Sunlight as thin and unsatisfying as gruel, not even intense enough to throw shadows. The phone at Rafferty’s ear is slick with sweat, an aftereffect of Rose and Miaow’s escape.
“He’s not in,” says Porthip’s secretary.
“When will he be in?” The floor he spent so much time cleaning has gotten gritty again, and he drags his feet over it, enjoying the sound.
“I have no idea.”
Just for the hell of it, he kicks the stool that’s pinched his butt so many times and watches it topple over onto its side. He doesn’t think he’ll ever have to see it again, and he won’t miss it. “Is that usual?” he asks. “That you’d have no idea when he’ll be in?”
“No,” she says. “When he gets in touch with me, would you like me to tell him what this concerns?”
“He’ll know what it concerns,” Rafferty says. “Can’t you get in touch with him?”
The woman does not reply for a moment, and then she says, “No.”
“Really. Is that usual?”
“Oh, well,” she says. “It’ll be in the paper tomorrow anyway. He’s in the hospital.”
“Which one?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Sure you can.” He looks at his watch. About forty minutes more on the tape that’s running upstairs. He’ll have to go up, do his stuff in the apartment, and put in the next cassette. “Anyway, there’s only one hospital he’d go to.”
“Really,” she says neutrally.
“Sure. Bumrungrad.”
There’s a short pause, and she says, “Well, that’ll be in the paper, too. But before you get smug, Bumrungrad’s a very big hospital.”
“Right,” Rafferty says. “I’ll never manage to find him.”
He hangs up and calls Kosit.
“OUT OF THE question,” Dr. Ravi says. He’d answered the phone at Pan’s office. “You can’t just stop by and see him any time.”
“It’s not any time,” Rafferty says. “It’s half an hour from now.”
“This is a very bad day. Extremely busy.”
Rafferty has no trouble visualizing the little man, probably wearing another ambitiously pleated pair of slacks, seated behind the desk in the small office outside Pan’s big one. “Sorry it’s a bad day, but I’m coming anyway.”
“He won’t see you.”
“He’ll see me. Just say one word to him. Say ‘Snakeskin.’”
The pause is so long that Rafferty thinks Dr. Ravi has hung up. When he does speak, all he says is, “Half an hour?”
“Yes. But two other people are going to get there first, two kids. Let them in and have them wait. It’s important that they’re not out on the street when I arrive.”
“Any other orders?” Dr. Ravi says.
“That’ll do for now,” Rafferty says.
He folds the phone and sits on the stool, which he has put upright again. The day in front of him is a maze, an urban labyrinth with several ways in and probably only one safe way out. Within an hour Rose should call to tell him they’re with Boo’s kids down at the river. They’ll be fine down there, at least until dark, when he’ll move them. Assuming that he’s alive to do it.
The taped hand goes into spasms, sending a long, dark line of pain up his arm. When he stands up, the stool pinches him, and this time his kick sends it all the way to the opposite wall, where it breaks into pieces.
There are at least three places he needs to go. At some point he’ll have to dump the final tails, so no one from either side is riding his slipstream. He’s pretty sure he knows how to do it, but he’s been wrong a lot recently, so he turns his mind to it, and while he worries about that, he also worries about time. This is Saturday, and his bank will close early. He focuses on the schedule, trying to factor in imponderables, such as bad traffic or a sudden bullet in the back of the head.
Instead he finds himself worrying about Arthit. His best friend, alone for the first time in his adult life, is floating somewhere on the tide of the city, adrift over depths of abandonment and grief. Running from his loss, running from whatever it is that Rafferty has let out of the bottle. And as hard as it is for Rafferty to imagine Arthit needing help, he probably does. He probably needs several kinds of help.
HE CAN GIVE himself ten minutes, no more. The seconds tick off in his mind as he moves through the apartment silently while he and his wife and child chat with each other over the speakers.
From the headboard of the bed, he takes the Glock and the spare magazine. His closet yields up a pair of running shoes and his softest, most beat-up jeans, since he may have to wear them for some time. He chooses a big linen shirt that’s loose enough to conceal the gun. After he changes, he slips his cell phone into his pocket, where it will stay until he replaces it later in the day. He goes to the sliding glass door to close it but stands for a moment looking past the balcony and out over the city. Its sheer size is a comfort. It unfolds around him in all directions, block by block like giant tiles, fading eventually into the perpetual smog and water vapor that obscure the place’s real size, but he knows that it goes on and on. People have hidden in it for years, just another stone on the beach. He turns and goes over to the little tape recorder, rests his finger on the “stop” button, and waits for a natural pause.
