The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Last night I would have said no,” Rafferty says. “He’s done what he needed to do. But that was before I knew he was crazy. And I’m not just throwing the word around. He’s as crazy as a shark on methamphetamine.”

  “Yaa baa,” Lutanh suggests, using one of the Thai names for crank.

  “Good-looking?” Betty asks as Lutanh takes a hummingbird sip of her orange soda. Lutanh’s nails, curved around the glass like a circular stairway, are at least two inches long and have been painted an orange that complements the drink.

  “I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “Not much.”

  “Not,” says Leon.

  “Some crazy man, very sexy,” Betty says, dismissing both of them.

  “Don’t get near him. I mean it, he’s dangerous.”

  “Look like what?” Betty says.

  Rafferty describes Varney—Paul, he silently corrects himself—and when he gets to the snake tattoo, Lutanh says, just above a whisper, “I see him before.”

  “Where?”

  “He come my bar.”

  “Which one?”

  “This or That Bar,” she says. “Patpong 2.”

  Leon says, “Not the Queen’s Corner?”

  “I change,” Lutanh says. “Have better customer at This or That Bar.”

  “Did he take anyone?”

  “No. Come three time last week, then not come. Buy me drink. Have watch, big like steering wheel. Have, have ngu.”

  Betty says, “Lao for ‘snake.’”

  “Me,” Lutanh says, pointing at herself. “Me Lao.”

  Hofstedler says, with a faint blush, “Lot of ladyboys from Laos now.”

  “We pretty,” Lutanh says.

  “Have you seen him?” Rafferty asks Betty.

  “No,” Betty says. “But I look, just for you, okay?” She shows him two rows of big, even teeth.

  “Okay. But don’t do anything that might tell him you’re . . . you know, interested, not in any way. If he even glances at you, you go in another direction.”

  “And lady?” Betty says. “Lady you want to know about?”

  Rafferty describes her, and when he gets to the birthmark, Lutanh says, “I see her, too. I see in street, about six o’clock, two, three times.” She pronounces it “sick o’clock,” which had bewildered Rafferty when he first arrived in Bangkok.

  “Which end?” Rafferty says. “Was she coming from Silom or Surawong?”

  “Surawong, same as me.”

  “Six o’clock.”

  “Maybe sick thirty. Sick, sick thirty.”

  “Could you tell where she was going?”

  “Other side,” Lutanh says, lifting her chin toward Patpong. “Other side of night market.”

  “Got it,” Rafferty says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a thousand-baht bill. “Can you two split this?”

  “Oh, no,” Lutanh says. Suddenly she looks shy. “I do for you. No money.”

  “I’d rather—” he begins, but Betty, moving so fast he doesn’t see her hand, snatches the bill.

  “Lutanh, she like you,” Betty says. She gives him the big teeth again, but this time it looks like she’s thinking about taking a bite. “She think maybe you like ladyboy, but me, I know. You like lady. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Rafferty says. He looks at Lutanh, feeling obscurely guilty. “I’m sorry.”

  Barely audible, Lutanh says, “No problem.” She doesn’t look up.

  “I give her five hundred later,” Betty says. “Eight o’clock tonight, nine o’clock, she forget you.”

  Lutanh laughs, covering her mouth with her hand, Japanese style.

  “Come to my bar,” Betty says. “We have real lady, too.”

  Rafferty starts to reply, but Hofstedler speaks first. “These . . . girls,” Hofstedler says, and he surprises Rafferty by leaning back on his stool and putting his arms around their shoulders. Even Toots, who has seen literally everything, looks surprised. “These girls saved my life.” His blush deepens to a fierce red. “These wonderful girls saved my life.”

  It’s nearly sick o’clock, and Rafferty heads up Patpong to Surawong, almost the lone male swimming against the tide of young women streaming into Patpong to report for work. They come in twos and threes, most of them, some with their hair gleaming from a recent shower, either holding hands or interlocking elbows with this week’s best friend. Rose has told him how deep and how short some of these relationships are. In an environment where it’s essential for someone to have your back, the climate is rich for sudden, intimate friendships and unforgivable betrayals.

