The Fourth Watcher pr-2

by Timothy Hallinan

  The Fourth Watcher

  ( Poke Rafferty - 2 )

  Timothy Hallinan

  Timothy Hallinan

  The Fourth Watcher

  PART I

  SMALL CHANGE

  1

  Three-Card Monte

  Poke Rafferty has been on the sidewalk less than five minutes when he spots the tail.

  Three of them, all male. One ahead, two behind. Taking their time, no telltale urgency. All relatively young and dressed to fade: one white T-shirt, one red T-shirt, one long-sleeved black shirt. Pants of that indeterminate color produced by years of hard laundering, a sort of enervated second cousin to beige.

  The clothes aren’t much help, but they’re all Rafferty has: no conspicuous physical anomalies, no scars, no rap-inspired dreadlocks, no tattoos, no bleached hair. He’s looking at a trio of standard hands dealt out of the Thai genetic shuffle-short and slim-waisted, with the black hair and dark skin of the northeast. Three everyday guys, out on a choreographed stroll, doing a pretty slick version of the barre rotation: changing places at random intervals, the man in front casually crossing the road to the far sidewalk and drifting back, replaced moments later by one of the pair behind. A rolling maneuver, like a deal in three-card monte.

  The guy in the black shirt is what Arnold Prettyman calls “the flag.” He’s wearing reflective shades, he walks funny, it’s too hot for long sleeves, and it’s too sunny for black, even at 10:30 a.m. So either Rafferty is supposed to notice him or he’s not very good.

  Prettyman’s First Law of Espionage, drummed into Poke’s head over the past couple of weeks: Always assume that the other guy is good.

  So. Take score. Moderate foot traffic, average for an early weekday morning in an upscale Bangkok shopping district. Stores just open, offering lots of nice, big, reflective display windows, useful to both the stalkers and the target. The sun is still low, so shadows are long, which can be either helpful or deadly around corners. The usual blast-furnace, wet-blanket Bangkok heat, heat with an actual weight to it that frequently takes Rafferty by surprise even after more than two years here. It changes the way he dresses, the way he breathes, and even the way he walks. The way everybody walks. It shortens the stride and makes it pointless to waste energy lifting the feet any higher than absolutely necessary; all the effort goes into moving forward. The result is what Rafferty has come to think of as the Bangkok Glide, the energy-efficient and peculiarly graceful way Thai people have of getting themselves from place to place without melting directly into the sidewalk.

  Unlike the other two, whose glides are so proficient they might as well be ice-skating, the guy in the black shirt moves like a man wearing cast-iron boots: heavy steps, a lot of lateral hip action. He looks like Lurch among the ballerinas. The man has, Rafferty finally recognizes, a clubfoot, so put a check in the physical-anomaly column after all. The clubfoot is housed in a black architectural structure half the size of a tuk-tuk, the three-wheeled taxis so ubiquitous in Bangkok. So here’s Black Shirt, aka Tuk-Tuk Foot; him, Rafferty can spot.

  Okay, he can spot him. So what?

  Thought One is to lose Black Shirt first. Reduce the opposition numbers and then worry about the others. Thought Two is to stay with Black Shirt and try to lose the others, on the assumption that he can spot Black Shirt anytime.

  But.

  The men who are following him probably expect him to proceed from Thought One to Thought Two. Of course, they might know he’d realize they’d expect that, and they’d revert to Thought One. That’s what Prettyman would probably do in this situation.

  Or is it? And is there a Thought Three that hasn’t even come to him?

  Rafferty feels a brittle little arpeggio in his forebrain, the opening bars of the overture to a headache.

  A long time ago, he learned that the best course of action, when you’re faced with a difficult problem, is to choose one solution, at random if necessary, and stick with it. Don’t question it unless it kills you. Okay. Lose Black Shirt and keep an eye on the other two.

  The flush of comfort that always accompanies a decision recedes almost immediately at the thought of Prettyman’s Second Law. There are usually more than you can spot.