“Hang on a minute,” he says out loud. He pushes “stop.” “I’m going out for a couple of hours, but I’ll get back in plenty of time for dinner. Anybody want anything?” There is no reply, since he’s pulling out the cassette in the recorder and slipping another in. He rewinds the new tape all the way to the beginning of the leader, which will give him twenty seconds or so of silence before Miaow and Rose start talking. He says, “Okay, then, bye,” pushes “play,” and goes out the door, putting some muscle into closing it so it can be heard. He’s still standing out there, waiting for the elevator, when he hears Rose’s voice through the door.
The new tape is a little less than two hours long, the product of their trip down to the fourth floor on the previous morning. He has that much time until the apartment goes silent. After that they’ll begin to wonder. When the curiosity gets too strong, they’ll come through the door.
And then they’ll probably be looking to kill people.
THE GUY BEHIND him isn’t trying to be inconspicuous. He stays two or at most three cars back all the way, a cell phone pressed to one ear. When Rafferty’s taxi stops at the gates to Pan’s earthly paradise, the follower cruises past slowly, then pulls in to the curb halfway down the block.
When the guard opens the gate, Dr. Ravi is already standing there. He lifts his left hand to study his watch, says, “Seven minutes late,” and turns to climb into the swan. “As I told you, time is very tight today.” The vehicle is moving while Rafferty still has one foot on the ground.
“Are my guests here?”
Dr. Ravi purses his lips around something small and sour and says, “They are.”
Rafferty says, “You were never poor.”
If the comment surprises Dr. Ravi, he doesn’t show it. “No. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor.”
“You managed to pay for Oxford.”
“Cambridge,” he says, biting the syllables. “I was on a partial scholarship.”
They are cresting the hill that blocks the view of the garden. “You don’t like street kids.”
Dr. Ravi’s shoulders rise and fall. “I don’t mind them in the street. In the house is a different matter.”
“Is that a sentiment your employer shares?”
“I have no idea. He was more like them when he was young than I was.”
“People change,” Rafferty says as the apple tree gleams its way into sight.
A diplomatic head waggle of disagreement. “In some ways. At the core, though, I think they stay the same.”
“Really? You don’t think power corrupts?”
Dr. Ravi makes a tiny adjustment to the steering column with no discernible effect. “It corrupts the corruptible.”
“Ah.” Rafferty sits back and watches the garden slide past. “You knew what Snakeskin meant.”
“Of course. The first thing I did when I came to work here was to go through the documents that spell out Khun Pan’s past.”
“Why would you do that?”
Dr. Ravi turns to face him for a moment, a glance that’s meant to put Rafferty in his place, and then looks back at the road. “I’m his media adviser, remember? I need to know what’s back there, what’s on record, in case something gets dredged up. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that there are people in the media who don’t like him.”
“So you’re an expert on his past.”
Dr. Ravi worries the idea for a few seconds and says, “To some extent.”
“Then how’d he get burned?”
They glide past the empty little village, as deserted now as Da’s is. The pigs watch them go with lazy attention, as though wondering whether the swan is edible. “That”—Dr. Ravi accelerates slightly, as though the talk has gone on too long—“you’ll have to ask him about that.”
THE FIRST THING he hears when he opens the front door is laughter, coming from the back of the house, the direction of Pan’s office. Then he hears voices, Pan’s surprisingly wispy one and Da’s. Whatever Pan says, Da starts laughing again.
She turns to smile a greeting at Rafferty as he pushes the door open. Pan is standing in the middle of the room with Peep in his arms. The baby’s dirty blue blanket looks incongruous against the yellow silk covering Pan’s chest, beneath the unsettling pink of his mouth. Boo lounges behind Pan’s desk with his hands folded over his nonexistent belly, apparently completely at ease, and Da occupies the chair Rafferty had claimed four days earlier, the afternoon before the gala fund-raiser.
“What a treat,” Pan says to Rafferty, although his smile is measured. “You have very interesting friends.”
“She’s from Isaan,” Rafferty says.
“Yes,” Pan says, “we’ve had a few minutes to get that on the table. And he’s a flower of the pavement, isn’t he?”
“Or a weed,” Boo says. He grins, but his eyes are watchful.
“Have they told you why I brought them here?”
“We just got here,” Da says. “And we don’t really know.”
“Well, it’s probably rude to bring up business so quickly, but Dr. Ravi says you’re pressed for time.”
Pan gives Peep a little bounce. “Dr. Ravi is an old woman. When you’re as rich as I am, time is elastic.”
“It’s elastic when you’re poor, too,” Boo says.
