The Hot Countries (14 page)

Arthit says, “He did a lot of work to draw your attention to it.” Shaking his head, he picks up the card again and again reads it aloud. “
Where is she?
He wants millions of dollars. He wants Treasure, for some reason. He's saying he'll do anything to get her.”

Rafferty says, “I have no idea how to deal with this.”

“Well,” Arthit begins, and then he tables what he was going to say. “Let's calm down for the moment. Here's what we've got. Using a coroner's picture of the boy and a description of Varney, we haven't found anyone who saw them together, and people would probably remember if they had, because that's a combination—adult foreign man and little Thai kid—that's not supposed to happen anymore, at least not in plain sight. But we do have two people who saw them a few feet away from each other for thirty seconds or so on the night the boy was killed.”

“Where were they?”

“Silom end of Patpong. One of them was on door duty at the Thigh Bar, down near the end, and the other was a vendor, practically at the beginning of the street. She also saw—the vendor, I mean—she saw Varney leaving Patpong, on the run, the night you chased the kid. He took off in one direction and the kid in another, a couple beats later.”

“He was heading for the empty bar,” Rafferty says. “He ran the sidewalk on Silom and then turned left up Patpong 2.”

“Probably waited with the kid until you came out of the bar, told him to count to ten or something, and took off to get to the bar ahead of you.”

Rafferty says, “Did anyone on Patpong 2 see him go into the bar? When I got there, I saw a woman from—”

“The Star of Light,” Arthit says. He touches three or four pieces of paper and pulls one toward him. “She's trying to quit smoking, and everyone inside was puffing away, so she went out for some air just as he charged past Foodland and into the alley. She couldn't describe him, except to say he had dark hair, because he was practically past her by the time she saw him, but who else could it have been? Anyway, about a minute later the kid streaked across the street and into the alley, and then she saw someone whom she described very accurately as you.”

“She didn't wonder what a
farang
and a little boy were doing in a closed bar?”

“She did, actually, but one of her regulars showed up right after you left and dragged her inside with him, and then it got busy. She quit at two and went home, didn't think about it again until the next morning. When she heard the news, to her credit, she called the cops.” He puts down the sheets of paper and paws through some others. “So four hours after Varney and the kid went into the bar, the Foodland manager calls the cops and the fire department. Our guys showed up first.”

Rafferty gets up, just to move. At the far end of the table, he picks up one of the fish traps and turns it over in his hand, looking down at it but barely seeing it. “All this happens in that half of Patpong 1. That's the end I come in on, when I go in at all. He may not know where I live, but he knows what direction I come from. Oh, and besides the kid, there's the bar worker he had following me. I only really saw her once, the first night I met Varney, and she had so much makeup on over that birthmark that it was hard to see what she really looked like or how old she was. Christ, if someone else hadn't spotted her, by now I'd be wondering if her birthmark was makeup, too.”

“Who spotted her, and where?”

“Ladyboy named Betty from King's Corner. Saw her going into Cowgirl. I was going to go back for her Saturday night, but I had to get home. And if she's the one who made the phone call to Foodland, I don't think she's got much of a future.”

Arthit says, “Give me a better description.” He writes as Rafferty talks. When he's finished, he says, “We'll scoop her up tonight.” He looks up and asks, “Why does he want Treasure?”

“I don't know,” Rafferty says. “Maybe that thing about her living with him if anything happened to her father was more than just talk. Maybe Murphy
promised
her to him.” He sits back, blinking. “Or maybe she's Murphy's heir. Maybe he sees her as the way to get his hands on her father's estate.”

The two of them silently think about that for a moment. Rafferty says, “Maybe, to look at the worst possibility I can think of, maybe Varney inherits if anything happens to her. And it could be a lot. A guy with three million in his closet might have money salted away all over the place.”

“Well,” Arthit says, “he's not going to get her.” He pushes his chair back as though he's going to stand, but instead he sighs and sits still, his eyes on the rows of paper. “I'm going to work on this, unofficially,” he says, “and it's all I'm going to do. The one good thing about being banished to the Nowhere Station is that I'm out from under Thanom's nose.” Thanom is the superior officer who is embarrassed that Arthit saved his career. “So you and I will be holding hands, so to speak. And I know one or two other former cops whose services I can borrow to supplement your pair of hit men.”