  Moving more slowly than the flow of foot traffic, forcing the trackers to lag awkwardly, Rafferty passes the entrance to a five-story department store, one of the newly cloned U.S.-style emporiums that have sprung up all over the city to serve Bangkok’s exploding middle class. He pulls his followers out of position by moving an extra twenty steps or so past the polished chrome of the revolving door, as yet unsmudged with shoppers’ fingerprints. Then he stops and searches the glass for reflected movement while he pretends to be fascinated by whatever the hell is on the other side of the window. He counts to five, turns away, takes two steps in the direction he’s been moving in, then decides that whatever was in the window-on second glance it seems to be women’s shoes, of all the stupid fucking things-is indispensable after all. He reverses direction abruptly, seeing the pair behind freeze at the edge of his vision and then scramble to separate, and goes back to the store entrance, moving quickly and decisively, trying to look like a man who’s just spotted an irresistible pair of high heels. Pushes at the revolving door.

  Cool air like a faceful of water.

  He finds himself in the cosmetics department, where a hundred mirrors point back at the door he has just come through. In the closest one, Rafferty watches White T-Shirt come through the revolving door, snap a quick, disbelieving look at the mirrors, and keep right on going until he’s outside again.

  Rafferty is practically the only customer in the store. Half a dozen hibernating saleswomen gape at him. One of them shakes herself awake and says, in English, “Help you, sir?”

  “I’ve got a terrible problem with. . um, tangling,” he says, tugging at his hair and keeping his eyes on a mirror that frames the two men talking in the street behind him. White T-Shirt with his back to the door, Red T-Shirt displaying dark skin and a pimp’s thin mustache. Lots of gesturing.

  “You hair okay,” says the woman behind the counter. She employs the unique Thai-style selling technique; the chat is more important than the sale. “You hair pretty good.” She squints dubiously. “Maybe too long, na? Maybe cut little bit here.”

  In the mirror Rafferty sees Red T-Shirt lose the argument on the sidewalk and push the revolving door. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” Rafferty says, shoving off from the counter. “Before I brush.” He walks quickly through the cosmetics department and boards the store’s central escalator.

  Standing sideways as the escalator’s sole passenger, he watches Red T-Shirt do some broken-field running between the counters to catch up, and then Rafferty turns and takes the rest of the steps two at a time.

  Turn right at the top of the escalator, move at a half run through a voluptuary’s forest of mannequins wearing impractical underwear the colors of extinct tropical fruits. The women’s-underwear department borders the housewares department, a broad expanse of gleaming white marble and porcelain meant to awaken kitchen envy in female shoppers. Rafferty stops at the first of a long line of gleaming stainless-steel sinks, complete with a homey assortment of washed dishes in a drying rack, and grabs the squeeze bottle of detergent, hoping it’s not just a prop. It is reassuringly heavy. Without looking back, he pops the top and spews a long zigzag of clear, thick liquid on the tile floor as he retreats up the aisle. At the far end, he waits until Red T-Shirt has found his way through the glade of underwear. Once he is sure the man has seen him, Rafferty turns and breaks into a full-out bolt. He is rewarded by the distinctive sound of running feet behind him, then a cry of despair followed by a clamorous crash as some display or another goes down. A
glance over his shoulder shows him Red T-Shirt at the bottom layer of a heap of broken dishes, flailing to get his hands and feet under him on the slick floor as shopgirls come running from all directions.

  The down escalators take Rafferty in easy stages to the basement, which is positively arctic. Housewives on the verge of hypothermia paw listlessly through piles of bargain clothes. At the far end of the sale area lurks an ersatz McDonald’s, complete with its own frightening clown. Beyond the bright plastic tables, their chairs bolted gaily to the floor, a set of tiled steps leads up to the sidewalk, and Rafferty takes them in two springs.

  Hot air again. Hot pavement through the soles of his shoes. Traffic noise.

  Lots of pretty women wearing bright colors. No White T-Shirt; he’s almost certainly watching the entrance. No Black Shirt. Red T-Shirt is probably flat on his back picking slivers of crockery from his hair.

