For the Dead (20 page)

“Half a minute,” he says, turning on the burner and feeling useful at last.

There are mornings, Rafferty thinks, that Rose is actually still asleep for the first ten or fifteen minutes she’s moving around. This seems to be one of them. She rests one hand on the counter, dead center in a spill of maple syrup, her eyes half closed, just staring at the teapot. As he measures out the Nescafé, he sees her lift her hand from the counter, look down at it, sniff her fingers, and then lick the syrup off them.

“Pancakes?” he says.

She says, “Coffee.”

“Got it.” He pours water in, gives it the approved triple-stir, and hands it to her.

She says, “Miaow?”

“In her room.”

“Mmmmm,” she says, but it’s in response to the taste of the coffee. She blinks a couple of times, swallows again, and says, “She’ll come out.”

“Women are harder on women than men are.”

“I won’t argue with that.” She looks down into the cup, says, “More, please,” and drains it. When he’s taken the cup from her hand, she trails an index finger through the spill of syrup, licks it again, and says, “I’m going to whisper now.”

“Hang on.” He’s scooping the spoon through the Nescafé again. “Either that or come over here and whisper.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“You sure you don’t want to try my coffee?”

“How long have we been together?”

“Five years? Six?”

“Have I ever wanted to try your coffee?”

“No.”

“Well,” she says, “thank you for thinking I’m capable of changing.”

He hands her the cup. She takes a long pull, squinting at him through the steam, and whispers, “We need to get a bigger apartment.”

“For whom? Is your mother coming? I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“Not for my mother. For—” She pats her belly.

He says, “That’s nine months—wait. Are you seriously telling me you’re going to sleep in a different room from—you know, the, ummm—” He puts a palm on her stomach, and she covers it with her hand and presses it gently against her, and his knees go a little rubbery. Her skin always seems to him to be a different temperature than anyone else’s.

“No,” she says. “But you may want to.”

“I’m probably flattering myself,” Rafferty says, sliding his hand over the smooth plane of her belly, “but I think we’re in this together.”

“And then, later,” Rose says. She takes his hand and lifts it to her face and presses her cheek against his palm. “We’re not going to put the baby into Miaow’s room.”

“That’s
two years
from now.”

“And we have all this money,” Rose says. She nips the tip of his little finger with a sleepy amusement in her eyes that suggests they might be a moment or two away from going back to bed.

He’s leaning forward to kiss her when Miaow comes out of the hallway, glances at them the way Rafferty might locate something he doesn’t want to trip over, and opens the refrigerator.

“And,” Rose says in a normal tone of voice, “the television is too big for this apartment.”

Watching Miaow’s rigid back as she pulls out a can of Diet Coke, Rafferty says, “Then let’s get rid of the television.”

Miaow leaves the kitchen with the refrigerator door wide open. Her bedroom door closes.

Rose gives the refrigerator door a push and says, “She’s definitely going to want her own room.”

Rafferty’s cell phone rings on the counter. A man’s voice says, “This is Nguyen. We need to talk.”

A
NNA IS MASSAGING
Arthit’s back on the bed, using her left elbow to torment one of the muscles that’s in spasm, when the phone rings. Grateful for the interruption, he starts to get up.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“My phone.”

“Let it ring.”

“It might be something important.”

“Your back is important,” she says.

“It’ll wait.” The phone is on the dresser, and the display says THANOM.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sorry to bother you on the weekend,” Thanom says.

The new Thanom, equipped with apologies and what seems
like a genuinely uncertain tone, makes Arthit uneasy. “Not a problem.”

“I need to put you on identifying the killers. The men on the phone.”

“I haven’t seen the men on the phone.”

“Doesn’t matter. I want you to work back from the victims.”

Arthit says, “Which victims?”

“The victims the killer described in the video. The ones he was avenging.”

Arthit allows himself to grin at the phone. “I don’t know what he said.”

“You don’t? You mean Dr.— Dr.—”

“Chaibancha.”

“Yes, thank you. Dr. Chaibancha didn’t tell you what he said?”

“You ordered her not to.”

Arthit can almost see his boss glaring at the phone, chewing on his lower lip and weighing the probability that he’s being made fun of. “I order people to do a lot of things,” Thanom finally says. “That doesn’t mean they do them.”

