The Hot Countries (28 page)

The boy called Beer limps forward and helps her up. She says, “You should be ashamed.” She holds out her palm, and the boy with the crimped head passes her a tight crumple of bills. She tucks them into the front of her dress, brushes cement dust from the black fabric, and looks down at Wallace.

“Long time ago,” she says in English, not even aware she's speaking it, “he was probably handsome man.” The boys are already filing out of the alley, and after a last downward look she follows.

Silence. A rat runs across the alley, pausing briefly beside Wallace and then careening away toward the street, but a foot or two from the entrance it makes a fast left and disappears. A man, bald, dressed in black, scuffs his way in, pausing for a second to give the alley a once-over, and then comes forward to stand above Wallace's body.

“You old clown,” Varney says. “You didn't even get laid.”

He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out something small and circular, a stiff piece of paper, then bends and slips it into Wallace's own shirt pocket. “Ahhh, well,” he declaims, turning. “‘He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.'”
He kicks a rock in front of him as he goes. “If I'm lucky
.”

A minute passes, maybe two. The rat reappears and saunters out through the mouth of the alley. The woman in the tight dress ducks back in, looking anxiously down the road in the direction Varney took. Reassured, she hurries to Wallace's side, kneels, and begins to fish in his pockets. She finds the circular piece of paper, glances at it, and puts it back. Picks up the wallet on the pavement and flips through it. Satisfied that it's empty and that nothing remains in his pockets, she lifts his left wrist and bends forward to peer at the Rolex.

“Fake,” she says, and Wallace groans.

She doesn't even remember straightening up and leaping backward, but the next thing she knows, her back is pressed against the side of the alley and she's trying to swallow a scream. But Wallace doesn't sit up. No spirit materializes above him. He just groans again, and the broken arm, partially bent at the elbow, slides a few inches over the gravel and dust of the alley floor.

The woman backs away toward the street, turning suddenly to make sure there's no one or nothing waiting behind her, and then she hurries onto the sidewalk. After a few quick steps, she slows, then slows again, then stops. She stands there, doing nothing. A passerby would probably say she's looking at her feet. Then she says, in English, “Shit,” and opens her purse to take out her cell phone.

29

It Doesn't Much Matter Who They Are

Hofstedler's sparse hair
stands out in stiff, thorny wisps, his eyes are crusted with sleep, and his pendulous lower lip is shaking, making him seem frail and infirm. It's 4:40
a.m.
, and the hospital's chalk-white light turns the veins at the sides of his forehead almost ink blue.

“I should have kicked his door down,” he says for the fourth or fifth time. “After you came to the bar tonight to tell us about that man, I should have kicked his door down. I knew he was in there.”

“It's not your fault, Leon,” Rafferty says, rubbing his face with the palms of both hands. “If it's anyone's, it's mine.”

“Why?” Hofstedler says. “You invited this man? No, he
came
, he was
looking
for you, and we all, all of us, we talked and
talked
about you, told him you would come some night. Like
children
we talked, happy for the attention. Happy someone was
interested
in us. Useless, stupid.
Quatschköpfe,
babbling old idiots.”

The room has pale gray walls, a scuffed brown tile floor, and, shoved up against one wall, six bolted-together plastic chairs in colors so bright they look angry. One of the room's doors, permanently open, leads to the hallway that connects to the hospital's entrance and public areas. The other door, permanently closed, seals off the secret chambers where the doctors perform their mysteries. Mounted on the wall opposite the chairs is a flat-screen TV, mercifully dark. Someone has cleaned it wrong, probably with ammonia, and the wet cloth has left long streaks that pull rainbows from the fluorescent light, like a film of oil on a puddle. Rafferty has been studying the rainbows off and on ever since he joined Hofstedler in this awful room. The rainbows offer Rafferty a kind of refuge from what's happened to Wallace.

“Come on, Leon,” Rafferty says, leading him toward the garish chairs. Despite his three hundred–plus pounds, Hofstedler follows with virtually no resistance; it's like towing a balloon. Rafferty gets him to the fire-engine-red chair at the left end of the row, and Hofstedler sits, although he seems barely to be aware he's doing it. He's blinking semaphores, his lower lip continuing its meaningless movements. Rafferty sits beside him and puts an arm around his mountainous shoulders, feeling the shivers running through his frame. Hofstedler has always seemed so solid, the boulder that anchored the entire structure of the Expat Bar, held it in place, and now he's a quivering old man, muttering in German.

