The Hot Countries (7 page)

But she could read him.

Hansum man
, Jah called him.
Teerak
, Jah called him, Thai for “sweetheart.”
Wallet
, Jah called him, and he'd thought it was a joke about his money until he realized that Thais can't pronounce a sibilant at the end of a word, and she was trying to say his name. He took to calling himself Wallet, appreciating its appropriateness even if Jah didn't understand it.

The airport's name nags at him.
Don Mueang? Do military flights come through Don Mueang?
It sounds wrong, but he shrugs it off, along with his shirt and trousers, and pads toward the shower.
The women may be professionals,
he thinks,
but they're still Thai, and Thais are clean. It shows respect when you come to them fresh from the shower.

He steps into the shower still wearing the cheap watch and sees it just as the stream of water hits it. In seconds he's out of the tiny stall, scrubbing at the watch with a graying towel, holding it up to see whether the second hand is still jerking forward in the one-second increments that mark the watch as a fake. He dries it a final time, puts it to his ear, and slips it back on his wet wrist, then sees what he's done and yanks it off again to pat the skin dry, and a few minutes later he's back on the bed, drying his shoulders and toweling away the drops of water that hit the top of his head. He checks the watch again, sees the second hand lurching from silver numeral to silver numeral, and asks himself,
Weren't these luminous?
Asks himself,
Wasn't “Rolex” written in gold?
What watch is this? How many of these has he bought since he lost the Rolex?

He leans back against the pillows, sees in his mind's eye the face, the hair, the timeworn, destroyed Wallace he'd seen in the mirror.
Jah
, he thinks.
She'd be seventy by now.
A kind of deep-sea pressure settles on him, squeezing out a long sigh. He hears Jah's laugh, as though she were in the living room.

The light in the living room is on. Wallace thinks,
Leon. Leon was here, wasn't he?
And then he pulls the thin blanket over himself and closes his eyes, and he's asleep.

7

A Rat on a Sharp Stick

“He's American,” Rafferty
says. “No regional accent, could be from anywhere.”

“We get about three-quarters of a million Americans every year,” Arthit says, rubbing his eyes. “And we've got another twenty, thirty thousand living here.” He's wearing an industrial-gray T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, baring short, hairy legs. It's Saturday, and he'd obviously planned to sleep in, although Anna has already left for the homeless-children's shelter. On Saturday she teaches her special class of nonhearing children. On the weekdays they're mixed in with those who can hear. Coffee is dripping in the kitchen, but Rafferty, who was up most of the night—stewing, as his mother would have said, in his own juices—has already downed a pot and a half and is feeling the persuasive, strumming adrenaline of anxiety.

Rafferty says, “Thank you for the statistics, but he's not like m
ost of the tourists and expats. He stands out. He's after the money, Arthit, Murphy's money. He tracked me down in that bar somehow and set the whole thing up. He was in the bar when I arrived last night, talking, of course. About ten minutes after I came in, he said he forgot something. So he goes back outside for a minute or two, just long enough to make a phone call or give an instruction. When he comes back, he's not carrying anything I can see, so maybe he didn't forget anything after all. Half an hour later, the kid barges in and gives me this.” He taps the piece of paper on the table, now stiff and dry. “He was
watching
me as I read it. He wanted to see my reaction.”

“And how did you react?”

“I don't know. I have no idea. It was like I'd gotten caught between a pair of cymbals, and all I could do was wait for the ringing in my ears to stop.”

“I'm not going to minimize any of this,” Arthit says. “But who could he be?” They're in the living room, wan morning light filtering through the windows, the sky outside flashing a few optimistic, misleading patches of blue like fake watches gleaming inside a con man's coat. The house is silent and immaculate but wrong to Rafferty's eyes—Anna's pictures are on the walls, and her small ornaments and prizes litter the tables, spaces that had been decorated with the things that Noi, Arthit's wife, dead now for a year and a half, had kept there. Still, it's immeasurably better than it had been in the months following Noi's death, when Arthit had closed the door on the world so he could drink uninterrupted, his loneliness a beacon he defied anyone to acknowledge. “Who would know Murphy had all that money?” Arthit interrupts himself with a yawn. “Who'd know how much it was? Most important, who'd know you had anything to do with him?”

