For the Dead (11 page)

He gulps the coffee and lets his eyes wander the room, seeing Murphy’s money everywhere: stacked beneath the cushions of the hassock, inside the couch, running all the way around the edge of the room beneath the carpet in stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Back in the old days, he’d felt flush if he had forty or fifty thousand baht stowed in the safe hidden in the headboard of his and Rose’s bed.

But, of course, this money isn’t really his. He doesn’t even know whether the person to whom it actually belongs is alive.

In all, the apartment has a little less than half a million dollars in it, jammed into every piece of furniture, in empty cereal boxes in the kitchen, in weighted baggies in the toilet tanks. He knows it’s silly to salt it everywhere like this—when he took it from a burning house eight weeks ago, it had fit very snugly into a single large briefcase—but he can’t bring himself to keep it all in one place. Given the number of unpleasant people who have come unbidden through their front door and the ease with which they’ve done it, it’s always possible there will be another, so why make it simple by putting all that money in one place? This way, at least the son of a bitch will have to work for it.

At times he wishes he could throw the money off the balcony. He can’t bank it because he can’t explain where he got it, and in Bangkok a large sum of money emits a fragrance that can penetrate the thick walls of banks, all the way to government and law-enforcement offices. The ones in uniform would give him a few memorably bad moments and take it all.

Here’s
another
reason he wishes he could just call Arthit. As a cop, Arthit probably knows how crooks hide the huge sums of illicit money the papers are always talking about. But he and Arthit—perhaps the best male friend he’s ever had—haven’t spoken comfortably since Arthit announced, in a brusque, awkward phone call, that Anna—Dr. Chaibancha—was going to move in with him.

Poke and Dr. Chaibancha have a wary non-relationship. She had been an acquaintance of Arthit’s now-dead wife, Noi, but when she knocked on his door to re-establish her friendship with Arthit, it was under false pretenses: she had actually been sent by Thai security police in the hope that she would learn, through Arthit, where Rafferty was and pass the information back to them. The cops had lied to her, appealed to her patriotism, but he still doesn’t trust her, and she knows it, and it can’t be paved over. The memory of her treachery, a little less than a couple of months ago, stands between him and Arthit like a wall.

The cup is empty. Rafferty shifts his weight from foot to foot in the middle of the living room, wishing he had work to do, wishing he knew how to talk to his daughter, wishing he could call his best friend, wishing he wasn’t burdened with all that money. Wishing he weren’t haunted by the image of a girl running into a burning house. Wondering how someone who has everything in the world that matters to him could be so deeply and so completely discontented.

A
RTHIT SAYS
, “S
AME
man?”

Anna nods. She won’t speak aloud in public. They’re in the back corner of a restaurant just far enough from the station that it’s unlikely a familiar cop will wander in—and if one does it’ll confirm his belief that Thanom is going to keep an eye on him and Anna for a while, if only to know whether they met immediately after Anna looked at the surveillance videos. Arthit is certain he wasn’t followed from the station, so if anyone was, it’s Anna.

He looks around the restaurant again, sees no one who seems to be paying attention to them. He says, “Only one man.”

That I saw
, she writes on one of the blue cards she carries.

“Kosit figures there were at least three. The security men in Sawat’s condo were killed with knives. Had to take two, at minimum. The man who shot Sawat and his guards was waiting upstairs in an unoccupied unit. So he thinks three. How do you know it was the same man on both tapes?”

He sips his iced coffee, keeping half an eye on the food cooling in the center of the table. She’s too busy writing to eat, and he feels a twinge of guilt and puts his hand over the pad. With his other hand, he indicates the food.

Anna pushes his hand away.
He made his hair gray the second time and he walked like an old man, but when he moved fast, it was easy to see it was the same one
.

“What kind of gun? In the second video, the killing of Thongchai.”

She shakes her head and shows him the palms of her hands.

“Not a big one, like the first time.”

Another shake of the head.

Arthit takes the pen and draws two crude guns, one a revolver with its curved lines, and the other a boxy automatic. Anna taps a fingernail on the automatic and holds up her index fingers, about seven or eight inches apart. She waits, and he nods.