“So,” Rafferty says, both to get it straight and also to try to bring Hofstedler out of himself, “some woman called the hospital and reported a
farang
who'd been beaten up, over near Petchburi, and when the ambulance crew got there—”

“Crews,” Hofstedler says. “Three of them. Competing, like always.”

“Okay, three. When they got—”

“They all wanted to be paid,” Hofstedler says, his voice finding support in his anger. “All three came to the hospital. Shouting for my money. This
city
,” he says. “Why am I in this city?”

“When they got him here, they found your phone number in his wallet?”

“Yes. And the picture of him, the one the police have now. You have not seen it, but it was taken in front of the bar. That swine cut his face out in a circle and put that piece in Wallace's pocket, but behind him you can see the Christmas lights in the window. Until they showed the picture to me, I thought he had been burglarized and beaten, but this photo comes from Varney. And also they found the number for Louis. They called Louis also.”

“Louis?” Rafferty says, and into the room comes the Growing Younger Man.

To Hofstedler the Growing Younger Man says, “How is he?” And then, “Hello, Poke.”

“Hey
 . . .
uh, Louis,” Rafferty says.

“How he
is
?” Hofstedler says, more loudly. “He is beaten and cut, broken
bones
he has, he does not talk, he does not open his eyes. How he is? He could be dying.”

“We don't know that, Leon,” Rafferty says. To the Growing Younger Man he says, “They're working on him.”

“When he's out of here,” the Growing Younger Man says, sitting in the chair next to Poke, “I'll put him on a regimen of holistic supplements, clean out his system. The stuff they give you in hospitals is poison.”

“You will give him your
 . . .
your
goofus dust
when
he is out of here?” Hofstedler says. “We will be lucky
if
he is out of here.” He leans forward, plants his palms on the edge of his chair, and lifts himself, with a grunt, to his feet. “This is too much,” he says as though to a large group of listeners. “It is not bad enough that we're old and foolish, that people think we are laughingstocks who have thrown our lives away so we can be old alone.” To Poke he says, “Do you know I'm alone now? Do you know that Nam-Fon has left me? Twenty years we are together, and now she
 . . .
she
 . . .
” He makes a violent sideways gesture with his arm, as though batting something away. “It is not good to be old alone. But this is not about me. This is about Wallace, this is about
us
. All of us. We are who we are. We will never be young again, but I will not let this man treat us so. I will
not
.”

His voice has increased in volume, and his face is reddening. Rafferty remembers his heart attack and starts to say something calming, but Hofstedler makes that same sideways arm sweep, knocking Rafferty's words into some imaginary corner. “Wallace is
 . . .
is a noble soul. He has been sad, a man of sadness, his whole life that I have known him, and he has been
dignified
in his sadness, he did not wrap himself in his sorrows like some romantic hero and
parade
in them like a black cape for everyone to say
aaawwwww
, and if my English sounds like a book, well, fuck the book and its mother. This
cannot
stand.”

Both Rafferty and the Growing Younger Man are on their feet now, trying to calm him, but Hofstedler is in full flood.

“I am swearing to you, Poke, that I will do what I can do, I mean
all
I can do, to help you stop this terrible man. We will all help, yes, Louis? All of us—Pinky, Bob, that man with the hair. We are not in the second childhood yet, are we? We can do something, we can think, we can have ideas, we know Bangkok better then he does, that swine. I know you, Poke. You will go
after
him, and you must let me help. You must let all of us help.”

“I'm in,” says the Growing Younger Man. “We're all—” And the door to the inner sanctum opens to admit a tired-looking doctor in his late thirties or early forties. He might be Indian, with deep, probably permanent, circles beneath his eyes, dark skin, and straight, thick, black hair bristling from beneath a plastic hairnet. There's a Japanese brushstroke of dried blood on the front of his scrubs.

“You're the one they called, is that right?” he says to Hofstedler. He speaks accented English.

“Me, too,” says the Growing Younger Man. Hofstedler, absolutely still, looks as though he's hanging by a string from the ceiling.

“Yes or no?” the doctor says impatiently.

“Yes, yes,” Hofstedler says, blinking in time to the words. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“Fine, I heard it the first time. Well, then, he'll be all right.”

Hofstedler makes a choking sound.

“He has a broken arm, which we've set and put in a cast, and two broken teeth we can't do anything about here. A dentist, later. What looks like a knife cut on the broken arm, which I've stitched up. The stitches are going to itch under the cast. And a concussion, certainly a concussion.”

