The Fourth Watcher pr-2

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Hang on, hang on,” Rafferty says. “Just get hold of yourself and tell me-” He sees the girl’s eyes go past him, sees the shadow of the man behind him, actually feels the warmth of the man’s body, and then his head explodes.

  Somewhere in the fog, his mother and father are arguing.

  This is unusual. They rarely speak enough to argue.

  Poke has grown up with his father’s silence. It fills the house they share, the small stone house Poke’s father built with his own hands. No other house is visible, and the unpaved driveway washes out in the infrequent winter rains to make their isolation complete. The desert is silent, the house is silent. His mother communicates mostly by banging pots and pans. Most of the time, the only conversations are the ones in Poke’s mind. But now his mother and father are arguing.

  “. . fucking idiotic thing to do,” his father is saying.

  “There was no other choice,” his mother says. Then there is silence again.

  “. . a thug’s grab,” his father says. “Leung should have known better.”

  Leung, Poke knows, is a Chinese name. Knowing this, knowing that he knows it, brings him back to himself.

  His head hurts.

  Sandals slap a hard floor.

  He is cold. It seems to him it has been a long time since he was cold. His clothes are still damp from the rain, and he is lying on a cold floor, probably cement. Something is beating at the back of his head, even though the back of his head seems to be resting on the floor. He wants to touch his head, but he cannot move his hands.

  There had been a cement floor in the old Shanghai apartment house where he’d finally found the woman his father had run to. She was short and almost spherically fat. She held her arm at an oblique angle where it had been broken in some Chinese upheaval or other, and her cheeks were painted with spots of bright red, round and hard-edged as coins. Her lipstick shrank her mouth by half, turning it into the flower of some poisonous fruit. She had been distantly kind to him but had said nothing about his father, redirecting his questions into paths of her own. She had neither denied nor admitted that Frank was there, but Poke knew. The air in the apartment had been sweet with the aroma of his father’s pipe.

  “Give him the blanket,” says the woman’s voice, and something soft settles over him. Poke opens his eyes.

  A large room: maybe a garage or a warehouse. The ceiling is high enough to be dark beyond the two bare bulbs that dangle from wires above him. He has a vague impression of metal beams, more the shadows than the beams themselves, and then a head comes into his field of vision. He cannot see the face against the bright lights above it, but it is surrounded by straight dark hair.

  “How are you?” It is the female voice he has been hearing.

  “Nice of you to ask.” He wants to reach behind him and lift himself up, even though his head is swimming, but his hands are fastened together in front of him.

  “Oh, great,” says the young woman from the van, giving the irony back to him. “Now everybody’s mad at me.”

  “ ‘When all men are arrayed against you,’ ” Rafferty misquotes, “ ‘maybe you’re the problem.’ What’s with my hands?”

  “They’re cuffed,” she says. “Just to make sure you’ll sit still long enough to realize we have to talk.”

  “We could have talked in the street.”

  “We thought you had watchers. You’ve been quite extravagantly tailed the last few days. Did you know that?”

  Poke does not reply.

  “Who are they? Who’s Arnold? Who was the guy with the police last night?”

  “None of your fucking business.” He shifts his back on the floor to see her better. Still beautiful. “Okay, we’re talking. Do something about my hands.”

  “Let me give you some information first, and then some rules. The information is that nobody wants to hurt you. Not any more than we already have, I mean, and that was sort of an accident. We’re actually here to try to help you.”

  “Maybe a greeting card,” Poke suggests. “With a perfume strip. Or a phone call. Something casual, something that doesn’t involve brain injury.”

  She continues as though he has not spoken. “The rules are that you’re not going to do anything stupid, at least not while we’re talking You’re going to listen to us until we’re finished, and then it’s up to you. You can do anything you want. If you decide to ignore what we tell you, it’ll be your own fault. You can walk right out of here. We felt obliged to warn you, but we’re not your guardians.”

  “I don’t need guardians.”

  “You have no idea.” She holds up her right index finger. “Humor me for a second. Can you see this?”

