, he’s disappeared.”
Rafferty sags against the wall. “Hell.”
“What’s wrong?” Kosit asks. “You two are close. I tried to ask him what was going on, and he practically bit my nose off.”
“Problems of some kind. He won’t talk to me either.”
“Must be bad, then. You guys are like a pair of gloves.”
“It’s bad. Listen, do whatever you can, okay? Even if he acts like you’re imposing and he’d be happy if you fell off the edge of the earth, just sort of take his temperature every so often. He may need help any time, and you know him. He’d rather die than ask for it.”
“I know. I mean, I’m a guy, but he takes it to ridiculous lengths.”
The elevator stops. Before the doors open, Rafferty says, “Remember, don’t say anything inside.”
Kosit nods and claps a hand to his mouth, and Rafferty crosses the hall and opens the door.
Rose and Miaow are in the living room. A heavy, unmistakably toxic chemical odor punches him in the nose. Miaow is sitting on the hassock with a towel over her shoulders and something slick and gleaming—vegetable oil or petroleum jelly, maybe—spread over her forehead and cheeks. She’s as shiny as a potato bug. Rose, who has a mouth full of Q-tips, is wearing rubber gloves and combing something viscous through Miaow’s thick hair, which has been parted even more ruler-straight than usual. His daughter doesn’t meet his eyes, but she registers Kosit behind him and slams her lids shut as though that could make both men disappear.
Rose says around the Q-tips, “Don’t distract me. Whatever you want in the kitchen, you know how to find it.”
“Yes, I love you, too. I think it’s time for a beer.” He gives Kosit raised eyebrows and gets a nod, so Rafferty goes into the kitchen, the bullet holes in the linoleum and the cabinet looking as big as lunar craters, and pops the refrigerator door. “Which do I want?” he asks aloud. “Singha,” he says, holding up one finger, “or Tiger?” He holds up another.
Kosit gives him two fingers back, so Rafferty pulls a Singha for himself and a Tiger for Kosit. “And does my brusque little honey want anything?”
“Half an hour without being asked what I want.”
“This is wonderful,” Rafferty says, uncapping the beers. “We’ve reached the point in our relationship where we no longer have to be careful of each other’s feelings. We’re finally finished with all that tiptoeing around the real issues, all those secret resentments.” He hands Kosit his bottle and takes a haul off his own. “Our long national nightmare is over at last.”
Rose pulls a couple of Q-tips from her mouth and uses them to wipe carefully at Miaow’s hairline and then, with the other end, the curl of her ear. “Go away. Go in the other room. This is girl business.”
“If you want me—”
“I won’t,” Rose says.
“—you know where to find me. Just hovering aimlessly at the end of an invisible thread, putting my entire life on hold while I wait to see how I can be of service.”
Miaow says, “Poke,” in a tone that practically takes the paint off the walls.
“I guess it’s unanimous. Okay,” he says to Kosit, “the bedroom it is.”
The two of them sit on the bed and drink. Rafferty slides open the headboard and grabs a wad of baht. He counts out seven one-thousand-baht notes and hands them to Kosit. Kosit pulls out the receipt again and puts it on the bed, smoothing it with the side of his hand, to show that it’s actually for sixty-eight hundred. Then he fishes around in his pockets until he comes out with a sweat-damp clump of smaller bills, which he pries apart with blunt, tobacco-yellow fingers. He hands Rafferty a salad of twenties and fifties and a couple of coins. While Rafferty drops the money uncounted into the compartment in the headboard, Kosit probes his shirt pocket and pulls out a crumpled pack of Marlboros, undoubtedly Korean street fakes, and wiggles his eyebrows in interrogative mode. Rafferty reaches down to the floor on Rose’s side of the bed and comes up with the swimming-pool-size ashtray she uses at night. Kosit looks at it so gratefully that Rafferty thinks he might take a bite out of it, but instead he shakes a bent cigarette free and lights up. His face assumes an expression of such relief that Rafferty toys with the idea of lighting one himself, but he muscles it aside. The two men sit in companionable silence in the middle of a miasma of smoke, sipping their beers, while feminine mysteries unfold unwitnessed in the living room.
Finally Kosit stubs out the filter and puts the ashtray back on the floor. He dips a hand into the bag and begins to pull out the items he has bought: two four-packs of long-life AA batteries, a handful of microcassettes, the overpriced connectors, and a glossy box decorated with a photo of a small recorder that Rafferty recognizes, with a pang, as identical to the one Elora Weecherat had used. He takes the box from Kosit, opens it, and shakes the contents free onto the bed. Yes, it’s exactly the same. He picks it up, expecting it somehow to be much heavier than it is, and slides open the compartment at the back, where the batteries go. Kosit picks up a thin black cord with a little square power brick at the outlet end and shows Rafferty where the male end of the jack slips into the recorder. He uses his index finger to flick a package of batteries and leans to whisper in Rafferty’s ear. “Insurance,” he says. It’s not much louder than a breath. “In case there’s a power outage.”
Rafferty nods, but he can’t take his eyes off the tape recorder. Weecherat’s daughter was seven, she had said. It’s a magical age.
Whatever it takes, whatever he has to do, he’s going to make Captain Teeth pay.
ON THE TRIP to the abandoned apartment house, Da and Peep share the van with the woman and baby they had ridden with in the morning. There is no sign of the third woman. Before Kep gets into the front seat, the woman with the dark baby says, “They’re taking her somewhere else. They always move a woman when they change her baby.”