Hofstedler says, “He is alive.” He seems to be unaware that he is weeping.

The doctor shakes his head impatiently. “Of course he's alive. Would I do all this to a dead man?”

Rafferty says, “Is he awake?”

“You're joking,” the doctor says. “I can't get him to go to sleep. He wants to go home.”

Hofstedler is still weeping, but somehow he's also smiling when he says, “This is not a good idea.” He sniffles hugely.

“No,” the doctor says. “We're going to keep him here for at least twenty-four hours to watch that concussion, make sure he's not bleeding in there, building pressure on the brain. One thing, though. I'm not sure he knows where he is. He couldn't tell me what year it is.”

“This is not new,” Hofstedler says, wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve. “He has trouble lately with
 . . .
with all that. That's why my phone number was in his pocket.”

The doctor narrows his eyes at Hofstedler. “Weren't you a patient here?”

“My heart,” Hofstedler says. “I am surprised you remember.”

The doctor gives him a sudden, broad smile. “You made a dramatic entrance. That squad of
katoey
who carried you in took over the whole hospital.”

Hofstedler says solemnly, “They are good friends.”

“We all need friends at times,” the doctor says. “Doesn't much matter who they are.”

Rafferty insists on
getting a cab and taking Leon home. He's afraid to leave him wandering around in Bangkok; the man's thought processes are erratic, and he seems unmoored. It's a surprise to Rafferty when the cab stops in front of a run-down four-story apartment house in a sketchy area, the kind of building that Bangkok developers demolish in their imaginations twenty times a day. The only other time he went to Leon's place, it was an expensive condominium near the river.

“This is where I am living now,” Hofstedler says, seeing the look on Rafferty's face. “I gave Nam-Fon, my wife, the condominium. She
 . . .
she cares where she lives. I do not.” He opens the door but doesn't get out. “It is— What time is it, Poke?

“Six twenty
a.m.
Where's your watch?” Poke has never seen Hofstedler without his three-pound Swiss watch.

“I forget,” Hofstedler says. “When the call comes, I can think only of Wallace.” He leans to one side as though about to climb out of the cab, but instead says, “Would you like some coffee, please? Maybe a sweet roll? I have sweet rolls—they are only two days old or maybe three.”

“I have to go home, Leon. I need to get cleaned up and drive Miaow to school. I can't let her take the bus now, not with—”

“Of course, of course,” Hofstedler says, nodding more often than is necessary.

“But I'll tell you,” Rafferty says, putting a hand on Hofstedler's arm, “the minute Wallace feels up to it, the three of us will go out for the best dinner in Bangkok.”

“This is good,” Hofstedler says, and he sits there gazing at nothing until the cabbie turns around to look at him. “Is good,” he says again. “Okay. I go home.” He grabs the edge of the open door and hauls himself out of the cab, then starts lumbering across the sidewalk.

“Can we go?” the driver says.

“Just a minute.” Hofstedler navigates the sidewalk and climbs the steps without mishap, but trying to fit his key into the door, he drops it. His shoulders sag. He gazes down at it so long that Rafferty starts to climb out, but then the big man bends down stiffly, picks up the key ring, and manages the lock. He disappears into the darkness of the hallway as the door slowly swings closed behind him, and then he's gone.

Rafferty says to the driver, “Have you ever wanted seriously to kill someone?”

The hotel is out of oranges, so Miaow is rolling into little balls the threads she's peeled from inside the skins of the tangerines that were sent as a substitute. Once they're rolled tightly, she flicks them at Rafferty. She has splendid aim; she's hit his nose twice, and one of the pellets is stuck to his right cheek. He can see it at the lower periphery of his vision, but she's so delighted that he lets her go on thinking he doesn't know it's there.

His cell phone rings as another fragrant little wad of tangerine thread hits the center of his forehead and bounces onto his plate. Miaow raises a single clenched fist and says, “Three points.”

He looks at the phone: Arthit. Getting up, he says to Miaow, “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” and then leaves her there, looking one-upped with another little tangerine ball in her hand, and takes the phone into the living room.

“Well,
this
is interesting,” Arthit says. “But is it too early for you?”

“I've been up since three.” Because he knows Miaow is listening, he gives Arthit a compressed and sanitized version of his evening, complete with the scrap of photograph in Wallace's pocket. Arthit says, “He shows up to go
boo
at you and goes after Wallace the same night. He knows he hasn't got much time. Despite all his posturing, you can't get away with this sort of wholesale mayhem, not in Bangkok.”