For the Dead (2 page)

F
OR WHAT SEEMS
like the second time in an instant, Miaow sits up. The coolness of her forehead tells her she’s been perspiring in spite of the single lightweight sheet that covers her.

She hears herself panting. Her heart sounds a quicker-than-normal rhythm in her ears, muffled as a drum in a distant room. But everything she’s looking for right now is
here
, it’s all here, after all: her dresser, her closet door framing the pale ghosts of her clothes, the rectangular blotches that represent her paintings and drawings. So even though the room is so dark she hates it, hates the paint she made Poke choose nine weeks ago, still, she
is
in her
room, which means that she was only dreaming that she woke up before.

When her bed was on the sidewalk. Crowded, like most Bangkok sidewalks, dusk but not yet dark: bat-time, mosquito-time, evening crowd-time, people pushing their way around the bed without noticing what it was, without seeing her as she sat bolt upright with the sheet clutched to her chest. Trying to hide the dirty T-shirt, the ragged shorts, the blackened feet and scabby knees, the grimy nails, dark skin, snotty upper lip, and tangled hair of a street child.

They flowed around her like water around a stone, as though she were something of no value, not worth a glance. But
dirty
. A few women tugged at their skirts or moved their purses from one arm to another, as though they were afraid something might hop on them from the filthy child, lost in the bed in the middle of the sidewalk.

The filthy child. The impoverished, lice-ridden, terrified child she has tried so frantically to leave behind. The child no one at her fancy school knows she ever was.

Miaow realizes she’s clenching the bottom sheet in her hand, so hard her forearm is cramping. She releases the cloth, flexes her fingers, and picks up her pillow. She stands it on end in her lap and puts both arms around it, hugging it to her. It’s not enough. She thinks about going into the other room to crawl in between Poke and Rose as they mumble permission they won’t remember in the morning.

She hasn’t done that in
years
.

But she hasn’t had this dream in years, either. It’s been five years now since she was seven or eight and couldn’t read and didn’t know her full name, and they took her off the sidewalk and put her in this safe little box eight stories up. Wrapped a life around her, a life she hadn’t even known how to imagine.

Why dream it now?

She could talk about it tomorrow at school with Andrew, she
thinks, except that Andrew doesn’t know she was ever a street child, and anyway he’s so
boy
. Dreams and feelings don’t interest him. He lives in that strange boy world where the only things that matter are the things you can see in hard light, the things you can bump into and measure and argue about: “It’s not yellow, it’s green, and if it were yellow, it would be a statistical improbability.” If you said, “It
feels
green,” he’d snort. Her least favorite thing about Andrew is his snort.

She has to learn to
manage
him, she thinks, the way Rose manages Poke. Rose has gotten Poke, well, maybe not to
accept
that everything she believes in is real, but at least to acknowledge that it’s all in the room with them—the wonderful Rose-cloud of feelings and hopes and memories and beliefs and dreams. The maybes, the what-ifs, the wouldn’t-it-be-fines, the ghosts and the spirits of place. If Poke were to draw a map of their apartment, he’d probably find a way to put it in.

And Rose would tell him he got the color wrong.

The same way
she
did, Miaow did, in this room. Picked a color so dark she can barely see her own feet. So here she is, wide awake in a room that’s way too dark, and they’re in there, sound asleep.

But still, there are walls around them, keeping out everything that’s not-them. In a few hours it’ll be light and they’ll all say hello to one another again and pass one another in the rooms and the hallway, surrounded by the smell of Poke’s stupid coffee, and—and—they’ll
fuel up
from one another before they go out into the day.

She hugs the pillow closer. Everything is fine. She’s here to stay.
They’re
here to stay. She’s got school, she’s got a few friends, she’s got Andrew, such as he is. The filthy child has been left far, far behind. Everything is fine.

So why did she have that dream again? Without thinking, she glances at the clock. It’s 2:51
A.M.

T
WO FIFTY-ONE A.M.

The clouds, lighted pearl from beneath, are impaled like a tent on the tall buildings.