“Someone exactly like Varney,” Rafferty says. “Someone who was involved with Murphy. He's the same kind of man Murphy was. There's nothing soft in him anywhere. You should have seen his face when he lit into poor old Leon, practically calling him a Nazi. Tormenting him like a rat on a sharp stick. You know as well as I do that Murphy had to have a network, probably a loose group
of sociopaths he could call on when he needed them. He'd survived as a fixer and a strong-arm man for the US government and whoever else would pay him, all over Southeast Asia ever since the Vietnam War ended. My guess is that Varney was closer to him than most of them, close enough to know about the money, maybe even working with Murphy on whatever operation the money was for—that bombing operation down in the south, for example. Not just a hired hand. Closer than that.”

“If that's the kind of guy he is, you know what it means.” Arthit leans forward, stretching his lower back, his palms on his thighs, seesawing his shoulders up and down. “He could be connected, he could be official or semi-official. Murphy was working with the Yanks, and he had the private phone numbers for our internal spook corps. Major Shen, for example.”

Rafferty says, “He doesn't feel military. Murphy was ex-military, using his army connections and experience to work as a fixer. Frighten some farmers off their land, arrange to break some heads if a bunch of peasants protest the fact that they're being poisoned by a gold mine. He probably knew dozens of thugs, guys with skills. Ex-CIA, ex-whatever. They're all over the place. As Varney would say, they're drawn to the hot countries.”

“But too young to have been with Murphy in Vietnam,” Arthit says.

“That's what I mean. Not military. Maybe a contractor who worked in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan—some war of the week—through one of those fake soldier outfits, Axe or Whisker or whatever they're called. But you know, Arthit, the fact that he wasn't actually military isn't very comforting. Some of these guys are worse. I've got a pregnant wife and a daughter, and these aren't the kinds of people I want coming through my door.”

“You don't know any of this for sure,” Arthit says.

“I do.” Rafferty puts his fingertips on the note and slides it back and forth on the table. “I know
with certainty
that Varney sent that kid in with that note. He knows I've got the money, Arthit. And he wants it.”

“I'll do what I can,” Arthit says, “but it's not much.” He grabs the edge of the table and pulls himself to his feet. “Coffee?”

“Oh, hell, why not?” Rafferty says, getting up. “Black, okay?” He follows his friend through the dining room. When Noi was alive, the table had always been lush with flowers, but Anna doesn't have Noi's magical sway over plants, and now the centerpiece is a pair of antique Thai fish traps, weathered, elongated baskets with reeds pointing inward around the opening so the fish can swim in but not out again. They'r
e
from the largest and poorest region of the country—Isaan, in the northeast, where Rose lived with her family until she ran to Bangkok to avoid her father's plan to sell her into the sex trade.

“I can only get so much information from immigration,” Arthit says. He opens a cupboard, stares into it, closes it, opens another one, and takes down two thick mugs. “Noi kept them over there,” he says, nodding at the cabinet he'd opened first, “and I
always
look there.” He shakes his head. “Still getting used to things,” he says. “Anna also puts the utensils in a different drawer from the one I'm used to.” He opens a drawer and pulls out a splotchy, wooden-handled knife that has a blade about twelve inches long and two inches wide, with no point but a gleaming edge. “This was Noi's favorite knife,” he says. “Hand-forged Japanese sword-quality steel, about three hundred US. So sharp you could use it as a straight razor.”

“It's not exactly a dazzler,” Poke says. “Looks like it was brought up from a shipwreck.”

“It's not stainless. Stainless chips when it gets thin, so it can't take an edge like this. Look.” He slides the knife edge down his forearm, and when he shows it to Poke, it's got little hairs on it. “Anna's thrown it away three times.” He wipes it carefully on his shirt and puts it back into the drawer. “Getting used to things,” he says again.

Poke says, “Immigration.”

“Right, right. I can find out when he entered the country, what kind of visa. I can find out what he wrote on the immigration documents: where he arrived from, his passport number, whatever occupation he's claiming.”

“And where he's staying. There's a blank on the form for—”

“Don't be silly.” Arthit pulls the carafe off the hot plate and pours. “Anyone can write anything he wants on those things. You can make it up out of thin air.”

“Wouldn't his home address be on his passport?”

“He could have moved a dozen times.” He hands Rafferty the mug. “Or, if he's the kind of guy you think he is, who knows if it's really his passport?”

“Still,” Rafferty says. He sips the coffee. “It's better than nothing.”