“Well,” Arthit lies, “she did.”

“What he said to Sawat was ‘Two women, three children.’ And the second time, to Thongchai, he said, ‘One woman, two children.’ ”

“Women and children. Got it.”

“I want you to find those murders in the database. There can’t be many with that precise victim count. You’ll probably know them when you see them. They’ll have something in common, something that points at Sawat.”

“Right.” Anna, who has been smoothing the covers on the bed, makes a rolling gesture with her hand that means
hurry up
.

Arthit holds up a hand. On the other end of the line, Thanom hasn’t even paused. “I’m arranging for you to use the computers at a station outside Bangkok. It’s a few hours’ drive, but no one will be looking over your shoulder. I’ll email you the information.”

Anna is watching him, her forehead furrowed in what looks like puzzlement. He feels the same expression on his own forehead and smoothes it out. “Yes, sir. Tomorrow?”

“First thing. And you’ll communicate with me only directly. No emails, no voice mails except to tell me to call you back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.”

As Arthit puts the phone down, Anna tilts her head slightly, a question.

“I have the feeling,” Arthit says, “that I’m being gotten out of the way.”

B
OO
’
S OFFICE OCCUPIES
a windowless corner in an unpainted concrete building that adjoins Father Bill’s First Home center for Bangkok’s homeless children. The office isn’t much—its third and fourth walls are a pair of white screens loaned by the same hospital that furnishes the hospital bed and the almost-nurse—but there are still days, after all his years on the street, when he can’t believe it’s his.

He has a small desk and three chairs—reserving the comfortable one for himself—plus an ancient, cracked-screen laptop and a broken table fan that he keeps on top of the desk because he thinks it makes him look prosperous. Behind the desk is a wheeled whiteboard that’s supposed to be filled with to-do lists, but kids come in when he’s not here and decorate it with doodles.

He’s no longer the sullen, amphetamine-addicted street child whom Miaow dragged home to Rafferty, trying to repay him for having protected her when she was left on the sidewalk to live or die. He’s tall and handsome now, with shining shoulder-length hair and an effortless air of competence. After years of commanding street gangs and then helping other street children escape the sidewalks, he’s now—at the age of sixteen—been given probationary control of a rundown, dirty, badly ventilated building, two stories high and swarming with mice, that adjoins First Home,
a substantial shelter and school that feeds and educates Thailand’s poorest children.

Father Bill, the priest who runs First Home with Old Testament firmness, regards Boo as an experiment, the goal of which is to find a way to open his sanctuary to some of Bangkok’s more dangerous street kids—kids who have stayed alive by committing occasionally violent crimes. In the ten months Boo has been here, he’s had as many as thirty kids sleeping in the building at a time, boys downstairs and girls on the second floor. So far only nine of them have made it into First Home.

Boo worries about the kids, but he’s worried about himself, too. A couple of years ago, he rescued a 17-year-old girl named Da who had been put on the street by a high-ranking gangster to beg. At the last moment, the gangster had handed Da an infant—women with babies earn more—so when Boo snatched her from the gang, he took the baby, too. And now, he supposes, they’ve become a family. He’s being paid almost nothing at First Home, but he and Da and the child need every penny of it.

Which makes him even more anxious that in the ten months since Father Bill gave him the space and the opportunity to prove himself, more than half of the kids Boo has lassoed into staying there have melted back onto the streets, and most of the others have accepted the meals and the bed but declined the school and the other activities that the priest regards as minimum commitments for formal admission to First Home. Sooner or later, these kids disappear, too. Boo is on trial.

And now this.

The young black American woman sitting opposite him is not coping well with the heat; the underarms of her short-sleeved blouse are soaked, and a bead of sweat wobbles at the tip of her nose. Boo wouldn’t dream of laughing at her, though; he admires
Khun
Katherine far too much for that. She came all the way from America to work with Father Bill’s castaway kids, and no one puts in longer days than she does.