  Rafferty slows, debating the wisdom of turning the tables and grabbing one of them for a brief conversation. He is weighing the pros and cons as he makes a right into a side street and the little man with the black shirt and the clubfoot steps out of a doorway, smiles apologetically, levels a small black gun at Poke’s head, and shoots him square in the face.

  2

  The Fourth Watcher

  From his perspective half a block away, where he appears to be entirely focused on choosing a spray of vaguely reptilian orchids from a sidewalk vendor, the fourth watcher-the

  one the other three don’t know about-tracks the movements of the gun. He stiffens as the little man in the black shirt brings his hand up, takes a useless step forward as Rafferty stumbles back, watches open-mouthed as the trigger is pulled.

  Not until he is walking away, his orchids tightly wrapped in newspaper, does he permit himself to laugh.

  3

  The First One She’s Had in Years That Isn’t a Street Fake

  The first thing Peachy notices is that the man counting her money is perspiring very heavily, almost as heavily as a foreigner. Like many Thais, she finds it perplexing how much

  farang sweat, although Peachy, who has persisted in regarding herself as a lady through a lifelong roller coaster of social ups and downs, would never use a word as common as “sweat.” During one of the brief periods of prosperity her family enjoyed when Peachy was growing up, they hired a British governess named Daphne. Almost forty years later, what Peachy remembers most vividly about Daphne is her hatred of the word “sweat.” “Horses sweat,” Daphne had said, sweating generously in the Bangkok summer. “Men perspire. Women glow.”

  So the bank teller fumbling with the bills for her payroll is perspiring, in defiance of the glacial air-conditioning, which is cold enough to raise little stucco bumps on Peachy’s bare arms.

  In fact, the teller’s shirt is so wet it’s transparent. Peachy has seen horses sweat less profusely, even after one of the races to which she used to be. . well, addicted. If there’s a more polite word for “sweat,” Peachy thinks, counting silently to herself as she watches the stack of thousand-baht bills grow, there should be a more polite word for “addicted” as well. “Habit” is a bit weak, considering that the horses cost Peachy practically everything she owned. She managed to hang on to her business only because a farang, an American, had handed her an irresistible, absolutely life-changing wad of money that she couldn’t refuse even though it came with a mandatory partner. Together, she and Rose, the partner by command, have rebuilt the business until they have actually begun to show a profit. But the horses had cost her dearly, had cost her much of what she had taken for granted in life, had cost her-

  Had cost her, in fact, much more than she is prepared to think about now, especially when she should be watching this very nervous man count out her money.

  The teller’s hands are shaking, too.

  His eyes come up to Peachy’s and catch her regarding him. He smiles, or tries to smile. It looks like the smile of a man who wants to prove he can take bad news well. Cancer? No problem. The smile is impossible to return. Peachy begins to feel distinctly uneasy.

  “Forgive me,” she says, leaning forward slightly and politely lowering her voice. “Are you feeling all right?”

  The teller straightens as though someone has plugged his stool directly into a wall socket, and his eyes widen into an expanse of white with the irises marooned in the center. Peachy involuntarily thinks about fried eggs. “Me?” the teller asks, swallowing. “Fine, fine. And you?”

  Peachy takes a discreet step back. The man smells of something, perhaps illness or even fear. “Fine, thank you.”

  “It’s just. . you know,” the teller says, blinking rapidly. He makes a tremulous gesture at the stack of white-and-brown bills in front of him. “Lot of, um, um, money,” he says.

  “We pay the girls today,” Peachy says, and then replays the sentence in her mind. “They’re housemaids,” she clarifies. “We run a domestic agency. Bangkok Domestics.” Although she’s grown fond of Rose, she still can’t bring herself to call it Peachy and Rose’s Domestics.

  The teller tries to square the bills into a neat pile, but his hands aren’t steady enough, and he gives up and shoves them under the glass partition like a pile of leaves. “You must be doing well.”