Arthit says, “Let's assume you're right. Let's say he's after the money.” He goes to the door that opens into the tiny yard behind the house and pulls it open, and the room fills with the edgy, new-rain scent of ozone, one of Rafferty's favorite smells.

“He is,” Rafferty says. “He knows somehow that I was there, in Murphy's house when it blew up, and he
wants the money
.”

Arthit is standing at the small kitchen table, loading sugar into his coffee. “Kind of a shame you can't just give it to him.”

“You know I can't. It belongs to Treasure. As badly as he treated her, she's still his daughter, and the only thing I can do for her is make sure she eventually gets that money.”

“Of course,” Arthit says. He takes a big breath. “Listen, about Treasure—”

“And here's the real issue,” Rafferty interrupts. “Even if I did give it to him, it wouldn't solve the problem.”

“Why not?” Arthit sits down and stirs his coffee.

“Because,” Rafferty says, “he obviously thinks I have
all
of it. All three million eight hundred and forty thousand dollars of it. Which makes me more than three million short.”

Two cups of coffee later, Arthit says, “I need to change the subject.”

“By all means. This is what you wanted to talk about, back at that restaurant?”

“It is.” He looks down into his empty cup. “How long since you've gone to see Treasure?”

A pang of guilt yanks Rafferty's spine straight. Treasure is the thirteen-year-old daughter of Haskell Murphy, who had tried brutally to transform her into a version of himself, bullying her, deriding her, and even beating her while half attempting to train her in the tactics of sabotage and terror. When Rafferty met her, the night Murphy's house exploded, she'd been fiercely feral; when her father had been shot, she'd cried out, “Again, do it again!” Rafferty had assumed she'd died in the explosion, but in fact she'd taken refuge in a hedge behind the house. Two months later she'd been found, feverish and nearly starved, in an alley by two street kids who had hauled her to a shelter.

And now Anna, the new love of Arthit's life, is teaching at that shelter.

“I haven't seen her in more than a week,” Rafferty says. “The thing with Rose—”

“Anna says Treasure has asked a few times where you were.”

“Aaaahhhh, hell. I'll go later today.”

“She's becoming a thirteen-year-old child instead of a small, violent adult,” Arthit says. He touches his wet spoon to the surface of the sugar in the bowl and then to his tongue. “I have to admit, I thought you were crazy when you decided she should stay at the shelter. I was thinking doctors, professionals, you know. But you were right. What she needed was kids. She'd never been around other children, and she didn't trust adults, except for you. And now she's hardly the same person.”

“Thanks to Anna and Dok and Chalee,” Rafferty says. Dok and Chalee are the street children who found Treasure and got her to the shelter. They'd stayed with her through the first and hardest days and became the first friends she'd ever had.

“Not so much Dok lately,” Arthit says. “He and Chalee had a fight a few days back. And Treasure's got
 . . .
well, an admirer.”

“You mean since I was there? In a few days?”

“He had a head start,” Arthit says. “It's the kid whose face she scratched. He calls himself Tip.”

“The one who sneaked in to look at her when he thought she was asleep?”

“That's the one. He's got an eye. She's beautiful.”

“Her mother, Neeni, was gorgeous, even when I saw her, doped on codeine. Does Treasure reciprocate?”

“She talks to him a little bit,” Arthit says. He shrugs. “Anna says she won't cross the room to sit near him, but she stays put when he comes near her.”

“Poor Dok,” Rafferty says. The scrawny little boy with the two big, ratlike front teeth is his favorite. “I think he was in love with Chalee.”

“There will be other loves,” Arthit says. “Even with those teeth.” He's put his cup on the table in front of him, and he's turning it right and left, looking into it as though there's someone down there signaling up to him.

Rafferty says, “What is it?”

“She's different from the other kids in the shelter,” Arthit says. His face pales for a fraction of a second, reflecting a white flicker of lightning on the other side of the open kitchen door, but he doesn't seem to register it. He's choosing his words slowly, obviously picking his way across a subject that matters to him. He waits out a brief rattle of thunder before speaking. “
Yes
, she was abused physically and emotionally, and
yes
, her mother lived in a bottle of cough syrup and barely remembered her own name, but still, Treasure was—is
 . . .
accustomed to a level of material comfort that the other kids can hardly imagine, and she reads and writes at a much higher level than they do. Anna is essentially running two classrooms at the same time: one for Treasure and one for everybody else.”

Outside, Rafferty hears the rain begin to fall.