He gets up, and the two men face each other over the table. Rafferty says, “
Former
hit men.”

“If you say so.” Arthit holds up the card again. “I'd like Anna not to know for the time being that Varney wants Treasure. I'm going to put one of those cops on this house to reinforce your whatever-he-is when the girls are here, but I don't want them to know about it.” He returns the card to the table
and reaches for a sheet of paper that's at arm's length. “One more thing,” he says, “just as a point of information. The vendor at the end of Patpong who saw Varney near the boy that night? She says Varney had a little camera and he took a couple of pictures, just before he ran off. He was pointing it up Patpong, which is to say toward you.”

“Taking pictures of me,” Rafferty says. “Why?”

“To give to someone you don't know?” Arthit suggests. “Might be another indication that he knew even then that he was going to kill the boy and he'd need to give a picture to someone else, someone you wouldn't recognize, so he or she could follow you.”

“Maybe a
bunch
of people I don't know,” Rafferty says. Then he says, “I'll feel a little better when you find that bar girl.”

15

I Need the World to Hold Still

The rain, which
had lightened on Sunday, has returned, bringing the wind along as an extra dividend. Rafferty's cheap umbrella has already been yanked inside out, so he tucks it under his arm on Arthit's front porch and resigns himself to getting wet.

He stands just far enough from the curb to be visible to the morning's oncoming traffic and raises the useless umbrella to flag a cab. There's a pothole about three feet in front of him, and a surprising number of cars manage to hit it as they go past, throwing a shin-high wave of oily water in his direction. He barely notices, just keeps waving his skeletal umbrella at the slow-moving stream of traffic and thinking about what he can and can't do.

One thing he
knows
he can't do is find Varney, if the man doesn't want to be found. Bangkok is just too big and too full of trapdoors and obscure corners. Arthit has put out a request for Varney's immigration paperwork, but they both doubt that it will contain any information about where Varney is or who he might actually be.

But Varney
needs
to talk to Rafferty. If Rafferty had gone in, that boy—

He shuts the thought down, blinking against the force of it, but it won't stay down. The boy
what
? Would be alive? Maybe, maybe not. Varney probably would have sent the kid away so he could make his demands without witnesses or just beat Rafferty half to death to get the information out of him. Up until now the man has done nothing in front of witnesses. The two of them have said something like four sentences to each other. Varney has made his demands through those anonymous notes, with nothing to link him to them except the boy.

So maybe he would have killed the boy later to eliminate the connection. And maybe not.

The boy had been seen too often. Varney must have been planning to replace him. Why else take the picture? Arthit's right—it had to be so someone new could spot Rafferty, someone waiting at the Silom end of Patpong with a photo in his hand. Maybe as a replacement for the other person who knows Varney, the bar worker with the loopy curls. He has an impulse to cross his fingers for her.

All that effort so Varney can find Poke. He
needs
to find Poke.

All right, then, Poke will make sure Varney can find him. That seems to mean hanging around Patpong.

A cab splashes to a stop in front of him. He gets in and says, “Patpong.”

“Is morning,” the driver says, in English, pulling into traffic. “Nothing open.”

“I'm sorry,” Rafferty says, wringing out the cuffs of his pants. “I was thinking out loud. Silom Soi Pipat.”

They inch forward in silence for a moment or two, and the driver says, in Thai, “I hope that was a cheap umbrella.” His eyes find Rafferty in the mirror to see whether he's been understood.

“Two hundred baht,” Rafferty says, in Thai.

“Probably you could have gotten it for a hundred and twenty,” the driver says, nodding agreement with himself. “It's cheap, so you'd still be wet, but for eighty baht you could buy a towel.” He accelerates briefly and then brakes again, and Rafferty realizes it's going to be stop-and-start all the way home. “You want a girl?”

“I have one.”