  “It’s getting better,” Peachy says. Although the bills all seem to be brand new, they look damp and a little bit sticky, as though they had been absorbing moisture in the perspiring man’s pocket. She doesn’t, she realizes, actually want to touch them. Below the counter she unsnaps her purse-Gucci, the first one she’s had in years that isn’t a street fake-and holds it wide. Then, using her expensive new fingernails and hoping she’s not being rude, she sweeps the money off the counter and into the purse. “Bye-bye,” she says in English, turning away.

  The bank teller’s eyes follow her all the way across the lobby: a woman in her late forties, wearing clothes that could provoke buyer’s remorse in a seventeen-year-old. He resolutely refuses to look out through the picture window at the front of the bank, where he knows the man will be. Watching him.

  He looks up to face his next customer.

  4

  Karma Is a Soft Drink

  Rose draws the usual quota of stares as she navigates the crowded sidewalk of Bangkok’s Pratunam district, threading her way between the stands of the sidewalk vendors.

  She slows to take a closer look at a T-shirt with a picture of the plump, fuzzy forest spirit Totoro on it. As she looks at the shirt, other people look at her. Almost six feet tall and-as Rafferty insists-hurtfully beautiful, Rose has been conspicuous since she turned fourteen. She has grown used to it.

  But she feels the gaze of the extremely pretty girl who is eyeing her from two stalls away. Women look at Rose almost as much as men do, although usually for different reasons, and not for four or five blocks. This girl, Rose is certain, has been tagging along behind her for at least ten minutes.

  Someone she knew at the bar, perhaps? No, she’d remember. The girl is probably hasip-hasip, literally fifty-fifty, half Asian and half Caucasian. The only hasip-hasip girl in the bar where Rose danced, back in the bad old days, was half Thai and half black. Anyway, this girl is too young. It’s been a couple of years since Rose last took the stage at the King’s Castle in Patpong Road, and this girl can’t be more than seventeen.

  Still, the face tugs at her. Rose has a remarkable memory for faces, a side benefit of her years in the bar, when a dancer’s profits, and occasionally her physical safety, depended on remembering customers’ faces. There’s something familiar about this girl. Something in her bone structure?

  For a moment their eyes meet and Rose smiles, but the girl quickly turns away, browsing yet another stall.

  Rose offers one-third of the asking price for the Totoro shirt, settles in thirty seconds for half, and bags it. It’s her present to herself. Although she’s squeezed every baht since she moved in with Rafferty and stepped out from under the waterfall of money that flowed from the pockets of the customers in the
bar, today she can buy herself a present. After all, this is her day. Then, feeling a little guilty, she buys another-girl’s size eight-for Miaow. Unlike virtually all of Miaow’s other T-shirts, this one isn’t pink, but the child has watched the animated film about Totoro so many times that she goes around the apartment she shares with Rose and Rafferty singing the theme song in phonetic Japanese.

  A glance at her oversize plastic wristwatch tells Rose that Peachy will already be in the office, and she has come to expect Rose to be on hand. She dumps the bag with the T-shirts into her purse, a leather tote the size of home base, and edges through the press of shoppers toward the soot-stained four-story office building, an architectural monument to melancholy, where Peachy and Rose’s Domestics operates.

  As she nears the door, she is reassembling the girl’s face in her mind. Just as a tingle of prerecognition begins to build, someone swats her lightly on the shoulder, and the image dissolves.

  “Fon,” Rose says, feeling the smile break over her face. “Money day.”

  “Seven months,” Fon says proudly. “It’s been seven months.” In her mid-thirties, dark-skinned, with a plain face made even plainer by a dolefully long upper lip, Fon is still beautiful when she smiles. She barely comes up to Rose’s shoulder, so she embraces the taller woman by hugging her arm. “So the money’s small, no problem,” she says. “They like me, and I like them.”

  “They should like you,” Rose says. “They’re lucky to have you.”

  They start up the stairs, and Rose resolves for the fiftieth time to sweep them sometime soon. They may have been swept to celebrate the millennium, but not very well. Grit scrapes beneath her shoes. It sounds like someone chewing sand.