  “Of course.”

  “Only one? No ghosting, no double vision?”

  “No.”

  “Follow it with your eyes.” She moves it slowly from side to side, and Poke tracks it. Then she moves it toward the bridge of his nose until his eyes cross, and she laughs. The merriness of the laugh makes him even angrier. “You’ll live. If we take off the cuffs, will you behave?”

  “I’ll listen. After that, it’s anybody’s call.” The word “call” brings back Peachy’s anguished voice. “But I need my phone. Now.”

  “Afterward,” she says. “And we’re not concerned with what you do after we talk.” She looks over her shoulder. “Or at least I’m not. Leung.”

  A man peers into the circle of light above Poke’s head. A cigarette dangles from one corner of his mouth. “Feeling better?” His English is heavily accented.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Say hi to Leung,” the young woman says. “He’s been following you. Actually, we’ve all been following you. If you didn’t spot us, it’s because we were lost in the crowd of other people who were following you. You want to tell us what that’s about?”

  “Just get the cuffs, okay?”

  The blanket is whisked back, and the man called Leung bends down and busies himself with Poke’s hands. Needles drill them as the circulation rushes back in. Poke gets both hands on the floor behind him and pushes himself to a sitting position.

  It seems to be a garage, the floor irregularly spotted with pools of dark oil. The light is cast entirely by the two bulbs overhead, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. Either there are no windows or the sun has gone down. The van lurks in the gloom at the near end, ticking as the engine cools.

  The back of his head hurts badly enough to be dented.

  “Here’s a chair,” the girl says, pushing one forward. It’s a cheap folding chair, made of battered gray metal. “Get off that cold floor.”

  His damp clothes feel heavy as he works himself up-first to his hands and knees and then, grasping the back of the chair, to a posture that makes him feel like Rumpelstiltskin. His head begins to spin a warning, and he eases himself sideways onto the chair without rising further.

  “Better?” she asks.

  “What about an aspirin?”

  “Aspirin’s bad for you.” She gives him the almost-smile he had seen in the street.

  “Aspirin is an anti-inflammatory,” Rafferty says. “Getting hit on the head is bad for you.”

  “I’m no nurse. My job was to see whether you were still being followed and then to get you here. I’m essentially finished.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk.”

  “Not me,” she says. “He wants to talk.”

  “He.”

  “Him.” She steps aside, and Poke sees an old man shuffle around the end of the van, his feet in cheap carpet slippers. The edge of the light hits his knees, and then, as he moves forward, his waist, and then his shoulders, and then his face, and Poke looks at the face twice before he launches himself from the chair, shaking off Leung’s hand, and does his level best to break his father’s nose.

  PART II

  FOLDING MONEY

  15

  The End of the World

  Miaow’s ice cream is melting. For the past minute or two, she’s been
remorselessly stirring it into a soup, following the movement of the spoon with her eyes as though she

  expects some spectacular chemical reaction. The silence between her and Rose stretches uncomfortably, measured by the circular movement of the spoon.

  The brown of the chocolate and the chemical pink of the strawberry make a particularly unpleasant-looking swirl. Rose raises her eyes from the bowl, telling herself she’s not really rolling them, and waits.

  “Why him not talk me?” Miaow says at last, in the defensive pidgin she has been using since the conversation began.

  Privately Rose thinks this is an excellent question. As happy as she has been with Rafferty since his proposal the previous evening, if he were here right now, she’d haul off and kick him in the shins. “He should have talked to you,” she says in Thai. “He made a mistake. Maybe he was nervous or something.”

  Tired of making circles, Miaow scrabbles the spoon back and forth through the thinning slop in a hard, straight zigzag. Rose finds herself counting silently to ten.

  The Haagen-Dazs on Silom, where they went to dodge the rain, is empty. The downpour had stopped practically the moment the door closed behind them, but Rose knew there was no escape, so she bought both of them a post-happybirthday ice cream. They had settled at a table, and the moment Rose picked up her spoon, Miaow had seen the ring.