  The majority of them wear the universal Southeast Asian street uniform of T-shirt and jeans, and most of them are not made up yet, saving that task to be done among their friends and not-friends on the benches that will be crowded with men only ninety minutes later. It’s an evening ritual, chatting and painting their faces beneath the flat fluorescents that will snap off at 7 p.m. in favor of glittering disco balls and the primary-color spotlights that will airbrush the women’s flesh into a smooth, blemish-free, marketable commodity. For now what he sees are the unadorned faces of the northeast, the rice basket of Southeast Asia, where for decades farmers and their families have methodically been cheated by private industry and the government alike, scraping along at subsistence level and, when even that is beyond them, sending their sons and daughters south to the bars, brothels, massage parlors, sidewalks, and escort services of Bangkok.

  The sex trade, like the rice trade, drives up the nation’s gross national product for the benefit of the sleek and the fat, so these impoverished farm families are making a double contribution—their rice and their children—to support the rich men in their billion-baht houses and to pay the cops and soldiers who are called into action when the squeezed rise up in protest. It is, he thinks, a system in which the prey funds the dental work that preserves the teeth of the predators.

  The woman with the birthmark had come in from Surawong, according to the wispy-voiced Lutanh. The problem, from a surveillance perspective, is that the high roofs of the night-market booths running down the center of Patpong block the view of whichever side of the street the watcher isn’t on. Rafferty can’t just stand around in plain sight, because she’ll probably see him before he sees her. The last thing he wants to do is tip Varney that he’s on the hunt; if he has any advantage at all, it’s that Varney doesn’t know that the quarry has turned around to sniff the air.

  The thought of Varney, an outlier if there ever was one, brings to mind Rafferty’s concept of circles of reality, which he originally formulated as a boy in the desert outside Lancaster, California. Of all his early ideas about how the world works, that was the one most altered by travel. Everyone, he has long believed, lives more or less comfortably in the center of a circle of reality, circumscribed by culture and geography and expectation. It may be challenged and reshaped occasionally by an unforeseen tragedy or a windfall blowing into it like a meteorite, yet by and large it changes slowly, with time and experience. But travel made it inescapably clear to Rafferty that the circle of reality for a middle-class American desert boy has little in common with that of an Indonesian rice farmer, which has little in common with that of Rafferty’s Manhattan book editor, which in turn has little in common with the circle of reality of a terrified child bride in Pakistan or an African woman stranded in the midst of a tribal war.

  And yet, as widely different from each other as those circles are, Rafferty is certain that Varney orbits a space far beyond the sharp edge of improbability that borders every one of them. However varied the circles are, there’s one way in which they’re all identical: they all exclude Arthur Varney.

  On the far side of Surawong, he sees what he needs—a foot-massage shop with a big plate-glass window. He crosses the road carefully, and for two hundred baht he buys twenty minutes in the chair nearest the windo
w. He tips the masseuse to leave his feet alone.

  For a few minutes, he loses himself in the street scene. Then his attention is drawn to a couple on the other side of the glass, a middle-aged farang and a younger Thai woman, arguing. Their faces are intense and hard, but Rafferty thinks he could sense the argument even if they were headless. The man’s arms are crossed defensively across his chest, and the woman has one hand on her hip with the elbow angled sharply back, away from the man. Hands on hips, he thinks. It can mean several things. One hand on the hip, with the elbow pulled back like that, is anger pure and simple. It’s as easy to read as a face.

  He hears Miaow’s voice in his ear, saying Delsarte, and he realizes that he’s eavesdropping visually and that the Delsarte method is a terrifically valuable asset to someone who wants to do exactly that. And he’s suddenly conscious of the position of his own body, leaning toward the window with one hand clasping the arm of the chair, a posture that announces, I’m watching. He turns back into the room and finds three of the masseuses watching him watch the street. Attention draws attention, he thinks.