“That’s true, isn’t it?” Pan says. “I hadn’t thought of it, although I should have. I was poor long enough. But for everybody else, everybody who has something but not enough, time is rigid. It’s a floor plan for the day, isn’t it? You can only stay in each room so long.”
“So,” Rafferty says, “are we going to sit around and philosophize, or should we get down to it?”
Pan’s smile dims a notch. “You seem to be in more of a hurry than I am.”
“Cute baby, isn’t it?” Rafferty says.
“Adorable.” Pan raises Peep and makes a little kiss noise. Peep screws up his face, waves a fist, and starts to cry. Da rises and goes to take him, then carries him back to her chair.
“Did Da tell you where she got him?”
“Where she got him?” Pan’s smile widens again. “I’ve been familiar with those mechanics since I was, let’s see, about twelve.”
“He was handed to her,” Rafferty says. “Five days ago. By an old acquaintance of yours.”
Boo sits straighter behind the desk.
Still watching Peep, Pan says, “You think I know someone who gives away babies?”
“Well, you used to know him. His name is Wichat.”
Pan turns his head a few inches to the left and regards Rafferty as though he’s favoring his dominant eye. “You’ve been busy.” He leans back, resting part of his broad bottom on the edge of the desk. “If you wanted to know about all that, you could have talked to me.”
“You did work with Wichat.”
“Of course. I started out with him. Dozens of people could tell you that. I would have told you, if you’d asked. It’s no secret. I was a crook. There weren’t a lot of other employment opportunities for someone like me. And if you wanted to be a crook in those days, at least in the part of Bangkok I was being a crook in, you did business with Wichat. Actually, with Wichat’s boss, Chai. Is this going to be in the book?”
“Unless you can come up with something better.”
Pan seems suddenly to remember that Boo and Da are in the room. The smile returns, and he looks down at Da, who is holding Peep. The baby’s cries have faded to a damp snuffle. “Girls always look most beautiful holding babies,” he says.
Rafferty says, “Not a really contemporary point of view.”
Pan lets his gaze linger on Da for a moment, and then he says, “I’d rather it weren’t in the book, but if it is, you should be very clear on the point that I’ve had nothing to do with Wichat, or anyone like Wichat, for twenty years. I have no idea whether Wichat is—what?—giving out babies? Why would anyone give out babies?” He tugs at the crease in his sky-blue slacks. “And why tell me about it now?”
“I’m sorry,” Rafferty says. “I haven’t done this right. We’re actually here to ask for your help.”
Pan’s eyebrows climb half an inch. “Help.”
“See, this is what I think is happening. Wichat is buying babies from poor families, some of them probably Cambodian, and selling them to rich people, to farang. And he stashes the kids in the interim with female beggars. He hides them in plain sight and even makes a little extra money. Da says people give more to—”
“A woman with a baby,” Pan says with badly masked impatience. “Obviously. But how in the world do you think I can help?”
“I’m not completely sure,” Rafferty says. He leans against the wall beside the door. “Da and Peep ran away from Wichat’s guys because she was going to get raped. Boo helped them escape. And of course they have something that belongs to Wichat, which is to say Peep. So they’re on the run now, and I’m hiding them.”
Pan lets his eyes drift back down to Da and Peep. Behind him, Boo looks past him at Rafferty, his eyebrows elevated in a question. Pan says, “Why? Why are you hiding them?”
“I owe Boo a favor. So I guess the question is whether you can do anything, considering that you used to be buddies with Wichat, to get him to let go of Da and Peep, just stop searching for them.”
Pan surveys the room, not really looking at anything. “I suppose what he really wants is the baby. Why not return it to him?”
Da says immediately, “No.”
“Right,” Pan says. “Of course not. Well, you say he’s for sale, right? If it’s just about money, if Wichat just doesn’t want to lose his profit, then I can probably do something, maybe compensate him. How much is he getting?”
“Thirty to fifty thousand U.S.”
“You’re joking.”
“That’s my best guess,” Rafferty says.
“Still,” Pan says, “even if I bought Peep for Miss…Miss Da here, Wichat might be more worried about what she could tell people. Especially if he’s making that much money.”
“I think he is,” Boo says. “Both making that much money and worried about Da talking to people.”
Pan’s eyes flick to Boo as though he’s surprised at the certainty in the boy’s voice. “So, you see, it’s a little awkward. If I talk to Wichat, let’s say to offer to buy Peep, then he knows that I’m in touch with these kids. It opens up a raft of questions. That’s awkward. He and I aren’t friends anymore.”
“If you say so,” Rafferty says.
“Let me think about it,” Pan says. “They’re safe for the moment, I suppose?”
“I think so.”
“Would they be safer here?”