“You could see what he said after he threw in the match?”

She scratches her head and then wiggles her hand from side to side, meaning,
sort of
. Then she begins to write again.
I think he said, Two children. One woman
.

“And when he killed the first men,” Arthit says. “He said, ‘Two women, three children.’ ”

She nods.

“Victims, probably,” Arthit says. “Sawat and Thongchai murdered a lot of people. These killings were probably revenge for the dead.” He rubs the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, and says, “Children.”

Anna drops her gaze to the tablecloth. Without looking at the blue card, she folds it in half and then in half again. She uses her thumbnail to sharpen the creases and looks up as he taps the tablecloth.

“So first you looked at the video from last night, where he killed Sawat and the other three, and then someone brought in the second tape.”

Anna nods.

“And what happened to the cop who brought the tape into the room?”

She makes a brusque, shooing-away gesture, flapping the backs of her hands toward him.

“Thanom told him to leave. And Thanom’s reaction,” Arthit says. “When he saw the face on the second tape, the face of the fat man, how did he look?”

Anna unfolds the creased card and writes on the blank side,
Like he went to the bathroom in his pants
.

Arthit surveys the restaurant again and sees no one to worry about. He has a
thousand
things to worry about, but none of them seems to be present. He says, “Do you want to take the food home?”

She nods, gathering up the blue cards and stacking them, evening their edges so she can put them into the compartment in the front cover of the pad, where she keeps the ones she’s written on, and he motions to the waiter and makes a box in the air with his hands, miming shoveling the food into it. Anna breaks into laughter. She writes,
Talking to me too much
, and he joins her, although the laugh has to push its way past something squatting in the center of his chest.

The killing of Thongchai, Arthit thinks, will be very bad for Thanom. Thanom barely dodged the hail of institutional bullets when Sawat’s murder-for-hire scandal broke, and several innocent men went down in his place. Thongchai was Sawat’s lieutenant and accomplice. These killings will raise all the old questions again, and someone—finally—will have to take the blame. The question is, who.

For Arthit, one fact is inescapable. Thanom
knows
Anna will tell him about all this. The talk about respecting Arthit, about Arthit’s
ethics
, isn’t worth the breath Thanom used to pronounce the words. Ethics are the last thing Thanom’s interested in. So what’s he really up to?

He touches the back of Anna’s hand and forces yet another smile, in a day of forced smiles. “If you’re not going to eat, I need you to do something. I want you to leave by yourself. Go left on the sidewalk and don’t look around. Go two blocks down to the little
soi
that’s got all the pharmacies on it.”

She nods.

“Take the
soi
all the way to the boulevard and then flag a cab. Go to the house, go anywhere you want. I’ll see you tonight at home.”

Her eyelids drop for a second, and when they come back up, her eyes are an open door, completely unguarded. She says, out loud, “Home.”

The word on her lips blindsides him, and he hears what he just said. Part of him wants to push his chair back and run from the restaurant, leave her there with her life and her ruined career and the son she never gets to see, and part of him wants to put his arms around her and tell her everything will be fine, although “fine” feels miles and miles away.

He can’t hold the smile, so he brings up his hand and brushes the backs of his fingers over her cheeks, then he nods, a tiny nod, less than an inch, that means something enormous. She puts her hand on his and presses it to her cheek. For a moment, that’s all there is.

After she’s left, Arthit follows his watch’s second-hand around the slow circle of a minute and then tracks it another thirty seconds for safety’s sake. Then he gets up, his back still stiff, and picks up the white plastic bags of food.

He sees no one obvious on the sidewalk, so he picks up his pace, a man in a hurry, and when he gets to the little
soi
with the pharmacies on it, he drops a bag of noodles.

Crouching on the pavement to pick up the food as people sidestep him, he sees Anna, almost all the way to the next block, and ten meters behind her, measuring his stride to hers, her follower.

Thanom
, he thinks.
Children
, he thinks.

R
AFFERTY SAYS, IN
Thai, “I don’t know what to say to her.”