  So he smiles and sits back and exhales, doing the Delsarte version of a guy relaxing in a comfortable chair, and when he turns idly to the window again he sees the woman he’s been waiting for climb out of a cab on the other side of the street: the long spiral curls, the smudge above her mouth. She’s wearing full makeup an hour before she’s due on the stage, and he thinks, She probably always wears it.

  He’s up in a shot and through the door as the women in the shop laugh behind him, one more farang who’s spotted the woman of his dreams. On the sidewalk he’s hit by the wet heat and the smell of exhaust, and at that precise moment it starts to rain. Hunching his shoulders and squinting against the dazzle of moisture, he dives into the traffic, weaving between headlights across the shining pavement.

  But the traffic demands attention, and by the time he’s at the entrance to Patpong, she has disappeared. On the verge of diving into the crowd, he becomes aware of his posture, spine bent, neck craned forward, a parody of the searching man, and he straightens and relaxes and moves forward, just fast enough to thread between people who are moving more slowly than he is, but trying not to project the concentrated attention that will draw notice.

  He thinks again, Delsarte. How could he have forgotten this for all these years?

  He wipes rain from his face. What had she been wearing? Something blue, he thinks; he’d been distracted from her clothes by the distinctive, long, Lillian Gish spirals of curls, something out of a silent movie, although the style seems to be coming back lately. In fact, he immediately spots a similar hairstyle ahead of him, but the curls are shorter and darker, and when he draws up beside her, it’s a different woman. She answers his look with a bright, professional smile, and he gives her a tamped-down version in return as he moves past her, hearing the immemorial bar-girl question, “Where you go?”

  “He go here,” someone says, and slaps him loudly on the shoulder. He’s face-to-face with Betty. Up close she looks even more like a man, like a weight lifter who’s accidentally wandered into a comedy and finds himself in drag. She says, “You come my bar?”

  Rafferty gives up. By now he has no chance of catching up to the woman with the birthmark. If she’s making better time than he is—and it would be difficult not to—she could be most of the way to Silom by now, except that she’s probably vanished into a bar. And he’s not going into a bar to look for her, because she’ll see him first, with the radar that allows bar girls to keep one eye on the door at all times.

  “I was trying to follow that girl,” he says in Thai.

  Betty points a finger at a spot above and to the left of her mouth, and Rafferty nods. “She just go by,” Betty says in English. She bats her lashes at him. “Go in bar.”

  “Which bar?”

  With a sidelong glance that looks like it’s gotten a lot of use, Betty says, “Lutanh like you.” She lifts her head as though to confirm it’s raining and grabs his shirt and hauls him out of the wet, beneath the blue plastic roof of a booth that’s selling, of all things, baby clothes.

  Dutifully, Rafferty says, “I like her, too. I like both of you. But I’m married.”

  “Many men who like ladyboys are married,” she says, speaking Thai now. “If there were no married men, we’d all be selling makeup.”

  “I’m not that kind of married. What bar?”

  “Cowgirl,” Betty says. She attempts a pout, but it looks so silly that Rafferty laughs, and she joins him. “I’ll tell Lutanh to forget about you,” she says. “You have no spirit of adventure.”

  “Cowgirl is a big bar.” He hasn’t been in it for years.

  She wiggles her head side to side, a gesture he associates with India. “Thirty, forty ladies.”

  “Not so bad,” Rafferty says. “I’ll see if I can pick her up when they close.”

  Betty brushes some rain off Poke’s shoulders. It feels maternal. “What will you do when you find her?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Follow her home. Eventually I want her to lead me to the man, if she can.”

  “This is not actually a great plan,” Betty says.

  “No, it isn’t,” Rafferty says. “If you think of anything better, call me.”

  10

  He Was Supposed to Kill Me

  The five of them sit at the table, moving food around on their plates, in a silence so thick and so lengthy it makes Rafferty’s ears pop. The only one who’s eating is Chalee, and she looks up at everyone else and stops chewing, her fork halfway back down to the plate, which is piled with pad see-ew—rice noodles, gravy, and chicken.