“She’s out of danger,” Katherine says in her slow, careful, badly pronounced Thai. He could speak English to her, but she insists on Thai, and she’s gotten better even in the time Boo has been here. She’s taken the chair closest on the other side of the desk, having been in the office often enough to avoid the one that wobbles. “Her fever is gone, her vital signs are good. She might even have gained a little weight. If she’d chew and swallow something, we wouldn’t have to keep her attached to the IV. There’d be no reason for her to stay in that hospital bed.”

“Except that there’s nowhere else,” Boo says.

“You can’t keep her sedated and handcuffed forever.”

“She’s tried to harm herself. And
has
hurt others. She gouged the faces of the two guys who brought her in.”

“I walked her to the bathroom this morning,” Katherine said.

He blinks. “You should have asked me.”

“She had to
go
, Boo. The boy was there, so I couldn’t give her the bedpan.”

“What boy?”

“That sweet little one with the awful teeth.”

Boo thinks for a moment. “Noo.”

“That’s not what his girlfriend calls him. Noo? You mean, like
rat
? What a terrible nickname.”

Boo puts his elbows on his desk and rubs his eyes. There’s no point in pretending he understands anything she’s saying. “His girlfriend?”

“The one who was with him when he found the patient.”

“Chalee,” Boo says. “She calls him Dok. So, you couldn’t use a bedpan because Dok was in the room. Why were Dok and Chalee in—”

“They’re always in there.”

“They’ve been skipping school?” Classes are offered six days a week, including Saturday.

“They take turns. The one who goes catches the other one up. Did you know that Chalee can draw?”

“What? Who cares?” He pauses. One of Katherine’s responsibilities is the relationship between Father Bill and the hospital that donates medical supplies and the beds; there’s no point in alienating her. “Has—has she talked to them?”

“No. But she likes them.”

“You don’t know that. All you know is that she hasn’t tried to kill them yet.”

“She lets Dok sleep on the bed.”

Boo brings his palms down on the desk. The noise is louder than he expected it to be. “Why don’t I know about this?”

“They’ve been with her practically ever since she—”

“They’re spending the
night
in her room? I do a bed check every night, and they’ve been here.”

“You thought they were here the night they found her, too,” Katherine says, and then she laughs, and, after a second, Boo joins in.

“They’re with her now?”

“Always,” Katherine says patiently. “That’s why I couldn’t use the bedpan. And I wanted to take her for a walk.”

“So you unhandcuffed her, too. She might have hurt you.”

“She was calm,” Katherine says. “She’s better with women.”

“She’s better with women,” Boo repeats mechanically, but he’s thinking,
She was calm?
“You talked to her?”

“Sure. All the way to the bathroom and back. All she did was look around. She sniffed the air a few times, like an animal.”

“And then you handcuffed her again. She didn’t fight you?”

“She put her arms on the railings of the bed and looked at the ceiling. She doesn’t need to be in a hospital bed, although she won’t want to part with Dok and Chalee.”

“But she won’t
eat
. And how can you be sure she won’t hurt herself?”

“Boo, we need that bed. We have two sick kids inside the compound. I know you hate to lose any of them. But this girl is twelve or thirteen. She’s not an infant who can’t meet her own needs, she’s—”

“Meet her own needs? She won’t even eat.”

“She can’t get the care she needs here,” Katherine says. “Maybe she should go to an institution.”

Boo says, “I thought this was an institution.”

“Where she can get medical help. Emotional help. She hasn’t spoken a word, she won’t meet your eyes, she’s borderline suicidal, which is probably why she won’t eat. These aren’t the normal street-kid problems.”

“I’ve had kids almost this bad before,” Boo says, although it’s not actually true. “The best help for kids is other kids. She’ll stay here.” Katherine mops her forehead with the tail of her blouse, which is already soaked, and Boo watches her suffer the heat with a tiny bit of satisfaction. “But she needs the bed just a little longer. I can’t trust her around the other kids yet.”

“She’s getting along with—with Chalee and Dok.” Katherine puts her hands on the arms of her chair. “Come on. She’s awake now. The kids are with her. Just come take a look.”

Boo gets up unwillingly and follows her through the gap in the partitions that defines his doorway and across the boys’ dormitory—empty in the daytime and with blankets and sheets on only a melancholy seven cots—and out of the building. They’re no sooner in the blinding sunlight than Chalee almost runs into them, Dok hurrying just a few steps behind her.