  For the past twenty minutes, Rose has been trying to explain to a girl of eight-no, make that nine-that the upcoming marriage is nothing for her to worry about.

  “Everything will be the same, but better,” she says for the third time.

  Miaow continues to slash through the spirals, giving Rose a first-class view of the knife-straight part she imposes on her hair.

  Rose fights an impulse to grab the spoon. “It’s like when Poke told you he wanted to adopt you. You didn’t want that at first either.”

  “Did too,” Miaow says in English.

  Rose briefly toys with saying, Did not, but rejects it. There are conversations Miaow literally cannot lose, and that’s the opening gambit to one of them. “Miaow,” she says. “Poke and I love each other. We’re grown-ups. We should be married.”

  “Not married before,” Miaow says. She is sticking with English because she knows it gives her an edge.

  Rose sticks with Thai for the same reason. “Poke adopted you because he wanted you to really be his daughter. He’s marrying me so I can really be your mama.”

  Miaow’s spoon stops. She regards the mess in her bowl as though she hopes an answer will float to the top. When she speaks, directly to her ice cream, Rose has to lean forward to hear her. What she says is, “You already my mama.”

  In the eighteen months Rose has known her, Miaow has never said this before. Even as a mist springs directly from Rose’s heart to her eyes, her mind recognizes a master manipulator at work. Rose honed serious manipulative skills working in the bar, and she automatically awards Miaow a B-plus, even as she blinks away a tear. “But not really,” she says. “Not one hundred percent.”

  The words fail to make a dent. Rose reaches over and takes the spoon from Miaow’s hand. The child’s eyes follow the spoon, and Rose realizes she might just have committed a tactical error, so she licks the spoon and hands it back, trying not to make a face at the mixture of flavors. She dips her own spoon into her scoop of coconut sherbet and holds it out. Miaow examines it as though it might contain tiny frogs, then opens her mouth. Rose feeds her, and as she tilts the spoon up, the thought breaks over her: My baby. “Miaow,” she says without thinking. “Do you know how much I love you?”

  Miaow looks up at her, her mouth a perfect O. She has chocolate on her upper lip. “You. .” she says. Then she looks away, staring at the Silom sidewalk through the window. A very fat woman, weighed down further with half a dozen plastic shopping bags, hauls herself past the window, and Miaow’s eyes follow her as though someone has told her she is seeing her own future. Then, without turning back to Rose, she says, “I know.”

  Having finally managed to insert the thin edge of the wedge, Rose leans down on it. “And Poke. You know that Poke loves you more than anyone in the world.”

  “Love you number one,” Miaow says, still in English. “But that’s okay.”

  “Look at this,” Rose says, holding up the hand with the ring on it. “This is Poke,” she says, touching the ruby. Her fingernail moves to the tiny sapphire. “This is me.” She taps the surface of the topaz. “This one, in the middle. Who do you think this is? Who do you think this is, right next to Poke?”

  Miaow says, “Oh.” Her chin develops a sudden pattern of tiny dimples, but she masters it. She puts down the spoon. When she looks from the ring to Rose again, she is back in control. “Why am I yellow?”

  “Tomorrow you’ll be a sapphire, same as me, because we have the same happybirthday. But you’ll still be in the middle.”

  Miaow processes this for a long moment. Then she asks, “Why?”

  “Because you’re the center of our lives.” Rose passes her finger along the three stones. “This is us, Miaow. Do you know how old jewels are? Jewels last forever. This is Poke’s way of saying he wants us to be together forever.”

  Miaow stares at the ring. Rose sees her mouth silently form the words: One, two, three. Then Miaow says, “Okay.” She picks up the bowl, lifts it to her lips, and drains it. The moment she puts the bowl down, she says, “Can I have a cell phone?”