  “Isn’t it good?” Anna asks anxiously.

  Chalee nods, finishes chewing, swallows, and glances at Treasure for a cue. Treasure says, “Yes,” and looks down at her plate again. Chalee nods in agreement.

  The clock in the living room ticks a couple of times, and Rafferty thinks, I’ll never get those seconds back.

  Arthit clears his throat. Everyone regards him expectantly. He clears his throat again.

  Rafferty says brightly, “I like the fish baskets.”

  Anna says, “I bought them at Chatuchak.” Chatuchak is Bangkok’s biggest open-air market.

  Chalee says, “You bought them? But they’re old. We had new ones in my village.”

  Rafferty says, “They turn a beautiful color when they get old,” and is rewarded by a twist of Chalee’s mouth that makes him feel like an idiot.

  Chalee says, “How much?”

  Anna says, “I’m sorry?”

  Chalee tilts an imperious chin at the fish baskets. “How much did you pay?”

  Anna says, “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t know how many baht?” Chalee says with some incredulity. She’s speaking Thai.

  “It was a long time ago,” Anna says, and Rafferty can practically see her wishing she had her blue cards back.

  “Huh,” Chalee says. “New, maybe sixty baht.”

  “Old ones are—” Treasure says. It’s the first sentence she’s begun since they sat down. Her glance at Anna is so quick that Rafferty isn’t sure he saw it. “Old ones cost more.”

  Treasure’s Thai isn’t quite as assured as her English and Vietnamese, but it’s better than Rafferty’s. While Treasure was still at the age when children absorb language through their pores, her father’s retinue had moved all over Southeast Asia and many of the maids who had raised her had been Thai.

  Chalee says, “Why?” She pokes a finger through a tear in one of the baskets. “A fish would swim right through this.”

  Anna waits to see whether Treasure will reply, and then she says, “Some city people like old things.”

  Chalee shakes her head. “When I have money, I’ll never have anything old.”

  “Here is . . . different,” Treasure says. She li
cks her lips, and her gaze drops to the table’s surface for a moment as she organizes her thoughts. “You know those store windows where everything is old?”

  “Oh,” Chalee says, her face brightening. “That kind of old.”

  Treasure says, “Antiques.” Then she goes silent, her head cocked slightly, one ear turned toward the direction of the living room.

  For the forty or so minutes he’s been here, commanded to come to dinner by a desperate-sounding Arthit, Rafferty has seen that Treasure is always listening for something. It’s in the straightness of her spine, the angle of her head. She goes motionless whenever there’s a sound from the street, and her eyes keep straying to the living-room windows. At the moment her head is lifted and her mouth is very slightly open. All he can think of is an animal that’s scented something.

  When the knock at the door breaks the silence, she drops her spoon onto her plate with a clatter that makes Chalee jump.

  “Don’t worry, Treasure,” Rafferty says. “This one’s mine.” To Arthit he says, “May I answer the door?”

  Arthit is already standing. “With me behind you.”

  The two of them go through the living room, and when they reach the front door, Arthit steps in front of Rafferty and moves aside to pull the door open so that he’s standing partway behind it, and Rafferty is surprised to see the automatic in his hand.

  The man filling the doorway is almost cumbersomely big, tall for a Thai, with a thick neck, broad shoulders, and a belly that’s obviously had its way for some time. His face is a mismatch of features that might have been intended for several other people: small eyes, too close together, and wide nostrils, the nose short above a long upper lip, jaws so broad that his head narrows at the temples. Despite the unusual features, if Rafferty hadn’t known that the man was coming, he doesn’t think he would have recognized him; his once-black hair is frosted with gray, and he’s added at least ten or twelve kilos of solid-looking bulk since they first collided with each other, five or so years ago.

  “This is Sriyat,” Rafferty says, stepping aside to let Arthit emerge from behind the door. Sriyat takes a step back at the sight of the gun, and Arthit tucks it out of sight. Rafferty says to him, “May I invite Sriyat in?”