Soft rain creates misty orange halos around street lamps. The narrow
soi
gleams almost empty at this hour except for the two black SUVs following the shining path laid down by their headlights. The leading SUV brakes in preparation for a turn, and almost simultaneously the brake lights blink red on its twin, following three meters behind.

Half a block ahead, to their left, a driveway slopes downward beneath one of Bangkok’s newest and most architecturally wrongheaded condominium extravaganzas, an exercise in eccentric, asymmetrical solid geometry clad in a hammer-dimpled shell of titanium. This reflective surface, more than a vertical acre of it, bounces the heat and light from the afternoon sun directly into the shops, offices, and dwellings across the street, making them blindingly bright and raising temperatures into the nineties on the Fahrenheit scale, despite aggressive air conditioning. That entire side of the street had banded together to complain.

That entire side of the street had been told, with exquisite politeness, to stop complaining

As the lead SUV nears the building, a heavy steel accordion
gate at the bottom of the sloping driveway clatters into motion and begins to slide aside. Neither driver signals a turn.

The first SUV slows to a creep, the driver trying to avoid scraping the vehicle’s undercarriage as it starts its descent. The man in the backseat does not like to hear the undercarriage scrape.

As the vehicle glides into the garage, the lights carve ten thousand ice-blue diamonds from the beads of rain on the polished black surfaces of the roof and hood. The driver has already turned off the windshield wipers, it having been forcefully stated by the man in the backseat that running the wipers inside the garage, when there’s no water to remove, creates unsightly streaks of black rubber on the windshield, made of a very expensive polycarbonate compound that can repel slugs fired from a handgun, up to and including a .44 magnum.

The two vehicles coast to a stop near a brightly lighted polished-concrete pillar the size of the average studio apartment that houses two steel-doored elevators beneath multiple security cameras. Upstairs, in the reinforced security bunker behind the door at the rear of the lobby, the SUVs have been visible on wall-mounted flatscreens since they made their turn into the driveway, although neither of the uniformed men in the room has said anything. Now the front passenger door of the second SUV opens, and a man climbs out and moves around the car, glancing in all directions. Another man gets out of the first SUV, dressed, like the first, all in black. They separate, circling the vehicles to survey the garage. Each wears a low-slung holster on his hip, his right hand resting on the grip of an automatic pistol. In thirty seconds, they’re back in position, beside the SUVs.

The first man out of the car goes to the elevator and pushes the call button. Behind him, a third black-clad man descends from the backseat of the lead SUV and does yet another visual check of the garage before he joins the others.

The elevator car arrives, and the man standing in front of it steps back and pulls out his weapon. He turns, and makes the
okay
sign: it’s empty. He puts out an arm to keep the doors from closing.

One of the two men outside the elevator hurries to the first SUV, pulls open the rear door, and takes a deferential step back. A short, bulky man in jeans and a thin, soft, satin-shiny black leather jacket emerges. He has pitted skin, oiled hair, a wide nose, and the bunched mouth of someone who’s just tasted something bitter when he expected sweet. The men with him scramble into a loose formation, one on either side, and the tight-faced man leads them to the elevator. As the doors close behind all of them, the drivers move the SUVs into the shadows.

In the security bunker behind the lobby, two uniformed guards sit in wheeled chairs. On one of the screens they face—more than a dozen of them in all, ranging across the wall in front of the guards—the men from the garage crowd into the elevator. The silence of the security bunker is broken as one of the office chairs slides backward a foot, and the guard who is in it—who had been sitting slumped forward—falls facedown, striking his chin on the edge of the control console. His neck bends bonelessly as his head snaps back, and when he hits the floor, his head is cocked so acutely it rests on his left shoulder. The other guard does not react. The room is silent except for the slow, dripping sound of fluid hitting carpet after it falls from the dangling hand of the seated guard.

Upstairs, the three men in front fan out into the hallway. One of them waits for the man inside while the others hurry to a door halfway down on the right, unlock it, and go in, fast. About thirty seconds later, one of them sticks his head out. “Clear,” he says. The sour-faced man and his companion trudge down the hall and into the apartment.