“Then don’t say anything,” Rose says, in English. Two hours have passed since she returned from her mysterious errand. They’re on the living room couch, a litter of takeout boxes and paper plates on the table. It’s been dark for almost an hour, and Bangkok glitters like costume jewelry through the glass door. Rafferty loves to sit with Rose and watch the night slide in.

Music, muted and tinny, floats in from Miaow’s room, the door to which is closed and guarded, in Rafferty’s imagination, by a pair of fire-breathing dragons.

“Mrs. Shin said they were almost two hours late for school.”

“I’ll ask her about it,” Rose says, from the center of a cloud of remote serenity that puzzles and irritates him at the same time. She smells like limes, the result of having scrubbed the backs of her hands with them. She thinks it lightens her skin. Since they sat down, she’s been gazing through the glass door at the city as though this evening it’s assembling itself differently than usual.

“Andrew, Andrew,
Andrew
,” Rafferty says, the words pushed out of him by a surge of irritation.

“They got to school, didn’t they?” Rose says. “That should make you happy. When she starts not going to school at all,
that’s
the time to worry.”

“I don’t know,” Rafferty says. A wave of moroseness makes
him slump until he’s sitting on his spine. “What do I know about girls?”

“Everything that matters,” she says, patting his hand comfortingly.

“I knew this had to happen eventually. I mean, in theory.”

“Nothing is happening,” Rose says, sounding a little too patient for his taste. “She has a friend. The friend is a boy. They were late to school one day, that’s all. Her body is changing, and she’s hiding it, and she doesn’t—”

“Her body is changing?”

“It’s confusing for a girl when—”

“Her
body
is changing? Where have I been?”
Outside that burning house
, he answers himself silently.

“Why do you think she wears your shirts all the time? Look at you, you’re like a guard dog, with your ears pointed up. You should be chained to the wall.”

“I’m not ready for this. I mean, I knew it would come sooner or later, but I voted for
later
.” He sits there without doing anything for a minute and then says, “Poor kid.”

“She’ll live through it.”

“Do you think she’s hungry?

Rose says, “She said no twice.”

“Maybe I should ask again. If she’s growing and all—”

“The hall is only seven meters long,” Rose points out. “She’s capable of walking that far, even if she’s weak from hunger.”

Poke subsides for a few heartbeats and says, “She’s
twelve
,” as though the number were a crushing argument.

“Maybe thirteen,” Rose says. “Considering all this,
probably
thirteen.” She’s wearing cut-offs and one of Poke’s white shirts, and she smoothes her thighs with her palms as though she enjoys the feel of her own skin. Rafferty watches enviously.

“Are you calmer now?” Rose says.

“I’ve been calm the whole time,” Rafferty says, trying to sound calm. “Just because I’m concerned, that doesn’t mean I’m not—”

He breaks off as Miaow trudges by, looking persecuted, to disappear into the kitchen. By the time Rafferty has thought of something to say so she won’t think she interrupted something he didn’t want her to hear, she’s come back out with a can of Diet Coke and a plastic bag filled with slices of sour green mango with chili and salt that Rose bought from a street vendor. She holds it up, more as a point of information than a question, and disappears again. Sure enough, she’s wearing one of the loose, shapeless shirts she borrows from Rafferty after school.

“It’s a good thing I’ve got a lot of shirts,” Rafferty calls after her, getting three or four muttered syllables in response. “I probably shouldn’t talk about that,” he says to Rose. “Or should I? What’s the protocol?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.” At long last, Rose looks at him, but she’s giving him the glassy eyes that mean she’s thinking and he knows she’s not listening to him. Then she focuses on his face and says, “I want a TV.”

Rafferty says, “Excuse me?”

“A television,” Rose says. “I want a television.”

“Me, too,” Miaow says from the hallway.

“Are you listening?”

“No.”

“Good, because I’m not buying a—”

“
Everybody
has a TV,” Miaow says, coming into the room with the plastic bag looped over her index finger and a piece of reddipped mango in her other hand. Rafferty’s shirt hangs loosely enough that, he thinks, Andrew could fit inside it, too.