“Why?”
“They don’t want people talking too much.”
Kep climbs in, slams the door, and starts the van without so much as a glance at Da. But three or four times during the long ride, she feels his eyes on her in the rearview mirror. When she looks up to meet his gaze, he holds hers until it becomes necessary for him to pay attention to some kind of static on the road. And then, a few minutes later, his eyes are on her again, weighing her, appraising her. He has never looked at her like this before, and it brings a warm, faintly dirty-feeling prickle to her neck and cheeks, as though she has not washed in several days.
She stops checking the mirror.
When he pulls to a stop in the dirt yard, the first day’s routine is repeated. As the women get out of the van, Kep holds out a heavy envelope to each of them. Each of the women empties into the envelope with her name on it all the money she has taken in, and Kep adds the bills he has seized during the day.
He adds no bills to Da’s envelope.
“Wait,” she says as he licks the flap.
Kep says, “Shut up.”
“You took eighteen hundred—”
Kep gives her a flat gaze. He looks sleepy. “I don’t remember that. Anybody see you give it to me?” He runs his thumbs over the moistened flap, sealing the envelope. Then he pulls the envelope back and brings his hand around, slapping her across the face with it.
It’s not a particularly forceful slap, but all the coins in the envelope have slid to the end that is moving fastest, and the hard weight of the jumble of coins strikes her cheekbone with enough force to jar her and bring tears to her eyes. Blinking to clear her vision, she takes an inadvertent step back, almost a stumble, and comes up against the hot, unyielding surface of the van. Kep follows her, his nose practically pressed to hers, and the sleepy look has been replaced by something dark and tightly focused, and Da recognizes it, with a sharp, sinking feeling, as joy.
“I told you,” he says. “You make as much as I say you make.” She can smell the alcohol on his breath, and out of the corner of her eye she sees the other woman backing away with a hand placed protectively over the eyes of the child at her chest. Da curves her spine, pulling her waist and pelvis away from him as far as she can, not because she fears him sexually but to make space for Peep, who is beginning to squall in alarm. “You’ve made almost nothing in your first two days,” Kep says. “Barely enough to feed yourself. And you haven’t been nice to me.”
“I don’t—” Da begins.
“We could get along much better,” Kep says, and he brings up a hand and brushes the backs of his fingers over her cheek. “Up to you. You can be nice to me, or maybe we should take the kid and give him to somebody else.”
She knows he sees her eyes widen in alarm, but she tries immediately to wipe it out. The only way to handle a bully, she has learned, is with a quick kick. She spits into her free hand and scrubs the cheek where he touched her. Then she snaps, “Fine,” and holds the baby up. “Take him now. He’s wet and he stinks, and I’m sick of him. Here.”
Kep has backed up as she thrusts Peep at him, and he takes another step back with her pursuing him, holding Peep at about the level of his face. “Take him,” she says. “Do me a favor and take him. I’m sick of him, I’m sick of the whole thing. Take him. You can eat him for all I care.” She keeps pushing Peep at him, hearing the child squeal and seeing the spark of panic in Kep’s blunt, dark face, and she knows that he’s frightened. He can get into trouble over this, she realizes, losing a new beggar, having to take back the child. It’s a problem, and the man in the office won’t appreciate a problem. Kep has put two feet between them now, and she uses it. “Here,” she says, holding Peep out and turning halfway away, as though to walk to the road. “I’m leaving. Is that what you want? You want me to leave?”
There is no response, and she turns to Kep and sees him looking not at her but up at the windows on the second story of the building. There are faces there, looking down, watching everything that’s happened. Some are laughing. Others stare openmouthed, waiting for the resolution.
And Da knows, sure as a fist in the stomach, that she has failed.
Kep can’t lose this kind of face in front of the others. She no sooner realizes this than she feels his fingers dig into the muscles at the sides of her neck. “Don’t be in such a hurry,” he says. He squeezes hard enough for her knees to go weak. “We’ve just begun our talk. And you’re not going anywhere, you little bitch. I’ve got someplace special for you tonight.”
He knots her blouse in his hand and half drags her around the van and toward the front door. Da struggles, but she can only do so much without dropping Peep. Finally she grasps the child with one arm and reaches out and twists her fingers through Kep’s thick hair. She yanks hard enough to pull some of it out.
And he rounds on her, his face flaming, and hits her in the face with his closed fist. The blow snaps her head to the left, and her ankles tangle as she tries to step back to keep her balance, and she goes down, falling sideways to the left. It takes everything she has to land on her back, with Peep on top of her. The child is screaming. There is blood in Da’s mouth, salty and warm.
“You like to pull hair, huh?” Kep says. He is so furious that his eyes have practically disappeared. He knots his fingers into Da’s hair and hauls her to her feet. Then he drags her through the door and into the corridor and pushes her up against the wall on the left while he fishes in his pants pocket for something. When his hand comes out, it holds a jingling ring of keys. He chooses one and slips it into the lock on one of the doors that were closed the night Da first came into the building. He pulls the door wide, puts a hard, heavy hand on the back of Da’s neck, and shoves her through the door into the dim room. Then the door slams closed, and she stands there, swallowing blood and aching, the baby crying with all its being, in total darkness.
She hears the click of the lock.