The front door opens into an enormous room, cream-carpeted, that ends in floor-to-ceiling draperies hanging over the external wall, which is all glass. The furniture is heavy and ornate, lots of gilt wood and marble, the kind of decor associated with Saudi royalty.

One of the guards goes toward the back of the apartment. Another remains in the open doorway, and the third trails behind the bulky man in the black leather jacket as he heads for a small flat-screen display on a table against the left wall.

The bulky man says, impatiently, “Come on, come on.” The screen fills instantly with an image of the room they’re in, from a camera high on the back wall that’s pointed at the door they just came through. The bulky man says, loudly enough to be heard several rooms away, “We left at four twenty.”

The screen goes dark for a second and then fills again. It looks like the same shot, but there’s a time-code in the lower-right-hand corner that reads 16:20. The bulky man watches as the image flickers through almost ten hours of video in a little more than eight minutes. Nothing happens on the screen. No one comes through the door.

The bulky man grunts. His eyes are deeply sunk and rimmed with red from drinking. His oily, black-dyed hair begins well back on his head and ends in greasy curls at the collar of his shirt. The hair frames a smashed nose that looks like it’s taken a lot of blunt force, the small, bunched mouth, and three puffy chins. Three steel earrings glint in his left ear.

As the screen goes black, the bulky man turns away. One of the others is still standing in front of it, and another is standing in the door to the hallway. The third is in another room, where he has been operating the hidden hard drive with the security video on it.

“Tomorrow,” the bulky man says, his back to the door, heading toward the bar at the rear of the room. “Two o’clock.”

The guard standing in the front door opens his mouth wide, throws out one arm, and goes straight down, landing in a seated position and toppling sideways. At the sound of his body hitting the floor, the man standing at the screen turns quickly to see a man in tight black clothes topped by a snug hood that’s drawn down over his hair. His face is streaked diagonally with black but
otherwise uncovered. He brings up a stubby FN P90 compact submachine gun, braces it against his hip, and squeezes the trigger.

The sound seems to tear the room in half. The man in the black leather jacket, who moved very quickly at the first sound, is almost all the way to the bar by the time the man who has been shot crumples to the carpet. He dives behind the bar as the man in the doorway leaps across the room and disappears from sight into the back of the apartment—toward the closet that houses the hard drive. A moment later, the gun rattles again.

Crouching behind the bar, the man in the shiny black jacket yanks out a black automatic. He grips it in both hands and starts to rise, just far enough to get a quick look over the top of the bar, but the man with the submachine gun is back, raking the top of the bar with gunfire. The long white curtains hanging behind the bar are blown backward, and the floor-to ceiling windows behind them shiver into a million pieces and fall into the fog of the clouds. The curtains are sucked through the opening, billowing outward into the mist.

By now the man behind the bar is down on his stomach. He doesn’t see the one holding the machine gun go back into the hallway, doesn’t see him step back into the room, holding a bottle with a rag trailing from it. The man in the door lets the submachine gun dangle in its sling as he touches a disposable lighter to the tip of the rag. The rag ignites instantly. The man with the gun waits a long, relaxed second and pitches the bottle over the bar.

The space between the bar and the blowing curtains explodes into flame. A bloom of yellow fire rises above the top of the bar, and a hunched form, bent low and burning, charges around the end of the bar and into the room. Half-wrapped in flame, the man in the black jacket has his gun extended, but no one is there. Fire from his jacket licks at his face. The oil in his hair ignites, and he throws himself flat on the carpet, frantically rolling over and over again to extinguish the fire.

He rolls up against something.

It is the foot of the man with the submachine gun. He kicks the automatic out of the burning man’s hand and bends down, bringing his face close to that of the burning man.

The overhead fire sprinklers come on. The man on the carpet begins to steam. He and the man with the gun stare at each other through the falling water.

The man holding the gun says two words in Thai, words the burning man sees but doesn’t hear over the roaring in his ears. Straightening the gun, the man says two more words and pulls the trigger.