“Then why did you want to go to Patpong?”

“I didn't. It was a mistake.”

“Patpong is always a mistake. Your girl, she's Thai?”

“Yes.”

“Only one?”

“One is all I want.”

Since they're not moving anyway, the driver turns partly around to take a look at the
farang
who only wants one woman. “How long?”

“Almost seven years.”

“Married?”

“With a daughter.”

“Good man,” the driver says. “She can cook?”

“Who? The wife or the daughter?”

“Either one.”

“Neither of them. They're good at getting things out of the refrigerator, but that's about it.”

The driver sighs and fiddles with his window. “Must be beautiful, then.”

“They are. Both of them. Smart and good-hearted, too.”

“Those are important,” the driver says. “But cooking matters.”

Rafferty says, “Bangkok is full of food.”

The driver sees daylight opening up ahead and sprints toward it. “You're a lucky man.”

“I am,” Rafferty says, and he thinks,
Time to move Rose and Miaow
.

Anna realizes her mistake the moment she, Treasure, and Chalee walk into Boo's office, which they're still using as a classroom. She shouldn't have let the girls wear their new clothes. The kids in this room have never worn anything new in their lives. Compared to them, Chalee and Treasure look like they're walking the red carpet.

Despite her efforts to get out of the house in time, they've arrived a few minutes late, so the other students are already in their seats when she follows the two girls in. Every eye in the room is wide, pasted to the bright new blouses. The store-fresh, unwrinkled jeans. The clean, unscuffed shoes. Most of these kids have spent their lives in mismatched flip-flops.

Anna can't hear the silence in the room, but she sees that no mouths are moving, although many are hanging open. She watches the blood mount in Chalee's face as she feels the attention being directed at her. Treasure seems oblivious. She has not allowed anyone but Dok and Chalee to get close to her. She's so separate from the others that she might as well exist three or four seconds in advance of them, as though if they reached out to touch her, she wouldn't be there anymore. Anna sees this attitude as a survival mechanism from Treasure's years in her father's house.

Treasure pauses just inside the room with the check-everything alertness she's demonstrated since she heard about Varney, and then goes in, surrounded by her invisible walls. A couple of girls snicker at the garish blouse Chalee bought. Treasure brushes past Tip, the boy with the crush on her, ignoring his smile as if the only one in the room she sees is Dok. She slows as she approaches Dok's chair, but he avoids her eyes, and she quickens her pace again to get to her seat in the front right corner of the room, where Dok and Chalee can keep the others away from her.

Anna sees Chalee follow Treasure in, her feet dragging in her bright new shoes, her eyes on the floor.

One of the boys puts two fingers to his mouth and makes a sound that Anna thinks must be a shrill whistle. Chalee straightens, and her face stiffens. A few other boys laugh, but the girls are silent. One of them reaches up and tugs at Chalee's borrowed blouse, but when Chalee pauses and glances down, the girl drops the cloth and wipes her hand on her own T-shirt.

In order to get to her seat, Chalee, like Treasure, has to pass Dok. Dok, still angry about their disagreement, pulls his chair back a few inches as though to avoid being touched, and Chalee stops. Her chin dimples with the effort it takes to keep her lips pressed together as she stares down at Dok, who turns his head away from her. She looks around the classroom and finds everyone occupied with something else. When no one will return her gaze, she turns at last to Anna, searching her face for something. Whatever it is, she doesn't see it, and she lowers her eyes to break the connection and picks once, twice, at Treasure's new blouse with the blue anchor on it. Then her face crumples and she whirls around and pushes past Anna, out of the room.

Treasure waves an arm to draw Anna's eyes. “Let her go,” Treasure says, even before Anna realizes that she'd been turning to follow Chalee. “What can you tell her?”

Dok pushes his chair back and stands. He says, “She's
still
my friend,” and he's out and through the door in almost no time.