  Ninety minutes and three cell-phone shops later, Rose has heard approximately ten thousand words from Miaow on cell phones in general, how they can play music, how great the games are, how much safer she’ll be with one, and-above all-an encyclopedic disquisition on text messages: They’re cool, they’re cheap, and all her friends send them all the time. Rose’s comment that she thought Miaow’s friends spent at least some of their time at school didn’t create a pause long enough to slip a comma into. Now, as Miaow works her thumbs on the touch pad of her new phone, so fast that Rose can’t see them move, Rose fishes through her bag and realizes she left her own phone at home. She borrows Miaow’s, after waiting until the child finishes keying in the third act of Macbeth or whatever it is, and dials Rafferty’s number. His phone, Rose learns, is not in service, which means he has turned it off. She hands the phone back to Miaow, who immediately polishes it on her T-shirt.

  “I’ll send this one to you,” Miaow says, doing the thumbs thing again. “It’ll be on your phone when we get home.”

  “Which is where we should go,” Rose says. “Poke will be there soon. When he’s all alone, he breaks things.”

  Miaow finishes punching at the keys and then checks the shine on the phone. She uses the front of her T-shirt to rub at a stubborn spot. “Let’s go to Foodland,” she says. “Let’s buy him a steak.” She flips the phone open again. “I can call Foodland and see if they have steak.”

  “They have steak,” Rose says. “I was going to make noodles with duck and green onions.”

  “Poke’s American,” Miaow says. “He eats anything, but he always wants steak.”

  “Poor baby. He tries so hard. Do you remember the night I gave him a thousand-year egg?” Thousand-year eggs, which found their way to Thailand via China, are not really a thousand years old, but they might as well be. They’re black, hard, and as sulfurous as a high-school chemistry experiment. Rose starts to laugh. “Did you see his face?”

  Miaow is laughing, too. “And how many times he swallowed?” She mimes someone trying desperately to get something down.

  “Like it was trying to climb back up again,” Rose says, and the two of them stand in the middle of the sidewalk laughing, with Miaow hanging on to Rose’s hand as though without it she’d dissolve into a pool on the sidewalk.

  “You’re right,” Rose says, wiping her eyes. “If I’m going to be his wife, I should feed him a steak once in a while.”

  “He wants to be Thai,” Miaow says, and Rose, startled, meets her eyes. Then the two of them start laughing again.

 
It is almost seven by the time they step off the elevator, dragging the bags that contain at least one of practically everything Foodland had on discount: shampoo, bleach, detergent, toothpaste, toilet paper, four place mats, two stuffed penguins, five pairs of underpants for Poke (who doesn’t wear underpants), a baby blanket because it was pink, a flower vase, some flowers to put in it, and five porterhouse steaks. As the elevator doors open, Rose says, “We saved a fortune,” and then the two of them stop dead at what looks at first like a pile of wrinkled clothes someone has thrown against the door to the apartment.

  But then the pile of clothes stirs, and Peachy looks up at them.

  This is a Peachy whom Rose has never seen before. Her lacquered hair is snarled and tangled, her face blotchy where the powder has been wiped away. Two long tracks of mascara trail down her cheeks.

  “That man,” she begins, and then starts to sob. “That-that American-”

  Rose drops the bags and hurries to her, takes both of her hands, and brings her to her feet. As Peachy straightens, a crinkled brown paper shopping bag, crimped closed at the top, tumbles from her lap to the floor, and Peachy jumps back from it as though it were a cobra.

  “It’s okay,” Rose says. “Poke says it’ll be okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” Peachy says. “It’s the end of the world.” She points a trembling finger at the paper bag, and Rose squats down and opens it.

  And stares down into it, still as stone.

  Then she says, in English, “Oh, my God.”

  16

  I Don’t Know What “Usual” Means to You

  "She’s your sister,” Frank says. “Say hello, Ming Li.” From beside Frank, Ming Li says, deadpan, “Hello,

  Ming Li.” She sounds as if she finds nothing out of the ordinary, as if meeting her half brother for the first time in an abandoned garage, after she’s had someone cave his head in and he’s tried to assault their father, is nothing to get ruffled about.