“I don’t know,” Rafferty says, watching Pan’s eyes. “Maybe.”
“Well, where are they staying now?”
“In my apartment house. An empty unit, down on the fourth floor.”
“Do you have security? Is there a doorman or anything?”
“It’s not that kind of apartment house,” Rafferty says.
“Maybe here, then,” Pan says. “If there’s one thing I have a lot of, it’s guards.”
Rafferty says, “What do you guys think?”
“I like it at your place,” Boo says. It’s what Rafferty told him to say if the question came up. “We don’t get in anybody’s way.” He looks at Da, who nods.
“Fine,” Pan says. “I’ll think about Wichat. I’m sure something will come to me.”
“That’s all we can ask,” Rafferty says. He pushes himself away from the wall. “You kids mind waiting for me outside? You can walk down to the village. I’ll be out in a minute.” He turns to Pan. “That okay with you?”
“Sure. Just don’t get too close to the pigs. Shinawatra can be aggressive.”
Da says, “I know all about pigs.” Then she says, “Shinawatra? Like the prime minister?”
“I’ll explain it later.” Rafferty turns his back to Pan and opens the door to let them out. With his left hand, he pulls the automatic from his pants, and as Boo passes him, Rafferty glances down at it. Boo follows Rafferty’s eyes and takes the gun without missing a step. When Rafferty closes the door and turns back to Pan, nothing in the big man’s face suggests that he registered the transfer.
“So?” Pan says. He turns and goes behind his desk. He sits and pulls a drawer open.
“Da tell you about how they turned off her town’s river?”
“Actually, the boy told me. Terrible, terrible.” He takes the tube of lip balm out of the drawer and applies it. “The sort of thing that should never be allowed to happen.”
“What can you do about it?”
“Me?” Pan drops the tube back into the drawer. “I have no formal power.”
“And if you did?”
“Oh, well. If we’re going to be hypothetical, then hypothetically, I’d prevent it.”
“Would you give them their river back?”
Pan shakes his head in irritation. “It’s done. It’s over. What I’d do is make sure it never happens again.”
“What do you mean, over? A few bulldozers, an afternoon’s work, they’d have their river back. And how long could it take, how much could it cost, to rebuild a few shacks like the ones you put up in that postcard village in your front yard?”
“That’s not the point. The money’s been spent, the golf course has been built, probably a hotel put up. The people who did this are powerful. They’re not going to let go of it. They’ve got clout.”
“In short,” Rafferty says, “it wouldn’t be expedient.”
“You’re oversimplifying, and you know it. The point is to prevent it next time.”
Rafferty gives it a minute, turns and takes a circuit of the office. When he’s facing Pan again, he says, “So. How’d you burn your hands?”
“Sooner or later,” Pan says. He sounds weary. “I knew you’d bump up against that sooner or later. I told you I was in protection, right?”
“Right. With Wichat’s boss, Chai.”
“Chai,” Pan says. “That was a guy. Balls of steel. That was when we had real gangsters, not store dummies like Wichat.”
“Wichat means business.”
“Yeah? You talk to him?”
“Sure. I’ve talked to half a dozen people on the yellow list. A lot of them have wondered how you got burned.”
“Right, the burns. One of the women I was protecting had a three-wok restaurant on the curb, and some guys who had wandered onto the wrong block tried to rob her. I was just down the street. Protection, right? If I’m extorting money for protection, the least I can do is protect them. So I…um, got involved, and while I was taking care of the first guy, the second guy threw a wok at me. Full of hot oil.” Pan opens the top two buttons of his shirt and shows Rafferty an expanse of shiny, hairless flesh. “So naturally, like a total idiot, I reached out and tried to catch it. Not just my hands, but all the way up my arms and across my chest. Hurt like nothing else in my whole life.”
“So,” Rafferty says, “it happened back when you were working with Wichat. Before the Mounds of Venus.”
“That’s right.” Rafferty holds Pan’s gaze until Pan looks down at his shirtfront. He rebuttons the shirt and pulls a cigar out of his pocket. He centers it in the moist-looking mouth and fires up the smoke.
When Rafferty feels as if the silence has been stretched far enough to snap, he says, “Uh-huh.”
Pan drags on the cigar with every evidence of being completely absorbed in it, but when he finally looks up at Rafferty, he has the eyes of someone who suspects that the guy across the card table has just filled the holes in his straight. “You asked Ravi about Snakeskin,” he says.
“Actually, I didn’t. I just said the word to see whether it would persuade him to let me in. And it did.”
“How interesting,” Pan says. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder whose side you’re on.”
“What a coincidence,” Rafferty says. “So am I.”