Anna feels like she's walked into a wall. The new clothes were a spotlight; Chalee had gone home with Anna on a Friday and returned on Monday wearing an outfit that cost more money than most of these children have ever had, clothes that announce as clearly as a trumpet fanfare that a change has taken place, that life will be different for Chalee now. Accidentally, Anna has built a wall between Chalee and the others. The children have always felt that Treasure was an exotic, a migrating bird that wouldn't be with them long, but Chalee was—
had
been—one of them.

And, of course, she still will be. Treasure will be gone, but Chalee will still be here. Homeless, with her useless new clothes. She won't even have anyplace to keep them.

Anna feels a hot wave of shame rise within her. As it heats her face, she feels Treasure's eyes on her from the corner. The girl's gaze is remote and empty of emotion or even curiosity. She's simply assessing Anna's reaction.

There's only one thing to do. She has a classroom of children waiting, most of whom have normal hearing while some are hearing-impaired. She walks to the whiteboard and waves up the child who can sign to the others. “Neung,” she says, steadying her voice. She picks up a marker for the whiteboard. “Please come up and sign for me.”

When Neung is halfway to Anna, Treasure shoves the girl aside, on her way out of the room.

Normally when Rose
is on the couch, Rafferty sits on the white leather hassock, now stuffed with Murphy's cursed money, so he can look across the glass table at her. But for this conversation, he wants to be beside her, preferably touching her. So he has his hand resting on her thigh when she says, in Thai, “How good a hotel?”

“First-rate,” he says. “Four stars.” No response. “Five?”

She lifts her chin, almost never a good sign. “I wanted my mother to come down.”

Rafferty nearly groans; they'd talked about it, but it's slipped his mind entirely. He says, “We'll get her a room, too.”

“How nice,” Rose says. She takes a strand of hair and winds it tightly around her finger, watching it with what seems to be fascination. “Maybe we'll be on the same floor.” She gives the hair a yank and says, “I don't suppose you'd like to explain it to me.”

It takes him off guard, and he says, “I can't believe I haven't.” He's about to go on, but she lifts a hand that says,
Stop
.

“This is the wrong time to uproot us,” Rose says. She pats the air with her hand to indicate that he's to let her finish. “I don't bother you with this very often, but right now I need to be sure of things. I need the world to
hold still
. I get up every morning and think a
bout the baby, looking at the place it will be born into. When we're talking to each other, I'm thinking about the baby, how you'll feel about everything when he—she—they are here. When I'm with Miaow, I'm wondering what kind of a sister she'll be for the baby. When we're watching TV, I'm wondering whether the baby can hear all that English so it can learn two languages at the same tim
e.” She brings an index finger up and blots beneath her eyes. “And what it's all really about is keeping the baby
safe
, and here you are—”

“You don't
bother
me with it?” Rafferty sits forward, trying to see into her eyes. “Don't you think I do the same thing? Maybe not as much as you do, but every day—”

“But here we are,” Rose says. “And you're asking us to move.”

“I'm frightened,” he says. “You know that I don't usually waste time getting frightened, but right now I'm scared to death.”

She pulls her leg out from beneath his hand, her arms crossed tightly over her belly, gazing down at her lap. The space that opens between them seems to be filled with clear, cold air. Through the sliding glass door to the balcony, clouds, edged here and there with pewter, glower sullenly at him, but Rafferty can see just
the top half of the door from the couch because of the big flat-screen, which continually surprises Rafferty by its presence in the room. The apartment is quiet in the way it is only when Miaow isn't in it.

Rafferty says, “I want you and Miaow out of here.” He tells her about Varney, about the demands for Murphy's money and Treasure, and about the boy's death. “He doesn't know where we live,” he says, “but I don't think that's going to last very long.”

Rose says nothing.

“I can call your mother,” he says.

She waves it away. “She's not the problem. The baby is the problem, Poke, because that's what I
do
now, I think about the baby.”

Rafferty's cell phone rings.

With what sounds like resignation, Rose says, “Answer it.”

“I don't want to answer—”

“Does that mean that you know what you want to say to me?” Now she's looking straight at him. “After what I just said?”

“It's complicated.”

She gets up. “Answer the phone.”

The display reads
arthit
. Rafferty gets up and says, “Hey.”